Game news Steam accused of “normalizing hatred and extremism among gamers” in this shocking report
Published on 11/18/2024 at 7:35 p.m.
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Steam is accused of “normalizing hatred and extremism in the gaming community” after an investigation identifying “millions of examples of extremist and hateful content” on the Valve platform.
Steam 'plagued by extremism and anti-Semitism'
Steam, the most popular gaming platform, is accused of “normalizing hatred and extremism in the gaming community” in a rapport written by the Anti Defamation League, a non-governmental organization that fights against all forms of anti-Semitism. The organization points the finger at Valve for facilitating the dissemination of hateful and extremist material through a “very permissive approach to content policy”.
The ADL report is based on an “unprecedented” analysis of Steam's public data, including more than 458 million user profiles, 152 million user profile and group avatar images, and 610 millions of user comments. By probing this data, the organization reportedly discovered “1.83 million examples of extremist and hateful content, including explicit hate symbols like 'happy merchants' (an anti-Semitic meme), Nazi imagery like the Totenkopf and the Sonnenrad as well as copypastas shaped into swastikas”.
A recurring case
According to this report, Pepe the Frog (a comic book character turned meme, before being hijacked by the alt right and the far right) and swastikas are the most common extremist symbols found on Steam, representing 54.6% and 9.1% of the symbols detected, respectively. The ADL also discovered “tens of thousands of terrorism-related content” with more than 15,000 user accounts displaying the logos of Hezbollah, Hamas, and others.
This is not the first time that Steam's laxity in moderation has been singled out. The platform had already been attacked in 2018 by Pc Gamerthen in 2022 by American Senator Maggie Hassan who decided to send a letter to Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve, alleging “a significant presence of users displaying and espousing neo-Nazi, extremist, racial supremacist, misogynistic and other sentiments ” on Steam. Last year, the platform nevertheless decided to update its community rules in order to further clarify what was and was not tolerated on the platform. But ultimately, it's up to Steam to enforce these rules.
