The Anti-Defamation League has accused Valve of “allowing the proliferation of hate”, after publishing a report finding over 1.8m instances of extremist or hateful content – including Nazi imagery and support for foreign terrorist organisations – on Steam.
The Anti-Defamation League – which describes itself as the “leading anti-hate organisation in the world” – shared its findings in a report published on its website, after conducting an “unprecedented, platform-wide” analysis of Steam. This is said to have spanned over 458m user profiles, 152m profile and group avatar images, plus more than 610m comments on user profiles and groups, with the ADL’s Centre on Extremism saying it ultimately identified 1.83m unique pieces of extremist or hateful content.
Examples given include explicitly antisemitic symbols and copypasta, white supremacist copypasta, Nazi imagery – such as the swastika or Totenkopf – plus “tens of thousands of instances of users expressing support for foreign terrorist organisations like Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Hamas and others”. The ADL also claimed to have found 184,622 keywords on Steam used in an extremist or hateful context – including “1488”, “shekel”, and “white power” – adding that 1.5m unique users and 73,824 groups had shared at least one example of potentially extremist or hateful content.
The organisation went onto claim Steam has no public-facing content policies specifically linked to hate or extremism. However, a quick search reveals Valve’s developer and community guidelines do, in fact, explicitly prohibit hate speech, specifically “speech that promotes hatred, violence or discrimination against groups of people based on ethnicity, religion, gender, age, disability or sexual orientation”.