Valve accused of "allowing the proliferation of hate" as report finds 1.8m instances of extremist or hateful content on Steam

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".

That, then, raises questions around Valve's enforcement of its policies, as the ADL highlighted elsewhere in its report: "The fact that extremist and hateful content is relatively easy to locate on Steam, raises questions regarding the efficacy of Steam's moderation efforts." It noted, for instance, that while Valve deploys filters and other forms of automated content moderation on user summaries and comments, these do not apply to all user-generated fields - and filters can manually be disabled. Additionally, the ADL called Steam's keyword detection "easy to evade", noting altered words and ASCII art can be used to circumvent Valve's moderation tools.

"While Steam appears to be technically capable of moderating extremist and hateful content on its platform," the ADL continued, "the spread of extremist content on the platform is due in part to Valve's highly permissive approach to content policy. In rare notable cases, Steam has selectively removed extremist content, largely based around extremist groups publicised 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."

"Valve needs to make significant changes to their approach to platform governance," the ADL concluded, "both in terms of policy and practice to address the ways in which hate and extremism have proliferated on the Steam platform." It finished by urging Valve to adopt policies prohibiting extremism and hate, to audit and "Red Team" content moderation practices to close loopholes, and to engage with civil society, academics, and researchers. More, including recommendations for policymakers, can be found in the full report.

"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 at ADL's Centre for Technology & Society, added in an interview shared by Bloomberg. This, he continued, "increases the likelihood that someone will travel all the way down the rabbit hole." Eurogamer has asked Valve for comment.