A leading gaming app that is popular with adherents of the neo-Nazi wing of the alt-right movement has at least 173 groups dedicated to the glorification of school shootings
http://www.newsweek.com/neo-nazis-school-shooters-gaming-app-835597
A leading gaming app that is popular with adherents of the neo-Nazi wing of the alt-right movement has at least 173 groups dedicated to the glorification of school shootings, according to a report published last week by Reveal News . Separately, dozens of neo-Nazi groups have cultivated active communities on the app.
The report notes that these Steam groups—which typically have between 30 and 200 active members—glorify men like 22-year-old Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and injured over a dozen others in the vicinity of the campus of University of California, Santa Barbara, before committing suicide in 2014.
Rodger was a virulent misogynist and wanted to punish women for rejecting him. Other shooters, like Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech senior who killed 32 people in 2007, are also hailed in these Steam groups. The groups have names like "School Shooters Are Heroes" and "Shoot Up a School." Some of them allude to “future” school shootings yet to take place and are filled with racist language.
The link between violence and the scattered culture of internet Nazism has received greater scrutiny in recent weeks, following a CBS News report that suspected Parkland, Florida, mass shooter Nikolas Cruz allegedly possessed gun magazines engraved with swastikas. Gaming apps like Steam have become increasingly popular within that community.
One example of neo-Nazis using Steam is Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, who handles the technical side of the white supremacist troll website Daily Stormer, and several months ago appeared to threaten to “slaughter” Jewish children in retaliation for his website being taken offline. Auernheimer appears to have a group on the app, which discusses games in the context of whether they portray Adolf Hitler in a favorable light. The broader community of Daily Stormer also appears to have an active community on Steam called “Storm Sect” with roughly 200 members.
Other neo-Nazi groups on Steam have more overtly hateful and violent names like “Fag Lynch Squad,” which depicts shadowy figures hanging limply from nooses in its profile picture. AtomWaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group linked to a number of murders, had its community on Steam removed earlier this month, Reveal News reported.
Angela Nagle, a leftist writer, demonstrated links between the origins of the alt-right and gaming culture in her book Kill All Normies : Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right. The veneration of school shooters and other killers is similarly linked.
It is not only on Steam where neo-Nazis have found a platform within the gaming world. Discord, another gaming app, was instrumental to young neo-Nazis in planning the Unite the Right event that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August, which led to the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer. Discord has made efforts to remove violent and far-right content from its app following reports of the rally, but new groups continue to pop up on that platform.
Unicorn Riot, a volunteer media collective, published recordings and messages this week that appeared to reveal internal planning discussions from the young white supremacist group Patriot Front, which were initially hosted on Discord. Patriot Front splintered from Vanguard America, the group in which the man accused of killing Heyer allegedly marched during the protests in Charlottesville.
Discord told Newsweek in a statement that the company is still trying to purge groups like Patriot Front from its app.
“Discord has a Terms of Service and Community Guidelines that we ask all of our communities and users to adhere to. These specifically prohibit harassment, threatening messages, or calls to violence,” a spokesperson said, noting that the group recently removed several offending servers. “Though we do not read people’s private messages, we do investigate and take immediate appropriate action against any reported Terms of Service violation by a server or user.”
These people are mentally ill.
They most likely are armed also.
Yes they are and would use any tool they can find to push their mentally ill racist agenda. It's sad however that the gaming application Steam gets brought into this at all, they are merely a game purchasing and new game development platform that can be misused just like Twitter or Facebook.
90% of them are probably under 15 years old, they're just stupid Kids posting idiotic crap in an anonymous forum and these "Groups" are just like the groups we have on this site. Most of these kids probably don't even really believe the bullshit they write they just egg each other on and say anything because it's anonymous so there will never be any repercussions. It's make believe and when they're done they'll go outside and play with their Black, Brown, and yellow friends and no ones the wiser.
You know this how? The 'protesters' in Charlottesville sure as hell looked like grown men to me.
Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer is 32.
They're on a forum on a Gaming site and they're glorifying school shootings and other stupid crap. Use your brain and think about it for a moment and you'll realize it would be ridiculous to think otherwise. It's called Deductive Reasoning.
He's a Hacker not a Gamer.
You're obviously uninformed about the average gamer. Maybe 25% are teenagers, the rest are adults and about the same percentage are over 50. I used to play on a COD with a clan whose youngest player was 36.
One needs FACTS for that to have value.
The seed is about Stream groups, not video games.
Glad we agree.
This seed is meant to be inflammatory instead of being informative, and has no value. That said, most of the mass shooters had leftist beliefs and were life long losers.
As always, your comments are a waste of everyone's time.
Sorry that the truth hurts.
Sad that you do not denounce these groups but attack the seed and seeder
I would denounce such groups if they really existed and/or had any impact on anything. They'd be in the leftist press all the time.
Sad that you think everything is a left conspiracy.......
But... but... but... Antifa!!
According to Donald Trump, we should go grab their guns and ask questions later! (might be the most intelligent thing he has ever said, btw)
Yep, that would go right along with the leftist agenda of confiscation without due process.
hey! your conservative president said it, not our moderate one
trump is a repub when he does something or says something the repubs like, but if he says something they don't like then he is a former dem.....
Hey TG, he's not a Conservative. I admit, he has produced more conservative ideas and policies than any president in decades, but he's not a Conservative. He's even using Alinsky's Rules For Radicals against the Left, which they've never experienced before, but he's beating the crap out of them at their own game and with their own tactics and they don't have any idea how to deal with it. They're beating their heads against the wall and during the meantime he has appointed one Conservative Supreme Court Justice so far, wiped out 600 useless regulations, 200 have been put on hold and 700 have been delayed since he was elected. There's much more, but I won't bore you with them right now.
Well, at least you admit it. That's a step in the right direction. Now only 11 more to go.
He's a Republican all the time as far as Party Affiliation, but sometimes he's gets a little nutty and that's when the Democrat part of him breaks out.
I'm surprised he hasn't screamed at the sky yet with all the Fake News gong on all the time against him.
It's only fake news when repubs don't agree with it
In case any one doubts the existence of Neo-Nazi groups (I'm looking at you, Mr. Jones):
In case you didn't catch it, that was only one group who the reporting sites called Atomwaffen. Never heard of them. Good thing we have the people doing the investigating or we wouldn't know the Obama Administration spied on quite a number of people around the world, in this country and the Trump campaign. I can't wait until the Special Prosecutor gets into that investigation, you know, the real collusion and the Soviet Style tactics by the last administration, can you?
I have just decided fuck it. The US is finished, our representative democracy has finally failed and will give way to autocracy. Fortunately for me and my family, we are all set and can just keep our heads down. To the rest of you... good luck with all this bullshit.
Skirting the CoC [ph]
Yawn. Come on, give me something to actually reply to. Comment removed for CoC violation [ph]
Fucking CoH.
I have a steam account. We don't need these assholes ruining a good thing.
Off Topic [ph]
Same, didn't realize steam had become a platform for nazi pieces of shit.
Trump’s White House video games meeting has a very concerning list of invitees
The list of invitees to US president Donald Trump’s White House video games meeting today has been released. And it’s a sorry sight, including names from notorious right-wing censorship advocacy groups, and not a single qualified expert on the topic.
Following the tragic shooting in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School three weeks ago, Trump made some off-the-cuff remarks about the effects of violent video games on young people’s behaviour, causing many to wonder if they’d somehow been sent back in time twenty years. Despite multiple reputable published studies over decades showing no link between gaming and real-world violence, and despite no school shooting ever being credibly linked to violent video games (despite many untrue claims by the world’s press), the once-thought tired concept has been given new life.
Trump later announced that he was meeting with members of the video games industry to discuss the matter, but splendid work by Kotaku quickly revealed that no company involved with the ESA (representing nearly all major US publishers) had been asked. Following what must have been some frantic scrambling, the White House has pulled together a list of attendees to a formal meeting to discuss the matter, and it makes for grim reading. And includes President Trump’s brother’s boss.
Steam also offers "Wolfenstein: The New Order" where you can gleefully murder as many Nazi's as your hands can handle, so the gaming website is obviously not at fault here. Question to all the conservatives here, if one plays Wolfenstein, does that make them a member of antifa?
True. But to be fair, that game initially was released before steam was around.
A lot of games Steam sells were created before Steam was around. I own almost 500 games on my Steam account and I'd say nearly half of them were created before 2003.
Couldn't that be said about all of the COD versions too?
Yes, most of the CoD games are all about killing Nazi's.
Yep, only way to snatch a K 98.
unlocked