The email in the comments
People defending this as “those are lighning bolts, not everyone knows it’s nazi imagery” are american, right?
Like, everyone in Europe knows this is strictly and unmistakably nazi imagery, especially in Poland. There is no wiggle room for not knowing; that’s not even an excuse GOG themselves are trying to make, because if they tried to use that excuse then literally no one with the ability to read it in Europe would be uneducated enough to fall for it.
Racists wil Fuck around and then plead ignorance to avoid Finding Out.
People defending this as “those are lighning bolts, not everyone knows it’s nazi imagery” are american, right?
Nah, they know what they are. They’re trying to a) downplay the symbol’s significance and normalize displaying it and b) get a “snowflake got triggered by lightning bolts” own out of it.
I’m sure there are some fash doing this, but a lot of comments here seem extremely naive and forgiving. And they come from lib instances, which I have grievances with, just not regarding dogwhistling & normalizing fascism (unless it comes out of UA…)
It was used in Poland as a symbol of feminism when women protested against criminalization of abortion.
This is why it became nazi imagery, declared and sanctioned by polish right-wing government because they needed an excuse to stop the movement.
You from america, friend?
European.
And you should tell those guys they stole their symbol from 21st century feminists:
I’m gonna need some proof of this. I wonder why a German, designing a sign for the German members of the SS in 1929 (10 years before Germany invaded Poland), would choose a sign with the purpose of harming a Polish feminist/pro-abortion movement.
It makes no sense and I can’t find any sources saying anything like that at all.
So cough up some sources. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
https://natemat.pl/324721,symbol-czerwonej-blyskawicy-co-oznacza-czerwony-piorun-na-strajku-kobiet
Article is in Polish, but I thing google translate or DeepL should work for you to get the gist. They picked this symbol as “lightning”
One lightning bolt by itself is a very different meaning to 2 right next to each other.
Especially so when next to a Black Sun
Double lightning bolt is unmistakably a nazi symbol.
On that I cannot disagree. All I wanted to defend was a singular lightning bolt.
Dude, you got the timeline completely wrong: https://www.obieg.pl/en/210-the-red-lightning-of-all-poland-women-s-strike-forwards-and-backwards
The red lightning sign as part of the polish pro-abortion movement came into existence in 2016! A whopping 87 years AFTER the Nazis created the SS sign.
If the Nazis made the sign to discredit poland’s pro-abortion movement, they would have needed time travel to do so.
WTF I just learned about this.
Idk about the polish feminist movement, but, respectfully, what the fuck are you on about
(Polish feminist lightning bolt I could find with 5s of research, they seem to do a pretty good job at differentiating their logo by having a single bolt with a different shape that is red and black instead of black and white. Red and black are usually associated with anti fascism btw)
What are you on about? Red and black anti fascism? Like, I dunno, people who wore those uniforms?
Yes, I am talking about this symbol. And while on the image you picked it clearly looks more like lightning, the narrower version was used too. And the idea that “SS” and “S” is the very same thing is just bonkers. All the alphabet would be symbols of hate by now.
Yes ?
Oh god.
So swastika (a hindu symbol) got taken by nazis and now nazi colours are taken by anti-nazis.
And everyone still thinks they know definitely what specific symbol/colour/letter symbolizes?
I’m giving up. I’m never correcting anyone on nazis ever again. If someone tells me that rainbow was used by hitler-lovers, I will just accept it as possible.
Just shut up, please. Your stupidity and lack of even basic knowledge is exhausting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_FrontOMG even black straight arrow is a nazi symbol?
these symbols seem to render very differently on different devices. i got a wheel of hatchets, an eight-pointed star, and two futhark runes on desktop.
…which is why it’s at the very least irresponsible for them to send something like this. if there is actually intent here that only makes it worse.
Their “apology” actually admitted that they knew about the potential for rendering differences. They say they knew that certain symbols could render as Nazi icons, which is why they specifically excluded those symbols from the email they sent to German accounts.
But if we extend that same “we didn’t send it to Germany” thing to the logical conclusion, it means they intentionally sent it to everyone else even when knowing the potential for issues.
This is a protocol, you can’t memorize the reason behind every protocol you can only incorporate it into routine otherwise you would have to memorize a set of encyclopedias that shifts like aand on a desert.
Sure there’s intent. Obviously!
Thats it?
Gaben, “we aren’t a monopoly there’s plenty of other publishers to buy from”
GOG
Steam once again using the winning strategy of doing nothing while your opponent fucks up
This is the top of the email:
This is the typeset of the game they’re promoting:
This looks like a monumentally stupid fuckup. Never attribute to malice that what can be easily attributed to stupidity, incompetence, or negligence.
I’m sorry, not with the fucking double sig rune. You can’t be that brain dead to not see and know it is the symbol of the fucking SS and then even try to dance around German laws against the usage of NS-symbols and even fuck that up.
The transphobic company is also a nazi company.
I am shocked, shocked I say.
transohobic company
Yo imma need some blue text about that
pretty certain itwas mostly a font rendering fuck-up. that being said, the should have diyched the symbols altogether.
Stupid marketing fuckup. Still it’s my preferred store because no DRM.
If no one gets fired over this, then it’s not a marketing fuckup. It just means they don’t mind nazis there.
Why must someone get fired? If this is a mistake, I’m perfectly fine with that person getting yelled at.
Because there is no way
ϟϟwas sent by mistake. This is a character combination that has one use. And is irrelevant to slavic history. And they accompanied it with a kolovrat. This is the guy who invented the kolovrat as a pseudo slavic neopagan symbol. If it was just oneϟit would be iffy at best, but you know, benefit of the doubt, maybe they copy-pasted a random selection from some random neopagan website. This is the specific combination that has one (1) known use.The kolovrat alone reeks of neonazism, the
ϟϟis exclusively a nazi symbol, there is no wiggle room
What exactly happened? Newsletter email name had some nazi symbols as far as I can see. But why? Did they stated something for nazi? Or was it just a hacker prank? Any statements like at all?
It’s obvious that GoG is bunch of polish Nazis and since CDPR one of founders is GoG owner, it means CDPR is Nazi.
People really tearing GoG to shreds here but I don’t really understand why. I’m not a GoG user/stan so I don’t have a dog in this race, but this doesn’t (to me) seem to follow any pattern of malicious behavior.
- To my knowledge they haven’t had recurring big controversies of this kind that show systemic cultural issues. Their Wikipedia page has a “Controversies” section with 3 events, including this one, for a total of 9 sentences.
- Even if it was sent maliciously and intentionally, if they apologize and it doesn’t happen again I’m not going to get bent out of shape. These email campaigns are run by peons low on the totem pole and hardly get any thorough review.
- The SS symbol is relatively niche and bland (though I concede this differs by country). To my knowledge it’s not the most common dogwhistle or exceedingly controversial. I’ve often seen people gaff into it when trying to punch up text with lighting bolts ⚡. It’s not exactly on the same tier as the death’s head => concentration camp connection.
- Building on the above and knowing that GoG uses ai, its plausible that it could be accidental
- An intern gets some copy, runs the header through Ai like he usually does because emojis in headers perform way better.
- The LLM looking for “runes” has a strong bias for pairs of the symbol; probably nobody writes Elder Futhark runes, and especially that one, outside of the SS context.
- Even if the intern knows the symbol, not all systems render it in an obvious way.
- The email service automatically filters it from German emails due to stricter laws on Nazi symbols.
I’m not saying people can’t choose to believe it was malicious or that it’s impossible for GoG to have a rotten company culture. But I’m confused at the level of vitriol. You’d think we were talking about tobacco or oil companies with an established history of killing puppies.
The SS symbol is not a dogwhistle. Dogwhistles are meant to be covert and unassuming to anyone except those within the neofascist subculture, like 1488 and triple parenthesis.
Unlike those dogwhistles, meant only to be understood by an ingroup, the SS lighning bolts are as explicit as a swastika. I would go even as far as to say that they are more egregious than a swastika, as swastikas have cultural significance in some cultures that can muddy the waters when interpreting the symbol alone. The SS bolts have no such excuse.
Also it wasn’t an automatic filter on german emails, it was a filter on german speakers. German emails configured with english as their language did receive the email, according to comments here.
There is no benefit of the doubt to be allowed here. If they don’t have an extremely solid explanation (and LLMs aren’t that, they know how to recognize actual dogwhistles, they wouldn’t output actual 1940s nazis imagery so famous & standard, unless instructed to), then either someone needs to be fired, or we as the public need to understand that there is complacency for actual nazism within this company.
Again, this isn’t some little dogwhistle people might be confused about. This is standard 1940s nazi imagery, on the same level of significance as the swastika. I knew this as a child in the 2000s, as a kid who never paid attention in class and found history to be the most boring topic.
They ran the ss symbol - except for the campaign in Germany where nazi symbolism is illegal - so they knew what it was and ran it anyway
People responded to this going “hey dude wtf” and the official response has been…not smart
And now it is blowing up
One of the main issues with all that is that there was a review, and they didn’t sent it to Germany because of that review. So no, it was known, it is not a niche dog whistle, and I for one am not blaming the intern (if any) who did it, but rather the moderator who allowed the letter to go
Yeah the final responsibility is entirely on whoever owns the email campaign/process. Having read their response to the community, it was more tone deaf and confusing than just delaying a statement or making a more focused one.
At the end of the day they did stop the email mid send-out and are allegedly doing a review, which is the most you could ask of the higher ups. I’ve been through similar fires (though not Nazi or PR related) at some companies, figuring out exactly who said what and when can be very tricky. They probably don’t yet know how strong the feedback was, when it was given or who might be lying to save their job.
Immediately putting out specifics like “we didn’t port the feedback” is a terrible idea. The public has even less context, not knowing how siloed the review process is or if logistics played a factor (German review came last, reviewer was in a different timezone, etc…).
Whole process has been bungled all around.
I much prefer the gog approach as a video game platform in a huge way. I would like to see this approach of selling games win.
But they fucked up so massively here… Accidental or not, the iconography of the twin lightning bolts in an international context is so clear.
They need to make their apology so loud and so clear, that any little nazlets thinking this is a sign from someone on gog staff, instead realize that there is no safe space for their hatred there.
You cannot be ambivalent to maybe being associated with Nazis in the minds of some people. That’s how you get Nazis.
I don’t get all this noise too, being nazi is finally cool again! Those woke lefties want to break all good things again…
I think it was just someone using that symbol thinking it was an innocuous Nazi reference, not understanding that it holds nearly as much significance as the Swastika itself to some people.
PR Firms and marketing departments aren’t especially bright, so they need to understand that there has been a tightening of perception on that front, and ANY Nazi imagery is considered inappropriate for marketing purposes.
Mmhmm. At least I can stop lying and pretending gog is any good now.
People can shit on Valve all they want, but at least they never went full Nazi.
100 % ai. Llms love emojis in subject lines
Nah it’s the new email marketing meta. So many emojis and ASCII symbols. It’s the new play to try to stand out from all of the existing ad industry noise in people’s email inboxes
All of which have emojis now…
How is this one of several comments here calling them emojis? How are you all somehow here on Lemmy while seemingly having grandma level tech illiteracy?
They’re not emojis, they’re ascii characters. Emojis are emojis, a very limited set of pictures. These are not that.Lol I love how you got your shit rocked after being so condescending
The Nazis didn’t invent those symbols, they appropriated them. It’s ridiculous that a group of assholes can erase centuries of history by misusing symbols
The nazis (in particular their graphic designer Walter Heck) did literally invent the sigrune/doppelrune, it doesn’t have roots in history and there is no excuse for them to have sent it given they admit they didn’t send it to germany. Like… no, there’s no justification for this one.
The Elder Futhark predates Nazi Germany by well over 1,000 years. Wikipedia says it was used between the 2nd to 8th centuries.
Edit: dang are people getting upset over a fact check? I never said it was okay to use symbols appropriated by Nazis.
And the skull and crossbones has been used since the 1700s - and yet people happily run around sporting the Jolly Roger, while someone openly wearing the Totenkopf is undeniably a nazi (or Graham Platner, who as far as I can tell is somehow actually just that dumb)
Graham knew what it was. He’s a murderous psycho, by his own admission. This aw shucks I didn’t realize this was a nazi symbol shit, is just that, shit. He joined the military because he wanted to kill humans. He went on back to back tours until they said no. He then became a MERC so he could get around that and keep killing people.
Okay.
I’m not disagreeing with that, but to say the Nazi shite invented runes is wrong. I thought it was pretty well known that the Nazis appropriated many of their symbols from historical findings.
Sorry, sincere question: do you not see it’s the same thing? They didn’t invent a squiggly line - they invented the concept which is represented as the specific angles of those squiggly lines. He didn’t invent the jolly roger, he invented the totenkopf.
edit: oi stop downvoting them they’re not wrong they’re just slightly misunderstanding my original statement.
No I understand that. The S rune on its own has its place in cultural history with all the other Runes, while putting two of them next to each other can only be seen as a Nazi symbol, much like the Swastika. In the modern practice of Heathenry and Paganism (which I practice) it is a very important distinction because the Nazis appropriated so much from European history for their symbolism. For example, the Swastika is the symbol for the Sunwheel, but I outright refuse to use it for anything because fuck Nazis. You can find it in ancient Buddhist temples that long predate Nazi Germany, and it has its own separate meaning for them, but for 99% of people it screams Nazi.
Another lesser known symbol appropriated by Nazis is the “Winged Othala” symbol. The regular Othala Rune is one thing, but adding those little “Wings” on the bottom makes it 100% a Nazi symbol.
I guess one of the points I’m trying to make is to know what is and isn’t some Nazi bs, and that some of those symbols are irredeemable after such strong Nazi usage, but others are just simply mistaken for Nazi symbols when they aren’t. I specifically avoid using anything in my religious practice that has Nazi association, and am ready to explain anything else that people might mistake otherwise.
2nd to 8th centuries… so it’s been out of fashion for over a thousand years, before a certain group decided to ‘popularize’ it again. Hmmmm…
Edit: dang are people getting upset over a fact check?
They’re used because you’re defending the Nazis!
Please explain how knowing about the Elder Futhark is defending Nazis?
It’s because the topic is about Nazis and the usage iconography that may or may not be associated with Nazis.
I’m not neurotypical myself so I get missing some nuance, but you can’t be neutral when it comes to Nazis, unless you’re actually OK with Nazis getting cozy in our spaces.
You basically have to say fuck Nazis in every comment. Fuck Nazis!
This could all be fun theory history lessons if we didn’t have literal Nazis running around. But that’s not the world we live in, sadly.
He didn’t invent shit. He copied a rune and appropriated it diagonally. S, N, Z whatever, it’s the same damn thing. Sowilo.
Ppl keep praising his ass here like he wrote the bible or some shit when all he did was take what was already there and twisted it.
he wrote the bible or some shit when all he did was take what was already there and twisted it
I have really bad news if you think this wasn’t exactly what happened when they wrote the bible…
Gog admitted they knew what the symbols represented when they chose not to send them to German subscribers. There’s legitimately no excuse for using Nazi symbols in this case, regardless of your ideas about where they may have originated.
I have really bad news if you think this wasn’t exactly what happened when they wrote the bible…
If you’re agreeing he didn’t invent shit, I’d recommend amending your comment saying that he didn’t. No need to add legitimacy where there isn’t any. No pressure though.
As for gog, the deed is done and out in the world. Whatever they do from here on out, it will be with this burden attached.
If you’re agreeing he didn’t invent shit
Not even slightly, but I don’t particularly feel like going on about how no human creation is truly original, waxing interminable over the distinction between symbols and concepts or, you know, defending a nazi right now.
it will be with this burden attached
Probably this will be forgiven provided they don’t do anything more indicative of actually being Nazis. I’m not sure it should be given the spectacular process failures needed to knowingly email out a bunch nazi symbology, their history of trans/homophobic jokes, their insanely miserable work culture… but it probably will be, much as all those previous examples were. It’s depressing.
Not even slightly, but I don’t particularly feel like going on about how no human creation is truly original, waxing interminable over the distinction between symbols and concepts or, you know, defending a nazi right now.
But in a way, we kinda have to. I mean, are the nazis today the same as the nazis which started this movement or are they a separate entity and should be treated as such? Are all the nazi groups today are their own inventions and should they be granted the so-called ‘honour’ of having invented their particular brand of ‘doppelnazism’? Or should we reserve that for when one particular branch starts calling itself something else and only looks to have been inspired by nazism, but is something else entirely?
Yeah, history is a continuous chain reaction. And the problem with fixating on specific points as the start of something has the disadvantages of ignoring everything which lead up to it and disagreeing on which point to put an end to it.
With your point of view, nazism ended with the second world war and what we suffer now is something different. A new invention as you say.
With my point of view, the dude didn’t invent shit and just stole what was already there and now we’re dealing with more of the same, the major difference being there’s no new brand of terror to set them apart visibly.
But in a way, we kinda have to.
Uh, no? No we don’t? I’ve already expressed an utter lack of interest in arguing about this with you - this hasn’t changed. And please stop trying to force acceptance of your position onto me, this is the second time you’ve tried that and I’m still not going for it.
Culture is always evolving. Some words and symbols have had different meaning in the past than they do now. With context it can be fine to use them without association with the stronger cultural associations. If I see a swastika on a Buddhist temple, I’m not going to assume the Buddhists are Nazis. But if I see a symbol or word without context I’m going to assume the strongest association to that symbol in my culture. Just how culture works.
So in the case of the emails, where there is plenty of context, it’s not an issue. Right?
“Slavic adventure” doesn’t give enough context to consider it not to be a white power kind of thing.
If they were runes within the game it’s fine since you’d know from playing the game it isn’t about Nazi type shit. But the subject line of an email that just says “slavic adventure” followed by the SS symbols isn’t really enough.
Shut up and hate Nazis with us. Or are you a Nazi too?
Fucking calm your this lmao. It’s aascii character, it can’t hurt you
Fuck nazis and fuck you
I’m pretty sure the email refers to slavic stuff, not nazis
The two SS bolts are ostensibly nazi imagery, there is no way anyone who went to school in Europe in the past century doesn’t know that. Also they skipped sending the email to users with German as their GOG language; they knew exactly what they were doing.
It was the fucking logo for the SS
looks like slavic rune to me, im not in this debate, but is there any proof of the higher ups as Nazi, or are you guys just doing this out of fun?
It’s not proof that the higher ups are nazis, but it is literally the logo for the SS, not just some generic slavic runes.
Fucking calm your this lmao. It’s aascii character, it can’t hurt you
The phrase “I don’t believe your ethnic group has a right to live” is also just a bunch or ascii, but do you see how that’s a fucked up thing to send to your customers?
They were ascii characters in a very peculiar order.
i was told words cannot hurt you
It’s Unicode so it can hurt him!
The NON BREAKING ZERO WIDTH SPACE character is directly adjacent to the FEELING OF BEING STRUCK IN THE FACE BY A BASKETBALL WHEN YOU WERE NOT EXPECTING IT character. I really wish they had left the fifth circle of Hell out of the Unicode standard :/
The “GOG Bad Now” people in this thread are out of their minds.
This was overwhelmingly obviously some combination of poor decision and mistake with no malicious intent behind it.
Yes, it was a fuck up. Yes, they should apologize. No, this should not be a brand-ruining event for GOG.
If there was any history in their past for them to suggest they were facists or nazi sympathizers, this might be a different story.
Their response admitted that they did not send the same email to their German customers as they knew if would be offensive.
So why send it to everyone else in the world who is also offended by nazis? And why send those two runes side by side? There’s only one meaning in that choice. Both decisions show intent, not a little mistake.
Saying it was a mistake or a poor decision ignored the several points where people could have (should have) stopped the email from going out.
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