In the hours after former US president Donald Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, a new Fortnite game appeared: Donald Trump vs Assassin. The game was quickly removed, but several other games that include antisemitism and political violence remained on the gaming platform, according to a new report from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) shared exclusively with WIRED.
The games identified by the GPAHE were built using Fortnite Creative’s “Islands” feature, which allows users to design their own maps, or gameplay areas. One of them replicated the Jasenovac concentration camp in what is now Croatia where tens of thousands of Jews, Romani, and Serbs were murdered during World War II. In the game, users were able to play as members of the Ustaša, a Croatian nationalist group that was influenced by fascism and Nazism. This map was labeled as “education” content.
When WIRED brought the GPAHE’s findings to the attention of Epic Games, which owns Fortnite, Alan Cooper, a spokesperson for the company, said that the Jasenovac game was one of two games removed for violating the platform’s policies. Cooper told WIRED that the company had “actioned” a third game highlighted in the organization's research.
Another game called Trump vs Biden pits players against each other on red or blue teams to represent the two US political parties. The winning team is decided by whichever manages to kill more members of the other side. Cooper says Epic reviewed the game and “found that they are not in violation as the players do not play as Trump or [President] Biden and there is no depiction of real-world violence against the candidates.”
Another game identified by the GPAHE, called afD ZONEWARS, promotes Germany’s right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and includes a song that references the racist “Great Replacement” theory that asserts that immigrants are replacing white Europeans. (Following publication, Epic alerted WIRED that it had taken down this game.) The GPAHE’s research turned up more than a dozen games with antisemitic or violent political content.
Fortnite, which has an estimated 236 million monthly active users, has policies prohibiting the creation of content that fosters “illegal activities, including the promotion of known real-world gangs or gang violence, the promotion of known real-world terrorist organizations or terrorism, harassment, bullying, assault, doxing, [and] swatting.” It also prohibits content that “includes hateful symbols or depictions or content that glorifies or incites violence.” Yet it appears that games containing hate and violence remained online despite these rules, potentially reaching millions of users around the globe.
Wendy Via, CEO and president of the GPAHE, says that, just like on any platform where users can create their own content, “you’re going to see absolutely everything” on Fortnite. Policies may prohibit content that dehumanizes, demeans, spreads hateful language, or perpetuates negative stereotypes, but Via says that these rules are vague enough to allow problematic content to remain up. She also points out that Fortnite overly broad policies regarding political speech. (In a response to WIRED, Epic clarified that there are policies in place to help promote a safe environment in its games.) “They don't have a specific policy, so they can give themselves the room to leave something up, or take it down, depending on what's going to best suit their purposes,” she says.
Cooper says that the company’s rules for creators prohibit encouraging users to to join, participate in, or donate to real-world political organizations. “We make our best efforts to apply the rules and not make arbitrary decisions to block content allowed under the rules,” he says. “When we see areas where we recognize the rules could be improved, we update the published rules prior to enforcing them.”
While some games, like those featuring hateful political speech, might fall into a gray area of Epic’s policies, other games appear to violate the company’s rules. One game identified in the GPAHE’s research pits Biblical Egyptians against Jewish people and allows users to play as Egyptians, killing Jews. These games were created by the same developer who uploaded a game allowing users to simulate storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. (After the GPAHE flagged the game in May it was removed.)
“Whatever amount of money these games are bringing in, [Epic] doesn’t need,” says Via. “What is the incentive to keep them up other than just not wanting to have to deal with it, not wanting to have to make a political statement of some sort?”
The gaming industry has long struggled to keep hateful groups and content off their platforms. In 2022, US Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire sent a letter to Gabe Newell, the president of Valve corporation, which manages the online video game distribution platform Steam, after reporting showed that neo-Nazi content had flourished on the service’s community spaces. In 2021, the Anti-Defamation League estimated that some 2.3 million teen gamers aged 13 to 17 had been exposed to white supremacist ideology or hate speech via gaming.
Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat is a policy adviser on technology and law at the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University and coauthor of a report on extremism and gaming which surveyed the issue across several companies. Epic Games, she says, employs several layers of moderation before a game is uploaded to its platform. Games that pass a “safety review,” which includes an automated system that flags any possible issues, and then a human review, are allowed on the platform. But Rosenblat says that extremists may find ways around this. For instance, the Jasenovac map had no preview photo available, which researchers surmised might have been why it evaded detection.
Moderating violence in games can be tricky. “In the case of gaming, it’s hard, because you’re not talking about the real world, necessarily,” says Rosenblat. There is a “blurry line” between fiction and reality, and “players can always say ‘We're doing a historical account of what happened, and this is our belief of what happened’ or ‘We're just playing around with a counterfactual, and we don't mean that in reality.’”
But Rosenblat says that games are more than just their content; they are also their community of players. “You could have a very violent game that has a very healthy culture,” she says. “Other games might attract people who actually have an interest in carrying out that violence in real life or trying to justify” real life violence.
The danger, Rosenblat adds, is that games with certain themes might attract certain types of players, who might use hateful or violent rhetoric. While not all users exposed to such rhetoric are likely to take that outside the game, or even change their views, “a lot of gamers are children, very young children, impressionable children,” she says. “Over time, they may just consider these narratives normal.”
Cooper notes that Epic tells its moderation team to “assume good intent on behalf of the creators if they’re unsure about a content violation” in an attempt to not over-censor. “This fails from time to time due to human error or lack of awareness of some controversial subject matter,” Cooper says, adding that, in addition to its moderation systems, Epic encourages “users to report inappropriate content.”
Garrison Wells, a researcher at UC Irvine who studies digital games and extremism, says extremists are more likely to gravitate toward games where users can create their own content and environments. These environments then become hostile to players who might not be comfortable with hateful speech or content.
“The trend that we see is that players who are targeted more often are leaving these spaces,” Wells says. “So it's leaving anyone who's less inclined to report or less offended or just numb to that sort of rhetoric to continue in the games.”
This can compound the issue, says Wells, because many games rely on user reporting in order to police their platforms.
But Via says that, while moderating games may be difficult, it’s clear companies can figure it out when they really want to. “As soon as [the Trump assassination game] was up, they got it down,” Via says. “So why can’t they take down this other stuff?”
Updated: 7/18/2024, 12 PM EDT: WIRED has clarified how users could play certain Fortnite games that had been highlighted by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. WIRED has also included Epic's response with regards to its policies about the safe environment of its games.
