Valve has been accused by the Anti-Defamation League of allowing hateful content to fester on Steam. A report published on its website claims that it has found millions of instances of extremist and hateful content, with the company not doing enough to moderate it. This allegedly includes everything from Nazi imagery, support for terrorist organisations, and hateful depictions of certain communities.
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This is not the first time the ADL has published a report about Steam being a haven for such activities. In 2020, the organisation published a report on similar grounds, albeit not in such detail. This latest report includes statistics on the kind of content and the groups that this hateful content targets.
Steam Is Rife With Hateful Content
The ADL’s Center on Extremism has found “millions of examples of extremist and hateful content – including explicit hate symbols like sonnenrads and ‘happy merchants,’ as well as copypastas (blocks of text that are copied and pasted to form images or long-form writing) shaped into swastikas – on Steam Community, the platform’s social networking space where users can connect, congregate and share content.
“The clear gaps in Steam’s moderation of this content inflict harm by exposing untold users to hate and harassment, enabling potential radicalization and normalizing hate and extremism in the gaming community. Understanding the extent of extremist and hateful content on the platform is key to fighting the proliferation of hate online.”
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Among the ADL’s findings are 1.83 million unique pieces of content that depict hateful and extremist messaging. This includes Nazi imagery and support for terrorist organisations like ISIS. It also found 1.18 million unique instances copypastas depicting messages of antisemitism and white supremacy. The report goes into further detail about the different kinds of hateful content that it found on Steam.
“Valve needs to make significant changes to their approach to platform governance both in terms of policy and practice to address the ways in which hate and extremism have proliferated on the Steam platform, concluded the report”
The Anti-Defamation League made a number of recommendations to Valve. These include adopting strict policies against extremism and hateful messaging, enforcing these policies on a large scale, fixing the loopholes in the moderation system that creators of this content exploit, and consulting civil society groups to shape policies.
Steam
Owned by Valve, Steam is a digital storefront and library for PC games. With many sales, updates, account functionality, and compatibility with many different platforms — as well as streaming options and its own Steam Deck handheld – it remains one of the biggest storefronts for PC gamers.