Senator Urges Valve to Address ‘Extremist, Hateful’ Content on Steam

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

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

“We have seen on other social networking platforms that lax enforcement of the letter of user conduct agreements, when coupled with a seeming reluctance by those companies to embrace the spirit (namely providing users with a safe, welcoming place to socialize) of those same agreements, leads to toxic social environments that elevate harassment and abuse,” Sen. Warner, a Virginia Democrat, said in a statement.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization founded to combat antisemitism and other forms of discrimination, claims it 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 allegedly the most common extremist symbols spreading on the platform, accounting for 54.6% and 9.1% of the detected symbols, respectively.

The ADL claims it also identified 15,000 public accounts using symbols from ISIS, Hezbollah, and Hamas in their profile pics. The group also claims to have identified “hundreds of accounts” using images of terrorist attackers like Anders Breivik, who killed 69 people in an attack on a summer camp in Norway in 2011.

The organization also highlighted cases of users posting extremism-linked content on Steam before committing attacks of real-life violence, such as an 18-year-old white supremacist who attacked a cafe in Turkey in August. In addition, it found 18,352 groups that had potentially extremist or hateful keywords on their group profiles, such as “shekel” and “white power.”

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

About Will McCurdy

Contributor

I’m a reporter covering weekend news. Before joining PCMag in 2024, I picked up bylines in BBC News, The Guardian, The Times of London, The Daily Beast, Vice, Slate, Fast Company, The Evening Standard, The i, TechRadar, and Decrypt Media.

I’ve been a PC gamer since you had to install games from multiple CD-ROMs by hand. As a reporter, I’m passionate about the intersection of tech and human lives. I’ve covered everything from crypto scandals to the art world, as well as conspiracy theories, UK politics, and Russia and foreign affairs.

Read Will’s full bio

Read the latest from Will McCurdy