Senator urges Valve to tackle ‘extremist, hateful’ content on Steam

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Senator Mark Warner leadership has urged at Valve to respond to allegations that 1.8 million pieces of extremist or hateful content have been identified on gaming platform Steam.

In one recent reportThe ADL’s Center on Extremism (COE) claims to have identified 1.5 million unique users and more than 73,000 groups that have used at least one piece of potentially extremist or hateful content.

“We have seen lax compliance with letter of user conduct agreements on other social networking platforms, coupled with an apparent unwillingness by those companies to honor the spirit (namely, providing users with a safe, welcoming place to socialize) of those same agreements to embrace. , creates toxic social environments that exacerbate harassment and abuse,” Senator Warner, a Virginia Democrat, said in a statement.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization founded to combat anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination, claims to have included more than 458 million profiles, 152 million profile and group avatar images, and 610 million comments in its dataset.

Pepe the Frog and swastikas are reportedly the most common extremist symbols spreading on the platform, accounting for 54.6% and 9.1% of detected symbols respectively.

The ADL also claims to have identified 15,000 public accounts with symbols of ISIS, Hezbollah and Hamas in their profile photos. The group also claims to have identified “hundreds of accounts” using images of terrorists such as Anders Breivik, who killed 69 people in an attack on a summer camp in Norway in 2011.

The organization also highlighted cases in which users posted extremism-related content on Steam before committing attacks of real violence, such as an 18-year-old white supremacist who attacked a cafe in Turkey in August. In addition, 18,352 groups were found that may have had extremist or hateful keywords in their group profiles, such as ‘shekel’ and ‘white power’.

Senator Warner is asking Valve to provide details by December 13 on how it enforces its policies, how it defines certain terms, details about complaints, plans for the future and more.