Comer Calls on Heads of 4 Major Gaming, Chat Sites to Testify Over Extremist Use of Platforms

The House Oversight Committee chair says Congress must examine how online forums are being used to radicalize users and incite politically motivated violence.

John Rigolizzo

Published: 9/18/2025, 4:23:57 AM EDT

Comer Calls on Heads of 4 Major Gaming, Chat Sites to Testify Over Extremist Use of Platforms — Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) during a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 3, 2024. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

House Oversight Committee chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) called on the heads of several online forums to testify before the committee over the radicalization of online forum users.

Comer sent letters to the CEOs of online chat service Discord, Valve Corporation, which owns the gaming platform Steam, live streaming platform Twitch, and message board Reddit on Wednesday. The move comes after authorities revealed that the suspected assassin who fatally shot conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was active in a chat room on Discord.

“The politically motivated assassination of Charlie Kirk claimed the life of a husband, father, and American patriot," Comer said in a press release on Wednesday.

"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."

The release included copies of letters sent by Comer to Discord CEO Humam Sakhnini, Valve CEO Gabe Newell, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy, and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. The identical one-page letters request the four CEOs to testify before the committee at a hearing to " examine radicalization of online forum users, including incidents of open incitement to commit violent politically motivated acts." It also requests them to provide written testimony in advance.

The hearing is scheduled to take place on Oct. 8 at 10 A.M. in room of HVC-210 of the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center—also known as the Speaker's Hearing Room.

Platforms Under Scrutiny

Discord is a live chat service with text, voice, and video functionality. It is typically used to communicate during video game play, but also has a number of communities dedicated to chatting. A pro-Trump chat server called "The Donald" was banned in connection with the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol. The assassin who attempted to shoot then-presidential candidate Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, was active on Discord. More recently, the suspected assassin who shot and killed Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University was active in a Discord community. The FBI is investigating 20 or more users in a server on which the suspect was active, though Discord maintains the killer did not plot the assassination on its platform.

Steam is a video game distribution and digital store for video games. Originally intended to support Valve's products, the store has expanded to include a large collection of mainstream titles and other digital content that can be downloaded. Steam does have a social networking functionality, the Steam Community, but it is used in gameplay and for discussion of the games themselves.

Twitch is an online streaming service primarily used to stream video game play, although it also allows users to stream non-gameplay-related "IRL" (In Real Life) streams. Twitch's community guidelines explicitly "[do] not allow content that depicts, glorifies, encourages, or supports terrorism, or violent extremist actors or acts." The rules also ban illegal activity, so-called "hate speech," harassment, and "[c]ontent that exclusively focuses on extreme or gratuitous gore and violence." However, one of the most popular streamers on the site, Hasan Piker, has repeatedly called for violent action against his conservative political opposition. Elon Musk and other users have called on Piker to be banned from Twitch this week, tagging Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (Amazon owns Twitch).

Reddit has a reputation for left-wing bias, confirmed by multiple academic and nonprofit studies. The site has banned several high-profile right-leaning message boards, or "subreddits," including r/The_Donald—the site's largest pro-Trump subreddit with over 755,000 users—allegedly for promoting threats of violence against public officials. In 2016, Huffman admitted to silently altering posts criticizing him to instead target the moderators of the subreddit. However, the site has also banned the subreddit for the leftist podcast "Chapo Trap House" for similar violations.