A new report from the Anti-Defamation League accused Valve of “enabling the proliferation of hate, after finding more than 1.8 million instances of extremist or hateful content, including Nazi imagery and support for foreign terrorist organizations, on Steam.
The organization goes on to state that Steam does not have public content policies specifically related to hate or extremism. However, a quick search reveals that 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 on the basis of ethnicity, religion, gender, age, disability or sexual orientation”. .
This, then, raises questions about Valve's enforcement of its policies, as the ADL notes elsewhere in its report: “The fact that extremist and hate content is relatively easy to locate on Steam raises questions about the effectiveness of Steam's moderation efforts.” It states, for example, that while Valve implements filters and other forms of automatic content moderation on user summaries and comments, these do not apply to all user-generated fields, and users can disable filters manually. Additionally, the ADL says that Steam's keyword detection is “easy to evade,” noting that altered words and ASCII art can be used to evade Valve's moderation tools.
“While Steam appears to be technically capable of moderating hateful and extremist content on its platform,” the ADL report 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 on extremist groups publicized in reports or in response to government pressure. However, this has largely been ad hoc, and Valve has not. systematically addressed the issue of extremism and hate on the platform.
“Valve needs to make significant changes to its approach to platform governance,” the ADL report concluded, “both in terms of policy and practice to address the ways in which hate and extremism have proliferated on the Steam platform.” “. It ends by urging Valve to adopt policies that prohibit extremism and hate, to audit the content moderation practices of the “Red Team” to close legal loopholes, and to collaborate with civil society, academics and researchers. More information, including recommendations for policymakers, can be found in the full ADL report.
Eurogamer has asked Valve for comment.