It has been roughly a year since the consumer hashtag movement, #Gamergate, began, and a lot has been written about it. To hear prevailing narratives tell it, #Gamergate is naught but misogynistic harassment on social media given form, essentially a natural evolution of so-called toxic masculinity within the hobby of video gaming and within the larger internet. Multiple individuals, who claim to have been victimized by this movement, are easily identified by unifying cry of claiming to have been harassed extensively by what #Gamergate's supporters claim is solely a consumer boycott intended to fight against collusion in the gaming press. One can see an immediate disconnect, thusly, from what countless editorials have said about the movement and what its supporters have.
...And yet, very rarely is any viewpoint that #Gamergate is anything
but a misogynistic hate movement so much as given the time of day on many websites. This is almost
unheard of amongst hashtag activism campaigns; agree with them or not, movements like #Occupy and #BlackLivesMatter were able to get their voices reliably out in the mainstream press to the public writ large, whereas #Gamergate has had multiple prominent people involved with the press claim that it's not worth even discussing. This bizarre duality is, shockingly enough, a rather new development on Twitter - in its sordid history, there has never really been a campaign on the internet - of any real size of note - that has been so heavily demonized by its opposition and yet so vociferously defended by its supporters.
Yet whilst #Gamergate is accused of being nothing but a hate-fueled harassment campaign, there seems to be a shocking lack of attempts to get deeper in and learn more about what may have led to it. After all, if prevailing narratives are, indeed, accurate, then one quite literally
has to question how a campaign focused entirely on harassing and threatening women in games development and the press has managed to maintain such a bitter campaign over the course of an entire year (and counting) thus far. After all, when a group is this motivated to keep a hashtag movement going this long in spite of being so heavily demonized, then perhaps it is fitting that someone takes the time to look into this alleged hate campaign and attempt to determine the underlying causes of its alleged malice.
Doing do is not exactly hard - a brief analysis of the hashtag on Twitter will reveal countless posts on twitter covering breaches of ethics and goings-on by several large-scale gaming journalism websites who stand accused, by #Gamergate supporters, of open violations of journalistic integrity - in essence, in open opposition to the prevailing narrative about #Gamergate being about harassment. Indeed,
a peer-reviewed study by Women Action Media!, a feminist research group, revealed that a breakdown of tweets filtered by the GGAutoblocker - a block bot for Twitter specifically intended to help people filter out #Gamergate-related content -
only 0.66% of all Tweets it caught qualified as "harassing."
This statistic by its lonesome directly calls into question the credibility of those who claim that #Gamergate is indeed a misogynistic hate movement (especially given
the recent findings by the Society for Professional Journalists), but what is even
more fascinating, however, is the actions of those who are the
opposition to #Gamergate, given this particular revelation. Indeed, a cursory examination of #Gamergate's opposition reveals a chilling and often alarming level of outright collusion that not only essentially
makes #Gamergate's case for it, but which seems to feature campaigns of harassment, threats, and more that are
extremely well-documented compared to the nebulous and often context free incidents claimed as major cases of harassment by #Gamergate's opposition.
Perhaps one of the best examples of this is none other than
Brianna Wu's appearance on the David Pakman show. Brianna Wu, long a proponent of #Gamergate's opposition, claimed to have been driven from her home by threats and harassment that she
claimed was from #Gamergate - yet all of the incidents Brianna cited as the reasons for this
not only were provably hoaxes by third-party trolls that openly claimed responsibility for their actions, but ran
directly contrary to what all credible law enforcement recommends one do when recieving such harassment - to not make it public, and thus not encourage it further. David Pakman actually brought this up during the interview, and Wu immediately took issue with it, not knowing how to respond. By the end of the interview, Brianna Wu would, for the crime of simply asking a basic logical question, accuse Pakman of running a "hit piece" on her.
Almost a year later, Brianna Wu is continuing to claim the same discredited incidents are still credible threats to her person (for the uninitiated, one of the threats
Wu continues to complain about, featuring a man in a skull mask, is in fact
a work of satire by Internet Comedian Jan Rancowski) - which, of course, begs the question why, if she truly is recieving as much harassment as she claims (and I don't deny that Wu
has recieved harassment -
it's not right, regardless of who does it or why), she hasn't been able to post examples that
aren't provably hoaxes. Though Brianna Wu is by no means the only individual to make claims like this, she is the highest-profile individual to do so and the most systemically disproven; in addition to claiming hoaxes were actual threats, she is rather notorious for having false-flagged herself to attempt to showcase her own harassment in
a now-notorious incident on Steam that she has subsequently attempted to remove all evidence of.
Even more alarming than attempts to claim hoaxes are credible are cases where #Gamergate supporters themselves have been harassed, threatened, or extorted. In the aftermath of David Pakman's interview with Brianna Wu, Brianna Wu took to twitter to complain about her treatment in said interview. Soonafter,
Pakman's site was hit by a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) launched by her supporters and he was repeatedly
accused of being an "MRA Apologist" by said supporters.
Wu herself attempted to have a twitter user she didn't like mass-reported, at which point one of Wu's associates,
Sophia Banks, repeatedly accused that user of rape whilst presenting no evidence whatsoever and threatening to doxx anyone who defended her target.
Several prominent #Gamergate proponents and supporters have been subjected to what can only be described as
low-level terrorism by its opposition.
John Bain, sometimes known as TotalBiscuit, The Cynical Brit, is a Youtube video game reviewer with over two million subscribers and a consumer advocate who is a proponent of improved ethics in the game industry, and has, himself,
exposed rote corruption in the past with a debacle involving the game Shadows of Mordor. Since his involvement in the controversy,
Bain has recieved countless death threats - not only towards him, but towards his wife and child - from the opposition to #Gamergate. Such harassment is so endemic, brutal, and visceral that he is currently attending therapy. After tweeting support for AbleGamers charity,
#Gamergate opponents attacked Bain with horrifying rhetoric, in massive numbers, for daring to support a charity event whilst being a #Gamergate supporter.
Lizzyf620, similarly a #Gamergate supporter,
was likewise subjected to a campaign of harassment from #Gamergate's opposition in which the lives of her children were repeatedly threatened, leading to her not discussing #Gamergate any further for fear of her family's lives.
This willingness of #Gamergate's opposition to do exactly what it accuses #Gamergate itself of, evidence be damned, is perfectly encapsulated by the works and words of
Ian Miles Cheong, a former #Gamergate opponent who now stands as a supporter - who specifically turned against #Gamergate's opposition because of the terrifying levels said opposition would go to attempt to silence #Gamergate's supporters.
Cheong would then go on to publicize the tweets he received for daring to turn against #Gamergate's opposition, leading to him likewise receiving thousands of harassing tweets, multiple death threats, and several attempts to doxx him. This ongoing campaign of terror against #Gamergate supporters, all-but-completely ignored by many in the mainstream press has become so prevalent and is so ubiquitous throughout #Gamergate's opposition that
a Tumblr chronicling hundreds of documented cases of harass, threats, and doxxings of #Gamergate supporters by the opposition has gone up. At the "#Gamergate in DC" meetup,
a bomb threat was called in after #Gamergate opponents attempted to get the event cancelled for several hours. Similarly, during the SPJ Airplay debates,
another bomb threat was called in when #Gamergate advocates were talking to the Society for Professional Journalists, forcing the evacuation of the event.
It's not just supporters of #Gamergate that have felt the sting of harassment from #Gamergate's opposition, either. On October 12, 2014, well-known Youtube game chronicleer Boogie2988 reported on his own involvement as a neutral party in the #Gamergate controversy. For the crime of refusing to take a side,
he was relentlessly attacked by #Gamergate opponents who proceeded to spread around his personal information and attempted to get him accosted offline. As Boogie himself worded it: "
I only had one group involved in this doxx me, and let me tell you - it wasn't #Gamergate." A major developer of
World of Warcraft, Mark Kern,
was likewise initially a neutral party, but turned into a supporter specifically because of how #Gamergate's opposition - specifically in the mainstream press - attempted to silence all legitimate discussion on the matter.
Even William Shatner, famed actor who played Captain Kirk on
Star Trek,
has come out as being supportive of #Gamergate after #Gamergate opponents managed to systemically alienate and harass multiple individuals who had absolutely nothing to do with the controversy and dared to say we should listen to all sides, like author
Anne Rice, evolutionary biologist
Richard Dawkins, and
Adam Baldwin (who is also the first one to use the #Gamergate hashtag), specifically because of a block bot developed by #Gamergate opponent Randi Harper,
who has been pushing to use said block-bot as an industry-wide blacklist. Randi herself is a notorious harasser and doxxer who has aggressively gone after multiple individuals online, having
become so infamous for it that
a trio of articles covering
her litany of attacking other people went up on Brietbart and immediately went viral.
Swedish website Gamersgate.com, a video game distribution site, likewise
came under attack because #Gamergate opponents would not stop harassing them, despite pre-dating the hashtag by several years, because #Gamergate opponents thought it was connected to the hashtag. The site was eventually shut down because of the sheer volume of attacks the site suffered, including multiple DDoS attacks and hacking attacks done by #Gamergate opponents.
What the evidence clearly shows, without bias or reservation, is that the very thing #Gamergate is being accused of, oft without much credible evidence whatsoever, is actually being perpetrated,
en masse, by its opposition. This begs the question: Why is this not being covered? Why is the non-stop chorus to end harassment always
dead silent when it comes to supporters of #Gamergate being harassed, often by the very people who claim to be the biggest victims in the room?
this man, Kiwis. He DESERVES it.
