Steam is hosting too much white supremacist imagery in the community spaces and user-generated content, or at least that’s what a New Hampshire Senator believes. Maggie Hassan has sent a letter to Valve where she complains about such possible problems of the famous gaming platform, claiming that the service is proliferating Neo-Nazi content, as Vice reveals.
The Senator of the American state asked for some explanation from Gabe Newell, the President of Valve, meaning the company that owns the famous Steam platform.
The letter in question wrote, as the same website mentioned above quotes:
Steam has a significant presence of users displaying and espousing neo-Nazi, extremist, racial supremacist, misogynistic, and other hateful sentiments,
[Steam owner] Valve should be taking steps to prevent harmful content, especially given the relationship between online comments and violence in the offline world.
In specific groups, Hassan found “plain and unambiguous references to the neo-Nazi term ‘88,’ referring to the letters HH, short for ‘Heil Hitler,’” while slogans such as ‘Waffen-SS,’ ‘White Power,’ or “Zyklon” were also there.
Writing in an email for Motherboard, Hassan also wrote, as Vice quotes:
The rise of extremism and antisemitism in our democracy and around the world is horrible,
Online spaces can become a safeharbor for extremism and antisemitism to grow, organize, and manifest in violence. As a senior member of the Homeland Security Committee, I am committed to working on ways to stem hate and violence, and loosely-moderated online video game spaces have largely been able to evade oversight, which is why I am calling for answers from Valve.
There are thousands of games available on Steam, and many of them are free of charge. It’s estimated that for 2022, the annual gaming revenue of Steam amounted to 8.88 billion U.S. dollars. That’s down from more than 10 billion U.S. dollars estimated for the previous year.
We’re looking forward to seeing Gabe Newell’s reaction on the subject, as the Valve President will surely provide his point of view soon enough. Stay tuned!