Malicious reporting incidents are currently occurring within the player community of the Steam game Hearts of Iron IV, with individuals exploiting the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to file reports against mods. According to the DMCA’s safe harbor principle, platforms are required to mitigate legal risks by following a notice-and-takedown procedure for allegedly infringing works. However, this is predicated on the premise that the infringement reports are genuine and valid.

It is evident that due to Valve’s unclear reporting review mechanism, individuals are not even required to provide a verifiable email address when filing a report, which fails to meet the condition of having a valid and truthful reporting basis. These malicious and unfounded reports have led to numerous well-known mods receiving warning notices (yellow strikes), which may likely result in the mods being taken down. This situation could potentially encourage more malicious reporting and gradually spread to other communities. For instance, Workshop items in communities such as CS2 may also become targets of malicious reports. Given that many of these works are no longer maintained by their original creators, they could be mistakenly removed.

Valve needs to take swift action and introduce a review mechanism similar to YouTube’s, to ensure the authenticity and validity of reports.