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A time bomb ‘supercharged’ by the pandemic: How white
nationalists are using gaming to recruit for terror
Experts are warning that far-right agitators are using online
gaming platforms to spread hate and recruit a new generation of
converts. Supercharged by the rise of gaming and social
isolation during the pandemic, extremism academics say more
needs to be done to police these platforms for grooming hate. Io
Dodds reports
Thursday 07 April 2022 18:48
The player's profile picture raised no red flags: just the
smiling Lego like-face of a typical Roblox avatar, little
different from the estimated 220 million people who log in at
least once a month to the wildly popular children's video gaming
platform.
On closer inspection, however, the player's "favourites" list
had been arranged into an impromptu mosaic with the words:
"Patriotic Front. Life, liberty, victory! Reclaim America!" The
Patriot Front is an American group of fascist street fighters,
who use "reclaim America" as their slogan.
The player was also part of an in-game group called Justice 4
Floyd, whose logo appeared to be based on the black shield of
Nazi German SS combat divisions in the Second World War. That
group was linked by "alliances" to other Roblox groups with
names such as the British Nationalist Vanguard, the Condor
Division (similar to the Nazis' Condor Legion), and the New
Hampshire 2nd Infantry Platoon, whose description bore
references to known neo-Nazi groups.
This is just one of the suspicious networks uncovered in popular
video games and gaming-related social networks by Alex Newhouse,
a researcher at the Middlebury Institute of International
Studies in Monterey, California. In a talk last week at the Game
Developers Conference in San Francisco, he and gaming
psychologist Rachel Kowert laid out evidence of how the gaming
boom of the pandemic era has given far-right extremists, who
have long been active in gaming communities, new opportunities
to recruit and organise.
Worse, Mr Newhouse argues that major gaming companies, in their
quest to attract and retain users, are expanding the features
that extremists can weaponise while failing to increase their
safety efforts at the same pace – creating an online time bomb
that could lead to offline violence.
"As games are becoming more and more like social media platforms
themselves, with all the features that you would expect from a
Facebook or a Twitter, like groups and channels and friend lists
and all that, they become attractive to extremists who have been
deplatformed by Facebook and Twitter," he tells The Independent.
"We know that extremists are intentionally structuring these
networks to mobilise people to violence. They say as much, and
we've interviewed former extremists who talk about this... there
are individuals who are actively on the lookout or people they
think can be spun out into a mass shooter or a terrorist."
Extremists flock to Steam, Discord and Roblox
Gaming is no stranger to the far right. The hobby's large
quotient of disaffected and socially isolated young men has long
proved attractive to extremist groups, who have a historical
pattern of exploiting unexpected online services to spread their
message.
Mr Newhouse was a reporter at GameSpot in 2014 when resentment
over the increasing prominence of feminism and minority advocacy
in gaming communities exploded into a reactionary movement known
as Gamergate. The controversy spawned intense harassment
campaigns against female and non-white game developers and
galvanised the careers of activists and influencers who later
became key figures in the "alt right".
Gamergate also gave rise to 8chan, an online message board,
which has since became a central organising space for terrorists
across the world. This was where the Christchurch mosque gunman
in 2019 posted his manifesto, peppered with references to gaming
culture, and where "Q" – the mysterious messiah of the QAnon
movement – posted almost all of their conspiratorial
prophecies.
"In a cruel twist of fate, games critics and games media are
still today, in some ways, much better equipped to handle the
current landscape of extremism and disinformation than the
people who were covering terrorists in the 2000s, in early
2010s," says Newhouse, who later worked on data privacy at Sony
Playstation and is now deputy director of Middlebury's Center on
Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism.
Last year, Mr Newhouse noticed an "increasing amount of chatter"
in extremist networks that suggested their members were moving
in large numbers to services such as Discord, a group chat app
popular with gamers, and Steam, an all-purpose online gaming
platform that combines store front, social network and games
library.
The timing coincided with a series of crackdowns by major social
networks in the wake of violent attacks linked to extremist
communities such as QAnon and Boogaloo, culminating in the
storming of the US Capitol in January 2021. Mr Newhouse suspects
that was one motive for the migration, though he cannot be sure.
Discord, he told the GDC audience, "has become probably the main
place for the initiation of someone from the early stages of
radicalisation into increasingly robust [far-right]
socialisation and identity". He says extremist communities often
use a Discord "server" – effectively a linked group of
chatrooms, which can be public or private – as a hub for
activity in various video games.
Why Discord? Partly because it's already popular, especially
with the white men and boys aged 15 to 22 who far right groups
tend to target. But Mr Newhouse also says: "Discord has shown
that it's relatively unwilling to take pretty significant action
against these groups.
“They're able to post under the radar well enough that they
don't get as much attention as the big Telegram or Facebook
networks... it's probably the most popular, least enforced
platform."
'Groomed via online gaming'
In 2017, Discord's staff learned that their app had been one of
the major organising places for the Unite the Right white
supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which an
avowed neo-Nazi killed one person and injured 35 in a vehicle
ramming attack.
At the time, Discord’s "trust and safety" team consisted of
one person. The event sparked change inside the company, and by
last May the safety team had swelled to about 60.
Yet the problem persists. An investigation in August by the
Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a British think tank,
found 24 extreme right servers on Discord; 100 such channels on
the livestreaming service DLive; 91 channels on Twitch, a
better-known livestreaming service owned by Amazon; and 45
public groups on Steam.
Steam appeared to host the most entrenched and long-lasting
networks, acting as a community hub, while Discord servers had
short life-cycles due to the company's crackdowns and were used
to provide "safe spaces" for young people to explore extremist
ideas and to coordinate harassment campaigns against minority
groups.
Meanwhile, journalists have found numerous examples of far right
groups building propaganda content in video games, such as
interactive Nazi concentration camps in Minecraft and Roblox.
The ISD's report also found evidence that several extreme right
Discord servers hosted many under-17s, "raising concerns that
the platform is being used for the radicalisation of minors". It
found limited evidence of extremists using gaming communities to
groom new members, concluding that most used them to bond with
fellow radicals and mobilise action.
Exit Hate, a British group that helps people leave extremist
movements, tells The Independent that it is currently mentoring
two people who were "groomed via online gaming".
A spokesperson said those people could not be interviewed
because Exit Hate recommends its mentees wait 12 months before
speaking to the press, but added: "Just over 70 per cent of
people we talk to have been recruited online, with a growing
number influenced by far-right gaming."
Although there isn't enough data to know how the pandemic has
affected this picture, mainstream social networks have suffered
sharp upticks in extremism. Moonshot, a British company that
works with tech firms and government agencies to design and
measure the performance of counter-extremism programmes, says it
saw surge in extremist activity across the board.
"We have consistently found a connection between social
isolation and extremism, so increased isolation during the
pandemic, we believe, also made people more vulnerable," says
Ross Frenett, Moonshot's co-founder and co-chief-executive, who
has helped draft reports on extremism in gaming communities for
the European Commission.
"The pandemic [also] allowed a number of different previously,
loosely connected or unconnected ideologies to fuse. The fusion
of some of the anti-vax conspiracy narratives with QAnon and
neo-Nazi ideas – all that was supercharged during the
pandemic."
‘When I heard about this, my jaw hit the floor’
For Dr Kowert, who is research director at the gaming-focused
mental health charity Take This, says such research was an
alarming wake-up call.
"The first time I talked to Alex about his research, my jaw hit
the floor," she says. "A lot of times when you talk about
extremism in games, the thing that people imagine is a swastika
put in a Discord chat. They're not thinking about, actually,
these networks are people are being recruited, groomed, and
mobilised within these spaces."
While politicians and journalists have traditionally worried
about the content of video games – fearing, for example, that
bloody shooters would make their players more disposed to
violence – Dr Kowert says the real danger is more subtle.
She criticises the medium for its historically "ethnocentric"
worldview, with white player characters fighting stereotyped
foreign enemies, but argues that such narratives provide useful
rhetorical tools for extremists rather than priming players
directly to accept dehumanising ideas.
She also distinguishes between people who play games – now a
huge proportion of the rich world's population – and "gamers",
which has become a distinct cultural identity. "My mom plays
Wordle every day. If you asked her if she was a gamer, she would
never, ever say she was," says Dr Kowert. "I have three small
children, I haven't played a game properly in years, and I would
absolutely say I am a gamer."
However, Dr Kowert believes that this sense of shared culture is
part of what makes gamers vulnerable to radicalisation. For
many, "gamer" is a strong identity that induces feelings of
solidarity and self-sacrifice towards other members of the
group. Some undergo a process of "identity fusion", meaning that
their membership of the social group "gamers" becomes core to
their fundamental self.
Although most research on identity fusion has looked at
nationalist groups or military groups, Dr Kowert's research has
founder that gamer identity fusion is correlated with alt-right
identity.
She cites studies showing that social bonds between gamers tend
to be closer, more intimate, and more durable than the looser
companionship typical of other online relationships, in part
because they are forged through simulated battles and struggles.
"Friendships in games are formed backwards," she told GDC.
"They're emotionally jumpstarted by this shared activity. First
trust is established and then you get to know someone, whereas
traditionally you get to know someone and then later you can
determine if you trust them... that is a potential vulnerability
when it comes to radicalisation and recruitment."
Game companies may be exacerbating the problem
According to Mr Newhouse, the far right radicalisation playbook
tends to follow three basic steps. First comes the "shotgun"
phase, in which extremists blast out propaganda and provocations
into gaming communities, often disguised as "edgy" or ironic
humour. Their goal is both to normalise their ideas, blurring
the lines between bystander and true believer, and reach
individuals who might be predisposed to learn more.
Jim Whitley, a volunteer moderator for one of Reddit's major
Second World War history boards, describes a similar dynamic
playing out there. Neo-Nazis try various tactics to insert their
ideas into discussion, from insincere "just asking questions"
threads that "cloak one's opinions in questions that appear
innocuous" to "indirect" propaganda arguments that disguise
fascist apologia as historical scholarship.
"The best way to combat this sort of ideological intrusion is
with active moderation and vigorous responses. A laissez-faire
approach simply doesn't work, because the extremists care more
and will coordinate their efforts," Mr Whitley tells The
Independent. When moderators clock what's happening, the
fascists sometimes unmask, hurling antisemitic and gendered
abuse in private messages.
Then comes the phase of "social networking and identity
creation", in which sympathetic users are sucked into deeper
ties with extremists. These groups offer genuine support and
community while encouraging members to undergo far-right
identity fusion, moving into the third stage: "mobilisation".
Here, the most hardened and committed members become part of
efforts to organise material actions for the cause, such as
protests, rallies, skirmishes with anti-fascist activists,
vandalism, harassment campaigns, or even shootings and terrorist
attacks. Mr Newhouse has found probable such networks on Roblox,
Steam and Discord.
This whole process is made easier by the proliferation of what
Mr Newhouse calls "social hooks", meaning features that allow
gamers to build networks together that can span multiple games
and platforms. Groups, friends lists, alliances and feuds, and
tie-ins between games and social networks are all tools that can
be exploited by extremists, and all are becoming more common.
These features are hardly new, appearing in "massively
multiplayer" Noughties games such as Everquest and World of
Warcraft, but changes in the gaming industry have made them
ubiquitous. Video games today are fully mainstream, and
inescapable among Generation Z, while most of the biggest games
are now both online and free to play.
Whereas in the Noughties most games were single player by
default, with multiplayer bouts requiring special effort, it's
now the norm for big titles such as Fortnite, Minecraft and
Destiny to be continually connected to the internet, delivering
an endless stream of new updates, interactions with other
players, and opportunities to buy digital goods for real money.
"It's a matter of scale," says Mr Newhouse. "All these games are
becoming more accessible, and at the same time bringing with
them millions upon millions of more players. It's [at] the point
where for a lot of people, the games are their de facto social
platform – they're where they go to interact with the most.
"It's almost like the really die-hard World of Warcraft players
are more the norm than the exception these days, because of how
entrenched these games have become in the culture and how
pervasive those persistent community-building features are
throughout them."
'We're ten years behind where we should be'
Are the companies that host these communities doing enough? Mr
Newhouse believes not, saying that "content moderation in games
isn't as advanced as other forms of social media" and that
Discord has repeatedly failed to spot servers that are "openly
affiliated with extremist movements".
Moreover, he argues that many companies still treat the problem
as one of content moderation – finding and removing content
that breaks a set of rules – rather than of intelligence
gathering and network-breaking, which requires different
strategies.
Dr Kowert similarly says: "This is festering in gaming
communities, and we're ten years behind where we should be in
terms of how to combat it."
Mr Frenett believes the games industry is alert to the problem,
but warns that companies need to match what bigger social
networks are doing as best they can at their size. That means
having some kind of dedicated intelligence capability, banning
extremist activity even when it doesn't break the law, and
building artificial intelligence to automatically detect signs
of extremist organising, among other solutions specific to the
type of platform.
"Platforms should proactively search for harms," he says. "They
shouldn't sit around and wait for harms to be reported to them.
Whatever your capacity, there is an ethical responsibility to
ensure that the product that you're putting into the world is
safe by design.
"We don't expect car companies to just put out unsafe cars, and
then only make changes when people die. But far too often in the
technology world, the idea is 'build it and they will come, and
when there's complaints, we'll figure it out'.
"Maybe was excusable when the internet was in its infancy, but
we've all we've all been around long enough now to know that if
you're building a new platform, and it allows for social
connection, it will be abused by disinformation actors,
conspiracy theorists and terrorists."
Companies' efforts, and their openness in describing them, vary.
Discord, Twitch and Microsoft, which owns Minecraft, have all
joined the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), a
nonprofit founded by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube in
2017 to coordinate anti-terror efforts between tech firms.
As a condition of membership, all release regular transparency
reports that say how much content they have taken down and in
what categories, as well as how they find it in the first place.
Roblox and Steam's parent company Valve are not part of GIFCT,
although Roblox says it is "in dialogue" with the body.
In response to questions from The Independent, Discord and
Roblox both said they had dedicated counter-extremism or
counter-terrorism teams, though did not say how many moderators
they have. Microsoft said it strictly forbids "terrorist or
violent extremist content" but gave few details. Twitch and
Valve declined to comment on the record.
A spokesperson for Discord disputed Mr Newhouse's
characterisation, telling The Independent that it had
investigated and taken action against the servers mentioned in
the GDC talk. They said the company has a "dedicated
counter-extremism sub-team" that works proactively to find
radical networks before they are reported by users.
"It is Discord’s highest priority to ensure a safe experience
for our communities, and we are continuously investing in our
safety capabilities," the spokesperson said. "Our dedicated
safety team uses a mix of proactive and reactive tools to keep
activity that violates our policies off the service, including
advanced technology like machine learning models."
The company has also begun taking users' offline behaviour into
account when deciding whether its rules on extremism have been
broken (Twitch has done the same). Any credible evidence of
offline participation in known violent groups, or threats of
violence, could lead to an online ban.
Roblox gave the fullest response. “We abhor extremist
ideologies and have zero tolerance for extremist content of any
kind on Roblox," said the firm's vice president of trust and
safety Remy Malan. "Because of the swift, proactive steps we
take, extremist content is extremely rare on our platform and
therefore, for the vast majority of the Roblox community who do
not seek out such content, it is very unlikely they would be
exposed to it....
"We recognise that extremist groups are turning to a variety of
tactics in an attempt to circumvent the rules on all platforms,
and we are determined to stay one step ahead of them. We are
deliberately agile in our efforts – we constantly strengthen
the tools and filters we use to track down bad actors and expand
the range of content blocked by our moderation systems."
He added that Roblox has "thousands" of content moderators who
cover all hours, and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to scan
"every single image, video, and audio file" uploaded by users.
He also thanked Dr Kowert and Mr Newhouse for their work, and
said the company is in "active dialogue" with them, GIFCT, and
other organisations such as the ADL.
Gaming culture may be part of the solution
Content moderation alone can't dismantle extremist networks nor
solve the underlying social or psychological problems that lead
them to form. A lasting improvement might come from the same
unique elements of gaming culture that extremists try to exploit.
"We do know that games offer a lot of positive social and
emotional support," says Dr Kowert. "They are associated with
reduced loneliness; they produce bonding and social capital...
I've been friends with some of the people I play games [with]
for decades..."
The question, then, is why this same bonding process leads most
people into healthy, positive relationships and a minority into
political extremism. One potential answer, which Dr Kowert is
currently researching, is that high levels of harassment, hate
speech, or toxic behaviour in a community make its members more
likely to be radicalised in future, turning the process of
identity fusion to bad ends.
Moonshot has found that, in Mr Frenett's words, "engaging hate
speech is often an indicator that you're on the road to
extremism". If so, gaming companies would need to see harassment
and violent extremism as linked problems, adopting a coordinated
approach to both.
Either way, Dr Kowert warns that researchers must reckon with
the real needs people are seeking to fulfil when they join
extremist communities. "What's really critical about these
radicalisation groups is they absolutely make you feel welcome
and that you belong," she says. "The valence of the conversation
is obviously towards hate and violence, but they're there to
make you feel good and make you feel included and make you feel
special."
Mr Frenett argues strongly that games and gaming culture are
part of the solution, saying there is no systematic evidence
that gamers or gaming communities are at greater risk of
radicalisation than any other group.
"There's been a sustained attempt for decades now to connect
gaming with violence from groups like the National Rifle
Association to deflect away from the idea that gun control
[could reduce] mass violence, and unfortunately that perception
of gamers as vulnerable in and of themselves has filtered
through," he says. "It's frankly at best misguided, at worst
incredibly dangerous."
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https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/gaming-violence-white-nationalists-online-b2051956.html
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