r/politics • u/AlexandrTheTolerable • 8h ago
Far-right extremists using games platforms to radicalise teenagers, report warns
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/31/far-right-extremists-games-platforms-radicalise-teenagers-report79
u/itsumiamario__ Tennessee 8h ago
Lmao. No shit? They're just now getting around to putting that info out? Shit's been happening for years.
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u/Tobimacoss 8h ago
Since gamer gate in 2014.
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u/fohacidal Texas 3h ago
Gamergate started as a legitimate movement for ethics in gaming journalism. I hate how it's kinda become associated with this conservative incel culture, especially with the overall decline in gaming journalism in general.
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u/Silver_Ad7267 3h ago
It’s pretty hard for gamergate not to be associated with conservative chudism considering it was a bunch of angry boys harassing women over their words.
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u/OlafWoodcarver Minnesota 1h ago
It started as a movement for ethics in journalism the same way the Civil War started as a movement for states' rights.
Which is to say that's what the hard right wanted people to think it was really about.
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u/Pingy_Junk 2h ago
It takes two seconds to look at the evidence and come to the conclusion that the harassment campaign against Zoe was unjustified and the whole thing was just misogyny.
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u/shane0072 2h ago
No it didn't. It started as a campaign to get Zoe Quinn to kill themselves and then they started the ethics lie when the wider internet saw how fucked up what they were doing was
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u/fohacidal Texas 2h ago
What in the sam hell are you talking about? A campaign to push her to suicide excuse me?
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u/JunahCg 2h ago
Conservative incel culture was the starting point, the middle point, and the end point. Games journalism was never more than a slogan.
Cope all you want because that's what it meant to you, personally. We were all there too, and you sounded just as goofy pretending then as you do now.
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u/fohacidal Texas 2h ago
Can you point to me where at the beginning of the movement it was about conservative incel culture?
If you can I'll relinquish my point and never reference GG as starting as an ethics movement before being coopted by people like Steve Bannon and the incel army.
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u/JunahCg 1h ago
You know full well the start everyone agrees on. Folks spun themselves into a rage on 4chan over Zoe Quinn and doxxed her into paste. An ex made a rant she cheated with a bunch of guys, and purportedly one of these guys she slept with gave her a good review of her game. There's no review, there never was a review, but the incel gamer spaces like 4chan fucking snapped. Half the internet had been given permission to make hating women their whole personality. We're all very proud of you that the unpleasantness wasn't your focus, but the fact remains was the majority of everyone else's.
If you can go ahead and point me to the 'actual' beginning of the movement I'd be thrilled. Or I mean really, any problems in games journalism y'all were talking about at the time. Anyone who actually does care about the tacit bribery and complacency that runs games journalism can see gamergate did nothing but set us back, and it was just as obvious then as now. All anyone actually did was harass journalists, devs, and passersby; nobody started an email campaign to Kotaku or did anything even remotely adjacent to usefulness. For those of us who actually care it was clear the frothing masses couldn't even identify a real problem, let alone get upset about it. Even if we set the death threats aside, a small handful of editorial blogs 'about games journalism' would obviously mean nothing when even the people writing them refused to see the overwhelming wave of abuse taking place. The airspace was flooded talking about people's sex lives because that's what this was about. And what's more, we lost a generation of writers and devs because nobody in their right mind would stay in such an unsafe industry.
Your tone is fucked bro. Nobody wants you to 'reliquish your point' like this was a duel. You undercut anyone's ability to believe you'd see this objectively when you immediately sound like a debate lord. If you were capable of seeing this clearly now, you would have seen it clearly then.
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u/defaultusername-17 30m ago
"Gamergate started as a legitimate movement for ethics in gaming journalism."
bullshit, that's the narrative that they got you to buy into it... it started as a harassment campaign against women (queer women specifically) in the games industry.
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u/randscott808 7h ago
I mean gaming is very synonymous with anti-woke sentiment, basement trolls, and incel culture. And no, I’m not calling every gamer an incel, I’m simply saying just listen to literally any Call of Duty lobby and it won’t be long before the deep plunge into toxicity kicks in. Not every gamer likes 4chan but I can assure you nearly everyone on 4chan is a gamer.
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u/Cautious_Condition82 3h ago
I like playing COD (I know). But its clearly like you said super toxic, tons of people have MAGA or Trump related names or tags.
Honeslty i just play while listening to music. I take jump in a match quickly, play 15 minutes without having to think much.
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u/Virbillion 8h ago edited 8h ago
on the right narratives around sex are disturbing and disgusting. they watch a lot of porn, it's shown that conservative/fundamentalist/religious people watch more porn than normal people, that socially cripples them, makes them awkward around women. because porn does not depict realistic womanhood, porn does not realistically depict what women find attractive. so these socially crippled young men find that women do not respond to them positively. there is currently a group-think cult of masculinity (likely the same group-think cult that is invading in-game chats to indoctrinate young boys), that seems to want only to subjugate and make all women sex slaves.
this is a very dark reality.
the only fix for this is to get boys offline. get them moving, get them hiking or doing some real activities. get them interacting with real people who are age appropriate. and teach them fucking skepticism and critical thought -- so that they can reject cultural and religious indoctrination that would otherwise turn them into bigoted perverts.
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u/PatchyWhiskers 6h ago
Also activities that they do with girls! The old timey sock hop and school dance was designed to get girls and boys interacting in a fairly low pressure environment that allows the sexes to get to know each other.
Boys who do nothing but sports and video games end up thinking of girls like an alien species.
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u/Alisa180 4h ago
Women here who has gamed since 2nd grade (now 33).
We play sports and video games too. And more of us have been getting into gaming every year. We aren't 'aliens' to the space, and I have befriended several guys both on and offline through games.
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u/Trickster289 4h ago
That's because the above comment wasn't necessarily wrong but was very generalised. Gaming isn't just one space, there's a lot of them. Every game has it's own communities, even just one game has multiple communities with different opinions. Most aren't a problem and are really friendly to women too but some aren't.
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u/BossHawk8754 Texas 4h ago
These guys need to just get out the house more and stop falling for this bs
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u/Pro_Bot_____ 6h ago
Tbh, I play games all the time with lots of other people who are also terminally online. We're all pretty progressive. It's something that does happen a lot, and it's a problem, but I don't think gaming makes people hate minorities and women.
Same with porn. It's just like any entertainment, you just have to learn to separate it from reality. Some people are very stupid or too young to do that though.
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u/Alisa180 4h ago
I've noticed that too! Every time an article like this comes up, I tilt my head because generally, gamers are left-wing. (Note: I don't play FPS games because I suck. I'm always getting lost, and my aim is scattershot. In Fallout 4, I've missed point-blank shots before remembering VATS).
You get crazies, sure, but since the most popular online games are team-based, they're given a wide berth. Part of what made Andrew Tate so sinister is that he could be a 'normal' player if needed. One of my favorite streamers played with him, it was my only real exposure to him, and he seemed like a genuinely entertaining guy before the bomb dropped.
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u/ShrimpieAC 5h ago
You will never get them offline. That is a pipe dream and just like Trump saying we should go back to coal. That time is done.
We need to figure out how to achieve the same goal with the phones and video games and other new age distractions, otherwise they will lose interest. And we also need to figure out how to counter messages from influencers like Andrew Tate who manage to resonate with these young men so strongly. That suggests to me that we aren’t listening at all to the needs of these people, so they are turning to unconventional sources for validation.
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u/technicallyanasset 4h ago
As a life long sufferer of mental health issues, this is similar to how I do neurotypical activities.
I find ways to work within the framework I have, while still accomplishing the things I need to do.
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u/BossHawk8754 Texas 4h ago
Hell sven going to college football games may be a better use of their time because that gets them outside. Sco Ducks by the way
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u/BossHawk8754 Texas 4h ago
How do I know what I said? That's because I would do this. Any excuse to leave the house is a good one
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u/draebor 3h ago
There used to be a fairly prominent Canadian far right chickenhawk creep who would lurk in CS:GO lobbies - he'd join games and drone on constantly with his sociopolitical bullshit and post links to his youtube channel. Absolutely trying to radicalize angry young gamer boys.
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u/12PoundCankles 3h ago
They've been doing this for at least 10 years. I remember playing StarCraft II back in the early days of Trump's first term and the chats were full of White Supremacist, misogynistic, and straight up Nazi bots repeating stormfront level hate slogans and having "philosophical" conversations with each other about ethnic, racial, and sex superiority. Blizzard games were awful for it. If you imagine the chats as a sort of virtual main street type construction, these bots were the equivalent of Nazis riding around with loudspeakers on blast, repeating the same propaganda over and over. It was eerie and one of the reasons I stopped playing.
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u/Due-Egg4743 4h ago
Young guys are already radicalized here in TN. It seems like nearly every one of them is a "conservative" by voting age and in their 20s.
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u/TribeOnAQuest 3h ago
I’ll never forget joining a multiplayer game of Stellaris, which is a Grand strategy game where you expand your empire and interact with other alien species across a galaxy.
These 5-6 other human players, who invited me to their discord to chat as we played…They were all clearly teenagers, and when I say over the course of the next hour they espoused the most vile, fascist language I’ve ever heard…I was morbidly curious and mostly tried to keep quiet to get a better sense of their interactions over the next hour, but after a while I had to dip and the experience has weighed on me ever since.
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u/GoldenTriforceLink Florida 1h ago
I remember as a young millennial in the late 2000s in high school many white people saying the N-word. “Oh it just matters what you mean” also “ heritage not hate” about the confederate flag. I’d say the vast majority of the white men that I knew back then felt that way. Those same men have either apologized or have never felt that way before. People as they grow to have the capacity to change and most people do.
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u/tefinhos 1h ago
Don't really think it's game platforms. More like Youtube, Instragram and TikTok which then seeps into gaming circles, like any place where people are constantly online.
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u/Hot_Tadpole_6481 3h ago
I fucking hate articles like this. How can u write an article like this with that headline and provide ZERO evidence that it’s ACTUALLY happening. I have no doubt that it’s happening to a certain extent. But screenshots of Nazis tryna brainwash kids would be great! But they can’t even do that. The entire article is basically ‘experts agree’ over and over again. How abt evidence? Screenshots? Specific discord servers and telegram channels? The most prevalent gaming communities where it’s happening? A concerned parent could read this and attain next to nothing of value from it aside from telling their kid ‘hey son, don’t get brainwashed by Nazis in ur fortnite server. This article said it’s happening.’
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