Back in March, I wrote an article about how violent extremism happens to be fostered in spaces normally reserved for play.

Extremists use video games and gaming culture as a springboard to start the process of turning a child or teen into someone much more violent or otherwise worse than they normally would be.

I thought it would be a good idea to unpack how this funneling into extremism or criminal bevaior happens in steps as a sort of warning to readers about the presumed process.

Using games, game platforms to find targets

From the perspective of a would-be extremist or violent nihilist, an online video game might be a good place to find and recruit new people to do acts of violence.

There are a number of particular games or gaming platforms that might work for this purpose, and all of them have their own ways of doing things.

Roblox is commonly discussed as a vector for this. As a platform with game creation tools, users can make games or scenarios within the platform that can be used to entice kids or teens.

While it used to be a Wild West scenario with Roblox, the company behind it has taken some steps to try and crack down on bad actors. Aside from stringent community standards, they also introduced age-based accounts and expanded the parental controls on the platform to help parents take a more active role in the process of watching their kids’ playtime.

Despite this, Roblox faces a number of lawsuits in the US for either being deceptive about its child safety initiatives or otherwise not doing enough to prevent it from being a platform for child predators or extremists.

Other game platforms like this would be private Minecraft servers — basically using the game as a lure to a private server where bad actors might lie in wait.

In other instances, games with voice chat or text chat might also be used. These can include games like Fortnite. Some more enterprising bad actors might try their luck advertising their own privately hosted game servers on places like Steam, which is a game storefront with chat interfaces. The mobile game Gorebox — which a minor in Tacloban played prior to a school shooting — was also released on Steam.

For the most dogged bad actors, they can also try recruiting others in places where people livestream gameplay of themselves but also have chat functions, such as Twitch or YouTube Gaming.

In an age where popular Twitch and YouTube streamers have moderators working for them to scrub offensiveness from their chats though, it potentially becomes more of a problem with lesser-known streamers or those who purposefully engage in ragebait topics trying to rile up engagement for monetary gain.

Making contact means getting private

If gaming is being used as the springboard to get a vulnerable child or teen into doing harmful things, then gaming-adjacent sites and services can be used to seal the deal, as it were. By making their contact more private, bad actors can shield themselves from prying eyes and make it more difficult to be tracked or observed by authorities or parents.

One of the more commonly used applications for this purpose would be Discord — which lets users set up a discussion room with chat and voice-call functions for their members.

With free accounts allowed to be a part of 100 servers at most, a bad actor can easily hide among a crowd either by having their server be one among 100 servers, or can hide within a gaming or gaming-adjacent Discord server to try and find more impressionable people to join them elsewhere.

Speaking of elsewhere, some other bad actors might prefer using Discord then taking their more illegal conversations into a chat app like Telegram, WeChat, or Kik. While these platforms do have policies against such objectionable content, such as anti-sex-trafficking or anti-violence policies, it can be very hard to police or enforce, especially if a prospective target lies about their age or identity online.

What can be done?

As you can imagine, everything gets complicated once a child or teen is recruited into some clandestine operation for whatever reason, so prevention is better than cure, I would assume. The problem is there’s no reasonable way to go about it without stepping on someone’s toes.

Usually, what’s seen as needed is parental intervention, either by fostering healthy family relations or monitoring a child’s usage of games and apps. The problem is not every family is the same from the point of view of healthy family relations, and not every family has the resources to navigate technology their kids are likely better at using.

One other tactic, which is gaining popularity is mandating (by the government) or creating (by the app maker) age-appropriate settings for apps and services. This is all well and good, but some companies, whether it’s Roblox or some other big or small game, may not have the will to do the necessarily difficult task of investing into policing behavior.

For a large company like Roblox, investing in mechanisms to better protect users might be a logistical and financial hit. For a smaller game developer with less finances, like F2 Games of Gorebox fame, that’s a considerable ask and they already use common-sense rules to dissuade bad actors and young players from engaging with their games.

Barring some entity with immense political will working to force such drastic protections and changes as necessary among popular games and game-adjacent apps, it may be that a moderate approach is also needed.

Maybe if we give parents the resources to help themselves learn how to use and monitor the apps of their kids, and then teach them how to do it while pushing for more stringent protections on popular games and apps, we can try to attack the problem from both ends and make a dent at the problem besides. – Rappler.com