Last Updated on April 18, 2020
In a recent interview, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has signaled their intent to tackle “hate and harassment” in video games–almost six years after the legendary Gamergate fiasco.
The ADL was instrumental in the redrafting of YouTube’s Hate Speech Rules which led to a wave of censorship, effectively rendering some communities on the platform sterile–under the banner of combating hate.
The ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt confirmed the organization’s collusion with the tech titan to “counter hate.”
According to Bounding Into Comics, Greenblatt said: “Online hate and extremism pose a significant threat — weaponizing bigotry against marginalized communities, silencing voices through intimidation and acting as recruiting tools for hateful, fringe groups.”
As Reclaim The Net puts it, “The ADL (Anti-Defamation League) has done untold damage for freedom of expression online,” as several YouTubers lost much of their internet livelihood following the updates.
During an interview with ADL’s Center for Technology and Society Assistant Director Daniel Kelley for GamesIndustry.biz, entitled, “Getting the hate out of games,” the ADL singled out gaming industry giant Valve for their lack of responsibility in approaching hate and harassment.
Kelley said:
“On the one hand, games are media; you can talk about hate and harassment in the same terms you talk about it with movies or TV. Whose stories are being told? Who’s being included, who’s being excluded?
“At the same time, online games are social platforms. A comic book is not a social platform, so the fandom that exists around it exists on platforms that are not necessarily run by the comics industry. The game industry is creating social spaces. Online games are social spaces, so the responsibility for the form that hate and harassment take in those spaces is the responsibility of the companies that make those games.”
Kelley later cited a survey where “75% of people who played Overwatch experienced harassment.”
“So it’s unclear to me at this point how efforts to make games more inclusive as media interacts with games as social spaces and the harassment we see in those spaces,” Kelley added.
Throughout the interview, Kelley refers to the success made by the ADL in ridding social media of “hate speech.”
“There’s a lot more they could do, but if they had in place now was in place ten years ago, I think we’d be in a very different place,” he said.
Apart from clamping down on freedom of speech on social media, the ADL has added several amusing phrases such as “We Wuz Kangz,” “13/52,” and “boogaloo” to their online hate lexicon.
National File recently reported on a video game–where you can play as Trump, Putin, Hitler, Jesus Christ, Boris Johnson, and others with the objective to harm progressives, SJWs, and feminists–which caused some controversy as it managed to secure a sequel.
