Report: 74% of gamers in the US have experienced some form of harassment with 65% experiencing severe harassment including physical threats and stalking
74 percent of adults who play games online have experienced some form of harassment, according to a new report released today.
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands months after the Anti-Defamation League's broader survey finding 37% of Americans faced severe online harassment in 2018, but it narrows the lens to gaming specifically — and finds the problem worse there than online generally, with 65% reporting physical threats or stalking. That gap is what turns a social problem into a business one for platform operators.
The numbers also prefigure the accountability wave that followed: within three years, US lawmakers were pressing top game companies on how they assess extremist behavior, explicitly citing ADL research from this same survey series, while over seventy people — mostly women — shared abuse and discrimination stories from inside live-streaming. The 2019 baseline is the evidence base those later reckonings drew on.
First-order effects
- Game publishers and platform operators are handed a quantified liability: with nearly two-thirds of players reporting severe harassment, moderation stops being a community feature and becomes a risk item executives must answer for.
- Advocacy groups like the ADL gain a headline statistic specific to gaming, giving them leverage to push individual companies rather than the internet at large.
Second-order effects
- Companies that fail to act invite the external scrutiny that materialized in the lawmakers' inquiry into how game firms mitigate extremist risk — turning moderation budgets into a defensive necessity.
- As harassment data accumulates across surveys, parents and teen players — who Pew later found treat gaming primarily as a social space — become a constituency pressuring platforms to treat safety as a purchase criterion.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, online games get regulated and audited like other social infrastructure rather than treated as entertainment products, with harassment metrics becoming standard disclosure alongside engagement figures.
- Sustained documentation by the ADL and others shifts the burden of proof: platforms can no longer claim ignorance of scale, so disputes move from whether abuse exists to who bears responsibility for preventing it.
The trend: Online gaming is being reclassified from a hobby space to a monitored social platform, with harassment statistics driving a shift from voluntary moderation toward regulatory and legislative accountability.