WASHINGTON—Today, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) invited the Chief Executive Officers of Discord, Steam, Twitch, and Reddit to testify at a full committee hearing on October 8, 2025. The hearing will examine the radicalization of online forum users, including instances of open incitement to commit politically motivated acts.
“The politically motivated assassination of Charlie Kirk claimed the life of a husband, father, and American patriot. In the wake of this tragedy, and amid other acts of politically motivated violence, Congress has a duty to oversee the online platforms that radicals have used to advance political violence. To prevent future radicalization and violence, the CEOs of Discord, Steam, Twitch, and Reddit must appear before the Oversight Committee and explain what actions they will take to ensure their platforms are not exploited for nefarious purposes,” said Chairman Comer.
Discord is user-moderated* and has potentially an infinite number of self-sequestered communities/groups. A server could be the most fed-posty server ever made but so-long as nobody snitches or reports it's pretty much allowed to fester. The only sort of powers that all those people would want to give themselves is the ability to spy on servers or use ai or something to search for specific key words to give them a "warrant" essentially to look into it. This won't matter though if they have the same issue as Twitch & Reddit does and is just filled to the brim with Lefties in its leadership who'll give passes to left-wing rhetoric of violence but go overboard with banning right-wingers.
Steam has user to user messages where one could discuss private plans to kill people, and invite-only groups are a thing, but I don't think people are inclined to discussing illegal shit on steam, plus it's harder to direct-upload files. It's more likely the steam group would then have an invite to a discord group where actual shit is being discussed, if they're involved in the process of radicalisation at all - which I doubt in large part due to the inconvenience of it over anything else.
Twitch is pretty much wilfully blind to certain actors. Hasan has been allowed to say shit unmolested for years now and it's pretty much because the entire structure is built up of people who follow him ideologically. You can't discuss secret plans to murder people but if someone's calling for violence to a huge audience on the platform itself - like Hasan - and they do jack and shit about it, then that's a problem. I predict something like, "We believe in free speech and moderate only hate speech, there is no calls for violence or radicalisation taking place on our platform," and I
hope someone has brains enough to rebuke. (Not the "America deserved 9/11" quote, something actually tangible, like how he thought people should "stab landlords (in Minecraft)")
Reddit is like Steam (Public communities, user-to-user messaging) but on a far larger scale of enabling and encouragement by the leadership at all levels of the hierarchy. Admins to moderators to users dictate discourse and pretty much follow the trajectory of justifying violence and smothering common sense. It's like Discord but without the segregation of communities and Twitch with top-down enabling. Reddit would need to atomise moderation rather than relying on a handful of autists.
They'll use the fact they rely largely on user-moderation to escape culpability, with the most justified being Steam being incredibly hands off and — though some might be loathe to hear — Discord, whose interjections are user-requested via reports. Reddit will have to justify why their moderation structure is the way it is and why their site in particular is so prone to violent rhetoric. Twitch has to justify Hasan, which they absolutely cannot.
* They clearly have the capability to flag certain speech (and images) through AI.
