Recently, the Australian women's rights organization Collective Shout, which has pressured payment platforms such as MasterCard and Visa and used "financial scrutiny" to push Steam to remove a large number of R18 games, has once again become the focus of public opinion. This time, the group is targeting Elon Musk.
The cause of the incident was that after the recent controversy over the removal of many games from Steam due to payment restrictions, a large number of players spontaneously launched a petition calling on MasterCard and Visa to respect consumer freedoms and stop interfering in the operation of the gaming platform. The petition was subsequently retweeted by Musk and sparked wider discussion.
In response, Collective Shout founder Melinda Tankard Reister publicly criticized Musk’s behavior, saying it “made their situation more dangerous.” She pointed out that many female members of the organization have recently encountered a large amount of online violence, including death threats, threats of sexual violence and human flesh searches.
"These men have threatened to rape and kill us, sent vulgar and obscene images, encouraged us to commit suicide, threatened to use our photos to create vulgar content and even attempted to trace our home addresses," Reister said.
She emphasized that by forwarding this petition against Collective Shout, Musk was essentially amplifying gender hatred and online violence around the world: "Musk's actions incited violent threats, harassment and online attacks on our all-female team, forcing us to take additional security measures on all platforms to protect personal safety."
However, she also said that Collective Shout will not be intimidated by threats and abuse from gamers.
