Right-Wing Hate Groups Are Recruiting Video Gamers

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Almost every teen plays video games — 97 percent of boys, according to the Pew Research Center, and 83 percent of girls.

Increasingly, these games are played online, with strangers. And experts say that while it’s by no means common, online games — and the associated chat rooms, livestreams and other channels — have become one avenue for recruitment by right-wing extremist groups.

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These people became his son’s friends. They talked to him about problems he was having at school, and suggested some of his African-American classmates as scapegoats. They also keyed into his interest in history, especially military history, and in Nordic mythology. Above all, they offered him membership in a hierarchy: whites against others.

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John learned his son had been drawn into conversation with at least one group that the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a Nazi terrorist organization. He searched online for help and found a man named Christian Picciolini.

Picciolini runs the Free Radicals project, which he calls “a global prevention network for extremism.” He’s a reformed skinhead himself.

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But today, he says, it’s much more common for extremists to initially reach out online. And that includes over kids’ headsets during video games. Picciolini describes the process: “Well typically, they’ll start out with dropping slurs about different races or religions and kind of test the waters … Once they sense that they’ve got their hooks in them they ramp it up, and then they start sending propaganda, links to other sites, or they start talking about these old kind of racist anti-Semitic tropes.”

That’s also what Joan Donovan has seen. {snip}

“I saw how these groups communicated and spread out to other spaces online with the intent of not telling people specifically that they were white supremacists, but they were really trying to figure out what young men were angry about and how they could leverage that to bring about a broad-based social movement.”

And violent first-person shooter games, she says, are one place to find angry young men. She calls “gaming culture” “one of the spaces of recruitment that must be addressed.”

Donovan says that recruitment, and even the planning of harassment campaigns, happens not only during in-game chat, but during livestreaming of game play on platforms like Twitch and YouTube.

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Game-related Reddit threads and chat sites like Discord also host similar conversations. Last year, a nonprofit media collective called Unicorn Riot published chat logs from Discord in which known white supremacists planned aspects of the Charlottesville “Unite The Right” rally.

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What are companies’ responsibilities to ensure that young people won’t encounter hate groups? We reached out to several game and chat companies for comment. Riot Games noted in a statement that it relies on volunteers to moderate game-related chats. And Discord, the chatroom site, forwarded a statement from the Southern Poverty Law Center, praising it for recently banning several far-right extremist communities.

Greg Boyd, who represents video game companies for the law firm Frankfurt Kurnit, says “toxic” behavior including hate speech, to say nothing of recruitment, is a key industry concern and a frequent topic of conversation. {snip}

But it’s a daunting technical challenge. The three biggest video game platforms — Microsoft, PlayStation and Steam — host 48 million, 70 million and 130 million monthly active players respectively, Boyd says. {snip}

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Picciolini compares the companies to landlords with disruptive tenants “disrupting or damaging the building or threatening the other tenants. You know, they would take action.”

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