After the horrifying 2019 shooting at New Zealand’s Christchurch mosques, over 100 profiles on the gaming platform Steam paid tribute to the shooter.
A digital videogame storefront with some social networking features, Steam isn’t the most obvious home for charged political content. But just hours after the shooting, 66 Steam profiles took on the shooter’s name. Dozens more soon followed. At that time, the Christchurch shooter wasn’t the only terrorist commemorated by Steam users; hundreds of Steam pages referenced massacres in Parkland, Isla Vista, and Charleston.
Steam publisher Valve removed profiles referencing the Christchurch shooting after Kotaku reached out for comment on an article. But the fact that so many people—extremists, edgelords, or trolls—felt that they could profess these views on an over $4 billion platform with over 95 million active users says something unflattering about Steam.
Today, the Anti-Defamation League, a 107-year-old nonprofit founded to fight identity-based discrimination, released its report on “how the Steam platform harbors extremists.”
“It was disturbingly easy for ADL’s researchers to locate Steam users who espouse extremist beliefs, using language associated with white supremacist ideology and subcultures, including key terms, common numeric hate symbols, and acronyms,” the report reads. In a random search, researchers found hundreds of Steam profiles advertising Nazi or white supremacist imagery in their usernames, profile pictures, posts, or bio descriptions.
The ADL’s sample size is not significant ..
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