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,” per a press release published on Wednesday.
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 confessed to the crimes on Discord in a private chat with friends. In another chat, he joked about being the killer’s doppelganger. FBI director Kash Patel said Tuesday that the bureau is investigating members of the Discord servers; Discord said 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 memes and references to video game culture into the bullets 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 court documents 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.”
Utah governor Spencer Cox described Robinson 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; a report published in 2021 found that Steam, Discord, and Twitch hosted extremist activity that ranged from “racially abusive livestreams to open support for neo-Nazi terrorists.” In 2022, New Hampshire senator Maggie Hassan wrote an open letter to Newell asking about its moderation of extremist content.
In 2022, a mass shooting in a Buffalo grocery store was broadcast live on Twitch. A German synagogue attack was livestreamed on the platform in 2019.
In 2022, seven lawmakers attempted to grill game makers 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; U.S. Congresswoman Lori Trahan told Axios in 2023 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.”
