THE NEW YORK TIMES: How hate groups and terrorists use gaming platforms to recruit young children

Taking a page from the child molesters’ playbook, hate groups and terrorist organisations are exploiting games such as Minecraft and Roblox and other popular online platforms to recruit a new generation of extremists, researchers say.

Across Europe and North America, children now account for 42 per cent of terrorism-related investigations — a threefold rise since 2021, according to the United Nations’ Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate, an agency that identifies emerging terrorism trends.

In Europe, from 20 per cent to 30 per cent of the counter terrorism workload now involves minors as young as 12 and 13, according to unpublished data compiled by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, a research group in The Hague.

“It’s a trend that has been taken to the extreme,” said the organisation’s director, Thomas Renard.

He called the numbers “shocking” and like “nothing we have ever seen before.”

Violent ideological groups from across the political spectrum, attuned to the online era, are finding new members faster than governments are devising strategies to respond, UN investigators say.

As extremists’ recruitment evolves, the age of people entering their fold has been rapidly lowering in the West, according to more than two dozen radicalisation experts, youth counsellors and people affected by extremism interviewed by The New York Times.

Intelligence agencies in the United States and Australia, for example, have warned of extremists using video games including Roblox and social networking communities such as Discord to recruit and train new conscripts.

Researchers have documented digital worlds in games on Minecraft and Roblox where players can simulate terrorist violence and mass shootings, like the 2019 attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 51 people were killed.

“Extremists are able to create these games themselves, and if they make it something children are interested in, they can get a certain profile of child to join,” said Jean Slater, who researches violent extremist movements, with a focus on Roblox.

“People just assume regulators have taken care of this, because there’s no way a platform would allow an adult to talk to a 9-year-old.”

Roblox, in a statement to the Times, said content that glorifies hate “has no place” on the platform, and said it used a variety of measures such as AI detection and monitoring teams to identify users promoting extremism.

“No system is perfect, so we work every day to improve our systems, and we encourage parents to talk to their children about online risks,” it said.

Minecraft, which offers similar creative freedom to host private servers and design maps, has been used to build “propoganda-filled environments, memorialise violent events and embed hate speech,” according to a report by the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, a research group affiliated with King’s College London.

In a statement, Microsoft, which owns Minecraft, wrote that it “prohibits extremist content” and uses “proactive detection technologies” to ensure safety.

The company said it uses chat filtering, in-game reporting and parental controls on official servers, and applies “enforcement mechanisms as needed” on private servers.

Terrorism proceedings involving minors are often shrouded from the public because of the defendants’ ages, making it more difficult to understand how they became radicalised. But in recent years, some high-profile cases have led experts to point to online platforms.

In Britain, in 2022, a 15-year-old girl groomed by a neo-Nazi in Texas became one of the youngest people arrested on terrorism charges after she downloaded bomb-making guides and posted about blowing up a synagogue. She later died by suicide.

In Estonia, a 13-year-old-boy was found in 2020 to be the commander of a self-styled global neo-Nazi group plotting attacks in Western cities through a Telegram channel.

Whether the ideas being instilled in young people now will one day result in acts of violence is impossible to predict, but authorities say they are puzzled by the sudden spike in recruitment.

Much of the increase has come in the last year and a half, according to the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, though the rise of extreme content online long precedes that.

In many cases, minors swing between competing belief systems — from white power to jihadism — which some argue suggests the problem stems more from loneliness than ideology.

“We can’t always put our finger on why there seems to be a turning point,” Mr Renard said.

“Part of it is a bit of a snowball effect. Perhaps what is happening is we are now confronted with several things that come together quite nicely: the first digital generation, young people who grew up with smartphones in their hands and parents who were quite permissive.”

Radical groups across the ideological spectrum have adapted to those generational changes.

Video games are not their only tool. Children are also being radicalized through what UN investigators call “sophisticated funnel strategies.”

These guide young people from mainstream platforms such as TikTok and X to more extremist communities on channels including Discord or Telegram that are less moderated.

Both the FBI and authorities in Canada have also raised alarm recently over so-called com networks, transnational groups of loosely organised nihilist extremists who target children online.

Sometimes, they pressure children to film themselves engaging in self-harm, sexually explicit or violent acts, and then use the video as blackmail, according to the FBI.

“For a long time, your typical contact point would be social media,” said Arno Michaelis, a onetime neo-Nazi who now works with Parents for Peace, a US-based group that helps families affected by extremism across North America.

“But it’s a big concern to me that the recruitment has moved outside of social media through platforms that parents would think are more innocuous.”

The far right in particular has made efforts to become more appealing to boys and young men, and less visible to authorities.

One way is through so-called active clubs, all-white combat groups that train young men for the race war they believe is coming.

The model has spread across 27 countries, and a quarter of the newly founded groups are “youth clubs” aimed at boys age 15 to 17, according to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

“It took me a few months to realise I was in it,” said one young Swede who ultimately left the club.

“You first believe that people from the Third World don’t belong here. Then you start to believe racial theory.” He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears reprisals by members of the club. His account was verified by his counsellor.

“At rock bottom,” he said, “I would say if you would ask me then if Hitler did anything wrong, I would have said ‘no.’”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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