Researchers from Anglia Ruskin University have identified gaming-adjacent platforms such as Discord, Twitch, and Steam as key tools for recruiting individuals into far-right and other extremist ideologies. These platforms provide extremists direct access to young audiences, often interested in hyper-masculine gaming titles like first-person shooters. Far-right extremism is the most prevalent, focusing on themes like white supremacy and conspiracy theories. The study highlights the lack of effective detection and reporting mechanisms for extremist content across these platforms, which have largely escaped regulatory scrutiny compared to mainstream social media.
These gaming-adjacent platforms offer extremists direct access to large, often young and impressionable audiences and they have become a key tool for extremist recruitment.
Social media platforms have attracted most of the attention of lawmakers and regulators over the last decade, but these platforms have largely flown under the radar.
The nature of radicalization and the dissemination of extremist content is not confined to any single platform and our research identified a widespread lack of effective detection and reporting tools.
Extremists target those interested in these games, then begin to "funnel" them to less-regulated platforms.
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