Parents advised to be vigilant over summer holidays to risk of offenders using in-game live chats to target their children
Bruh as someone who used to play a lot of video games this article is 15 years too late. I remember neo nazis attempting to recruit me as a teenager in the early 2010s and they were not subtle. This shit is why we’re losing the war against fascism, the so-called “experts” don’t even know where the war is being waged and don’t even show up to the fight.
I think i have seen articles like this also 15 years ago. I also remember tv “documentaries” about “killer games” in Germany from almost 20 years ago, where they tried to paint everyone playing FPS games as Nazis too. One argument was that there is call of duty mods that allow to show the original graphics, where WW2 Nazis have swastikas on their uniform, which have been censored in the German version.
Extremists trying to recruit teenagers has been an issue since forever. As the “space” where teenagers spend their time moved online, so did the recruiting efforts.
The problem is real, but it should not be tied to games, or to rock music or to sports or to any particular hobby. It is a problem encompassing all of society. Parents need to talk with their children and know what is going on in their lives.
I agree on one hand, but I also feel like video games and other online spaces are kind of unique because parents don’t really think about their kids having one on one conversations with adults on them. If your kid is going outside they are mostly talking to other kids and not other adults. If an adult in your kid’s life IRL starts telling them Hitler was right you will probably catch wind of that much more easily than if it’s online. If a guy on an obscure medieval combat simulation game starts telling your kid Hitler was right (not a hypothetical - this happened to me as a teen and thankfully I saw through what was happening) you’re probably not going to even know about it unless you’re really engaged with your kid and what they’re getting into. I agree that’s on the parents but a lot of the kids these guys are resonating with are the ones whose parents aren’t particularly engaged with them or what they’re doing. I think there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that this does happen and is an intentional strategy from the far right, and I think trying to pretend that there isn’t a problem that is specific to games and the broader gaming community is harmful.
Because it’s a typical silly season article. Sure, the problem exists, but it’s neither new nor is this the first time somebody mentions it. It is just one of these topics that will get warmed up when there’s not too much else to write about. Actually, there are enough other problems to write about but these are difficult, need thought and research, eat resources and are political minefields. So it’s cheaper to bring up a safe topic for the tenth time without telling anything new.
The whole “spoiling the youth” thing is as old as media and older - Sokrates might want to have word if he were allowed to.
It’s crazy how much right wing became able to influence kids, and making nazi cool again. Because of course if a teen worries that your parent may be evicted or a young adult can’t find a job, it’s the fault of immigrants and feminist, not at all because of capitalism
The oligarchs who finance the content, media, news, and information the vast majority of workers consume — the people commanding the capital — do everything in their power to divert the workers attention away from the systemic issues.
“The entire government, regulatory, and political system has been corrupted by capital? It’s clearly the immigrants and trans fault.”
It helps that public education has been gutted, so they don’t understand just how despicable they are for associating with Nazis.
Gamergate’s effects are still echoing and doing damage today.
Not very sigma of those teens to follow trends like sheep.
It used to be pulp literature, cinema, comics, television, Rock’n’Roll and VHS that spoiled our young. Now it’s video games.
So they all suck right? Genuinely, Nazis in every game are nonexistent around diamond. The best of them are hard stuck plats and those are rare.
I’m not on the popular parts of the internet often but when I do get a glimpse I’m shocked at how much extremist content is just out there completely in your face.
It didnt used to be like that 10 years ago. The algorithms are being gamed to push extreme right and extreme left content to young people. It doesnt strike me as organic. I dont think majority of the audience have an interest in these topics.
Ive heard people repeat a “meme” and I have to stop them and be like where did you hear that why are you saying that thats a meme used by white supremacists to dogwhistle about mass killing events.
The internet is fucking wild. It may be more censored than ever but the content on there is still crazier and more extreme than it ever was. People have learnt to avoid the censorship, dont swear, don’t use slurs, dont post gore or nsfw content after that you can pretty much say whatever you want.
Yep an opinion isnt editable. What scares me is the misinformation, extremist groups churn it out at a frightening rate
What scares me is the organization of the extremist groups. It makes me feel like something has to be done to counter their influence. But I dont know what can be done because things are so cooked right now.
You can watch openly nazi pol boards where they sift through news stories and craft a narrative and then see the president of the US echoing it less than a week later. It used to take years for that stuff to filter out into the mainstream if it ever did. X is so bad for this stuff because news outlets treat it like a source of information so all you need is a bunch of fake accounts and you can make anything seem like news. Then news outlets report on it, then the next layer picks it up and echos it out to their audience and so on.
Yep it’s terrifying, they’re highly organised and sophisticated. There’s just so many of them it’s an impossible task
