A coordinated effort to flag and remove racist, xenophobic and terrorist material circulating on gaming and gaming-adjacent platforms has led to the referral of thousands of URLs by Europol and eight participating countries.
The joint operational action was conducted on November 13 2025 and identified dangerous content scattered across platforms popular with both young people and adults.
A total of 5408 links to jihadist material, 1070 links to violent right-wing extremist or terrorist content, and 105 links to racist and xenophobic posts were referred.
The initiative, led by the European Union Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU), shows how such material moves fluidly across digital spaces.
Experts involved in the Referral Action Day found that extremist creators often record scenes within games or game chats, modify them with coded language, emojis or chants, then push the edited clips onto mainstream social networks.
Some platforms originally built for streaming gameplay have also been misused to livestream attacks or recruit minors.
How Extremists Exploit Gaming Ecosystems
Investigators reported that illicit content appeared across a mix of platform types, including:
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Real-time streaming services with live chat
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Video-on-demand libraries
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Community forums for game tips, news and discussion
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Hybrid spaces offering gaming storefronts with social features
Many accounts did not outwardly signal extremist ties, although some used avatars or usernames referencing well-known terrorists. This layered dissemination process makes detection difficult, and officials say the abuse reflects patterns seen in several ongoing investigations supported by Europol’s European Counter Terrorism Centre.
Read more on online radicalization: Europol Warns of Metaverse and AI Terror Threat
Transparency Efforts and Next Steps
The EU IRU plans to publish its Transparency Report, detailing 2024 activities related to monitoring terrorist content, issuing referrals and working with private-sector partners. The document will also outline support for implementing the Regulation on addressing the dissemination of terrorist content online.
A new wave of referrals has emerged from law enforcement agencies that noticed a rise in radicalizing material embedded in gaming ecosystems.
Europol specialists held multiple operational meetings in the run-up to the action day, enabling participating countries to exchange intelligence and refine best practices.
The initiative is intended to reduce public exposure to extremist messages while strengthening cooperation across European jurisdictions.
