The 2nd GEMS Consortium Meeting was successfully convened at the Atomium in Brussels, Belgium, from June 27 to June 28, 2024. This milestone event brought together GEMS partners from across Europe to discuss the progress and future directions of the project.
During the two-day meeting the partners of the GEMS project provided a detailed update on their work and the tasks implemented so far. A significant part of the event was dedicated to the discussion of ongoing issues, challenges and the planification of future activities.
Over the past months, the GEMS consortium has achieved several critical milestones. First, we successfully completed the assessment of 24 gaming and gaming-adjacent platforms generating a significant knowledge on extremist content across gaming spaces on Discord, 4chan, Gamer Uprising, incels.is and Steam. This extensive research led to the publication of a report that investigates the prevalence of extreme right-wing and incel content in public spaces across the online gaming ecosystem. It focuses on key extremist narratives and themes, the role of games and influential voices, as well as recruitment and radicalisation tactics.
Second, we successfully completed a mapping exercise that was produced to identify the gaming ecosystem stakeholders that could become members of the European Network against Gaming-related Extremism (ENgaGE), which constitutes a pivotal component and central output of the GEMS project. The mapping exercise led to the development of the ENgaGE Stakeholders Database and the Gaming Stakeholders Mapping Report. The five chapters of this report are structured to provide context-relevant and specific information on key areas of stakeholders’ engagement in gaming and extremism as well as highlight actor-relevant findings for P/CVE.
Additionally, we have worked to identify normative, ethical and legal issues arising from the topics of substantive social science research in GEMS, a crucial feature for the successful implementation of the empirical research that it is planned to take place the next couple of months. A significant part of our work has been dedicated to the police authorities as primary beneficiaries and end-users of GEMS. A needs assessment exercise that will be used for the development of a training curricula for first line practitioners on the detection of radicalization in online gaming world is on the process of completion. These achievements demonstrate substantial progress and position GEMS well for the upcoming activities and milestones.
ELIAMEP, which leads WP6, was represented in this meeting by Ioannis Armakolas and Bledar Feta. The GEMS research team of ELIAMEP implemented a mapping exercise between January-May 2024 with the aim to map the activities of five categories of stakeholders: state-level stakeholders, non-state stakeholders, academic institutions, European and regional organisations, and gaming world stakeholders. In total, the research team identified and analysed the activities of 193 stakeholders, among them 68 state institutions and authorities, 44 gaming world actors, 45 non-governmental organisations, 20 European and regional organisations and 16 academic institutions. As part of their research, the team conducted more than 50 phone consultations to actively engage with the stakeholders and better understand their work and engagement with the gaming-extremism nexus. In addition, the research team sent 193 requests for information to ensure the accuracy of collected data and information. See the followed methodology in the graph below.
One of the main outcomes of this mapping exercise is the Gaming Stakeholders Mapping Report. The report consists of five different chapters, each one focusing on a specific type of stakeholders. Each one of the five chapters is divided into two sub-chapters. The first sub-chapter describes the role that stakeholders included in this category play in P/CVE. The main objective of this sub-chapter is to provide general information about the involvements of stakeholders in the already existing P/CVE mechanisms. The second sub-chapter puts under the microscope their specific engagement with the gaming-extremism nexus based on the findings of the mapping exercise.
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