In August, a teenage boy wearing a neo-Nazi symbol stabbed five people in Eskişehir, Türkiye. Shortly after, authorities found his profile on Steam, the most popular online video-game marketplace.

Valve Corp’s Steam sells thousands of video games and hosts forums and communities for video-game discussions. But instead of conversing about games like Call Of Duty, the attacker, known as Arda K., was sharing his reverence for mass shooters.

His profile picture was Norwegian neo-Nazi and mass-murderer Anders Breivik. His comments praised Florida nightclub attacker Omar Mateen. Other posts demeaned Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.

According to Turkish media reports, Arda K. planned the attack with another person he met on Steam.

Extremist images and phrases have proliferated on Steam, which is used by 30 million people at any given moment, according to a survey released Nov 14 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 organisations 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 organising on the platform, Kelley said allowing such content “increases the likelihood that someone will travel all the way down the rabbit hole”.

Steam has a code of conduct, including language that bars “encouraging real-world violence”. But it says nothing about extremist groups or extremist ideologies. Valve officials didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on the ADL’s findings or questions about its content-moderation policies.

In contrast, the popular gaming platform Roblox and the chat app Discord have robust guidelines prohibiting the spread or support of violent ideologies and refer explicitly to extremism.

“There’s very little moderation that takes place on Steam,” said Galen Lamphere-Englund, co-founder of the Extremism & Gaming Research Network. “What moderation does take place tends to focus on things like fraud or money laundering.”

In 2023, an estimated US$8.8bil flowed through Steam, according to the researchers VG Insights and Aldora, up 15% from 2022. Valve also makes the two top games on Steam: Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2, which VG Insights and Aldora estimate brought in US$1.7bil for the company last year.

The ADL Center on Extremism analysed 1.2 billion unique pieces of content on Steam, including 500 million user profiles, with the help of an artificial intelligence tool. Swastikas, images of Adolf Hitler and the white-supremacist slogan 1488 repeatedly popped up.

Users also displayed profile pictures of mass shooters’ faces, going back as far as at least 2019, when people began posting photos of the mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand. In 2018, the nonprofit news outlet Reveal reported that 173 groups on Steam venerated school shooters.

“They’re signalling, ‘This is who I am’,” said Oren Segal, vice-president for the ADL’s Center on Extremism. “For many of these people with avatars that are hate symbols or extremists, this is the first thing they want people to know about them.”

About 830,000 user and group profiles contained such images, according to the report, which recommends that Steam adopt policies prohibiting extremism and hate, and enforcing those policies at scale.

“Whether they have one moderator, a thousand moderators, or are using tools to do it, they should be doing a better job,” Segal said.

About 14% of Counter-Strike 2 and 11% of Dota 2 players reported exposure to white-supremacist beliefs in the games, according to a February survey from the ADL. In comparison, only 6% of players of Epic Games Inc’s Fortnite reported this.

“The gaming industry has in general more permissive moderation policies than social media platforms,” Lamphere-Englund said. “It’s received substantially less attention, although that’s changing as of late.”

 – Bloomberg