The Feds Are Coming for “Extremist” Gamers

Gaming companies are coordinating with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to root out so-called domestic violent extremist content, according to a new government report. Noting that mechanisms have been established with social media companies to police extremism, the report recommends that the national security agencies establish new and similar processes with the vast gaming industry.

The exact nature of the cooperation between federal agencies and video game companies, which has not been previously reported, is detailed in a new Government Accountability Office report. The report draws on interviews conducted with five gaming and social media companies including Roblox, an online gaming platform; Discord, a social media app commonly used by gamers; Reddit; as well as a game publisher and social media company that asked the GAO to remain anonymous.

The Intercept reached out to the companies identified in the GAO report for comment, but none responded on the record at time of publication.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have mechanisms to share and receive domestic violent extremism threat-related information with social media and gaming companies,” the GAO says. The report reveals that the DHS intelligence office meets with gaming companies and that the companies can use these meetings to “share information with I&A [DHS’s intelligence office] about online activities promoting domestic violent extremism,” or even simply “activities that violate the companies’ terms of service.” Through its 56 field offices and hundreds of resident agencies subordinate field offices, the FBI receives tips from gaming companies of potential law-breaking and extremist views for further investigation. The FBI also conducts briefings to gaming companies on purported threats.

The GAO warns that FBI and DHS lack an overarching strategy to bring its work with gaming companies in line with broader agency missions. “Without a strategy or goals, the agencies may not be fully aware of how effective their communications are with companies, or how effective their information-sharing mechanisms serve the agencies’ overall missions,” the GAO says. The report ends with a recommendation that both agencies develop such a strategy — a recommendation that DHS concurred with, providing an estimated completion date of June 28 this year. 

“All I can think of is the awful track record of the FBI when it comes to identifying extremism,” Hasan Piker, a popular Twitch streamer who often streams while playing video games under the handle HasanAbi, says of the mechanisms. “They’re much better at finding vulnerable teenagers with mental disabilities to take advantage of.”

The GAO’s investigation, which covers September 2022 to January 2024, was undertaken at the request of the House Homeland Security Committee, which asked the government auditor to examine domestic violent extremists’ use of gaming platforms and social media. While there is no federal law that criminalizes domestic violent extremism as a category of crime, since 2019 the U.S. government has employed five domestic terrorism threat categories. These are defined by the FBI and DHS as racial/ethnically motivated violent extremism, anti-government/anti-authority violent extremism, animal rights or environmental violent extremism, abortion-related violent extremism, and all other domestic terror threats. 

The GAO study also follows pressure from Congress to top gaming companies to crack down on extremist content. Last March, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., sent letters to gaming companies Valve, Activision Blizzard, Epic Games, Riot Games, Roblox Corp, and Take-Two Interactive demanding that they take actions to police gamers. 

“Unlike more traditional social media companies — which in recent years have developed public facing policies addressing extremism, created trust and public safety teams, and released transparency reports — online gaming platforms generally have not utilized these tools,” Durbin wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. In the letter, Durbin requested a briefing from the Justice Department on what channels exist “for DOJ and the online video game industry to communicate and coordinate” on the threat of “online video games by extremists and other malicious actors.”

The federal government’s interest in combating extremism has risen sharply following the January 6 storming of the Capitol. On his first full day in office, President Joe Biden directed his national security team to conduct a comprehensive review of federal efforts to fight domestic terrorism, which the White House has deemed “the most urgent terrorism threat facing the United States” — greater than foreign terrorist groups like the Islamic State group. Biden’s directive resulted in the first ever national strategy for fighting domestic terrorism, released by the White House in June 2021. The strategy mentions “online gaming platforms” as a place where “recruiting and mobilizing individuals to domestic terrorism occurs.” 

According to the national strategy, the intelligence community assessed that extremists emboldened by events like January 6 “pose an elevated threat to the Homeland”; and that “DVE [domestic violent extremist] attackers often radicalize independently by consuming violent extremist material online and mobilize without direction from a violent extremist organization, making detection and disruption difficult.” 

The federal government says that sharing information with gaming and social media companies is another avenue to identify and combat extremism. The government also recognizes that there are constitutional and legal questions about Americans’ free speech rights. According to the GAO report, both the FBI and DHS indicated that they are proceeding with caution in light of federal litigation on such matters, including one case on its way to the Supreme Court.

In response to a 2022 lawsuit brought by attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana, a federal judge last year prohibited the FBI, DHS, and other federal agencies from communicating with social media companies to fight what they consider misinformation. 

Federal law enforcement and intelligence have long focused on gaming as an avenue for both radicalization and as a backdoor platform for extremists to communicate. A 2019 internal intelligence assessment jointly produced by the FBI, DHS, the Joint Special Operations Command, and the National Counterterrorism Center and obtained by The Intercept warns that “violent extremists could exploit functionality of popular online gaming platforms and applications.” The assessment lists half a dozen U.S.-owned gaming platforms that it identifies as popular, including Blizzard Entertainment’s Battle.net, Fortnite, Playstation Xbox Live, Steam, and Roblox.

“We must stop the glorification of violence in our society,” former President Donald Trump said in 2019 after mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. “This includes the gruesome video games that are now commonplace.” 

The GAO report cites over a dozen expert participants in their survey, including three from the Anti-Defamation League as well as the Pentagon-funded RAND Corporation, and several academic institutions. 

The Anti-Defamation League has testified to Congress multiple times about extremists’ use of gaming platforms. In 2019, ADL’s then-senior vice president of international affairs, Sharon Nazarian, was asked by Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., if gaming platforms “are monitored” and if there’s “a way AI can be employed to identify those sorts of conversations.” 

Nazarian replied that gaming platforms “need to be better regulated.”

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