Parents advised to be vigilant over summer holidays to risk of offenders using in-game live chats to target their children

Far-right extremists are using livestream gaming platforms to target and radicalise teenage players, a report has warned.

The new research, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, reveals how a range of extremist groups and individuals use platforms that allow users to chat and livestream while playing video games to recruit and radicalise vulnerable users, mainly young males.

UK crime and counter-terror agencies have urged parents to be especially alert to online offenders targeting youngsters during the summer holidays.

In an unprecedented move, last week Counter Terrorism Policing, MI5 and the National Crime Agency issued a joint warning to parents and carers that online offenders “will exploit the school holidays to engage in criminal acts with young people when they know less support is readily available”.

Dr William Allchorn, a senior research fellow at Anglia Ruskin University’s international policing and public protection research institute, who carried out the study with his colleague Dr Elisa Orofino, said “gaming-adjacent” platforms were being used as “digital playgrounds” for extremist activity.

Allchorn found teenage players were being deliberately “funnelled” by extremists from mainstream social media platforms to these sites, where “the nature and quantity of the content makes these platforms very hard to police”.

The most common ideology being pushed by extremist users was far right, with content celebrating extreme violence and school shootings also shared.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/31/far-right-extremists-games-platforms-radicalise-teenagers-report

Posted by Naurgul

4 comments

  1. Looking forward to ‘we need to police these chatrooms and live chat’. Please verify your ID to protect the kids. ‘You have a problem with that? You must be a pedophile then!’

  2. Yes, sure, blame video games, not the bad policies by the governments who ignore young men concerns….

    The guardian is such a joke of journalism.

  3. And they keep accusing us of grooming/brainwashing children. We really need to take their accusations more seriously, especially when they make zero sense, because it’s almost definitely a confession each time.

    It also shows how immature they are, that they spend all their days playing games and socializing with freaking kids. Very creepy, to say the least.

  4. I don’t know why the guardian linked to the homepage of Frontiers instead of specifically linking to the original paper, here is the link for anyone interested: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1537460/full

    The primary goal of the paper’s original research section was not to answer the question “*do* extremists use these platforms to radicalise others”, but “*in which ways* are extremists using these platforms to radicalise others, and what is the industry doing to combat this”. The former isn’t really an open question anymore, so they only did a small literature review for that one. It’s weird that all these warnings by UK agencies are only being published just now when we’ve already known about the problem for years (since the 2014 gamergate bullshit at the very least).

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