New Steam study alleges that Valve's store is home to extreme right-wing "wars"

Can’t believe you havent included my all time favourite game - sex with hitler

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?

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.

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.

You know who controls the you know what.

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.

https://www.propublica.org/article/telegram-terrorgram-collective-bratislava-murders-neo-nazi-online-hate

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.

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.

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:

Yes. Study.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1586566/full

Valve’s hands-off philosophy with almost all of their social components is one of those massive double-edged swords, as anyone who trades steam items will tell you as well.

It allows anyone to take charge in participation, but that’s EVERYONE, including those who enjoy belittling others, which sucks.

Don’t the developers have moderation capabilities?

Valve could easily fix it by making game discussions default to owners only, but they’ve always been a shitty company so they dont bother

Now I wish Valve would implement Bluesky’s idea of blocklists.

Basically, the community would pool together to make voluntary lists of “Anti-woke mobs” that just troll through forums with rage bait, and add them to that list. It would require a level of trust, and tools to confirm each addition (eg, highlight a worst-case post from that user) but could start to clean things up.

They could also let users choose to hide posts from users below a certain Steam score, making it hard to occupy space with brand new accounts.

while I respect your right to have an opinion
removing the jester award, is in my opinion, stupid

Steam workshop’s always awesome, I use those forums for bug reports. Modders tend to be chill people.

Like… you REALLY telling on your ass if you think the steam forums are something anyone should want more of.

idk man I only use them when a game isn’t gaming right and there’s usually some posts about how to get the game to game correctly, sometimes even posts by the devs, let’s not pretend it’s *all* /v/ shit

I have no idea how Steam’s forums work since I only go there if I can’t find a solution to an issue elsewhere, but for that use case it’s totally fine?

GabeN is a pretty established Libertarian Tech Bro and Valve only moderates to the bare minimum requirement.

Isn’t that kind of what you want from a distributor? Looking up “Gabe Newell political views,” the top results were about him refusing to ban games, partly to avoid the Streisand effect, but also because he doesn’t believe in censorship. If Valve banned things based on company views, they’d quickly be at risk of an antitrust lawsuit.

I personally agree that Valve shouldn’t be involved in the forums. But I do think the publisher should be able to take over moderation if they so choose. Maybe that’s a thing, idk, I don’t know very much about the forums.

I do a quick skim of the review scores and get it

I’m the same way. I skim the first ten or so reviews, skipping low effort (one sentence) and try-hard (massive checklists and essays) reviews, and try to find a negative review or two. I’m looking for what the game is good and bad at to see if it likely justifies the price.