Steam players in shock after almost 2million instances of hateful conduct and messages are found
STEAM is the most popular platform with PC gamers, as the online storefront holds the vast majority of the market share.
Millions of people log in to play games on Steam every day, but it also has a number of social functions.
There are community boards for each game where people can share guides, tips, and fan theories.
These forums also allow developers to connect to the players, and update them on changes that are coming to their games.
Players can also send private messages to each other, or leave game reviews and let other players know how they feel.
Steam users can also fill out a profile, complete with a profile picture and a bio about themselves.
However, like almost every community platform where people can be anonymous, there are some hateful messages among the millions of interactions.
The Anti-Defamation League has published a report saying that the platform is “rife with extremism and anti-semitism”.
The organisation analysed almost 450million player profiles and over 600million user comments before posting its findings.
It found over 1.8million examples of hateful content, most of it surrounding Nazi symbolism and more generalised anti-semitism.
While many commenters and profiles were passing off the use of these as jokes, the ADL says the use of these memes normalises this hateful behaviour.
The report claims that users share these hateful messages via memes in the form of copypastas – large blocks of text that people copy and paste – and images.
A number of accounts were also found to normalise extremely violent real-world events via images and memes.
Steam does have moderation and auto-moderation in place, which censors certain words and allows people to report messages for removal.
However, with the sheer number of messages sent and profiles made, the service relies on reports to catch hateful content.
It should be noted that over half a million of the ‘extremist symbols’ recognised by the ADL are of Pepe, which can be an extremist symbol but is still often used humorously in gaming communities.
Despite this, the report shares clear examples and evidence of hate speech and extremism on Steam that is open to the public.
Steaming Mad
This has been an issue on Steam for a while, and it has been criticised before for lax measures when it comes to vetting its games.
Games like School Shooting Simulator were allowed on the platform until players fought back.
With any platform this large it’s difficult to moderate, but more needs to be done to prevent these messages from appearing.
We have reached out to Valve for comment on this story.
If you want to read more about Steam, check out the new Steam Deck.
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