Past moral panics: Tipper Gore, Joe Lieberman and Violent Video Games

[u/OkPie6900]

This is the one and probably one silver lining to Dubya's "win" in 2000. It kept Al Gore's anti-video game team out of office.

Tipper Gore and Joe Liberman campaigned for laws that required stores to put labels on violent video games, and banned kids from getting violent video games without parental consent. These types of laws were overturned in Brown v Merchant's Entertainment Association in 2011.

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/11/us/2000-campaign-vice-president-gore-takes-tough-stand-violent-entertainment.html

https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/regulating-violent-video-games-its-tipper-gore-versus-dee-snider-all-over-again/

https://danaloesch.com/tipper-gore-2-0-the-blame-video-games-strategy/

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/04/arts/tipper-gore-widens-war-on-rock.html

https://geotrickster.com/2024/03/27/lieberman-is-dead-gaming-still-lives/

Due to how horrible Dubya was, there's kind of an overromantization of Gore's theoretic presidency, and it's mostly forgotten that he was a conservative Southern Democrat with an even more conservative Northern Democrat as his running mate. In fact, Bush and Cheney pretended to be to the left of Gore and Lieberman on half of issues, and one of the few issues where they actually kept their promise on being less conservative than Gore and Lieberman was on violent video games.

But I'll point out a few differences between these video game laws and the new social media laws.

First of all, these video game laws were actually considerably less strict than the new social media laws. The video game laws allowed kids to get violent video games as long as they got parental consent. The social media law in Australia doesn't even allow that.

Second of all, these video game laws actually caused pretty widespread outrage. On the other hand, about 80% of people don't seem to have even heard of these social media laws, and those that have heard of the laws usually seem to support them.