Steam accused of 'normalizing hate and extremism in the gaming community' in new ADL report

SoftwarePlatformsSteam accused of ‘normalizing hate and extremism in the gaming community’ in new ADL reportWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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The Anti-Defamation League, a US organization that aims to combat antisemitism and support Israel, has published areportalleging that Steam is “rife with extremism and antisemitism,” and accusing Valve of allowing the spread of hateful and extremist material through a “highly permissive approach to content policy.”

Pepe the Frog and swastikas are the most common extremist symbols found on Steam, according to the report, respectively representing 54.6% and 9.1% of detected symbols. The ADL also found “tens of thousands of pieces of terrorism-related content on Steam Community,” including more than 15,000 public accounts with profile pictures featuring the flags or logos of ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas, and others. Hundreds of accounts were found using photos of white supremacist mass murderers Brenton Tarrant and Anders Breivik as their avatar images.

Game mods are also touched on in the report, which claims to have found hundreds of mods for games, most notably Garry’s Mod, “that specifically reference mass shootings.”

The report says “Steam’s public-facing content policy includes no mention of hate or extremism,” which isn’t entirely accurate: TheSteamworks documentationspecifically states that content with “hate speech, i.e. speech that promotes hatred, violence or discrimination against groups of people based on ethnicity, religion, gender, age, disability or sexual orientation” should not be published on the platform. Steam’scode of conductdoes not make specific reference to hateful or extremist content, but does forbid harassment, disruptive or damaging behavior, and the violation of the personal rights of other users.

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Valveupdated its community rulesin 2023 to provide a much more granular breakdown of what is and isn’t allowed, but as noted at the time, the real question was how it would go about enforcing those rules. Because this has been an ongoing problem for Steam: We reported on Valve’s “hate group problem” in 2018, and in 2022 US Senator Maggie Hassan sent a letter to Valve boss Gabe Newell alleging “a significant presence of users displaying and espousing neo-Nazi, extremist, racial supremacist, misogynistic, and other hateful sentiments,” and asking what Valve was doing about it.

“Valve needs to make significant changes to their approach to platform governance both in terms of policy and practice to address the ways in which hate and extremism have proliferated on the Steam platform,” the report states.

The ADL alsoput pressure on Twitch recently, leading to temporary bans for a group of Arab streamers who made jokes at a TwitchCon panel that the organization interpreted as antisemitic.

I’ve reached out to Valve for comment on the report and will update if I receive a reply.

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