Hate has had a presence on the internet almost since its inception. In 1983, the same year the internet is widely regarded to have begun, one of the first computer bulletin board systems was created by the neo-Nazi George Dietz. It was a space to share anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denial, and other racist documents, reaching wide popularity among white supremacists and marking the beginning of a new epoch in the history of hate speech. The first dedicated hate website, Stormfront, was created by neo-Nazi Don Black as an unprecedentedly proud community forum for like-minded far-wing extremists; It appeared online in 1995 and is still active almost every day, and at least four other such sites have had continuous operation since 1996 [4, pp. 958, 960-1, 969]. This briefing explores the role that popular online videogames play in the spread of modern-day online hate. 

While radical spaces like Stormfront may seem fringe and far from the mainstream, their number has grown dramatically over time, as has the spread of hate online. Extremism’s roots in the internet are deep, and their current reach in videogames, albeit less conspicuous, is far. Unlike dedicated extremist forums, free-speech first message boards such as 4chan and its more radical relative 8chan act as points of cultural connection between videogames and hate online, both being known hotbeds for alt-right activity. While 4chan has much stronger connections to internet culture and other platforms like Reddit, 8chan has been linked to a number of white-supremacist terrorist attacks including the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in which 51 people were killed; the gunman posted links to his live-streamed killing and white-supremacist manifesto, along with a warm thank you to his community, urging them to continue propagating their messages through memes [6, pp. 97-8].

Most alt-right activity lives in the sections (or ‘boards’) for politics on these sites (called ‘/pol/’), but the videogame boards are only a few clicks away, and the cultural crossover is evident. The 2019 Poway shooter, inspired by the Christchurch shooter, made a similar post to 8chan before carrying out his attacks, linking videogame music and eliciting “Get the high score” in response (see image below). Given the alt-right context of such forums, we should read this comment as meaning “kill as many Jews as possible” [6, pp. 96-9]. This dehumanisation towards ‘inferior peoples’ is rife among these political boards but spreads to the other boards, escaping into the wider internet in the form of memes and hateful language.

The Poway shooter’s post to the /pol/ board on 8chan just before he began his shooting spree [6, p. 98]:

The dehumanising treatment of mass murder as mere videogame violence epitomises the influence of videogame culture among hate groups, but this hate also runs vice versa from hate groups to videogames. As groundbreakers in employing new technology for their nefarious purposes, right-wing extremists have exploited videogames and adjacent spaces to normalise their hate, proliferate their messages, grow their communities, and enlist new members [9, p. 2]. Furthermore, various extremists and terrorists have used videogames as propaganda mechanisms [5, p. 2]. Just as hate groups employ videogame terminology in their communities, they bring their hate into videogames. By occupying the same spaces as millions of online gamers, these hate groups demonstrate and normalise their beliefs through the predominantly youth language of memes, all while maintaining a veneer of insincerity often disregarded as ‘trolling’ [9, pp. 477-8]. For example, a quick glance at one of 4chan’s videogame boards provided this:

An anonymous 4chan user taking the handle “panzer crew” provides a screenshot of their recent character skins in Roblox, the massively popular children’s videogame. The skins include four variations of WW2 era Nazi uniforms and an outfit in reference to “Pool’s Closed”, a movement of trolls who harassed the online communities of the videogames Habbo Hotel and Second Life with racial slurs and swastikas before their toxic image spread to the wider internet. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Enter Roblox.

• Roblox: A Case Study

1.1 Hate and Extremism in Roblox 

Roblox is an online multiplayer gaming platform and engine that allows users to create and share customised games/spaces, make, buy, and sell virtual commodities in a virtual economy using ‘Robux’, join self-made user communities, and communicate with users via text and voice chat features [12]. Of key importance to hate in Roblox is the near total control users have over the games/spaces they create, which is both Roblox’s main selling point as a videogame platform and what allows (hate) groups to finely control the imagery, community, and activity present in their space. Originally released in 2006, Roblox now boasts around 40 million user-created games and 85.3 million daily users, of which roughly 32.5 million, or 38.1%, are thirteen years old or younger [13]. Its daily user count is approximately 13% less than Reddit’s 97.2 million [15], putting it well ahead of Fort-nite’s 60 million [14] as a likely candidate for the most popular online multiplayer in the world.

From as early as 2009 Roblox has dealt with an expanding far-right and extremist presence on their platform [11]. In recent years, this presence on Roblox has been escalating exponentially. In 2021, Roblox sued Ruben Sim (a YouTube Roblox content creator) for 1.65 million USD, accusing him of inciting a ‘cybermob’ against the Roblox platform, using sexually inappropriate, racist, and homophobic language, and trying to upload images of Adolf Hitler [16, 9, p. 470]. In particular, Roblox objected to Sim making increasingly violent threats against the 2021 Roblox Developers Conference, which led to a short lockdown of the event.

Worse yet than crass content creators, extremist actors have used Roblox’s game making features to replicate atrocities and terror events including ISIS conflicts, mass-shootings, and prison camps [8, p. 34]. In 2022-3, the Singaporean government announced that two boys, one fifteen and one sixteen years old, had been radicalised to ISIS, participating in a number of ISIS replica Roblox games and creating a number of propaganda videos using these Roblox spaces [17]. In these spaces they took oaths of loyalty and roles like ‘chief propagandist’, imitating actual ISIS terrorists. Below are screenshots of ISIS propaganda videos created by the 16-year-old youth using Roblox game footage, captured by the Singaporean Ministry of Home affairs [18].

I was able to find a video of such a Roblox replica on the far-right video sharing platform BitChute (watch at your discretion), faithfully imitating a LiveLeak-style ISIS video about the violent seizing of an Alawite/Nusayri (Arabic ethno-religious minority) camp. The Alawite/Nusayri group has been the target of recent ethnic cleansing massacres in Syria, many at the hands of ISIS. Aside from these relatively well-known cases of extremist Islamic activity on Roblox, I was able to find two firsthand examples of white-supremacist groups on Roblox, each representing quite different ends of a hateful spectrum.

1.2 The East Coast Knights

On the obvious end of the spectrum are the East Coast Knights of the True Invisible Empire (ECK): a Pennsylvania based branch of the Ku Klux Klan, a white-supremacist and nationalist and neo-Nazi hate group. They claim to have chapters/realms in 23 states across North America’s Eastern half [19, 20]. Here is a screenshot of an East Coast Knight’s post to a white supremacist group on Gab.

I discovered the ECK on Gab when looking for Roblox related content. One of their members posted the above message on Gab three days before I found it. The post is concerning for a number of reasons: It was posted on a very vocally racist Gab channel (‘Nigger Things’), it links to a still active KKK run Discord server (Discord being the videogame adjacent messaging and voice-chat platform), it blatantly spells out the ECK’s plan to actively recruit young people on Roblox, and it shows their Roblox characters in (presumably) custom designed Klan regalia holding rifles. Free-speech first platform like Gab enables the ECK to actively recruit new members, blatantly demonstrating their abuse of Roblox to indoctrinate vulnerable children online using similar replica tactics to ISIS. All ECK activity found on Gab, Discord and Roblox has now been reported to the platforms, and we are awaiting their response. 

1.3 Teutonnia

On the subtler end of the spectrum is Teutonnia: a militarised Roblox community created in July of 2022, now with more than 37,000 members [22, 21]. Their official Roblox community page describes them in relatively harmless terms:

Despite the innocent enough appearance, and the inclusive language in their description, there are already some red flags about this group to consider just from their community page: Firstly is their name, ‘Teutonnia’, clearly a reference to Germany or the Teutons (ancient European tribe), and it is notable that at least one early 19th century American Nazi group used the name “The Free Society of Teutonia”; Secondly, their list of members includes the classes of players in their community and lists many German inspired military titles like High Command or Realmschancellor (joining two words together with German style agglutination), only strengthening the German military comparison; Lastly, the seemingly highest ranking class in Teutonnia, the ‘Realmspresident’, has the username ‘Der Spiess’, German for “The Spear”, notable Nazi slang used for a first sergeant in both the German Army and Waffen-SS [23, 24, 25, 26]. His character skin also sports a custom designed medal resembling a cross of the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle, which influenced the design of Hitler’s Order of the German Eagle. Below, you can see a list of player titles used in Teutonnia, the official user page of the (second) highest ranking member of Teutonnia (below the owner/creator), and his custom designed Prussian medal cosmetic item [21].

While far less on the nose than ISIS or the Ku Klux Klan, Teutonnia embodies the online extremist propaganda principle of plausible deniability, never directly stating their alignment with any far-right ideology while very clearly imitating the social structure, uniform, and overall semblance of the German Wehrmacht. In the next section I will explain why men, primarily boys, are drawn to using hate in their language and how both the obvious and insidious forms of hate in youth language can have devastating consequences for all groups around its use.

   2 Youth Hate Language and the Costs of Hate 

Bilewicz [1] gives a systematic breakdown of how exposure to hate speech can lead to a multitude of negative outcomes, including but not limited to:

1. Loss of empathy in favour of “intergroup contempt”, which both births and is born by hateful language

2. Normalisation of demonising the ‘other’ at the loss of indiscrimination

3. Increasingly desensitized and self-unaware use of hateful language

4. Political radicalisation

Furthermore, Bilewicz argues that these lost qualities of normality are the very things that aid in challenging hate, and so as hate erodes them so too is our ability to halt the propagation of hate eroded.

Specifically in the domain of videogames, Kowert [3, pp. 6, 8, 13-4] demonstrated that alignment with gaming culture is statistically indicative of extremist, sexist, and racist behaviour. Furthermore, they explored how personality traits like loneliness and an insecure attachment style exacerbate the aggressive and antisocial tendencies spread by gaming culture. Similarly, another study’s findings indicate that playing violent videogames in preadolescence, especially competitive ones, can raise the likelihood of aggressive or violent behaviour later in life [5, p. 8].

Beyond the psychological damage that exposure to hate speech can cause, there is even some evidence to suggest that repeated exposure to hate speech can leave neurological damage, seriously and physically impeding empathy and ability to see from another person’s point of view [7, pp. 9-10]. Given the obviously harmful potential effect of hate speech exposure, what can we do to prevent this kind of hate language in videogames and adjacent spaces?

   3 Conclusion

The confluence of factors enabling the current epidemic of hate speech online and the continued refusal of both industry and government to address it has led to an insidious proliferation of hate content in videogames and adjacent platforms. Additionally, boys (in particular but not exclusively by any means) have been systematically targeted; their spaces of fun, community, and cooperation have been invaded by extremists who have at the best poisoned the language of their immaturity with hate and at worst are actively recruiting them. So much more needs to be done to proactively address these concerns, real change to videogame and social media spaces must happen if the next generations are ever to escape the rising tide of hatred online.

References

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2. Huuki, T., Manninen, S., & Sunnari, V. (2010). Humour as a resource strategy for boys to gain status in the field of informal school. Gender Education, 22(4), 369–383. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540250903352317
   
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Footage. https://www.mha.gov.sg/docs/default-source/default-document-library/screenshots-of-isis-propaganda-videos-created-by-the-16-year-old-youth-using-roblox-game-footage.pdf

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