Over the last few years, the EU Commission, the United Nations, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, and various other organisations have increased measures to effectively prevent and counter violent extremism (P/CVE) in online gaming spaces. Nevertheless, gaming-related P/CVE efforts are still in the early stages of development and need further testing and evaluation to gain insight into their (un-)intended effects. Online youth protection measures are particularly important. While gaming is an activity enjoyed by all age groups, minors may be particularly vulnerable to extremist influences in online gaming spaces. To effectively protect minors from extremist exploitation and other harms, Germany’s approach to online youth protection is based on a triad of three equally important pillars that must be kept in balance: protection (Schutz), empowerment (Befähigung), and the right of young people to participate in an increasingly digitalised society (Teilhabe). To explore how online youth protection in digital gaming spaces could be improved in light of these three key principles, the Bavarian Regulatory Authority for New Media commissioned a research report on extremist exploitation of young people and opportunities for P/CVE, including 17 interviews with P/CVE and youth protection experts. In this Insight, we report a selection of the experts’ recommendations for industry, policy, P/CVE, and media actors, as well as the need for collaboration between these sectors to develop a holistic strategy and implement a whole-of-society approach against extremist exploitation of online gaming spaces. A discussion on the experts’ insights on extremist targeting of minors in the gaming sphere can be found here.
Tech and Games Industry
Experts emphasised that a lot of progress has been made by the gaming sector to counter extremist influences: “It’s actually quite important [to] emphasise and celebrate […] that the [gaming] industry is actually doing quite a lot here.” Nevertheless, measures against extremism in gaming spaces vary in scope, scale, and effectiveness, and further efforts are needed to mitigate extremist influences successfully.
One of the key concerns raised by youth protection experts among the interviewees was that minors, particularly young children, face difficulties when using reporting tools in gaming spaces, as not all types of content can be reported. In addition, many processes are ”very complicated and require basic knowledge or sometimes even in-depth knowledge of law to report something correctly” (translated from German). Experts therefore advised that platforms develop “child-oriented reporting systems […] [and] an intuitive user interface suitable for children” (translated from German).
For example, several experts called for measures to allow very young users to report incidents and content that made them uncomfortable but may not necessarily violate platform guidelines: “For kids, I think there should be a way lower reporting threshold. You should [be able to] say, like, ‘man, that made me feel terrible.’ […] [It] should be easy for kids to report.” To adequately respond to such reports, human moderators are necessary , who can assess the individual situation and respond to the child in an empathetic manner.
A hotly debated topic among the experts was limiting minors’ access to communication features, particularly if they allow for interactions with strangers. On the one hand, social spaces such as voice and text-based conversations were perceived as one of the main areas of concern, since recent studies demonstrate that social features of online gaming spaces can be exploited to approach minors and recruit them into extremist groups. On the other hand, experts recognised that these social features are also one of the key elements of gaming experiences and can have a range of positive effects: “I don’t want the takeaway to be like, ‘oh my God, don’t let them talk to anybody in games.’ […] You don’t want to take away the social part of games, because that [socialising aspect] also leads overwhelmingly to [a] reduction in loneliness and depression and [the] formation of friends[hips] and stress relief and love.”
Experts also emphasised that gaming companies should not only take measures to stop extremist exploitation of gaming spaces but strengthen non-extremist voices, and be involved not only in measures to protect minors from harm but also support efforts to create gaming-related prevention, resilience, and media literacy approaches. Online youth protection, as laid out above, should balance protection with empowerment and the right of young people to participate in digital spaces. Minors’ socialisation is increasingly influenced by the online world, including digital gaming spaces. As the biggest entertainment industry in the world, the gaming sector is in a unique position to make a positive long-term impact on the next generation, facilitate positive discursive spaces, and protect democratic societies from extremist influences. Ultimately, gaming companies can “contribute to a more positive discussion culture generally” (translated from German).
Policymakers and Regulators
Experts applauded the policy efforts of recent years to combat extremist influences on minors in online gaming spaces such as the EU Digital Services Act and, in the German context, legislation such as the Jugendschutzstaatsvertrag, but also called for further, more nuanced policy and regulatory measures. Interviewee 7, for instance, lamented that “there’s still a gap in […] understanding [that] […] digital communities are just as important […] as physical communities. So the policy really lags behind on […] supporting efforts to engage with […] gaming communities in a way that is effective.“ Policymakers should recognise the role of the heterogeneous ecosystem of online gaming spaces as increasingly important new discursive spaces. They are not only spaces of play, but ‘third places’ for social interaction, where millions of citizens congregate, interact, and are potentially influenced by the material being shared. This is particularly crucial for minors, who are still in the process of socialisation and may be more susceptible to being influenced by interactions with (adult) strangers in online gaming spaces.
Experts also called for nuanced regulation that takes several factors such as structural differences, affordances, and the diverse characteristics across online gaming spaces into account. Regulations “should understand that there’s a difference between Twitch and Discord, that there’s a difference between Roblox and […] Call of Duty,” and avoid enacting a one-size-fits-all approach across all games, gaming (-adjacent) platforms, and gaming communities. In addition, experts lament that the category ‘minors’, while useful in certain contexts, is too broad to be applied across the board without further nuance. The triad of protection, participation, and empowerment for pre-teens should reflect their level of maturity and be decisively distinct from the protection, participation, and empowerment of older teenagers’ demands and rights to privacy. Therefore, it “make[s] a huge difference for youth protection whether someone is 10 or 17 years old” (translated from German).
Furthermore, policymakers and regulators should look beyond addressing extremist influences and also focus on measures that enable using gaming spaces and content in a positive manner. While this can and should be done through funding programs for P/CVE initiatives, experts suggested that policymakers should examine other pathways too, including, for instance, offering official labels for particularly safe, well-designed games and platforms or enacting more long-term initiatives such as requiring that gaming companies employ community management teams proportional in size to their user base.
P/CVE Practice and Education
The experts advised that P/CVE measures should utilise the entirety of the heterogeneous gaming ecosystem. Presently, the production of bespoke P/CVE games is the most popular approach, but P/CVE efforts would benefit from exploring how other parts of digital gaming spaces and culture can be used as well, including commercial games, gaming (-adjacent) platforms, gaming aesthetics, gamified elements, and virtual reality settings. Ideally, a variety of approaches could be developed and implemented across the full spectrum of prevention, from primary prevention addressing non-radicalised audiences to secondary and tertiary prevention working with radicalised individuals, and potentially deradicalisation and disengagement work. To this end, the experts assumed that it is possible to utilise existing P/CVE approaches and either transfer them to online gaming spaces or adapt them to incorporate gaming elements. However, they also cautioned that a holistic strategy using the entire gaming ecosystem will likely require developing new approaches and formats, which means P/CVE practice must be willing to create and test innovative ideas.
In particular, they emphasised gaming literacy and resilience to harmful influences as general life skills for minors, applicable far beyond the P/CVE context. Gaming literacy approaches should ideally be implemented in schools to reach most minors. To this end, educators should be equipped with easy-to-use pedagogical material and technical resources to deliver such competency building. This was also understood to be a demanding solution, however: “if we look at this realistically, teachers often already struggle to implement the normal curriculum. If you then demand that they do media literacy in gaming on top of that, that’s not realistic. We need to ask where [if not in school] can we implement this?” (translated from German).
Experts therefore advised that practitioners should examine opportunities to reach minors outside of school contexts, such as youth centres, sports or music clubs, and other extracurricular activities, as well as family homes. Parents, the interviewees agreed, should be more involved in their children’s online gaming: “[I believe] that parents must engage more deeply with gaming and should understand themselves as a key part of strengthening their kid’s media competency training” (translated from German). For this to succeed, more accessible guidance for parents and measures to reach parents who are uninvolved in their childrens’ digital spaces. However, experts also stressed that while such guidelines should inform parents, they should leave room for individual decision-making rather than prescribing a one-size-fits-all approach. Minors, even those of the same age, may have vastly different levels of development and maturity; therefore, parental control must be nuanced and tailored to each child.
Media
While not directly involved in preventing and countering the exploitation of gaming by malign actors, the media plays an important role in setting the discursive agenda, shaping societal perceptions, and influencing public debates surrounding gaming. The experts assessed that disproportionately negative media coverage surrounding gaming, especially coverage that focuses solely on real or perceived risks such as addiction, social isolation, or exposure to harms such as sexual exploitation while disregarding the proven positive effects of gaming, can contribute to the widespread backlash from gamers against regulatory or prevention measures. This harks back to the ‘moral panic’ surrounding video games of the 1990s and early 2000s, where the predominant public framing of video games was solely focused on their assumed role in not only contributing to but causing mass violence such as school shootings. Not only is this perception not scientifically sound, but it has caused some gaming communities to become highly sceptical or outright hostile towards what they perceived to be undue interference in their leisure spaces.
Hence, P/CVE measures in online gaming spaces would benefit from a shift in the societal discourse surrounding video games, including more balanced media reporting: “Responsible media [reporting] is important. […] It’s just baffling, the way that […] [some media reports are] like ‘oh we need to not have gaming anymore and then the problem will be solved.’ […] Demonising gaming has done no good at all for what we’re trying to do, because now we have a large majority of gamers who are not at risk of radicalising but who are like ‘stay out of my computer game because you think I’m a potential danger to society’.” Games and gaming spaces should be recognised as important cultural and entertainment objects, and coverage should focus on their positive influences alongside potential challenges posed by extremist exploitation.
Conclusion: The Need for a Whole-Of-Society Approach
To devise a holistic strategy against extremist influences in online gaming spaces, these measures must be coordinated, and stakeholders must collaborate to develop a coherent, multi-layered whole-of-society approach. No single stakeholder alone can adequately address the issue. “I think that it’s not enough to focus on one sector. We cannot say only the gamers have to do something or only the platforms or only the social workers. Rather, gaming must be understood holistically. […] It’s not useful to try to find a single scapegoat” (translated from German).
Such a holistic strategy should recognise the heterogeneity of online gaming and ensure prevention and intervention measures acknowledge and utilise the entire spectrum of gaming-related content and spaces. A tight net of approaches is required to counter and prevent extremist exploitation while also exploring and leveraging the positive power of online gaming spaces. To do so, extensive multi-stakeholder dialogues are needed to build common ground and devise an approach that balances the need for protection from extremist influence with the education, empowerment, and positive participation of minors across the gaming ecosystem.
—
Linda Schlegel is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF), where she co-leads the RadiGaMe project and researches extremist activities in digital gaming spaces. She is also a Research Fellow at modusIzad, where she explores new avenues for digital P/CVE approaches, and a founding member of the Extremism and Gaming Research Network (EGRN).
Vivienne Ohlenforst is a Research Fellow at modusIzad and a member of the RadiGaMe project, where she co-develops gaming-related disengagement approaches. She investigates disengagement processes from various ideological phenomena, with a focus on supporting and empowering caseworkers through evidence-based practices.
—
Are you a tech company interested in strengthening your capacity to counter terrorist and violent extremist activity online? Apply for GIFCT membership to join over 30 other tech platforms working together to prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting online platforms by leveraging technology, expertise, and cross-sector partnerships.
The views and opinions expressed in this Insight are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of GNET or any of its partners.