Swastikas, portraits of Adolf Hitler… On the forums of Steam, an online video game store, hateful content is legion

This is not the first time that online spaces dedicated to video games have been used as tools for propagating violent and hateful speech. Thursday, November 14, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the main organization fighting anti-Semitism in the United States, published a report documenting the omnipresence of anti-Semitic and extremist content on the video game sales platform Steam and more precisely on its community pages through which its users can chat in writing.

In his report, relayed by the American media Bloombergthe ADL says it has found traces of 1.83 million pieces of content of an extremist or hateful nature. Among them, explicitly anti-Semitic symbols incorporating Nazi imagery, such as the swastika or the figure of Adolf Hitler, but also marks of support for terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State or Hamas. The phenomenon is not limited to a handful of Internet users: the report noted “1.5 million unique users and 73,824 groups” having used at least one extremist or hateful content.

However, the proliferation of this content on Steam has consequences that go beyond the framework of the platform, deplores the ADL. In the introduction to its report, the organization relates the story of a young Turk aged 18, author of a knife attack during which he injured several people, on August 12, in the town of ‘Eskişehir. According to an ADL investigation, Arda K. had, on the one hand, written a white supremacist manifesto and, on the other hand, published numerous extremist and hateful content on Steam.

Particularly viral messages

According to the report, thousands of users of the platform’s forums “glorify violent extremists, such as white supremacist mass shooters”. They adopt avatars representing some of these figures of terrorism and multiply the references, supporting photos, to attacks like the one committed in 2019 by the supremacist Brenton Tarrant against two mosques in the city of Christchurch, in New Zealand.

According to the ADL, this discourse is disseminated in particular by means of copypasta (literally “copy and paste”, in English, in reference to “copy and paste”), a popular method in online gaming communities which consists of republishing the same message thousands of times in order to flood a forum or a chat. Among the approximately 1.18 million unique cases of copypasta potentially extremist and hateful, 54% carried supremacist discourse, while 4.68% were anti-Semitic.

A true individual or collective showcase in these community spaces, the profile photo is also massively diverted for these purposes. The authors of the ADL report identified more than 800,000 profiles of Internet users or groups “whose avatars contained extremist or hateful symbols”. Among them, the most popular are twisted covers of the fictional character Pepe the Frog, who became the mascot of the American alt-right, but also swastikas, Nazi eagles or logos of terrorist organizations.

Steam, owned by the American company Valve Corporation, has in the past removed a certain amount of extremist content – ​​the platform is even legally obliged to do so in many jurisdictions. But the company never tackled the systemic dimension of the problem, according to the ADL which denounces “Valve’s very permissive approach to content policy”. Contacted by The WorldValve Corporation had not responded at the time of publication of this article.