A damning Anti-Defamation League (ADL) report compellingly claims that Valve’s Steam marketplace and social gaming facet have become a breeding ground for racial extremists. The ADL report doesn’t blame Valve directly for its users’ hateful rhetoric and actions, but it does point out that Valve hasn’t ever properly addressed the evidently rampant problem.
Seeing as how some openly pine for the overt toxicity and racial slurs of ye gaming lobbies of olde, it’s safe to say that the gaming community’s racism problem is no secret. Every few months, some streamer or esports athlete drops the n-word and is widely condemned while being heralded by some as martyrs of free speech, and now even sports stars are occasionally caught doing the same thanks to the proliferation of online visibility. While that vile behavior occurs in spite of platform moderation and is usually punished proportionally, ADL’s discovered that so little moderation from Valve has long allowed racial extremists to flower right under its apathetic nose.
The ADL report points out that while a 2019 survey shows that only 23 percent of US players say they’ve been “exposed to white supremacy ideology in online games,” those respondents say that Valve’s Dota 2 and Counterstrike: Global Offensive accounted for a disproportionately high rate of exposure. To understand why, ADL dove deep into Steam’s social space, where external reports have found users “glorifying Nazi imagery” and other hateful content for years. It published the below image, a non-exhaustive “friend mapping of a sample of nearly 200 users who embraced/propagated Nazi or white supremacist propaganda,” which interweave with a web of “16,697 friend connections“. ADL says it was “disturbingly easy” to find users who openly “espouse extremist beliefs” using blatant “key terms, common numeric hate symbols[,] and acronmyms” like swastikas, death’s heads, and “1488” references.
Whereas many play games to kill virtual Nazis, ADL says Valve’s lax moderation instead idly allows users to be radicalized into real ones. Not only is the “glorification of infamous extremist murderers” like Adolf Hitler, Anders Breivik, and Christchurch mosque shooter Brenton Tarrant normalized among the Steam userbase, but known “extremist leaders and mass killers” are/were active on Steam. Those among them that committed crimes like murder openly expressed the ideology that motivated them, with Tarrant’s username allegedly paying homage to American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell and the former leader of hate group Feuerkrieg Division quoting Joseph Goebbels and Heimlich Himmler in their bio.
ADL accurately claims that the kind of openness that Steam has allowed self-identified white supremacists effectively puts it on the same level as far-right platforms “Telegram or Gab,” especially considering how many extremists wear the badge of Steam “community ambassador.” Identifying the problem’s roots in Valve’s oversights in “platform governance both in terms of policy and practice“, ADL concludes that Valve can address it by taking “some of the most basics steps” like other platforms, such as “[speaking] out against extremism” and “[updating] online game platform policies around extremism.”
It’s sad that the same organization that was too controversial for the likes of PewDiePie’s fanbase is having to step in to to tell Valve to do its job, but that’s unfortunately what it’s come to. The ADL nor anyone else would imply that normally charitable Valve and Steam are evil, but the company’s inaction on what’s going on in its own backyard threatens to sully its reputation and continue to feed into an online network of hate that, when it seeps into the real world, kills.
