House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman James Comer is summoning the CEOS of Discord, Steam, Twitch and Reddit to Washington. A full committee hearing is scheduled for Oct. 8, at which Comer and the committee will ask Discord CEO Humam Sakhnini, Valve president and cofounder Gabe Newell, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy, and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman “explain what actions they will take to ensure their platforms are not exploited for nefarious purposes,” .
The hearing “will examine the radicalization of online forum users, including instances of open incitement to commit politically motivated acts,” per the release, in the wake of what Comer described as “the politically motivated assassination of Charlie Kirk.” Alongside the news release, the committee published the four separate letters it sent to each of the company’s leaders. At the hearing, each person will be able to give a five-minute opening statement before answering questions from committee members.
Aftermath has reached out to the four companies for confirmation of their CEOs’ attendance.
Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old suspect in the shooting death of Charlie Kirk, allegedly in a private chat with friends. In another chat, he joked about being the killer’s doppelganger. that the bureau is investigating members of the Discord servers; it found "no evidence that the suspect planned this incident or promoted violence on Discord.”
But Discord and other gaming platforms have been thrust into the spotlight as authorities and lawmakers attempt to decipher an extremely online culture they largely don’t understand. Robinson reportedly etched into the he prepared for the shooting: “Hey Fascist! Catch!” followed by a series of arrows that appears to reference a stratagem code in Helldivers 2 ; “Notices bulges OwO what’s this?,” a copypasta parodying furry culture; “Bella ciao,” the title of an anti-fasict Italian folk song popularized by video games and a Netflix series; and “If you Read This, You Are GAY Lmao.” The messages inscribed on these bullets are shitposts and extremely online in-jokes, something Robinson even admitted to in a text message exchange quoted in published this week: “The fuckin messages are mostly a big meme, if I see ‘notices bulge uwu’ on fox new I might have a stroke.”
as a person who was involved in “deep, dark internet, the Reddit culture, and these other dark places of the internet where this person was going deep.” He also said “clearly there was a lot of gaming going on.” Friends described Robinson as “very, very big into gaming,” like lots of people are.
Gaming and gaming-related platforms like Steam, Discord, and Twitch are used by millions of people daily, largely by people commiserating about their favorite games’ latest bad update , organizing gaming sessions, and sharing sometimes incomprehensible memes. That’s not to say that these platforms don’t have a problem with radicalization; found that Steam, Discord, and Twitch hosted extremist activity that ranged from “racially abusive livestreams to open support for neo-Nazi terrorists.” In 2022, to Newell asking about its moderation of extremist content.
In 2022, a mass shooting in a Buffalo grocery store was live on Twitch. on the platform in 2019.
In 2022, seven lawmakers on their role in extremism and harassment in online spaces in a letter addressed to executives of Activision Blizzard, Roblox, Take-Two Interactive, Epic Games, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Innersloth, and others. Very little came of the letter; that she was “disappointed that the majority of companies [that responded] failed to address some of our most urgent questions, including providing us with their policies around extremism, as well as transparency reporting around the topic.”