In this week’s news post, Star Stable Online wishes its LGBTQIA+ players, employees and community members a happy Pride Month and kicks off the “Rainbow Festival” ingame event.
Interesting side note: Star Stable has previously had events for Valentine’s day, but apparently no one objects to heteronormative content with romantic implications. I hope that SSE and its consulting companies who had a say in this will reconsider whether they really want to bow to homophobic scaremongering instead of proudly supporting their LGBTQIA+ players and employees. Many children of any age are themselves in the process of questioning their identity, gender and relationships to others, even long before "sexual orientation" comes into play. The existence of LGBTQIA+ people is not inherently adult. To put it frankly, I consider this to be regressive bullshit. Multiple people from the SSO team itself are blindsided and disappointed by this decision, and I am trying to find out more about why it happened: the best educated guess we have for now is that there was significant backlash from concerned parents, and that there are differences between what is considered appropriate for 13+ social media networks and what is acceptable in the game’s own launcher, where younger children can see it.
#SSO TEAMSPIRIT UPDATE#
UPDATE 1: In an utterly disappointing development, the paragraph quoted below has been removed from the news post the day after. However, the ingame items with different pride flag colors are all still available, and only the news post on website and ingame launcher has been edited. It was not designed to protect children from viewing particular types of content wherever they might go online.Ī possible reading is that letting kids buy specific pride color items is too close to "asking" kids about their gender/identity/orientation, i.e. The American Federal Trade Commission’s website even states thatĬOPPA is meant to give parents control over the online collection, use, or disclosure of personal information from children. However, I can find no sources or precedents of that law actively dictating anything about LGBTQIA+ content. Although COPPA is a US law and Star Stable Entertainment is a Swedish company, businesses with customers in the US still need to comply with these regulations. UPDATE 2: Star Stable claims that the mention of LGBTQIA+ people and Pride Month were removed in order to comply with COPPA law.
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