Steam chat is censoring links to a torrent site

Valve appears to be automatically monitoring the blocking the content of some Steam chat.

Torrent Freak reports that mentions of KickassTorrents made via Steam’s in-built instant messaging tool are not delivered to their intended recipient. However, rather than censoring out the name of the site the message itself is completely removed.

Neither the sender nor the recipient are warned about the message not sending.

Tests by TorrentFreak suggest that KickassTorrents is the only site being censored by Valve, although some others are flagged by Steam as being potentially malicious, with users seeing a warning prompt before clicking through.

The news also asks what other content Steam may be auto-censoring, and to what extent chat and user activity is being monitored.

KickassTorrents, which is the world’s largest torrent sharing site, was temporarily taken down last week after its Somalian domain was seized, although it was no long before it returned via an alternative host.