World’s largest and most popular online gaming platform inundated with hate
New York, NY, November 14, 2024, … More than 1.8 million unique pieces of extremist or hateful content, including explicitly antisemitic, neo-Nazi and Islamist terrorist material, were identified on Steam, the world’s largest and most popular online gaming marketplace, new research from ADL (Anti-Defamation League) finds.
In an unprecedented platform-wide capture of all publicly available profiles, groups and comments (as of July 2024), the ADL Center on Extremism (COE) also identified 1.5 million unique users and over 73,000 groups who used at least one piece of potentially extremist or hateful content. The comprehensive dataset includes more than 458 million profiles, 152 million profile and group avatar images and 610 million comments on user profiles and groups.
Millions of these hateful or extremist examples were found on Steam Community, Steam’s social networking space where users can connect and share content. Hateful and extremist content included tens of thousands of pieces of terrorism-related content; more than 15,000 accounts had profile pictures containing the logos and flags of foreign terrorist organizations like ISIS, Hezbollah, Al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Hamas, as well as the names of known terrorists. COE also identified antisemitic symbols like the “happy merchant” and Nazi imagery like the Totenkopf, swastika, sonnenrad and others. Posts with these symbols remained on the platform despite previous concerns raised by government bodies and policymakers.
“The wide breadth and sheer volume of hateful and antisemitic content on Steam is mind-boggling,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL CEO. “ADL researchers found millions of examples on the world’s largest online gaming distribution service glorifying everything from Nazi symbols to Islamist terrorists. This means millions of young and vulnerable people are regularly exposed to dangerous individuals and rhetoric, with a very real risk of inflicting harm both online and offline. Steam’s parent company, Valve, needs to make significant changes in terms of policy and practice to address this shocking proliferation of hate.”
Additional findings include:
- Copypastas (blocks of text that are copied and pasted to form images or long-form writing) are a popular method for sharing extremist or hateful content on Steam. COE detected 1.18 million unique instances of extremist and hateful copypastas, 54 percent (634,749) of which were white supremacist and 5 percent (55,109) were antisemitic. The most popular copypastas were, by far, variations of swastikas, at 51 percent.
- A significant number of Steam users and group pages use an avatar (profile picture) with potentially extremist or hateful symbols. Multiple users can have the same avatar image. COE identified 827,758 profiles with avatars that contained extremist or hateful symbols.
- COE also identified 184,622 instances of hateful or extremist keywords on Steam. Additionally, 18,352 groups used extremist or hateful keywords on their group profiles. The most used keywords in an extremist or hateful context on Steam Community are “1488,” “shekel” and “white power.”
- COE analysts identified thousands of profiles that glorify violent extremists, like white supremacist mass shooters. These include avatar pictures featuring mass shooters, references to manifestos and stills from livestreamed attacks, like the 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand shooting. In some cases – like the 18-year-old who attacked a café in Turkey in Aug. 2024 – users posting this content on Steam have subsequently committed acts of offline violence.
“We believe this is the most comprehensive snapshot of hate and extremism present on Steam to date,” said Oren Segal, VP of the ADL Center on Extremism. “The clear gaps in Steam’s moderation policies not only normalize hate and extremism in the gaming community, but also introduce users to the ideologies and movements that animate real world violence."
Earlier this year, the annual ADL Hate and Harassment in Online Gaming survey found that harassment of young gamers increased across the board, with three-quarters of teens and pre-teens saying they experienced harassment while playing online multiplayer games, up from 67 percent in 2022. Identity-based harassment of young people ages 10-17 increased to 37 percent in 2023, up from 29 percent in 2022. Nine percent of teens were exposed to white supremacist ideologies in online games, and of those, 30 percent were exposed on a weekly or greater basis.
The report includes detailed recommendations for Valve and for policy makers:
For Valve:
- Adopt Policies Prohibiting Extremism. Currently there is no policy on Steam that prohibits the presence of known extremists, extremist recruitment, the celebration of extremist groups and movements or even the expression of the hateful ideologies that animate extremists. While the game industry is, in general, behind the social media industry in addressing the abuse of their products by extremist actors, we have seen some progress in the last year. ADL reviewed the recent progress and wrote about three current models for game companies to potentially implement anti-extremism policies.
- Adopt Policies Prohibiting Hate.
- Enforce Policies Accurately at Scale.
- Audit and Red Team Content Moderation Practices to Close Loopholes.
- Engage with Civil Society, Academics and Researchers.
For Policy Makers:
As ADL has said previously, policymakers must demonstrate their commitment to disrupting hate and harassment in online multiplayer games. ADL recommends stakeholder groups take the following steps to play an active role in promoting online safety and mitigating the risk of these dangers and their impact on users:
- Prioritize transparency legislation in digital spaces and include online multiplayer games.
- Enhance access to justice for victims of online abuse as existing laws have not kept up with increasing and worsening forms of digital abuse. Policymakers must introduce and pass legislation that holds perpetrators of severe online abuse accountable for their offenses at both the state and federal levels. ADL’s Backspace Hate initiative works to bridge these legal gaps and has had numerous successes, especially at the state level.
- Establish a National Gaming Safety Task Force.
- Support research efforts with additional resources.
Methodology
To understand the scope of extremist content on Steam on a platform-wide scale, ADL’s quantitative analysis examined three types of media: extremist symbols (in profile and group avatars), copypasta (in multi-line text fields) and keywords (in short and long text fields). Concurrently, COE analysts conducted in-depth qualitative investigative research into users and groups of interest.
The data collection for this report aimed to capture everything publicly available on the platform as of July 2024, reaching back to the earliest data ADL researchers could retrieve for each section of research. Any content that was deleted or removed before the data collection window is not included in the study.
The hate symbol image detection research in this study was conducted using HateVision, a proprietary AI tool developed by the ADL Center on Extremism. Leveraging cutting-edge computer vision technology, HateVision is trained on a comprehensive dataset of 39 key potentially extremist and antisemitic symbols. This powerful tool rapidly scans and identifies hateful content on images and videos, enabling researchers to analyze vast amounts of multimodal data and detect hate, extremism and antisemitism with high precision. A full methodology section is included here.
ADL is the leading anti-hate organization in the world. Founded in 1913, its timeless mission is “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” Today, ADL continues to fight all forms of antisemitism and bias, using innovation and partnerships to drive impact. A global leader in combating antisemitism, countering extremism and battling bigotry wherever and whenever it happens, ADL works to protect democracy and ensure a just and inclusive society for all. More at www.adl.org.