This is not the first time that online spaces dedicated to video games have been used as tools to spread violent and hate speech. On Thursday, November 14, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the main organization that fights anti-Semitism in the United States, published a report that documents the omnipresence of anti-Semitic and extremist content on the Steam video game sales platform and more precisely on its pages. community networks through which users can chat in writing.
In his report, published 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 that incorporate 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 indicates “1.5 million unique users and 73,824 groups” have used at least one extremist or hateful content.
However, the proliferation of this content on Steam has consequences that go beyond the platform’s framework, regrets the ADL. In the introduction to its report, the organization tells the story of an 18-year-old Turkish youth, the perpetrator of a knife attack during which he injured several people, on August 12, in the city of ‘Eskişehir. According to an ADL investigation, Arda K., on the one hand, had written a white supremacist manifesto and, on the other, had published numerous extremist and hate 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 that represent some of these figures of terrorism and multiply references, supporting photographs, to attacks such as the one committed in 2019 by supremacist Brenton Tarrant against two mosques in the city of Christchurch, in New Zealand.
According to the ADL, this speech is spread in particular through copy paste (literally “copy and paste”, in English, referring to “copy and paste”), a popular method in online gaming communities that consists of reposting the same message thousands of times with the aim of flooding a forum or a chat. Among the approximately 1.18 million unique cases of copy paste potentially extremist and hateful, 54% carried a 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 the twisted covers of the fictional character Pepe the Frog, who became the mascot of the American extreme right, but also swastikas, Nazi eagles or logos of terrorist organizations.
Steam, owned by the American company Valve Corporation, has removed a certain amount of extremist content in the past; the platform is even legally required to do so in many jurisdictions. But the company never addressed the systemic dimension of the problem, according to the ADL that denounces “Valve’s very permissive approach to content policy”. Contacted by the worldValve Corporation had not responded at the time of this article’s publication.