“Sources,” on Arte.tv: these radical networks that infiltrate video games

ARTE.TV – ON DEMAND – DOCUMENTARY

Visually, it looks like one of those video games where you kill as many enemies as possible to earn points, with the "camera" adopting the player's perspective, advancing with weapon in hand. Except that on closer inspection, these "games" reproduce a massacre in detail: the Christchurch massacre in March 2019, perpetrated by Brenton Tarrant, a white supremacist, in two mosques in New Zealand (51 dead); the double attack on the island of Utoya , in Oslo , which occurred on July 22 , 2011 committed by Anders Behring Breivike (77 victims) ; that of Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016, in an LGBT nightclub, by Omar Mateen, jihadist (49 dead ); the Charlie Hebdo massacre, in January 2015, in Paris (12 dead)…

In total, journalists from Arte.tv's investigative magazine found around ten of these "mods"—games based on real-life massacres—on social media. They investigated the motivations of their "players" and designers, and contacted the platforms that host them. They brought back a previously unpublished issue of "Sources" with the disturbing title, "From Controller to Trigger: When Radicalization Infiltrates Video Games."

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