The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the company that introduced you nice hits like airport facial recognition, kids in cages, and a short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, is setting its sight on one other supposed hotbed of terror—video video games.

This week, the DHS awarded terrorism and misinformation researchers a $699,763 grant to research the methods extremism can unfold by means of on-line gaming communities. The DHS hopes the researchers will use the grant to develop a set of “best practices and centralized resources,” for recreation makers to watch and consider potential extremist exercise occurring on their video games. The DHS grant was first reported on by Vice.

In its announcement, the DHS acknowledged a number of the optimistic community-building facets of on-line video games, noting what number of have, “become focal points of social activity and identity creation for adolescents and young adults,” however went on to criticize builders for failing to correctly account for the methods extremist teams might doubtlessly use those self same platforms to advertise dangerous conduct.

“Extremists have used video games and targeted video game communities for activities ranging from propaganda creation to terrorist mobilization and training,” the DHS writes. “Game developers in general–from small, independent studios to billion-dollar multinational corporations–have lagged in awareness of how extremists may attempt to exploit their games, and how their communities can be targeted for radicalization.”

The grant cash will go in direction of a joint venture by the Middlebury Institute’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, psychological well being non-profit Take This, and Logically, an organization claiming to make use of synthetic intelligence to handle misinformation. In addition to setting finest practices and requirements, the teams will conduct a sequence of workshops for monitoring, detecting, and stopping extremism exploitation in recreation areas geared toward, “community managers, multiplayer designers, lore developers, mechanics designers, and trust and safety professionals.”

Anyone who’s spent quite a lot of minutes on common multiplayer video games can attest to the disagreeable, typically flagrantly racist sentiments hollered out over chats and slithering by means of chat packing containers. Though none of that’s significantly new, reporting and analysis present extremist teams, significantly these of white nationalist persuasion, are each recruiting disaffected players after which encouraging them to behave on their ideologies within the bodily world.

In 2017, The New York Times and different shops reportedly discovered video-game chat app Discord performed an outsized position in mobilizing Unite The Right members in Charlottesville, Virginia. Similarly, the Anti-Defamation League launched a survey in 2019 of U.S. online game gamers and located that 23% of respondents stated they’d been uncovered to extremist white supremacist ideology in on-line video games. When you think about someplace round 90% of teenagers reportedly play some type of video video games, that doubtlessly quantities to a hell of a variety of publicity to shitty racist rants.

At the identical time, the DHS and its related tendrils like ICE and TSA aren’t precisely recognized for his or her moral tact or deep consideration for civil liberties. In 2020, beneath the Trump Administration, American Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Anthony D. Romero known as for the wholesale dismantling of the DHS after brokers have been deployed to agitate, and in some instances snatch, anti-racist protestors all through the nation.

“The short history of DHS has been filled with violence, the stoking of fear, and a lack of oversight,” Romero wrote. “We can preserve our freedoms and our security better by dismantling DHS and beginning anew.”