Valve’s Steam store is more than just a place to buy PC games online. This is an active player community. Unfortunately, a significant number of these players post “unseen” hateful, racist and anti-Semitic content on the gaming site’s cyber social gathering place, Steam Community. Anti-Defamation League.
The organization found 1.83 million unique “extremist or hateful content” from 1.5 million unique users in 73,824 groups. The content included “obviously anti-Semitic symbols” and “tens of thousands of examples” of users showing support for foreign terrorist groups. The online gaming community even included an alarming number of “copycats”, more than half of which were variations of Nazi swastikas.
The report also found a “significant number” of Steam avatars with hate symbols. Investigators found 827,758 users with extremist or racist avatars, including the cartoon character Pepe the Frog in Nazi regalia, or avatars emblazoned with stereotypical tropes and appearances, swastikas, a white racist skull or “siege” mask, and the Naziagle. Another 15,129 avatars featured images of flags, emblems or logos of terrorist groups, most of which referred to the jihadist group ISIS.
The ADL has even uncovered images “glorifying violent extremists” and violent hate crimes. The report found references and footage of tragedies such as the 2019 shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the stabbing of five 18-year-olds wearing neo-Nazi imagery in Eskişehir, Turkey.
Even the “Collections” and “Mods” community on the gamer site had hundreds of mods with hateful images. An unknown user named after Christchurch shooter Brian Tarrant took the Valve physics sandbox game. Garry’s Mod and produced the ‘Australian S** poster collection’. The user recreated Tarrant’s body armor look and posted screenshots of the character killing Muslims, as Tarrant did in 2019.
Other users have used it Garry’s Mod A game to create maps that commemorate tragedies like the Columbine High School shooting and the white supremacist shooting at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo. The maps inspired even more racist comments and reactions such as “build the next synagogue” and “remember the labs, subscribe to PewDiePie,” a chilling reference to a comment Tarrant made live just before he was shot.
The ADL accused Valve, which owns Steam, of not doing enough to remove or limit the use of these images in their communities. The report claims that Valve takes a “highly permissive approach to content policy” and only takes action in “rare notable cases”.
“Steam has selectively removed extremist content centered around extremist groups that have been disclosed, primarily in reports or in response to government pressure,” the ADL report said. “However, it has been largely ad hoc, with Valve failing to systematically address extremism and hate on the platform.”
We’ve reached out to Valve for comment on the ADL report.
