https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1586566/full

The actual paper.

The title here from PCGamesN is rather bad, in the sense of being misleading:

No, its not really the 'store' part of Steam that is plauged with insane harassment of all kinds.

They've actually put a good deal of effort into trying to tackle things like review bombing and removing horrendous stuff you'd see on an actual storefront page.

This article somehow completely fails to explain that Steam is basically also a 'social media' type of platform, where users have personal pages and can comment on and message each other, form groups, form their own miniforums, etc etc.

Describing all of this in totality as 'a store' would be like describing TikTok as a store.

But, that aside, yes, the 'Steam community' has always been an insane shit show where if you just deleted 99.9% of it, nothing of value would be lost.

Why is this the case?

Because Valve does not want to hire an army of tens to hundreds of thousands of offshore, human content moderators, which... is what you would have to do to adequately police all of this, its what Facebook and other large social media platforms do.

Sure, they'll tell you they use AI or some advanced algorithm.

Even today, that is still mostly a lie.

Its always been somewhere between an army of offshore moderators getting paid slave wages and getting PTSD from their jobs, and something like a mechanical turk.

... But yeah, anyone who's been using Steam since the early days knows that the Steam community is largely cancer and should generally be avoided.

Also, this PCGamesN article incorrectly describes the NGOs and the ADL specifically as a 'target'.

The paper literally never describes the ADL or any other NGO or group as a direct target of these right wing groups.

What the paper actually says is that the ADL has conducted multiple of their own similar studies to try to understand social dynamics and extremism and harassment on Steam, which this paper cites and mentions.

It also says that a commonly identifiable attribute of a right wing extremist group is that they declare themselves as enemies of the ADL... but there is nothing in the paper that describes these groups actually targetting the ADL itself with... some kind of specific threats or harassment or anything directed precisely at, or specifically targetting, the ADL or other NGOs... the paper also at one point mentions that the ATF is also often specifically identified as an enemy of these right wing groups, as well as just Steam Moderators themselves.

Its a way of right wing virtue signalling to say 'Fuck the ADL' along with Nazi / Nordic symbology, 9/11 conspiracy theories etc.

The main focus of the paper is actually to describe the mechanics and attributes of what the authors describe as performative infighting amongst right wing extremist groups on Steam.

The paper specifically notes:

The first systematic review of extremist behavior on Steam was presented in Anti-Defamation League (2024).

...

The publication of this report appears to have induced Valve to more widely ban explicit neo-Nazi and white supremacist behavior, but extremist cliques and groups are still easily discoverable across Steam's social features.

IE, Valve took the ADL's report seriously, Valve is moving more heavily against explicit right wing extremism, but the problem still persists, and this paper shows ways of identifying and diagnosing the problem, presumably so as to also convince Valve to maybe consider these methods themselves.

From the article:

...the study shows that neo-fascist groups are using Valve's platform to start "wars," with a focus on recruiting new members and organizing harassment against various opposing groups.

These targets, which include everything from other Steam populations to NGOs like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), are branded as "enemies," while other affiliated groups are considered "allies." Bradley-Newhouse and Kowert conclude that neo-fascism is on the rise on Valve's platform, and that current moderation systems aren't doing much to stop it.

Phrasing enemy-based identifiers that right wing groups use to instead be "targets" is a significant mischaracterization of what the paper actually says.

The article totally fails to mention that these "wars" are infighting between right wing groups and clusters of right wing groups, fighting amongst themselves.

Literally nowhere in the paper does it describe these right wing groups actually "organizing harassment" directly against their self-identified enemy "targets".

That is not what the paper is about, but the phrasing in article strongly gives the impression that it is.

It is, again, about virtue signalling and infighting amongst right wing groups on Steam, and how understanding how that works can be helpful in identifying the most dedicated right wing extremeists on Steam.

In conclusion, this article was written by an illiterate idiot, either that or they are significantly selective with presenting or not presenting context, and are deliberately being overly alarmist.

Please read the actual paper instead.

Anyway, anecdotally, yeah, it does track with my own experience that Garrys Mod and HOI4 players are considerably more likely to be fascist extremists than players of many other games.

You know who controls the you know what.