Do you wanna know
why the FTC was getting involved?
It's fucking great.
On October 10th, 2014, The Escapist ran a column in which a number of developers who were pro-Gamergate were interviewed. At the time, this was the only article remotely like it. Suffice to say,
it exists only in Archival Format now. What happened?
Zoe Quinn and Alex Lifschitz called in their markers. MovieBob and Jim Sterling raised holy hell and between the two fatasses and a shrieking mob, they accused several of the devs interviewed of being "serial harassers." The "evidence" presented of this harassment was IRC logs, taken out-of-context from the Escapist's own fucking IRC channel - I.E., complete
horse-shit. Despite the complete lack of evidence,
the article was taken down. At least one developer's interview was
removed under the mere claims that he somehow harassed someone, with no evidence given whatsoever.
At about this point, we enter accusation territory, but it coincides with both Chipman's testimony, the GG timeline, and the testimony of anons involved at the time. The Escapist noticed the fucking obvious, which is that several of its own employees are anything but neutral on this particular subject, and many of them have long, detailed lists of conflicts-of-interest with various developers, Journos, et al. GG's Internet Autism Machine is in full burn mode, and fucking
everything is getting archived by the GG spergs, who are digging up every conflict-of-interest they can.
The Escapist, realizing how much damage weaponized Autism can do, and realizing that attacking their fucking
audience is a fucking stupid move, becomes the first site of many to update its Ethics policy to enforce disclosure of pre-existing relationships between devs and reviewers, and basically asks the FTC to confirm it and show they're on the level.
Suffice to say, Jimothy "There's No Such Thing as an Unbiased Review" Sterling does not like this very much, nor does Bob "No Bad Tactics" Chipman. Making matters worse, The Escapist steadfastly refuses to lock discussion threads on GG that repeatedly get invaded by Anti-GG trolls trying to use the SA tactic of descending on a thread and shitting it up en masse to get it locked; instead, The Escapist's moderators do the sane thing and keep banning responsible parties, otherwise letting the GG spergs have their sperging, contained to one series of threads.
With the line in the sand drawn between Jim and the GG component of The Escapist's audience, The Escapist went with the audience. Jim proceeded to lose his shit and go freelance.
He specifically cited the fact that The Escapist was not simply banning interviewees on he and his friends' say-so alone as the reason that he left. Chippy stuck with it a bit longer, promising to play by the rules, but ultimately we know how that panned out.
