ESRB is a private, non-profit organization. It assigns ratings to video games and it tries to get everyone in the industry to agree to work with its system. The publishers and the stores voluntarily comply with that system, but there are actually no laws that mandate that your game must be rated or that govern the sales of your game depending on that rating or the lack of it. In short, it’s the example of how Americans believe the market should regulate itself without government interference.
DEI is not “a government program”. For those who aren’t acquainted, it stands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, and it’s a common name applied to programs, initiatives, or organizational frameworks. Companies implement DEI policies for different reasons: some because they genuinely want to improve their workplace, others because they want to promote themselves as a good place to work. Just like with ESRB, there is no law that mandates that every company must have DEI policies.
Just like DEI, ESG is not a government program, it’s a concept that ends up influencing policies. In this case, we’re talking about investment policies. Unlike ESRB and DEI, I had to look this one up, because I haven’t even heard of it over the 10 years I’ve lived and worked here in the US. It stands for “environmental, social, and corporate governance”, and it describes what aspects of a company to look at when investing into it, if you want to invest “responsibly”. Again, there are no laws dictating or mandating any of this, and it’s the market itself that is self-regulating.
None of the things you mentioned there are government programs, and the claim that they are is just as false as this one:
Of the 3 acronyms you picked out of your alphabet soup, the only one that has anything to do with the concept of censorship is ESRB, and even that is not associated with the government.
You wanna know where the censorship comes from in the US? The answer is not as simple or satisfying as “Big Bad Government Overreach”.
The simplest I can make it is to say that censorship in the US happens when one or more politicians finds something they can use to make their constituents angry about so they can win their votes.
Case in point: ESRB. Its existence is the consequence of the US Senate hearings on video games violence in the early 90s. It started with Joe Lieberman, a senator, who got upset by Mortal Kombat and Night Trap for their violence, and it snowballed from there. It fueled a lot of fear, anger, and outrage among the kind of concerned parent who will look everywhere except in the mirror in search of the reasons for their child’s problematic behavior. The politicians loved that outrage and used it to win votes by promises of legislation. Facing threat of federal regulations, the games industry decided to organize and self-regulate, and the major publishers formed the first game-related political trade group, from which the ESRB later evolved.
Video games remained a popular scapegoat for much of the rest of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Anyone remember MAVAV? Pepperidge Farm remembers. MAVAV – Mothers Against Videogame Addiction and Violence – was a parody site that popped up in December of 2002, created by a sophomore student as their design project and attracted an incredible amount of attention, because it seemed so real. At that time, Jack Thompson still hadn’t gotten disbarred and was practicing as an attorney on a personal crusade against “obscenity” in the society, with video games being his favorite target. MAVAV fit like a glove into the anti-videogame sentiment of that time.
The point I’m making here is that censorship comes from misguided, outraged people. Those who are today decrying DEI as “woke” are the same kind of people who used to rant against video game violence.
So when you look for the source of censorship in the US, first look at yourself, and those around you. Look at who’s telling you to be angry, and what they’re telling you to be angry about.