Mark Warner raises issue with Steam, the gaming platform full of Nazis

I’d not heard of Steam, but those who know of it trend toward the antisemitic, misogynistic, white supremacist part of our population.

Steam is a social networking platform brought to us by the video game company Valve, and U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who for the next few weeks is still the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is highlighting how this Steam thing hosts more than 1.5 million individual users and tens of thousands of online groups that amplify all manner of awful content.

Warner is pressing these Valve folks to bring the platform’s content moderation standards in line with industry standards and crack down on the rampant proliferation of hate-based content.

“My concern is elevated by the fact that Steam is the largest single online gaming digital distribution and social networking platform in the world with over 100 million unique user accounts and a userbase similar in scale to that of the ‘traditional’ social media and social network platforms,” Warner wrote in a letter to Gabe Newell, the president of Valve, which was founded in 1996 and has a $25.5 billion market cap.

Congress has been trying to get Newell to address the hate content on its platform for a while now.

“In 2022, Valve received a Senate letter identifying nearly identical activity on your platform, and yet two years later it appears that Valve has chosen to continue a ‘hands off’-type approach to content moderation that favors allowing some users to engage in sustained bouts of disturbing and violent rhetoric rather than ensure that all of its users can find a welcoming and safe environment across your platform,” Warner wrote to Newell, who has not responded to any of the inquiries from senators on the issue.

According to a report from the Anti-Defamation League, 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 1 million unique hate-images.

“Steam is financially successful, with a dominant position in its sector, and makes Valve billions of dollars in annual revenue. Until now, Steam has largely not received its due attention as a de facto major social network where its users engage in many of the same activities expected of a social media platform,” Warner wrote.