Extremism finds fertile ground in gamer groups

Racism, misogyny grow unchecked in chat rooms

There are rules people must agree to before joining Unloved, a private discussion group on Discord, the messaging service popular among players of video games. One rule: “Do not respect women.”

For those inside, Unloved serves as a forum where about 150 people embrace a misogynistic subculture in which the members call themselves “incels,” a term that describes those who identify as involuntarily celibate. They share some harmless memes but also joke about school shootings and debate the attractiveness of women of different races. Users in the group — known as

a server on Discord — can enter smaller rooms for voice or text chats. The name for one of the rooms refers to rape.

In the vast and growing world of gaming, views like these have become easy to come across, both within some games themselves and on social media services and other sites, like Discord and Steam, used by many gamers.

The leak of a trove of classified Pentagon documents on Discord by an Air National Guard member who harbored extremist views prompted renewed attention to the fringes of the $184 billion gaming industry and how discussions in its online communities can manifest themselves in the physical world.

A report, released Thursday by the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, underscored how deeply rooted misogyny, racism and other extreme ideologies have become in some video game chat rooms, and offered insight into why people playing video games or socializing online seem to be particularly susceptible to such viewpoints.

The people spreading hate speech or extreme views have a far-reaching effect, the study argued, even though they are far from the majority of users and occupy only pockets of some of these services. These users have built virtual communities to spread their noxious views and to recruit impressionable young people online with hateful and sometimes violent content — with comparatively little of the public pressure that social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have faced.

JEFF CHIU — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Attendees play games while visiting the Discord booth at the Game Developers Conference 2023in San Francisco earlier this year. Extreme gamer chat rooms can be created on Discord or Steam without any oversight by the platform.

MARLENA SLOSS — THE NEW YORK TIMES Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat, policy adviser on technology and law at the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, says that although it is a small group of extremists, they are influential and have an impact on gamer culture.