For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
Weird how they specifically point out the ADL, a fascist propaganda machine, as an enemy of the right wing extremists on Steam and nobody else. There’s tons actual racism (allowed) on there and even calls for violence (not allowed), but no, attacking the ADL is too far
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1586566/full
The actual paper.
The title here from PCGamesN is rather bad, in the sense of being misleading:
No, its not really the 'store' part of Steam that is plauged with insane harassment of all kinds.
They've actually put a good deal of effort into trying to tackle things like review bombing and removing horrendous stuff you'd see on an actual storefront page.
This article somehow completely fails to explain that Steam is basically also a 'social media' type of platform, where users have personal pages and can comment on and message each other, form groups, form their own miniforums, etc etc.
Describing all of this in totality as 'a store' would be like describing TikTok as a store.
But, that aside, yes, the 'Steam community' has always been an insane shit show where if you just deleted 99.9% of it, nothing of value would be lost.
Why is this the case?
Because Valve does not want to hire an army of tens to hundreds of thousands of offshore, human content moderators, which... is what you would have to do to adequately police all of this, its what Facebook and other large social media platforms do.
Sure, they'll tell you they use AI or some advanced algorithm.
Even today, that is still mostly a lie.
Its always been somewhere between an army of offshore moderators getting paid slave wages and getting PTSD from their jobs, and something like a mechanical turk.
... But yeah, anyone who's been using Steam since the early days knows that the Steam community is largely cancer and should generally be avoided.
Also, this PCGamesN article incorrectly describes the NGOs and the ADL specifically as a 'target'.
The paper literally never describes the ADL or any other NGO or group as a direct target of these right wing groups.
What the paper actually says is that the ADL has conducted multiple of their own similar studies to try to understand social dynamics and extremism and harassment on Steam, which this paper cites and mentions.
It also says that a commonly identifiable attribute of a right wing extremist group is that they declare themselves as enemies of the ADL... but there is nothing in the paper that describes these groups actually targetting the ADL itself with... some kind of specific threats or harassment or anything directed precisely at, or specifically targetting, the ADL or other NGOs... the paper also at one point mentions that the ATF is also often specifically identified as an enemy of these right wing groups, as well as just Steam Moderators themselves.
Its a way of right wing virtue signalling to say 'Fuck the ADL' along with Nazi / Nordic symbology, 9/11 conspiracy theories etc.
The main focus of the paper is actually to describe the mechanics and attributes of what the authors describe as performative infighting amongst right wing extremist groups on Steam.
The paper specifically notes:
The first systematic review of extremist behavior on Steam was presented in Anti-Defamation League (2024).
...
The publication of this report appears to have induced Valve to more widely ban explicit neo-Nazi and white supremacist behavior, but extremist cliques and groups are still easily discoverable across Steam's social features.
IE, Valve took the ADL's report seriously, Valve is moving more heavily against explicit right wing extremism, but the problem still persists, and this paper shows ways of identifying and diagnosing the problem, presumably so as to also convince Valve to maybe consider these methods themselves.
From the article:
...the study shows that neo-fascist groups are using Valve's platform to start "wars," with a focus on recruiting new members and organizing harassment against various opposing groups.
These targets, which include everything from other Steam populations to NGOs like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), are branded as "enemies," while other affiliated groups are considered "allies." Bradley-Newhouse and Kowert conclude that neo-fascism is on the rise on Valve's platform, and that current moderation systems aren't doing much to stop it.
Phrasing enemy-based identifiers that right wing groups use to instead be "targets" is a significant mischaracterization of what the paper actually says.
The article totally fails to mention that these "wars" are infighting between right wing groups and clusters of right wing groups, fighting amongst themselves.
Literally nowhere in the paper does it describe these right wing groups actually "organizing harassment" directly against their self-identified enemy "targets".
That is not what the paper is about, but the phrasing in article strongly gives the impression that it is.
It is, again, about virtue signalling and infighting amongst right wing groups on Steam, and how understanding how that works can be helpful in identifying the most dedicated right wing extremeists on Steam.
In conclusion, this article was written by an illiterate idiot, either that or they are significantly selective with presenting or not presenting context, and are deliberately being overly alarmist.
Please read the actual paper instead.
Anyway, anecdotally, yeah, it does track with my own experience that Garrys Mod and HOI4 players are considerably more likely to be fascist extremists than players of many other games.
Thank you for the commentary (PCGamesN blocks IPs from Ukraine so I can't read the article). Will need grab a copy of the paper.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1586566/pdf
That should be the whole paper, at least where I am (US), they seem to just be giving it away for free, probably because it is a 'headline' paper for this edition of this journal.
Slava Ukraini.
EDIT:
Aha, your avatar.
Well agent, don't forget:
Cheers! Will need to schedule this for my evening reading session.
Thank you for the support!
Steam needs to shut down their forums. It’s clear they have no intention of moderating them and they are so incredibly toxic, hateful, and disgusting that I feel bad about using the platform at all.
I pretty much agree, I literally cannot think of a single time me engaging with the Steam forums has resulted in anything good at all.
Best case scenario you get absolute idiots who know nothing about how games work acting like they do, worst case scenario you run into something akin to Terrorgram.
EDIT:
I was completely serious in my other post when I said 99.9% of steam forums are worse than worthless.
Just say, hey, everything in any steam forum, discussion group, basically anything other than comments on steam workshop stuff and guides and your own posted screenshots and your own profile... yep, in 90 days, it all goes away, make your backups now, if you want to, here's a tool thingy to do that.
We have other platforms for lengthier discussions now, if a game wants to run its own community, fucking buy a domain, set up some forums, set up a discord, a reddit, a lemmy, whatever, do it yourself, its not worth steam potentially getting nuked or massively censored because it allows basicslly auto generated forums for every half baked idiot that makes some game.
I don't go there for discussions but have found useful fixes from it that wasn't on pcgamingwiki, which I've added to pcgamingwiki linking back to the steam forum. So it has its uses.
Despite the terrible discussions which I don't use it for it is still at the end of the day place people do ask for help and do receive it when that's the topic of the thread.
I honestly don't think I've ever been on a steam forum.
This shits generally everywhere nowadays, there's no hiding from it. It's like a worldwide pandemic of brain rot at this point. Everyone is polarized, and that's never going to lead to anything good. I'm still not sure we should all be this connected to each other.
Social media in moderation and with responsibility and rational thought, there's nothing wrong with that. But people don't seem to be able to self police themselves, it's turned into a massive addiction that's maybe somehow just as bad as the opioid crisis in some ways. It's infection has circled the globe, turning a lot of otherwise decent people into mindless meme chodes and racism repeaters.
The people who run social media sites knew all the stuff in your 2nd paragraph would happen from about 2010 onward.
I... remember reading blogs of people working for them, explaining how a human brain can't really handle knowing or having more than roughly 50 to 100 friends, after some threshold is passed, your brain switches into another mode of social thinking.
... And they knew that, and so much more, and exploited the fuck out of literally everyone, first to sell ads, then they realized data was the new oil.
Yeah, basically, social media was a mistake.
Algos will always naturally 'conclude' that the best way to drive engagement is to promote things that make people paranoid and angry, and speak to their insecurities, and make them worse.
Now we can literally buy an AI neck pendant friend for $99, for people who are so pathetic and so in need of validation they will just literally buy a simulacra of a friend, because socialization itself has been destroyed.
We are living through a kind of cyberpunk dystopia somehow more insidious and fundamentally debasing of what it even means to be human than any author I've read predicted or warned against.
My response so far has been 'the only winning move is not to play', I will never tie my real identity directly to any web presence ever again, nuked all my shit, everywhere, when Cambridge Analytica broke.
They have been social engineering with supercomputers for a decade now, and it is more or less making them so much money they literally do not know what to do with it, as it hollows out everyone and everything, acts as gasoline on their accelerationist fire.
... call this a parasocial relationship if you want, but I miss David Bowie.
If they only still made them like Bowie...
I agree with everything that you've said, it's sad and pathetic, but we've invited the monster inside. The calls are coming from inside the house now.
Black Mirror?
Oh, you mean the phone you hold in front of your face all the time, everyday, right?
When the screen's not on... literally black, glossy, relflective...
Please tell me I am not the only person who immediately made that association when that show came out.
You definitely aren't.
I really do feel terribly for Gen Z and A.
I am old enough that I remeber having to actually memorize phone numbers, used a phone booth a few times, could navigate around my town and generally on highways without a GPS/Map mounted to the dash.
The kids barely ever knew the analog world, and its not like us Millenials are any better parents than ours were.
When the infrastructure starts to give out, from climate disasters, or people can't afford it any more due to economic depression...
A bunch of people are basically going to go into withdrawl and become feral.
Why think, why learn? AI does it for you!
Untill that service is no longer available in your area.
I'm old enough I can remember operating an 8-track deck in my dad's truck. Didn't have GPS accessible until oh geez, probably my later 20s? My kids are very young, so they only know the touchscreen world.
I don't think there's any going back. If we had to, like if there was a bad event or whatever, I'd like to think we could all eventually adapt, but it would be rough for sure. A lot of people wouldn't make it.
"We can't rewind, we've gone too far..."
I wanna poke fun at you for actually having an 8 track, but at this point, culture is auto-cannibalizing, so I think we should just mostly celebrate, and maybe personally archive, what was once good.
8-tracks and 45s. I even remember early day modems where you actually had to pick up a landline, dial the number and then place the receiver in a specially built cradle that used analogue noise to communicate. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 that used cassette tapes to save data.
Best days of life if you ask me. Well actually maybe the mid to later 90s, when the Internet first started coming home for everyone. Watching live concerts and Napster and all of that. Instant messaging people, and being able to download every Nintendo game in existence, on demand. When computer games went from here to THERE, like Carmaggedon and games like that. Those were the magic days. When I discovered Napster I think we legit skipped school for almost the entire week.
Thanks for a trip through the memories!
Hey any time man!
Yeah I am a bit younger, but I dove head first into all things computer at a young age, so I completely agree with you that the mid to late 90s were... yeah, magic, just... incredible leaps and bounds being made by tech, there was a real optimism back then.
I was losing games of Starcraft in 98/99 because mom or dad picks up the phone, 56k modem now earrapes them and i get connection lost lol.
Trying to play Half Life 2, a few years later, on the same shitty eMachine... the computer could not handle the scene with Alyx being teleported in the intro / first level.
The uh, screen negative effect, plus the streaking emmisive particle blurs, every time it would crash so hard I would have to repair windows/defrag the drive.
What worked, was to stare at the floor that whole scene. That way you only get the screen negative flash effect, without the particles on top.
But yeah like, the leap from HL1 and like, Goldeneye style graphics, to HL2... fucking mind blowing.
Nowadays its all unoptimized UE5 garbage that actually looks worse in many instances than better optimized and more cleverly rendered games from 5 to 10 years ago.
Well the games for sure haven't for the most part gotten any better. Maybe with the exception of the Rockstar games, like I totally get all the hate, but their games are also always next level.
And the dial up days lol. My dad wisely and thankfully got a second phone line.
Also I remember those underpowered computer days too lol. We got a 200 Pentium MMX the spring of 97, and that thing was cutting edge at first, but it quickly got pretty dated, like even around 2000 it was starting to struggle with some of the newer stuff. The old man insisted on riding it into the mid aughts. I was long and away at school and afterwards, with my own computers by then, but he rode that thing into the ground, and oh boy was it crawling at the end. We'd come home from school, where we had like wide open broadband, and have to suffer through Christmas break at dial up speeds lol.
Rockstar is so obviously just money grubbing for the last 5+ years that it is pathetic.
Yes, they do put out groundbreaking shit, truly S tier in many ways... but I won't be playing GTA6.
Oh boy, two idiot criminals have shennanigans happen to them in Florida while they look cool and hot and do crime and appear to be basically morons with no personalities.
Meanwhile the GTA6 youtubers spend months, fucking months, inventing new gameplay mechanics by noticing random details and doing pattern matching like a schizophrenic.
Remember when GTA4 had like... a really serious and biting commentary on US society?
And then GTA5 was basically 'nihlism, but expensive, and also infuriating!'
And now GTA6 seems to me to just be 'lol thug life, life fast die hard, respawn, do it again.'
... Sorry, I could apparently write a fucking novel on how disappointed I am with Rockstar, they realized GTA online was a Steam like money spigot and then just never looked back, ruined everything in the name capitalistic profit they once artfully, and sullenly, exposed.
I hate GTA online. Actually I have to admit I still don't understand the appeal of online gaming, it has never scratched the itch for me.
I'll play GTA 6, but I'm going to keep my expectations in check. I also agree, GTA IV was thus far the pentultimate. I really like RDR2 as well, both are definitely in my top 5.
RDR2 was legitimately fantastic, unbelievably good story telling in single player, astounding graphics imo.
But, it also has (had?) an online component, and dear god what a shit show. monestized as fuck, full of bling'd out cowboys and cowgirls, broken network mechanics and hackers everywhere... and they basically just abandoned it because GTA V online was way more profitable.
You can have a good time in an online game, but basically, you have to find a rather rare and niche game that has somewhere between a small to tiny community, that is actually both politr and has a good sense of fun.
Back in the day, you could find that with some clans for some games, but most of that devolved into toxic bs and petty power struggles.
perhaps ironically, many of the simulation level military/flight type games, some tactical shooters... basically stuff that by default has an older audience on average, thats usually gonna have at least a better chance of having a non toxic community.
but, on the other hand, if you just don't care for multiplayer games, i totally get that, most game players online are literally idiot racist children, lol.
The conflict of interests is that they are whales that buy games, but never play. This is why Valve doesn't want to ban them.
You don't need to ban whales on steam who have tons of games.
Just get rid of or massively downsize steam community forums and group discussions.
They don't need to exist.
Whales can still be whales and write an angry game review or whatever, but we don't need discussion forums on Steam for every possible fucking thing.
Sure, but they’ll congregate on 8chan, discord, kiwifarms, their websites, etc.. You’ll also need to tackle Steam groups too. Too many of them.
Nazis are worse than roaches, you need to eradicate everywhere lest you suffer their mob campaigns.
It literally is not Valve's problem to handle what goes on off their platform.
If somebody wants to attempt that, uh, good luck? The US is currently run by fascists, all the fascists in government probably are not going to prioritize policing younger, dumber fascists.
If you just put all this burden on Steam, what you end up with is Steam gets massively censored in way more ways than just discussion forums.
But yes, I agree, I say, also just get rid of Steam Groups, entirely.
Just, boink, gone, don't need em.
Nobody ever uses them for anything serious, they are basically always shit post zones, at best.
Thats what I meant where I elsewhere more or less said 'nuke everything that isn't your personal profile and stuff you publish personally'.
Sure, keep some ability for commenting on like, user's screenshots, stuff people upload to the workshop, mods, comprehensive guides.
But, its the uploader's job to moderate them, just offer something like 'hold all comments for personal vetting or keyword filter scan' before they appear.
Pretty sure those options already exist in other contexts on Steam, but yeah, I am fully down with Steam just cleaning house on almost everything.
I also think that asking for more serious moderation on more platforms is a good idea, but the problem is always going to be having the resources to do that, as well as uh, facsists aren't going to investigate themselves.
Only other paradigm is to basically require a kind of NetID that either is your government ID or is tied directly to it, for all kinds of public discussion software, and once you do that, well, again, the government is fascists, so now if you criticize them, off to jail for you.
The US is currently run by fascists
Valve Headquarters: PO Box 1688, Bellevue, Washington 98009
Yeah, that's the precise whale I’m talking about. Imagine upsetting your landlord and despot.
I don't follow.
You initially said whales who buy tons of games, I assume you mean individuals with 1000+ games on their steam account, buys all the dlc and mtx and loot crates, that kind of whale.
Now you are reffering to... the US government as a whale?
What are you suggesting... be done?
... and by whom?
Are you suggesting Valve functionally commit hara-kiri by ... some kind of intentionally angering the fascist government?
What are you suggesting, that Valve fund investigators to link Steam accounts to other platforms and websites, and then... report that knowledge to... the government?
They wouldn't do anything other than sue Valve out of existence for being antifa.
Valve cannot like... arrest people, issue themselves search warrants, ... and if they did set up a system to do something like this, kablamo, now it is instantly turned around to hunt down trans people after Valve is sued into a government buy out or being purchased by fucking Larry Ellison.
Please, explain to me what you are trying to suggest, I don't get it.
I comprehend you're saying that Valve should get rid off forums and groups.
I’m saying they can't, the “US” will
sue Valve out of existence for being antifa.
freeze their assets, revoke their business licences, put them on a watchlist, and deathcamp Valve & affiliates.
Valve’s hands are fascistically tied to 🇺🇲’s RMVP.¹
¹ def. of RMVP
Ooooh, ok.
I would think that them just getting rid of much of their discussion 'zones' would be something they could do without pissing off the fascists, and also just being a net good in general...
... whereas if they kept all their steam groups and discussion forums, but instead, specifically began to more heavily moderate / remove right wing extremists from those discussion zones, I would think that would be much more likely to piss off the fascists.
Basically, I don't think the fascists in government really even understand fully what Steam is, everything it does, but, if they heard it was cracking down specifically on fascists, that would draw more heat to them than if they just removed features which are, imo, just a net negative anyway.
I don’t think the fascists in government really even understand fully what Steam is
Did you click the “🇺🇲’s RMVP” link? Elon Musk and Barron Trump know what Steam is, they have accounts, and were both livestreaming with their accounts.
Steam?
You mean the platform with critically acclaimed titles such as 'Hitler My Friend' 'Heal Hitler' 'Hitler is my crush' ?
I would never have guessed that the platform had a problem with far right communities. Surely the Sniper Elite folks have something to say.
Can't believe you havent included my all time favourite game - sex with hitler
I'm sorry, you're absolutely right. A crucial entry missed.
There's also a game called "Fuck Putin"
Humble bundle had bundles for Sniper Elite, and Wolfenstein/Doom games. The Nazis don't seem friendly in those games. Are you telling me they are not the bad guys?
Haven't played Sniper Elite in a while but I seem to remember being struck by how much they went out of their way to humanize Nazi soldiers.
Doom has Nazis?
Idk about Wolfenstein, but I have spent plenty of time in online gaming spaces.
Doom doesn't, but it was a wolfenstein and doom packaged together. And you get shot at both groups of nazis. And in sniper elite you can shoot hitlers testicle.
The amount of trump profile pics or racist names I see on steam is depressing
It's weird I just never see any of this at all. Is it just for certain games? Admittedly I barely ever go into the forums and when I do I'm looking for a specific answers to specific questions, so maybe it's just people who use Steam for General communication? But I don't know why anyone would do that so...
Most bigger games are full of reviews from „woke detectors”, followed by trolls spamming rainbows, followed by people with trump pfps inviting into their Nazi communities
Right. This is the whole issue with these studies as the data is skewed. The only people getting into 'wars' are single brain cell fuckheads who can't resist spewing rhetoric on a game store and/or associated forum. Normal users are using the platform as intended.
Why is HoI 4 in the background.........
Because of the group that they exemplified in the paper, the top 3 games that were common to right wing social circles on Steam were:
Counterstrike 2
HOI 4
Garry's Mod
Now, this isn't the same as saying 'everyone who plays this game is a right wing extremeist', its not that kind of analysis, but it is saying that if you are a right wing extremeist, these games are games you probably play.
You could however do some napkin math based on daily player counts and realize that CS2 has way, waaay more players than HOI4 or Gmod, and then realize that there likely are a disproportionate number of HOI4 and Gmod players who are right wing extremists, as compared to many other games.
The paper specifically says:
While most of these games are commonly played among all types of users, Hearts of Iron IV (HOI4) is an important exception. HOI4 is a strategy game developed by Paradox Interactive in 2016, and it was originally played primarily by hardcore strategy gamers.
However, since its launch, neo-Nazi and neo-fascist communities have increasingly adopted it as a symbol. Far-right communities have embraced the ability to play as Nazis and fascists in HOI4, and they have particularly celebrated the ability to create speculative fiction via the built-in story and user-created mods (White and Lamphere-Englund, 2024; Newhouse and Kowert, 2024).
Frankly, as a HOI4 enjoyer myself... they're not wrong, go try to follow all the drama behind the New Order mod, and you will probably see what I mean.
And also, as a former Gmod player, I can absolutely personally tell you all about Nazis and grooming in roleplay servers, as I am unfortunate enough to have crossed paths with Spartan5150/ParadymShyft many times, to the point that I could easily doxx him and tell you his real name, just off the top of my head.
If you don't know what I'm talking about: He's a Nazi pedophile with a penchant for grooming underage girls and sending them pics of his oddly shaped cock, and then baiting them into sending him their nudes, and then him holding those over their heads to force them to keep doing weird RP shit... who then went on to be the lead community manager for "The Isle", ostensibly an attempt to make some kind of 'live as a dinosaur' multiplayer simulation type game.
Anyway, here's the full table from the study, the paper this article is clumsily based on:
Gmod is also particularly popular in Eastern Europe and Russia, which seems to be a particularly toxic region. I've seen more than a few distasteful posts in Russian, such as when "burnt Ukranian corpses" spent multiple days as the most popular workshop item, with comments in Russian celebrating and making various racist and nationalist remarks.
Also not suprised War Thunder is up there too. Again, popular in Russia, and like HoI, its the type of game to attract Nazis and Wehraboos.
I find the hoi thing funny cause I play it just for the my little pony mod. All I can picture is a bunch of Nazi bronies now.
I also am well aware there's a very large and sizeable Nazi community inside the brony fandom and it's highly problematic.
There is a reason my friends list is limited to people I have Met in real life.
I don't think it's new info that there is a substantial percentage of fascists in communities that are predominantly cishet men.