A U.S. senator has written an open letter to Valve boss Gabe Newell asking for more stringent moderation of Steam.
Mark Warner, the United States senator from Virginia, demanded Valve crack down on what he called “hateful accounts and rhetoric proliferating on Steam.” IGN has asked Valve for comment.
Warner alleged that Steam is home to tens of thousands of groups that “share and amplify antisemitic, Nazi, sexuality or gender-based hate, and white supremacist content,” and called on Valve “to bring its content moderation standards in line with industry standards and crack down on the rampant proliferation of hate-based content.”
Warner’s letter follows a report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that identified over one million unique user accounts and nearly 100,000 user-created groups “that glorified antisemitic, Nazi, white supremacist, gender and sexuality-based hatred, and other extremist ideologies on Valve’s Steam platform.”
The ADL found Steam hosts almost 900,000 users with extremist or antisemitic profile pictures, 40,000 groups with names that included hateful words, and “rampant” use of text-based images, particularly of swastikas, resulting in over one million unique hate-images.
