Steam accused of ‘normalizing hate and extremism in the gaming community’ in new ADL report

When you buy from our articles through links, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.

The Anti-Defamation League, an American organization that aims to combat anti-Semitism and support Israel, has published a report report claiming that Steam is “rife with extremism and anti-Semitism”, and accusing Valve of allowing the spread of hateful and extremist material through a “very permissive approach to content policies”.

The ADL said the report is based on what it described as an “unprecedented, platform-wide” analysis of public data on Steam, including more than 458 million user profiles, 152 million profile and user group avatar images, and 610 million user comments. The ADL’s Center on Extremism found that “millions of examples of extremist and hateful content have been found, including explicit hate symbols such as sunwheels and ‘happy merchants,’ as well as copypastas (blocks of text that are copied and pasted to form images or long texts) . ) formed into swastikas” that are shared on the platform.

“The apparent gaps in Steam’s moderation of this content cause harm by exposing countless users to hate and harassment, enabling potential radicalization and normalizing hate and extremism in the gaming community,” the ADL wrote. “Understanding the extent of extremist and hateful content on the platform is key to combating the spread of hate online.”

Pepe the Frog and swastikas are the most common extremist symbols on Steam, representing 54.6% and 9.1% of detected symbols respectively, according to the report. The ADL also found “tens of thousands of pieces of terrorism-related content on Steam Community,” including more than 15,000 public accounts with profile photos featuring the flags or logos of ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas and others. Hundreds of accounts were found using photos of white supremacist mass murderers Brenton Tarrant and Anders Breivik as avatar images.

Game mods are also discussed in the report, which claims to have found hundreds of mods for games, most notably Garry’s Mod, “that specifically reference mass shootings.”

The report says that “Steam’s public content policy does not mention hate or extremism,” which isn’t entirely accurate: the Steamworks documentation specifically states that content containing “hate speech, i.e. speech that promotes hatred, violence or discrimination against groups of people based on ethnicity, religion, gender, age, disability or sexual orientation” should not be published on the platform. Steam code of conduct does not specifically refer to hateful or extremist content, but does prohibit harassment, disruptive or harmful behavior, and the violation of the personal rights of other users.

More relevant are questions about the application and effectiveness of Steam’s moderation policy. The report says that Steam appears “technically capable” of moderating content, and has done so “selectively” in the past in response to external pressure: an example of this is the removal of Pepe the Frog emoticons from the Steam Marketplace following a DMCA takedown filed by Pepe creator Matt Furie. But the overall approach was “largely ad hoc, with Valve failing to systematically address the issue of extremism and hate on the platform.”

Valve updated the community rules in 2023 to provide a much more detailed overview of what is and isn’t allowed, but as noted at the time, the real question was how one would enforce those rules. Since this is an ongoing problem for Steam: we reported on Valve’s “hate group problemin 2018, and in 2022, US Senator Maggie Hassan sent a letter to Valve boss Gabe Newell alleging “a significant presence of users who display and espouse neo-Nazi, extremist, racial supremacist, misogynistic, and other hateful sentiments”, and asked what Valve was doing with it.

“Valve must make significant changes to their approach to platform management, both in terms of policy and practice, to address the ways in which hate and extremism have spread on the Steam platform,” the report said.

“As ADL has previously stated, policymakers must demonstrate their commitment to disrupting hate and harassment in multiplayer online games. While government is necessarily focused on the dangers of social media and AI, policymakers must also pay attention to the immediate threats that are ubiquitous in online gaming environments.”

Also the ADL recently put pressure on Twitchleading to a temporary ban for a group of Arab streamers who made jokes on a TwitchCon panel that the organization interpreted as anti-Semitic.

I’ve reached out to Valve for comment on the report and will update it if I receive a response.