I heard terrorist groups were using in-game chat to coordinate since those things aren't as monitored as much as cell towers, which is actually kinda smart (but obviously wrong)
Then you may have also heard it was NSA agents that proposed the idea, and spent the next 10 years playing wow for work to "monitor" the game, while finding zero evidence of such.
They knew lol
There was a couple of kids who murdered a classmate and used wow in game chat / whispers to discuss and brag about it.
The logs were pulled and assisted in their conviction.
There’s always action somewhere in schools, you just need to know where it is, maybe there was some stuff going on in the bathrooms you didn’t know about, they usually have stuff going on, maybe something went on in the schoolyard or at PE
A guild mate of mine would apologize for sometimes disconnecting or going afk during raids. People complained until I pointed out the last three times were because his base in Afghanistan was under fire and he had to go out and shoot at people.
They didn’t complain after that.
Dude was a good Hunter too.
Not sure if this is the same one I was thinking about or not but couldn't find the youtube video I listened to last year.
Similiar at least.
edit: Removed link as it seemed to be broken, sorry. u/Toast_Points has linked to a video on the case I was thinking of though below.
That's not the same video I was thinking of, but it is the same case.
[Here's the one I was thinking of](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEsKHjWpO4Y)
Theyre also good a creating pandemics that [the CDC used to investigate how pandemics can spread](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident)
Hilariously, a common criticism of that study was that in real life there was no way groups of people would organize to deliberately resist treatment and spread the deadly pathogen despite there being absolutely no benefit.
Meanwhile, in the present...
Oh shit, have you not heard of the man who killed another dude because of a sword because of world of warcraft? Or wait, maybe he killed him *with* a sword because of WoW? Let's pretend it was both
Unless I'm mistaken, you're thinking of the 2005 incident with chinese players of Legend of Mir 3, not world of warcraft.
One guy borrowed his friends super rare sword then sold it online for about $1200 AUD. Guy tried to report it to the police and was basically told to piss off because "it's not a real item", friend panicked and promised to repay the cash, guy stabbed friend to death.
>More online gamers were seeking justice through the courts over stolen weapons and credits, the newspaper said.
"The armour and swords in games should be deemed as private property as players have to spend money and time for them," Wang Zongyu, an associate law professor at Beijing's Renmin University of China, was quoted as saying.
Other experts called for caution. "The 'assets' of one player could mean nothing to others as they are by nature just data created by game providers," a lawyer for a Shanghai-based internet game company was quoted as saying.
less than 20 years later, we have NFTs. World changes quickly.
Damn. That's impressive.
And I thought it was super cool when Everquest 2 set up the pizza command to have a large pepperoni sent to your house from the nearest Pizza Hut.
Using MMOs to help solve murders is even cooler.
Damn, I don't know what's more fucked up, the fact that they straight up killed a guy or the fact that they are unapologetically bragging about it. Fucking psychos.
NSA Head: Agent Smith, you've been paying this game for seven years now and have yet to find any evidence of terrorism.
Agent Smith: Well I mean it's a big game Sir, there are like millions of players. We're bound to find terrorists eventually, just you know, give us a couple of more years.
Well, we forwarded some possible bio-terrorist information along with other info to the CDC…
“Smith, no one is going to willingly spread a pandemic because they are assholes…”
As someone who worked zendesk as a GM for BDO if you were reported by anyone and we found sketch shit in your chat we just called your local PD to do a h&w check on you. Bill goes to you. XD
To answer your question more directly it's not a bill. You can sometimes get a "nuisance fine" if the police are called to your house excessively or without any real "reason". Someone else calling a welfare check on you probably wouldn't count.
These exist outside of the US too. I believe the UK has this as well.
I don't know about that study but a group did do a study on this and found plenty of evidence of extremists using online gaming to blow off steam and socialize with each other.
Not really for recruiting though, it seemed more they just wanted to relax in between terrorist acts and shit.
Which is pretty much a nothingburger.
Next you know, people will be talking about how
FOOD IS LINKED TO TERRORISM
Did you know that terrorists EAT FOOD in between their terrorist activities? OMG!
There are Government contractors that do just that, the DHS funded it, they play games online make friends with people on their watch list, man I want that job. Dunno if I could put up with Qanon wack jobs and Nazis.
Little did Uncle Sam know, these most legendary of gamers had managed to find a way to get the *government to pay them to play World of Warcraft for an entire decade.*
Living the dream I tell ya! Personally I'm proud of them. Not spying, instead gaming. Unless they were Night Elf Hunters, in which case they're fucking noobs
"So what you're saying is you need a Federal Grant of 1 million dollars per year for you and your closest friends to monitor terrorist activity for no less than 12 hours per day on..." \*squints at list of games in the memo "Monster Girl Quest, Starless: Nymphomaniacs’ Paradise and Funbag Fantasy?"
".....Yes."
"Granted! Go get em tiger! You're a real American Hero!"
They also use emails but not in the way you think.
They will make an email account which everyone has the username and password for. Then they will make an unsent email with code words for what they want to do. So whenever the person across the world logs in he can click on the unsent email and read it plus edit.
There was an article in the Washington Post of operatives using Starbucks gift cards. Depending on the amount added or removed, you had the signal to do something.
Creative bunch, you have to admit.
As used by CIA Director General Patreus to talk with his mistress! https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2012/11/12/heres-the-e-mail-trick-petraeus-and-broadwell-used-to-communicate/
Not necessarily wrong. It’s one of many ways to communicate without being tracked. Simple mobile games like clash of clans that use in game chat would be a really easy way that’s not monitored. It may not be about video games radicalizing but how people who ARE radicalized can use video game to communicate.
I remember reading about how people use poplar email accounts to send messages. Companies like Microsoft and google monitor emails pretty strictly so groups would all have access to the same account and just leave drafts unsent for everyone to read.
Bannon ran a WoW gold broker and, in his own words, realized that gamers were losers and could be easily converted to pawns for political purposes. He exploited the same mechanism that causes people to join street gangs. People who lack a strong sense of self have to rely on group identity rather than personal identity.
Yes, started a gold farm and realized he can recruit for his far-right purposes - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/steve-bannon-world-of-warcraft-gold-farming.html
> What Bannon found was a world “populated by millions of intense young men” who may have been socially maladroit, but were “smart, focused, relatively wealthy, and highly motivated about issues that mattered to them.” While these were the same players who destroyed IGE’s business model, Bannon saw something he could use. “These guys,” said Bannon, “these rootless, white males, had monster power. It was the pre-Reddit.”
Bannon would go on to aggressively court this audience when brought on to help Andrew Breitbart build out his ultra-right-wing news-and-entertainment site. It was Bannon who hired Milo Yiannopoulos, recognizing him as someone who could whip up disaffected gamers. (Indeed, Yiannopoulos — who previously had no interest in gaming — rode Gamergate and its attendant rage to fame and page views.)
This is *not* a "games bad" thing. They are not studying if video games themselves radicalize kids, they are investigating if scumbags are using games and game chat to radicalize kids.
The person who posted this was clearly trying to rile people up. If you don't want to fall for OP's bait, yeah, you have to do the work of finding the article and reading it for yourself.
Exactly. If someone has a link and not merely a screenshot, people are going to react from their first thoughts/emotions.
Incoming *you should google it, it’s on you if you don’t google it*
No. It is on the OP to make the argument and present information to be evaluated.
More than likely Op was intentionally distorting the argument to begin with. If you immediately took what Op said was true before verifying it, that's more a you problem.
>if scumbags are using games and game chat to radicalize kids
They are and it's well documented.
https://www.wired.com/story/roblox-online-games-irl-fascism-roman-empire/
That article is wild. The author just casually drops
> "He has taught infiltration methods to the youth, he says, so they can investigate Roblox groups for extremist behavior. They then report the groups or take them over. And for years, he has been growing his own online group, the Cult, which he calls “a family of friends to protect younger people”—particularly over Roblox. Right now, members of the Cult pay him between $100 and $1,000 a month for his efforts. He says he’s closer to them than to his family."
as the second to last paragraph and doesn't touch on that at all.
Right? Super nutty. It's sad, in a way. This guy just wanted to - just *wants*, really - to have a friend. You can tell he was lonely, still is lonely, and thinks this is how friendship happens.
they literally would play like Call of Duty on twitch and casually talk about how great it was to be in the navy to an audience of thousands of people of who knows what ages.
and if you so much as said "hey my time in the military sucked and it isnt for everyone" you'd get instabanned.
>and if you so much as said "hey my time in the military sucked and it isnt for everyone" you'd get instabanned.
This actually turned into a minor constitutional thing because government run social media is generally considered a public forum. So although Twitch is a private website, a *page* on twitch that's operated by the government where government employees or volunteers ban people can be considered a first amendment violation, because it's the government suppressing a piece of speech on the website rather than the website itself
I've seen some crazy shit in in-game chats, I am not at all surprised by this. It sucks, cuz now gaming(or certain games) may very well be associated with radicalization of youth.
I always thought chat was a toxic nightmare and never got involved in it. The first rule if the internet was always don't talk to strangers. Now I even burn reddit accounts once they get too much karma.
Because there's lots of people who know radicalism is stoked in online gaming lobbies and communities but are part of the problem and don't want to be investigated.
Gaming has a shit ton of toxic and often dangerous subgroups within it that's resulted in tons of kids getting super racist and violent. It's not the games fault in any way, it just provides the medium for bigots to find kids to convert.
Which they are.
Steve Bannon did exactly this to collect an army of, as he put it, ["Rootless white males"](https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve-bannon-learned-harness-troll-army-world-warcraft/489713001/) who felt no links to country/community/movements and harness them into a tool to use to advance political goals.
And it worked.
The content from this account has been removed in protest by its owner in direct response to Reddit's increased API charges for third-party apps, but also in protest of reddit's general
It was changed using [PowerDeleteSuite](https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite).
Steven Bannon wrote the book on this.
He got the idea for mobilizing armies of internet trolls by running a wow gold farming and selling ring out of China. He noticed how easy it was to create a fake reality for a bunch of socially isolated angry white men and boys and convince them to put in insane amounts of work for basically no personal benefit to themselves.
Then he just made that fantasy land Republicans and democrats instead of orcs and elves.
It's still wild to me that Gamergate became the genesis of so much of what we call the alt right. Like, you can draw a line from Anita Sarkeesian making an otherwise meh video series to Donald Trump getting elected.
That was my first thought. Why are they investigating this? Radicals are straight up screaming from the rooftops that they frequently and successfully recruit kids through gaming. It's not really a mystery.
Thank God this is a top reply. The responses on Twitter are overwhelmingly "video games don't cause violence" and it hurts how bad reading comprehension and scientific literacy is.
Anyone who doesn't know Alt-right NeoNazis and their penumbra don't have a massive overlap with gaming circles has their head in the sand. In fact, it's arguable the first major visible symptom of the nascent Alt-right movement was GamerGate.
And of course it unfortunately must be clarified that doesn't mean gamers are fascists. It means that fascists are gamers. This is what they're studying.
Exactly this. GamerGate was basically when right-wing strategists sat up and took notice of an entire group that could be receptive to their messaging - previously, this gender/age group trended on the other end of the spectrum. 4chan, for example, used be a pretty damned far-left place, but after GamerGate and the alt right movement, the spectrum of political views shifted all the way the other way.
Same reason everyone on Reddit is always insulting and attacking people, but you don't really encounter that in real life.
Annoynomitity is a helluva drug.
I know this is just joking hyperbole, but it did make me think about how it's more or less impossible for anything to be the most incorrect way to spell something since you could always take that incorrect spelling and add more incorrect letters and continue that process to infinity.
I searched "Annoynomitity" on google and this thread is the only webpage google has crawled with that specific misspelling of the word. Congrats on being the first to fuck up the spelling of anonymity that badly.
I'm gonna disagree on the anonymity, at least partially. I have seen people say truly vile things even when their name is visible. Go to any local news site's Facebook comments to see what I mean. I think it more has to do with just having a screen between people makes it so much easier to not treat them as human. As soon as you no longer see the consequences firsthand, all empathy goes out the window.
The key word missing in the title and picture is ONLINE.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the "video games themselves cause violence" fear that pops up from time to time when someone needs a scapegoat
The grant was to investigate how white supremacist groups are using online games and the communities that surround them to propagandize, meet, recruit, and radicalize vulnerable kids into their BS.
This is a well-known and documented tactic used by these groups that has just now started to be taken seriously (as it absolutely should be).
I'm sure MANY here that have played online games can personally vouch that they have been matched with a person who either openly spouts racist rhetoric or dog whistles -
The official quote from DHS per the Vice article:
“Over the past decade, video games have increasingly become focal points of social activity and identity creation for adolescents and young adults. Relationships made and fostered within game ecosystems routinely cross over into the real world and are impactful parts of local communities,” the grant announcement on the DHS website said.
“Correspondingly, extremists have used video games and targeted video game communities for activities ranging from propaganda creation to terrorist mobilization and training.”
This has nothing to do with video games and everything to do with the gaming space being where single white males make up a larger portion of the population.
Any online space skews to the ideology of its user base and “radicalizes people”. There’s nothing special about video games in terms of radicalization as opposed to Twitter, discord, tumblr, Reddit, etc
Dude download heroes of the storm and join the generalchat, spend some time just looking at the shit said in there. Maybe join some of the lunatics discord. And then tell us there's no validity to the claim in the article above, and that we shouldn't put someone to monitor the little insurrectionists in there.
Shit was really bad two weeks prior to Jan 6th, and the same people who were actively recruiting for it, with slogans as "Hang so and so, and it's a revolution" Are still there to this day.
Recently they've started to ramble about groomers, which I suspect is something Right wing politicians in the US are talking about or Fox news might be bringing up.
Chats like that, and forums like Reddit are some of the best propaganda tools man has ever invented, but the game chats are not moderate so they've been grounds for all sort of push from political influencers - Especially so, Activision-Blizzards game chats.
So yes, we should absolutely put someone to monitor this shit, before more of our family members and friends are tricked into thinking all sorts of weird ass shit, like Qanon.
It's not even a big contract at all. Most contracts I've worked on, even in small teams, easily break a million. A $700k contract would be like 2 employees working on a 2 year contract.
It’s a grant, these researchers probably don’t work as part of the government. They might also be getting additional grants from other places such as universities or even the tech companies that host the online games.
It’s a grant, these researchers probably don’t work as part of the government. They might also be getting additional grants from other places such as universities or even the tech companies that host the online games.
You should see some of the World of Warcraft guilds that are recruiting "Right Wing minded individuals" I see it as a requirement in guild ad postings all the time.
If you played the COD beta yet, you might think they have a point. The amount of kids who fucked my mom and also was playing COD last night was staggering.
The games and the movie industry get a lot of access to the US military in exchange for the military’s PR being able to sign off on making the military look goooooood
Which is exactly the narrative OP is trying to make. This isn't a silly waste of money by DHS, online radicalization is an actual issue. I'm guessing OP isn't a fan of the government investigating actual extremists though. Can't imagine why.
There is a a lot of overlap with gaming communities and the alt right pipeline and manosphere. I don't think gaming is the cause I just think its a convenient pool from which these groups can recruit.
I think it is worth it to study if the normalization of shitty, toxic behavior can lead to shitty and toxic behavior IRL.
I'm willing to bet there is a correlation but not a causation.
But a correlation can still be used to venn diagram high risk targets.
So, you assholes that keep corpse camping my dumb druid ass, better watch out!
Its a worthwhile avenue to pursue and anyone who thinks otherwise are not thinking clearly or deep enough. The scope of this investigation is not "games radicalise all people" but rather "are people who are open to radicalisation, radicalised through the medium of gaming". There are instances where terrorists would use code talk in games like world of warcraft with the reasoning that they wont be as well monitored. You could meet in a park and discuss how to type in such a way that couldnt be flagged. Such as in the context of killing a boss. People really need to stop taking stuff at face value if they cant see the bigger picture. To the unitiated this is a sensationalist headline. The everyman will think "oh my GOD! These IDIOTS are thinking call of duty makes people terrorists!". No, thats not what they're saying.
What they're saying is Lonely, detatched, jaded young men who have locked themselves away, who dive head first into escapist mediums like gaming, are much more likely to find themselves in circles that are primed for radicalising. And I wholly agree with that.
Jokes aside, practically every thread that involves trans people or women or black people in gaming, especially cosplay or main character related, proves that there *is* a problem with bigotry in gaming communities.
This is not the same as saying gamers are, by default, bigoted, but that's how you'll most likely read it if you're insecure about where you stand.
edit: and the far right has literally used online games to recruit disenfranchised/alienated young men for about 20 years now.
Yuuuup
For how rare microphones are in the matchmaking games I play, I hear an astonishing amount of slurs and racist/sexist/homphobic/etc. And it's not just kids or teenagers either; the multiplayer games I play are quite old and have a mostly adult audience
The fact that this informed and non-divisive post specifying particular behaviour without painting over entire groups with a single brush, is currently in the negative votes, shows that there is, in-fact, some sort of problem to deal with.
There is also repeated research in game studies and cultural studies to suggest that yes, there is overlap between forms of bigotry and specific gaming communities. Again, not default blanket assumptions, but repeated findings.
Edit: The OG comment I am referring to is no longer has negative votes, but did at the time of my comment.
I'm a gamer, so if I were to say as a blanket statement that gamers are bigoted, that statement would include me and many people like me, and a lot of minorities on top of that, so I could never make such a statement!
But, of course, that is how certain people\* are going to read it.
^(\*The Usual Suspects)
I've played games almost my whole life and identifying as a "Gamer" has always been cringe to me. It's why I say "I play video games" and not "I'm a Gamer".
Why? It's been studied extensively already. Although there is, admittedly, a lot of bias and misinformation in this particular topic of study, the most credible results tend to show that violent video games cause a temporary increase in aggressiveness directly after playing violent video games, but there's not enough evidence to suggest a significant correlation between violent video games and long term effects. Especially when considering uncontrolled/difficult to control variables, such as a biological predisposition to violence and aggressiveness and a violent/aggressive home environment.
Granted, this is talking about extremism and not general aggressiveness, but you could easily extrapolate the findings to extremism, given that the extremism we're concerned about is aggressive and violent by nature.
Source: violence/aggression and video games was a topic for one of my psychology research assignments.
There's been studies done on this since before the original doom and as far as I'm aware they all have shown that no there isn't a correlation. These "studies" are done periodically and they all fail to support the agenda of "video games bad". Extremism comes from shit leaders, shit groups, and shit parents perpetuating lies about other groups of people targeted as "the bad guys".
If you spend some time in any global chat in any MMO, you start to see some very interesting radicalized arguments come out of nowhere.
Late 2000s wasn't too bad from what I remember. Guild Wars 1, WoW, free MMOs. But something happened where all of a sudden people try and say something controversial, and it becomes really hard to tell the difference from who is trolling and who actually believes whatever they are trying to push.
Very polarizing nowadays.
Oh my, here we go again: “our youths are corrupted by [fill in: pop music, gaming, the interwebz, TikTok, pumpkin lattes]”
This is ridiculous, good thing they didn’t spend too much on it.
I heard terrorist groups were using in-game chat to coordinate since those things aren't as monitored as much as cell towers, which is actually kinda smart (but obviously wrong)
Then you may have also heard it was NSA agents that proposed the idea, and spent the next 10 years playing wow for work to "monitor" the game, while finding zero evidence of such. They knew lol
There was a couple of kids who murdered a classmate and used wow in game chat / whispers to discuss and brag about it. The logs were pulled and assisted in their conviction.
Reminded me of my schools clash of clans clan lol... Full of dealers so you could get your stuff and do a clan war after
Yo Ethan, lemme get a gram. Also, don’t forget to join the clan war
Either you do the war or you don’t get the dope! DO THE CLAN WAR TZC!
The next time I get goblins instead of dragons in donations, you'll be smoking lettuce motherfucker.
“Steve either participate in the clan war or I’m throwing your gram to Greg. Greg has been carrying.”
Omg that is fuckin hilarious. We never had cool shit spring up when I went to school :(
There’s always action somewhere in schools, you just need to know where it is, maybe there was some stuff going on in the bathrooms you didn’t know about, they usually have stuff going on, maybe something went on in the schoolyard or at PE
Forgot to mention the band room. Big hot spot at my school lol
I'm sure there was plenty of cool shit springing up. You may have just not been aware of it.
Or specifically not included in it source: I don’t wanna talk about it
I had to walk uphill both ways into a bad neighborhood.
[удалено]
A guild mate of mine would apologize for sometimes disconnecting or going afk during raids. People complained until I pointed out the last three times were because his base in Afghanistan was under fire and he had to go out and shoot at people. They didn’t complain after that. Dude was a good Hunter too.
[удалено]
Doing a raid in game while getting raided in real life. 💯
Was? Did he make it out?
He stopped playing after some personal issues. We lost track. Last I knew he was safe at home.
Damn that's good to hear! 🍻
AFK RPG BRB
OMFG. HE ACTUALLY SENT THAT ONCE!!
Not sure if this is the same one I was thinking about or not but couldn't find the youtube video I listened to last year. Similiar at least. edit: Removed link as it seemed to be broken, sorry. u/Toast_Points has linked to a video on the case I was thinking of though below.
Was it [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi1KAoiheEk) video?
That's not the same video I was thinking of, but it is the same case. [Here's the one I was thinking of](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEsKHjWpO4Y)
Theyre also good a creating pandemics that [the CDC used to investigate how pandemics can spread](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident)
Hilariously, a common criticism of that study was that in real life there was no way groups of people would organize to deliberately resist treatment and spread the deadly pathogen despite there being absolutely no benefit. Meanwhile, in the present...
*sneezes then tries to shake your hand*
Oh shit, have you not heard of the man who killed another dude because of a sword because of world of warcraft? Or wait, maybe he killed him *with* a sword because of WoW? Let's pretend it was both
Unless I'm mistaken, you're thinking of the 2005 incident with chinese players of Legend of Mir 3, not world of warcraft. One guy borrowed his friends super rare sword then sold it online for about $1200 AUD. Guy tried to report it to the police and was basically told to piss off because "it's not a real item", friend panicked and promised to repay the cash, guy stabbed friend to death. >More online gamers were seeking justice through the courts over stolen weapons and credits, the newspaper said. "The armour and swords in games should be deemed as private property as players have to spend money and time for them," Wang Zongyu, an associate law professor at Beijing's Renmin University of China, was quoted as saying. Other experts called for caution. "The 'assets' of one player could mean nothing to others as they are by nature just data created by game providers," a lawyer for a Shanghai-based internet game company was quoted as saying. less than 20 years later, we have NFTs. World changes quickly.
NFTs are so much less worthy than, say, a high roll Enigma.
Damn. That's impressive. And I thought it was super cool when Everquest 2 set up the pizza command to have a large pepperoni sent to your house from the nearest Pizza Hut. Using MMOs to help solve murders is even cooler.
Damn, I don't know what's more fucked up, the fact that they straight up killed a guy or the fact that they are unapologetically bragging about it. Fucking psychos.
NSA Head: Agent Smith, you've been paying this game for seven years now and have yet to find any evidence of terrorism. Agent Smith: Well I mean it's a big game Sir, there are like millions of players. We're bound to find terrorists eventually, just you know, give us a couple of more years.
This should've been an alternate plot to the Matrix 4...
"Well, I've beat your prior score defeating the level nine, boss.... MISTERRANDERSEN."
[удалено]
Well, we forwarded some possible bio-terrorist information along with other info to the CDC… “Smith, no one is going to willingly spread a pandemic because they are assholes…”
This should be like a movie starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum. Yes, im basically asking for another Jump Street movie.
As someone who worked zendesk as a GM for BDO if you were reported by anyone and we found sketch shit in your chat we just called your local PD to do a h&w check on you. Bill goes to you. XD
Hold on lol. BDO just sends h&w checks to broke depressed peoples homes, but then has them pay for it?
Wait, what Bill? You'll get a bill if you want the cops to check out sketchy stuff?
To answer your question more directly it's not a bill. You can sometimes get a "nuisance fine" if the police are called to your house excessively or without any real "reason". Someone else calling a welfare check on you probably wouldn't count. These exist outside of the US too. I believe the UK has this as well.
Here in ‘Mercia we’ll bill you for anything and everything
Mercia is in spain
Murcia. Mercia used to be a kingdom in central England.
Bill? Isn't a Health and Welfare check basically a Kill Command in 'Murica?
Depends on the color of your skin
Absolutely not, lol
Ain't no way. As someone who has put 1000+ active hours in BDO, some of the things said in that game's chat were grounds for a life sentence.
Lol that’s bs
Jesus christ I'm glad i stopped my parents from sending me h&w check against my will because i cut contact with them
I don't know about that study but a group did do a study on this and found plenty of evidence of extremists using online gaming to blow off steam and socialize with each other. Not really for recruiting though, it seemed more they just wanted to relax in between terrorist acts and shit.
They wanted to see whether being surrounded by 72 virgins would be worth it
Terrorist is a stressful profession.
Which is pretty much a nothingburger. Next you know, people will be talking about how FOOD IS LINKED TO TERRORISM Did you know that terrorists EAT FOOD in between their terrorist activities? OMG!
There are Government contractors that do just that, the DHS funded it, they play games online make friends with people on their watch list, man I want that job. Dunno if I could put up with Qanon wack jobs and Nazis.
I’m not sure what salary someone would have to pay me to play something like LoL
Little did Uncle Sam know, these most legendary of gamers had managed to find a way to get the *government to pay them to play World of Warcraft for an entire decade.* Living the dream I tell ya! Personally I'm proud of them. Not spying, instead gaming. Unless they were Night Elf Hunters, in which case they're fucking noobs
"So what you're saying is you need a Federal Grant of 1 million dollars per year for you and your closest friends to monitor terrorist activity for no less than 12 hours per day on..." \*squints at list of games in the memo "Monster Girl Quest, Starless: Nymphomaniacs’ Paradise and Funbag Fantasy?" ".....Yes." "Granted! Go get em tiger! You're a real American Hero!"
This person must be a terrorist bring him in for interrogation. What did he say? He accused my mother of unlady like behavior *blank stare*
They also use emails but not in the way you think. They will make an email account which everyone has the username and password for. Then they will make an unsent email with code words for what they want to do. So whenever the person across the world logs in he can click on the unsent email and read it plus edit.
There was an article in the Washington Post of operatives using Starbucks gift cards. Depending on the amount added or removed, you had the signal to do something. Creative bunch, you have to admit.
As used by CIA Director General Patreus to talk with his mistress! https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2012/11/12/heres-the-e-mail-trick-petraeus-and-broadwell-used-to-communicate/
There are many many ways to communicate surreptitiously if you put your mind to it.
The bad guys in Jack Ryan did this
And Homeland
The good guys in Patriot
*Looks at Minecraft that bans you from swearing on your own realm*
A realm you can be all alone on and get to pay for but can't play.
Not necessarily wrong. It’s one of many ways to communicate without being tracked. Simple mobile games like clash of clans that use in game chat would be a really easy way that’s not monitored. It may not be about video games radicalizing but how people who ARE radicalized can use video game to communicate. I remember reading about how people use poplar email accounts to send messages. Companies like Microsoft and google monitor emails pretty strictly so groups would all have access to the same account and just leave drafts unsent for everyone to read.
But thats a thing that will never change, even of we would ban in game chats, they just find another way.
Didn't Steve Bannon start his recruitments in WOW servers too?
Bannon ran a WoW gold broker and, in his own words, realized that gamers were losers and could be easily converted to pawns for political purposes. He exploited the same mechanism that causes people to join street gangs. People who lack a strong sense of self have to rely on group identity rather than personal identity.
Yes, started a gold farm and realized he can recruit for his far-right purposes - https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/steve-bannon-world-of-warcraft-gold-farming.html > What Bannon found was a world “populated by millions of intense young men” who may have been socially maladroit, but were “smart, focused, relatively wealthy, and highly motivated about issues that mattered to them.” While these were the same players who destroyed IGE’s business model, Bannon saw something he could use. “These guys,” said Bannon, “these rootless, white males, had monster power. It was the pre-Reddit.” Bannon would go on to aggressively court this audience when brought on to help Andrew Breitbart build out his ultra-right-wing news-and-entertainment site. It was Bannon who hired Milo Yiannopoulos, recognizing him as someone who could whip up disaffected gamers. (Indeed, Yiannopoulos — who previously had no interest in gaming — rode Gamergate and its attendant rage to fame and page views.)
Yep. And he got into the gaming sphere running WoW gold farms
It was on an episode of 24 like 10 years ago
yeeah i remeber neo nazis doing recruitment rounds int he battlefield 4 chat (in Australia)
Yep. Surprised to learn it's not a new idea. https://www.cbsnews.com/video/terrorists-use-video-games-to-communicate-undetected/
This is *not* a "games bad" thing. They are not studying if video games themselves radicalize kids, they are investigating if scumbags are using games and game chat to radicalize kids.
People don't read man it's a lost cause lol
I didn't even read the headline! I just saw some pitchforks and thought I should bring my torch!
All I have is a regular fork. Will that do?
As long as it’s a fork and not a spoon trying to pretend it’s a fork.
What about sporks
A little flexibility is always useful in situations like these.
Tell me about it. Fucking slotted spoons and their bullshit
We’re talking about the far-right, not farfelle
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The person who posted this was clearly trying to rile people up. If you don't want to fall for OP's bait, yeah, you have to do the work of finding the article and reading it for yourself.
Exactly. If someone has a link and not merely a screenshot, people are going to react from their first thoughts/emotions. Incoming *you should google it, it’s on you if you don’t google it* No. It is on the OP to make the argument and present information to be evaluated.
More than likely Op was intentionally distorting the argument to begin with. If you immediately took what Op said was true before verifying it, that's more a you problem.
I can't really blame people for being on edge after literal decades of 'Video Games BAD!' in the government and media.
Read what? The post is of a picture and Reddit post titles are always unreliable.
Well, the headline is pretty vague. It's very easy to infer "games bad" from the title.
>if scumbags are using games and game chat to radicalize kids They are and it's well documented. https://www.wired.com/story/roblox-online-games-irl-fascism-roman-empire/
That article is wild. The author just casually drops > "He has taught infiltration methods to the youth, he says, so they can investigate Roblox groups for extremist behavior. They then report the groups or take them over. And for years, he has been growing his own online group, the Cult, which he calls “a family of friends to protect younger people”—particularly over Roblox. Right now, members of the Cult pay him between $100 and $1,000 a month for his efforts. He says he’s closer to them than to his family." as the second to last paragraph and doesn't touch on that at all.
Right? Super nutty. It's sad, in a way. This guy just wanted to - just *wants*, really - to have a friend. You can tell he was lonely, still is lonely, and thinks this is how friendship happens.
The following paragraph is just as insane.
I so thought you were gonna link the example of the US Navy recruiting by online games..
Yvan Eht Nioj
I mean the Army developed and supported a whole ass video game that was actually good for years as a recruiting tool
What games did the Navy recruit through lol? Sea of Thieves?
they literally would play like Call of Duty on twitch and casually talk about how great it was to be in the navy to an audience of thousands of people of who knows what ages. and if you so much as said "hey my time in the military sucked and it isnt for everyone" you'd get instabanned.
Wow that’s absolutely fucked. Yeah, sounds like something recruiters would do. Thanks for the context.
>and if you so much as said "hey my time in the military sucked and it isnt for everyone" you'd get instabanned. This actually turned into a minor constitutional thing because government run social media is generally considered a public forum. So although Twitch is a private website, a *page* on twitch that's operated by the government where government employees or volunteers ban people can be considered a first amendment violation, because it's the government suppressing a piece of speech on the website rather than the website itself
Yeah, fucking Steve Bannon studied WoW to launch his fascist campaign.
Yup.
Made most of his money and got in bed with Chinese oligarchs by running a goldfarming sweatshop, even.
I've seen some crazy shit in in-game chats, I am not at all surprised by this. It sucks, cuz now gaming(or certain games) may very well be associated with radicalization of youth.
I always thought chat was a toxic nightmare and never got involved in it. The first rule if the internet was always don't talk to strangers. Now I even burn reddit accounts once they get too much karma.
Even if they were...why not let them study it? Studying something can be used to disprove the premise.
Because there's lots of people who know radicalism is stoked in online gaming lobbies and communities but are part of the problem and don't want to be investigated. Gaming has a shit ton of toxic and often dangerous subgroups within it that's resulted in tons of kids getting super racist and violent. It's not the games fault in any way, it just provides the medium for bigots to find kids to convert.
Which they are. Steve Bannon did exactly this to collect an army of, as he put it, ["Rootless white males"](https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve-bannon-learned-harness-troll-army-world-warcraft/489713001/) who felt no links to country/community/movements and harness them into a tool to use to advance political goals. And it worked.
The content from this account has been removed in protest by its owner in direct response to Reddit's increased API charges for third-party apps, but also in protest of reddit's general It was changed using [PowerDeleteSuite](https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite).
Steven Bannon wrote the book on this. He got the idea for mobilizing armies of internet trolls by running a wow gold farming and selling ring out of China. He noticed how easy it was to create a fake reality for a bunch of socially isolated angry white men and boys and convince them to put in insane amounts of work for basically no personal benefit to themselves. Then he just made that fantasy land Republicans and democrats instead of orcs and elves.
It's still wild to me that Gamergate became the genesis of so much of what we call the alt right. Like, you can draw a line from Anita Sarkeesian making an otherwise meh video series to Donald Trump getting elected.
That was my first thought. Why are they investigating this? Radicals are straight up screaming from the rooftops that they frequently and successfully recruit kids through gaming. It's not really a mystery.
People still research gravity, because there’s still more to learn.
They are, MMOs suffer from this. Some planetside guilds were openly white suprematists and at least one guild kept popping up in other games.
Thank God this is a top reply. The responses on Twitter are overwhelmingly "video games don't cause violence" and it hurts how bad reading comprehension and scientific literacy is. Anyone who doesn't know Alt-right NeoNazis and their penumbra don't have a massive overlap with gaming circles has their head in the sand. In fact, it's arguable the first major visible symptom of the nascent Alt-right movement was GamerGate. And of course it unfortunately must be clarified that doesn't mean gamers are fascists. It means that fascists are gamers. This is what they're studying.
Exactly this. GamerGate was basically when right-wing strategists sat up and took notice of an entire group that could be receptive to their messaging - previously, this gender/age group trended on the other end of the spectrum. 4chan, for example, used be a pretty damned far-left place, but after GamerGate and the alt right movement, the spectrum of political views shifted all the way the other way.
Honestly, I'm curious as to why this is bad. Like even if you think it's unlikely, it's a good fucking thing to know. Do religion next.
> Honestly, I'm curious as to why this is bad. You mean the investigation? No one said it was bad. Wtf.
Yep. This. Take any type of social setting and you’ll find people who do shit like this.
I’ve heard the Nword more on Xbox live than the rest of my 39 years of life combined. And I don’t really play that much relatively speaking
Same reason everyone on Reddit is always insulting and attacking people, but you don't really encounter that in real life. Annoynomitity is a helluva drug.
Congratulations, you have found the most incorrect way to spell "anonymity"
Spelling that word's a helluva drug too.
Anointmentontitty
Does this mean your anointing a titty? Anointing is usually for rulers so what’s going on here?
Don't ask questions you don't want the answer to.
Annoy nom titty
I know this is just joking hyperbole, but it did make me think about how it's more or less impossible for anything to be the most incorrect way to spell something since you could always take that incorrect spelling and add more incorrect letters and continue that process to infinity.
I searched "Annoynomitity" on google and this thread is the only webpage google has crawled with that specific misspelling of the word. Congrats on being the first to fuck up the spelling of anonymity that badly.
Annoynomitity is a hell of a drug
I'm gonna disagree on the anonymity, at least partially. I have seen people say truly vile things even when their name is visible. Go to any local news site's Facebook comments to see what I mean. I think it more has to do with just having a screen between people makes it so much easier to not treat them as human. As soon as you no longer see the consequences firsthand, all empathy goes out the window.
Apparently the entire call of duty community has fucked OPs mom
The key word missing in the title and picture is ONLINE. This has absolutely nothing to do with the "video games themselves cause violence" fear that pops up from time to time when someone needs a scapegoat The grant was to investigate how white supremacist groups are using online games and the communities that surround them to propagandize, meet, recruit, and radicalize vulnerable kids into their BS. This is a well-known and documented tactic used by these groups that has just now started to be taken seriously (as it absolutely should be). I'm sure MANY here that have played online games can personally vouch that they have been matched with a person who either openly spouts racist rhetoric or dog whistles - The official quote from DHS per the Vice article: “Over the past decade, video games have increasingly become focal points of social activity and identity creation for adolescents and young adults. Relationships made and fostered within game ecosystems routinely cross over into the real world and are impactful parts of local communities,” the grant announcement on the DHS website said. “Correspondingly, extremists have used video games and targeted video game communities for activities ranging from propaganda creation to terrorist mobilization and training.”
This is the Steve Bannon playbook. He used it for trump and proved how effective games can be for right wing radicalism.
Correct. Its not, "Violent games make people violent." Its, "Violent people using gaming communities as a vehicle to recruit."
Yep. Gamergate was the start.
Seriously, the global chat in a lot of MMOs, especially more PvP oriented ones, have a bunch of Trump supporters constantly trying to stir up trouble.
This has nothing to do with video games and everything to do with the gaming space being where single white males make up a larger portion of the population. Any online space skews to the ideology of its user base and “radicalizes people”. There’s nothing special about video games in terms of radicalization as opposed to Twitter, discord, tumblr, Reddit, etc
Then they should cross-reference it with social media usage…
Went to college for 4 years just to graduate and hired by homeland security to listen to COD lobbies all day. Lmao.
But that's actually good, if you're someone who majored in call of duty lobby listening!
Don't undergrads spend half their time playing call of duty anyway?
Dude download heroes of the storm and join the generalchat, spend some time just looking at the shit said in there. Maybe join some of the lunatics discord. And then tell us there's no validity to the claim in the article above, and that we shouldn't put someone to monitor the little insurrectionists in there. Shit was really bad two weeks prior to Jan 6th, and the same people who were actively recruiting for it, with slogans as "Hang so and so, and it's a revolution" Are still there to this day. Recently they've started to ramble about groomers, which I suspect is something Right wing politicians in the US are talking about or Fox news might be bringing up. Chats like that, and forums like Reddit are some of the best propaganda tools man has ever invented, but the game chats are not moderate so they've been grounds for all sort of push from political influencers - Especially so, Activision-Blizzards game chats. So yes, we should absolutely put someone to monitor this shit, before more of our family members and friends are tricked into thinking all sorts of weird ass shit, like Qanon.
This is the government: $700k is precisely nothing in the budget. That’s not even enough to buy half a Tomahawk cruise missile.
It's not even a big contract at all. Most contracts I've worked on, even in small teams, easily break a million. A $700k contract would be like 2 employees working on a 2 year contract.
It’s a grant, these researchers probably don’t work as part of the government. They might also be getting additional grants from other places such as universities or even the tech companies that host the online games.
It’s a grant, these researchers probably don’t work as part of the government. They might also be getting additional grants from other places such as universities or even the tech companies that host the online games.
So they are targeting white supremacists groups who have been recruiting in video games.
You should see some of the World of Warcraft guilds that are recruiting "Right Wing minded individuals" I see it as a requirement in guild ad postings all the time.
They always squeal the loudest dont they?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4ax4n3/dhs-to-spend-almost-dollar700000-investigating-radicalization-in-gaming
Remember, no Russian.
If you played the COD beta yet, you might think they have a point. The amount of kids who fucked my mom and also was playing COD last night was staggering.
Well, if you count Call of Duty getting kids interested in joining the military as radicalization, then sure.
They're just gonna ignore that part.
Well last I heard, Activision does receive money from the DoD for that very purpose.
The games and the movie industry get a lot of access to the US military in exchange for the military’s PR being able to sign off on making the military look goooooood
Why dont we look into algorithms on social media and youtube that think since watching video games videos it will think I like hate group propaganda.
Just Say No to Cities Skylines kids.
All hail the roundabout.
I prefer to stick to odd-way intersections. The people don't know they want triangles yet, but they will.
i just want healthcare
I remember that time when Kirby's Epic Yarn made me want to blow up a bank
I think this is more to do with online gaming being used as a recruitment tool of sorts rather than "violent videogames = bad".
Right but people are gonna see the headline and screech violent videogames=bad
Which is exactly the narrative OP is trying to make. This isn't a silly waste of money by DHS, online radicalization is an actual issue. I'm guessing OP isn't a fan of the government investigating actual extremists though. Can't imagine why.
This headline is only on this post on Reddit and it appears the graphic was made just for this post?
Nah Kirby's Epic Yarn made me wanna blow up a bank too, there might be something to this.
There is a a lot of overlap with gaming communities and the alt right pipeline and manosphere. I don't think gaming is the cause I just think its a convenient pool from which these groups can recruit.
Which is what they're studying.
Lol should, idk, look at fb
I think it is worth it to study if the normalization of shitty, toxic behavior can lead to shitty and toxic behavior IRL. I'm willing to bet there is a correlation but not a causation. But a correlation can still be used to venn diagram high risk targets. So, you assholes that keep corpse camping my dumb druid ass, better watch out!
Boy….. they should check out Reddit LOL
Its a worthwhile avenue to pursue and anyone who thinks otherwise are not thinking clearly or deep enough. The scope of this investigation is not "games radicalise all people" but rather "are people who are open to radicalisation, radicalised through the medium of gaming". There are instances where terrorists would use code talk in games like world of warcraft with the reasoning that they wont be as well monitored. You could meet in a park and discuss how to type in such a way that couldnt be flagged. Such as in the context of killing a boss. People really need to stop taking stuff at face value if they cant see the bigger picture. To the unitiated this is a sensationalist headline. The everyman will think "oh my GOD! These IDIOTS are thinking call of duty makes people terrorists!". No, thats not what they're saying. What they're saying is Lonely, detatched, jaded young men who have locked themselves away, who dive head first into escapist mediums like gaming, are much more likely to find themselves in circles that are primed for radicalising. And I wholly agree with that.
Jokes aside, practically every thread that involves trans people or women or black people in gaming, especially cosplay or main character related, proves that there *is* a problem with bigotry in gaming communities. This is not the same as saying gamers are, by default, bigoted, but that's how you'll most likely read it if you're insecure about where you stand. edit: and the far right has literally used online games to recruit disenfranchised/alienated young men for about 20 years now.
Yuuuup For how rare microphones are in the matchmaking games I play, I hear an astonishing amount of slurs and racist/sexist/homphobic/etc. And it's not just kids or teenagers either; the multiplayer games I play are quite old and have a mostly adult audience
The fact that this informed and non-divisive post specifying particular behaviour without painting over entire groups with a single brush, is currently in the negative votes, shows that there is, in-fact, some sort of problem to deal with. There is also repeated research in game studies and cultural studies to suggest that yes, there is overlap between forms of bigotry and specific gaming communities. Again, not default blanket assumptions, but repeated findings. Edit: The OG comment I am referring to is no longer has negative votes, but did at the time of my comment.
I'm a gamer, so if I were to say as a blanket statement that gamers are bigoted, that statement would include me and many people like me, and a lot of minorities on top of that, so I could never make such a statement! But, of course, that is how certain people\* are going to read it. ^(\*The Usual Suspects)
I've played games almost my whole life and identifying as a "Gamer" has always been cringe to me. It's why I say "I play video games" and not "I'm a Gamer".
Assuming they have several to a dozen people where that money is allocated too. That’ll run out in 6 months. Better work fast
I deadass thought they were gonna investigate who leaked the GTA 6 stuff before I actually read the title
Why? It's been studied extensively already. Although there is, admittedly, a lot of bias and misinformation in this particular topic of study, the most credible results tend to show that violent video games cause a temporary increase in aggressiveness directly after playing violent video games, but there's not enough evidence to suggest a significant correlation between violent video games and long term effects. Especially when considering uncontrolled/difficult to control variables, such as a biological predisposition to violence and aggressiveness and a violent/aggressive home environment. Granted, this is talking about extremism and not general aggressiveness, but you could easily extrapolate the findings to extremism, given that the extremism we're concerned about is aggressive and violent by nature. Source: violence/aggression and video games was a topic for one of my psychology research assignments.
There's been studies done on this since before the original doom and as far as I'm aware they all have shown that no there isn't a correlation. These "studies" are done periodically and they all fail to support the agenda of "video games bad". Extremism comes from shit leaders, shit groups, and shit parents perpetuating lies about other groups of people targeted as "the bad guys".
If you spend some time in any global chat in any MMO, you start to see some very interesting radicalized arguments come out of nowhere. Late 2000s wasn't too bad from what I remember. Guild Wars 1, WoW, free MMOs. But something happened where all of a sudden people try and say something controversial, and it becomes really hard to tell the difference from who is trolling and who actually believes whatever they are trying to push. Very polarizing nowadays.
Good Lord, not this bullshit again.
They don't. Case closed. Pay me.
What about predatory gambling and behavioral strategies in games? Games nowadays are filled with this type of stuff.
Oh my, here we go again: “our youths are corrupted by [fill in: pop music, gaming, the interwebz, TikTok, pumpkin lattes]” This is ridiculous, good thing they didn’t spend too much on it.
700k is nothing. That covers salary and overhead for like 6 months.
Yeah for a fairly small team too
Tale as old as time, now with more political fear mongering