The real danger lurking in Fortnite

IF YOU thought addiction was the only thing to worry about when it comes to online games, you’re wrong. There’s something far more nefarious hiding.

FAR-RIGHT groups are using online games such as Fortnite to radicalise kids and recruit them into their organisations, according to one reformed neo-Nazi.

Speaking about his time as a “white supremacist leader”, skinhead-turned-peace activist Christian Picciolini explained how his group “sought marginalised youth and promised them ‘paradise’,” reported The Sun.

Answering readers’ questions on internet forum Reddit, Picciolini made it clear that this is still happening today, through “nefarious tactics like going to depression and mental health forums, and in multiplayer gaming, to recruit those same people.”

“They drop benign hints and then ramp up when hooked,” he explained. In some games these hints can start by talking about how some in-game races are superior to others, for example, and move on from there to drawing real-world “parallels”.

Fortnite has emerged as one of the most popular online games. Pic: AFP/Frederic J. Brown

When asked what games these groups used, Picciolini said “Fortnite, Minecraft, COD, all of them.”

The people involved in recruitment in these games are “mostly foreign recruiters from Russia and eastern Europe,” according to Picciolini. These international initiatives are “somewhat” co-ordinated, he says.

Many fringe gaming-related groups are tied to the far-right, with the misogynistic Gamergate movement the best known thanks to its ties to the alt-right.

It’s also not Fortnite’s first brush with Nazi controversy. Developer Epic Games was forced into action last week, when players discovered some of the game’s floor tiles contained swastikas.

Players discovered a swastika symbol inside the Fortnite game.

It’s not the first time the internet or online gaming has been implicated in such radicalisation. Islamic State was found to be using a spelling app to radicalise British kids last year, and extremists targeted kids as young as 14 using YouTube with a message that jihad was better than football.

This story was originally published on The Sun and was reproduced here with permission.

Originally published as The real danger lurking in Fortnite