U.S. Senator Mark Warner Threatens Federal Action Against Steam If It Does Not Take Action Against Alleged Antisemitism Claims

Mark Warner, a U.S. Senator from the state of Virginia, threatened federal action against Steam and its parent company Valve if it does not take action against alleged antisemitism supposedly proliferating on the website.

Warner posted on X, “I’m taking action against hateful and anti-semitic rhetoric proliferating on Steam. We need to ensure that social networks aren’t breeding grounds for extremist, violent groups.”

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An attached press release also revealed, “U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA) today urged leadership at Valve, a prominent video game company, to respond to reports that their gaming distribution and social networking platform, Steam, is hosting extremist and hateful content – including over 1.5 million users and tens of thousands of groups that share and amplify antisemitic, Nazi, sexuality- or gender-based hate, and white supremacist content.”

It added, “Sen. Warner called for broad action from Valve to bring its content moderation standards in line with industry standards and crack down on the rampant proliferation of hate-based content.”

Of note, Warner’s team cited a report from the Anti-Defamation League claiming that “more than 1.8 million unique pieces of extremist of hateful content, including explicitly antisemitic, neo-Nazi and Islamist terrorist material, were identified on Steam, the world’s largest and most popular online gaming marketplace.”

According to the Anti-Defamation League, this data was allegedly created by an AI called HateVision that was trained on “65,954 instances of [hate] symbols” that was then used to identify “78.7% of extremist symbols in the test dataset (recall), and 97.1% of the symbols it classified as extremist were actually extremist (precision).”

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The Anti-Defamation League has previously been caught creating suspect reports in order to convince companies and politicians to take action according to its desires. In fact, Rachel Kowert, who founded the research department at Take This and served as Research Director revealed in an interview with Ars Technica that she created the Take This organization after encountering “a 2019 nationally representative survey from ADL. It found that nearly 1 in 4 respondents ‘were exposed to extremist white supremacist ideology in online games.'”

However, in a Game UX ‘22 presentation sponsored by Bungie, Kowert admitted the polling was a crock of crap, “In 2019 the Anti-Defamation League reported that nearly one in four, was 23%, of game players are exposed to white supremacist ideology in game.”

She continued, “And honestly, somebody asked me earlier how I got into this work because it seems like a very niche area, but it was this report. And when I saw that I thought that number is so high it can’t be that high; it can’t possibly be that high. And I called Daniel Kelley, who led this research, and he was like, ‘No, that’s the number.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, we have to do something about that. That’s terrifying.”

“In 2021, they did another report looking at the same thing and they found the number was closer to one in ten, but it’s unclear whether this is actually a change in the landscape or just differences in sampling as it is with research sometimes,” she admitted.

Nevertheless, in a letter sent to Valve Corporation’s President and co-founder Gabe Newell, Warner threatened, “Valve must bring its content moderation practices in line with industry standards or face more intense scrutiny from the federal government for its complicity in allowing hate groups to congregate and engage in activities that undoubtedly puts Americans at risk.”

He then demanded Newell answer a series of questions about Valve and Steam’s content moderation policies.

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