Nazis and white supremacists are having a field day on game platform Steam, reports Bloomberg News. Far-right material galore and no particular interest in moderating the spread of it; the company didn't even bother to respond to Bloomberg's inquiries.
Extremist images and phrases have proliferated on Steam, which is used by 30 million people at any given moment, according to a survey released Thursday by the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL's Center on Extremism identified 1.83 million instances of extremist or hateful content on the video-game platform, including Nazi imagery, support for terrorist organizations like ISIS and tributes to individual terrorists.
"Major gaming companies are selling their wares on a platform that is not addressing users' support of extremists and allowing the proliferation of hate," Daniel Kelley, director of strategy and operations for the ADL's Center for Technology & Society, said in an interview. While the survey doesn't cite evidence of extremists organizing on the platform, Kelley said allowing such content "increases the likelihood that someone will travel all the way down the rabbit hole."
People underestimate the scale of things. According to Bloomberg, Steam games and apps (not Valve, the company itself) are an $8.8 billion industry, and the platform is built along oldschool lines that prioritize the generation of as much content and engagement as possible (e.g. you don't even have to own a game to review it) with little moderation. It's just tens of millions of gamers sitting in the dark getting gibbed with propaganda and inauthentic content, with none of the scrutiny or attention given to the places media hang out (i.e. Twitter and Facebook)
