Steam is a pretty open platform, and so you can find a lot of stuff there, including some hateful communities, it seems. According to a report from the Anti-Defamation League which analysed the “entirety” of Steam, including 458 million user profiles, 152 million group and profile avatar images, over 600 million comments on user profiles and groups, it found nearly 2 million pieces of extremist or hateful content.
Things like Nazi imagery, support for terrorist groups, use of terms like “white power” and more were all outlined in the ADL’s report, which claimed that Valve isn’t doing enough to prevent this hateful content from finding its way onto Steam.
“The fact that extremist and hateful content is relatively easy to locate on Steam, raises questions regarding the efficacy of Steam’s moderation efforts,” reads the report. While filters do exist on content within Steam, these can be ignored and don’t apply to user-generated content.
The ADL recommends that Valve “make significant changes to their approach to platform governance, both in terms of policy and practice to address the ways in which hate and extremism have proliferated on the Steam platform.”
Do you think Valve needs these changes?