The Anti-Defamation League says Steam is a morass of hate and extremism

The Anti-Defamation League, which calls itself the world’s “leading” anti-hate organization, published a report that accuses Valve of letting hate proliferate on Steam

Valve

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which calls itself the world’s “leading” anti-hate organization, published a report that accuses Valve of letting hate proliferate on Steam. The ADL says its Center on Extremism came to this conclusion after conducting an “unprecedented” analysis of public data on the platform, including over 458 million profiles on Steam and more than 610 million comments on the PC game platform.

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The Center on Extremism found that white supremacist, antisemitic, and generally hate-filled content are common on Steam and in community posts, and it found 1.83 million individual pieces of content – images, posts, profile descriptions, and the like – that fall under the hateful or extremist categories. These range from text posts with slurs or symbols associated with hate, such as swastikas or the Nazi eagle, to blocks of text arranged to form similar icons or memes frequently used in extremist contexts, such as Pepe the Frog. 

CoE used an AI tool dubbed HateVision that’s trained on identifying 39 extremist symbols, but the study team only used the tool to identify potentially hateful content. Members of the CoE team analyzed the context they were used in to form the study’s conclusions and said that the method overlooked other potential instances of hate-filled content using images or symbols that also have benign interpretations, such as the Star of David.

Valve does have guidelines prohibiting hate speech and offensive material, though the company is selective about how and when it chooses to enforce these, something the ADL also acknowledged in its report.

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“While Steam appears to be technically capable of moderating extremist and hateful content on its platform, the spread of extremist content on the platform is due in part to Valve’s highly permissive approach to content policy,” the ADL said in one of the report’s key findings. “In rare notable cases, Steam has selectively removed extremist content, largely based around extremist groups publicized in reporting or in response to governmental pressure. However, this has been largely ad hoc, with Valve failing to systematically address the issue of extremism and hate on the platform.”

The report’s lengthy recommendations section includes a list of suggested actions for Valve to take, such as enforcing policies regularly and auditing moderation practices to reduce the instances of hate that can slip through Steam’s content guideline loopholes. However, it also closes with a list of recommendations for policymakers. The ADL recommends they press for legislation designed specifically for gaming platforms that makes it easier to see how companies are enforcing their guidelines and promoting user safety, and it also recommends creating a Gaming Safety Task Force dedicated to combatting the spread of hate in online gaming spaces.