Date
March 15th, 2023
Overview
Multi-player games and e-sports are pervasive in our modern technological society. With the ubiquity of smartphones in the hands of increasingly younger children these games and platforms open up larger and larger portions of our population to unsupervised virtual spaces. While games and e-sports serve as a creative outlet and a space for virtual friendship and camaraderie, their inherently unsupervised nature also opens them up as ideal platforms for the spread of extremist ideology and hate speech.
In partnership with Games for Change and the Singapore University of Social Sciences, the Secure Communities Forum hosted a virtual workshop titled "Countering Extremism and Hate Speech in Gaming & Esports: Trends and Developments".
We brought together leading global experts in extremism, hate speech, gaming, and public safety in order to explore how extremism and hate speech propagate on gaming platforms and ecosystems, and brainstormed deployable methods and tactics to effectively and durably counter this security challenge.
Speakers include:
Amal Alblooshi, Digital Wellbeing Program Lead
Susanna Pollack, President of Games for Change
Dr. Omer Ali Saifudeen, Head Military Studies Minor/Senior Lecturer, Public Safety and Security Programme, School of Humanities and Behavioural Sciences, SUSS
Jason Rosensweig, Director of Legislative Affairs and Policy, Illinois Department of Human Rights | Commissioner, Illinois Commission on Discrimination and Hate Crimes
Nicholas Khoo, Co-founder and Former Chairman of Singapore's Cybersports and Online Gaming Association (SCOGA)
Rachel Kowert PhD, Research Director, Take This
Dr. Constance Steinkuehler, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Belfer Fellow Game Design & Interactive Media Program Chair, Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Center Co-Director, Professor of Informatics University of California, Irvine
This project took place in the context of a larger Secure Communities Forum Initiative to develop a response model to extremism online. We compiled an expert team of global professionals to develop this response model and this event served to brief them on the subject of online gaming.