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"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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Polygon joins in denouncing GG.  There's still a bit of justification for the silence, and the same "ignoring them so as not to grant them legitimacy", but I do feel this contains less troubling elements than Jeff Gerstmann's GB letter.

 

It's good that gaming media is finally ending the silence, even if it is coming far too late.

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Given the amount of MRA language I've seen from Gamergate, I'd bet actual money the real grievance is that gaming has tolerated the presence of people who think that women are evil, because it never came up and there wasn't much reason to change. As gaming has become mainstream, there's been a move to change that, which genuinely does threaten gaming for them as a place where they can safely believe that women are evil and not be challenged.

 

Let me tell you, it's frustrating reading these statements and seeing thoughtless reparroting that Gamergate might well be a movement about ethics in journalism. It never was. It's a smokescreen. We have proof of this. They made it up and we have the IRC logs from when they made it up. All of this information is available. Did they just not look hard enough?

 

Also frustrating: Giant Bomb and others saying 'silence doesn't imply consent'. You might want that to be true, writer, but we know both perpetrators and victims don't believe it. We know that abusive people justify their abuse because they're the vocal part of a silent majority. We know that victims respond in outsize ways to statements of support, even fairly banal ones (I've been there, I've personally experienced it).

 

And I don't think statements saying 'don't harass people' mean anything because Gamergate doesn't believe it's harassing. It believes it's delivering justice and finally doing something about these evil women trying to take this safe space away from them. Which is why they can be "against harassment" but when someone suggests to prove it by donating to Zoe, Anita and Brianna, they recoil in horror.

 

Also why has no-one interviewed that one guy on NeoGAF who realised Gamergate was a hate group?

 

Quoted for truth. I understand GiantBomb's interest in not engaging with #GamerGate, because it risks making them a target for hate and bogging down their site, but to paint that as the smart and courageous decision is a little disingenuous. When has a hate group ever been derailed from its agenda by the refusal of its putative opponents to acknowledge it? Not in my knowledge.

 

I also am still skeptical of the "both sides are too extreme" argument. If there was a #GamerGate advocate getting even remotely the same level of hate as Sarkeesian or Quinn, why do we not know about it? #GamerGate is so much more organized than its many detractors, surely it would be a simple matter to tell 8chan or Reddit their sob story and get it all over Twitter, but instead we have loads and loads of hearsay, like "My friend's cousin was told to go die by an anti-GG Twitter account" and "My brother-in-law's coworker lost his job because of his support of GG," which are impossible to verify but still too many outlets take at face value in the interest of appearing balanced. It's so frustrating, especially because baiting #GamerGate into acts of open misogyny and harassment is as easy as falling down some stairs.

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Polygon joins in denouncing GG.  There's still a bit of justification for the silence, and the same "ignoring them so as not to grant them legitimacy", but I do feel this contains less troubling elements than Jeff Gerstmann's GB letter.

 

It's good that gaming media is finally ending the silence, even if it is coming far too late.

 

I'm seeing a lot of anger on Twitter about Polygon's statement, but that might be Cine retweets. Yeah, no, that's Cine retweets. Of the three, I like this one the most - I'm not thrilled about it, but 'we had no idea how to not make this worse and we feared for our actual lives if we made the wrong choice' strikes me as a thousand times more honest than anything either in this statement, or Giant Bomb's or Gamespot's.

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But yeah, I'm proud of Jeff for writing that. One of the first comments on the reddit thread to it spoke to "How could a victim of the exact ethical issues we're talking about take a stance against us", which felt kinda good to see. Maybe this one will break through.

 

But I also think silence in regards to some shouldn't be automatically condemned. Some people try to assume the best in everyone, and want to properly do their homework on something before completely going to one side of an issue. I started out on the anti-GG side, but I wasn't speaking up for the first few weeks other than wanting the harassment to stop. It wasn't until I did my research that I then came to discover, oh shit one side has nothing to stand on.

 

The problem is, the anti-GG side has done an altogether terrible job of laying out talking points, in actually pointing out the lies and hypocrisy of GG, or explaining why this diversity is something that you really do want, or any of the things that seem obvious and rote to a feminist but to most people seem like an overexaggeration.

 

This isn't me making excuses for GamerGate, that shit's been tarnished the whole time and is a serious shitheap. This is just in defense of those who did keep quiet, because frankly we didn't do a good job helping them learn why GG is so full of shit.

 

 

My experience has been very different. Find some solo game-developers on Twitter and follow them. Most of my feed has been nothing but people trying to explain the misogynistic intent and methods of gamer-gate for the past month or so. 

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Attacks from the likes of Jack Thompson or Leland Yee only strengthened the resolve of gamers and unified our collective culture. But attacks from inside that same culture have led to worldwide media condemnation, a toxic dialogue and violent threats. People don't feel safe in their own homes. No need to jump at shadows of conspiracy or collusion, GamerGaters; you've already unearthed the most damaging force in video games today.

Quality paragraph

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The problem is, the anti-GG side has done an altogether terrible job of laying out talking points, in actually pointing out the lies and hypocrisy of GG, or explaining why this diversity is something that you really do want, or any of the things that seem obvious and rote to a feminist but to most people seem like an overexaggeration.

 

This isn't me making excuses for GamerGate, that shit's been tarnished the whole time and is a serious shitheap.

 

The vocal arm of the anti-GG movement is mostly involuntary. If you believe that GG are the aggressors in the conversation (which I do) than anti-GG's only reasonable defense is solidarity. Though I agree a lot of the anti-GG's on social media aren't doing all that well to articulate exactly how GG is unfounded, they don't have much to work with. The sad truth is that it is human nature to want to fight back when assaulted. The problem is, and its the same reason solidarity is the only justifiable response to GG, is that the group's rhetoric is founded almost entirely in circular logic; there is literally nothing you could say to point out their hypocrisy or even misunderstandings.

 

Edit: "Children" may be a little much. Not because it's inaccurate but because I'd rather not rely on insults to validate my point. Let's say--- they are a violent and effective swarm uninterested with reason to communicate their ideals.

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I also am still skeptical of the "both sides are too extreme" argument. If there was a #GamerGate advocate getting even remotely the same level of hate as Sarkeesian or Quinn, why do we not know about it? #GamerGate is so much more organized than its many detractors, surely it would be a simple matter to tell 8chan or Reddit their sob story and get it all over Twitter, but instead we have loads and loads of hearsay, like "My friend's cousin was told to go die by an anti-GG Twitter account" and "My brother-in-law's coworker lost his job because of his support of GG," which are impossible to verify but still too many outlets take at face value in the interest of appearing balanced. It's so frustrating, especially because baiting #GamerGate into acts of open misogyny and harassment is as easy as falling down some stairs.

 

At the risk of sounding like one of those "middle ground" people, what I think Jeff in particular means isn't necessarily that the entire anti-GG side is too extreme, nor is every single supporter of GG (although I suspect a lot of them are).  I'm willing to bet that somewhere out there exists an "Adam Baldwin should die" type thread.  I fully believe that number to be exceedingly small and certainly nowhere near GG numbers of such things but not zero.  In the same vein, I also believe that at least some GG supporters genuinely believe in the idea of more ethics in journalism, or at least they did at some point.  I don't think those people could honestly make that claim now though.  

 

The events of the past couple months really reminds me of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Drumhead".  Particularly the ending:

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My experience has been very different. Find some solo game-developers on Twitter and follow them. Most of my feed has been nothing but people trying to explain the misogynistic intent and methods of gamer-gate for the past month or so. 

 

Sure, but you've already got several things on your side:

 

  • You're on twitter, the heart of this mess.
  • You're following specific game developers, which means you're probably more educated about the industry in general.
  • You're following enough of them that you see a consensus.

Now look at the common GGer's twitter account: Often following under 100 people, most are barely reaching 60. Many of those they follow even then are other GGers, which means that before twitter they likely followed ~30-40. They likely got their news from the most populous web sites for gaming content- Reddit, 4chan, etc. And what was the centralized message on those boards in the early days?

 

The vocal arm of the anti-GG movement is mostly involuntary. If you believe that GG are the aggressors in the conversation (which I do) than anti-GG's only reasonable defense is solidarity. Though I agree a lot of the anti-GG's on social media aren't doing all that well to articulate exactly how GG is unfounded, they don't have much to work with. The sad truth is that it is human nature to want to fight back when assaulted. The problem is, and its the same reason solidarity is the only justifiable response to GG, is that the group's rhetoric is founded almost entirely in circular logic; there is literally nothing you could say to point out their hypocrisy or even misunderstandings.

 

Edit: "Children" may be a little much. Not because it's inaccurate but because I'd rather not rely on insults to validate my point. Let's say--- they are a violent and effective swarm uninterested with reason to communicate their ideals.

 

 

To combine my response to both comments:

 

So we're all already well-established people in the community. We know who are voices of authority, we've done our checking out of the journalistic voices of the scene, we know who has a history of good criticism and who isn't. We even already know who our favorite reviewers often are, or at least our favorite outlets.

 

We're against people who honestly just aren't as well-educated in the community as us. They see a multi-billion dollar industry rivaling movies, but they don't see the severely underpaid workers who make the games, or the journalists who basically live on peanuts. They also have only really heard of indie devs who have huge success- the Notches, the Jonathan Blows of the world. So when they heard a female indie dev was sleeping with someone for positive coverage, they thought She must be after that money!

 

So they have an automatic assumption. A bias, even. But then when they go to check it out, they find tons of people arguing for one side... and only disparate fringes of conversation on the other, some of the conversation even the exact thing the Gamers got so insulted about(which furthermore, was couched in language far surpassing what the average gamer was coming into this prepared for, such as in the case of Leigh's Gama article), that honestly, we just didn't provide them what they needed to find landing on our side.

 

Now, we finally are getting more to write about it, and to explain things away, but they're not hitting the hard truths that really tear apart the GG machine. Partly because they don't want to drag Zoe's name back through, or inspire another crusade against Anita or Leigh. But you've gotta remember- social media is almost exclusively those most heavily involved, and the most likely ones to both get shitty information and then respond as if it's gospel(ie, perpetuate the lies and/or contribute to light, insulting harassment(not death threats)), are those who are involved enough to care but not involved enough to do the homework themselves. And those are the exact people whose job it has always been for the press to educate, and frankly, no one bothered until now. I just hope it isn't too late(and from what I've seen so far, it doesn't seem to be).

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At the risk of sounding like one of those "middle ground" people, what I think Jeff in particular means isn't necessarily that the entire anti-GG side is too extreme, nor is every single supporter of GG (although I suspect a lot of them are).  I'm willing to bet that somewhere out there exists an "Adam Baldwin should die" type thread.  I fully believe that number to be exceedingly small and certainly nowhere near GG numbers of such things but not zero.  In the same vein, I also believe that at least some GG supporters genuinely believe in the idea of more ethics in journalism, or at least they did at some point.  I don't think those people could honestly make that claim now though.

 

I understand that position and have some sympathy for it, but like you said near the end, it doesn't really hold up at all now. "There are a few extremists in our otherwise reasonable movement" and "There are a few reasonable people in our extremist movement" are situations in opposition to each other, but a lot of publications positioning themselves on the sidelines seem content to treat themselves as functionally the same, like just one instance of extremism is enough to tar everyone else (and one instance of reasonableness is enough to legitimize everyone else), in which case a centrist stance is the only reasonable one. I almost prefer Polygon's "This whole thing is so fucked up, we didn't know what to do" better than portraying the stakes of the issue in a certain way to make their position of convenience also the most correct one to have.

 

To combine my response to both comments:

 

So we're all already well-established people in the community. We know who are voices of authority, we've done our checking out of the journalistic voices of the scene, we know who has a history of good criticism and who isn't. We even already know who our favorite reviewers often are, or at least our favorite outlets.

 

We're against people who honestly just aren't as well-educated in the community as us. They see a multi-billion dollar industry rivaling movies, but they don't see the severely underpaid workers who make the games, or the journalists who basically live on peanuts. They also have only really heard of indie devs who have huge success- the Notches, the Jonathan Blows of the world. So when they heard a female indie dev was sleeping with someone for positive coverage, they thought She must be after that money!

 

So they have an automatic assumption. A bias, even. But then when they go to check it out, they find tons of people arguing for one side... and only disparate fringes of conversation on the other, some of the conversation even the exact thing the Gamers got so insulted about(which furthermore, was couched in language far surpassing what the average gamer was coming into this prepared for, such as in the case of Leigh's Gama article), that honestly, we just didn't provide them what they needed to find landing on our side.

 

Now, we finally are getting more to write about it, and to explain things away, but they're not hitting the hard truths that really tear apart the GG machine. Partly because they don't want to drag Zoe's name back through, or inspire another crusade against Anita or Leigh. But you've gotta remember- social media is almost exclusively those most heavily involved, and the most likely ones to both get shitty information and then respond as if it's gospel(ie, perpetuate the lies and/or contribute to light, insulting harassment(not death threats)), are those who are involved enough to care but not involved enough to do the homework themselves. And those are the exact people whose job it has always been for the press to educate, and frankly, no one bothered until now. I just hope it isn't too late(and from what I've seen so far, it doesn't seem to be).

 

I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree with you entirely, but what exactly is your reasoning that the paucity of cogent talking points against #GamerGate is fueling the movement? I don't know for sure, but I assume from my various interactions online that the same biases and reliance on single-stream media that have caused the movement to cohere also serve to exclude conflicting narratives, regardless of clarity and incisiveness. Both the best summaries and the least confrontational summaries that I've read, Deadspin being the most notable of the former, are flooded with comments parroting the same talking points as day one of the movement. There is no change and certainly no consciousness-raising evident there. The best I can say is that there is some more sophistication to how those same points are articulated, but we can source those directly back to 4chan- and Reddit-led efforts to clean up the movement's image. There's no evidence I can find that opportunities for a dialogue have been missed, not without total concession to the reality and legitimacy of #GamerGate's claims.

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Both the best summaries and the least confrontational summaries that I've read, Deadspin being the most notable of the former, are flooded with comments parroting the same talking points as day one of the movement. There is no change and certainly no consciousness-raising evident there. The best I can say is that there is some more sophistication to how those same points are articulated, but we can source those directly back to 4chan- and Reddit-led efforts to clean up the movement's image. There's no evidence I can find that opportunities for a dialogue have been missed, not without total concession to the reality and legitimacy of #GamerGate's claims.

 

Came across this today from https://twitter.com/pixiejenni about why dialog is so impossible:

 

http://geekessays.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/gamergate-patriotism-and-c-s-lewis/

 

This is the crux of my issue with GG. Instead of recognising that its rallying cries are based on a selfish love – on an urge to defend what they see as theirs (true or not) – it instead claims it to be about ethics, justice – these higher, apparently transcendent goals. You cannot have dialogue with a movement that sees itself as this – as Lewis says, the only thing a side with those transcendent goals wants is annihilation of dissent.

GG cries for ethics, for justice. But it harbours in its ranks and gives platform to the unethical, the unjust. It asks for less censorship, while encouraging the blacklisting of opinions they disagree with. It asks for less corruption, but keeps crying out the ‘youtubers are not journalists’ line when shown corruption there. It decries the use of metacritic in developers’ payrates, but attacks the journalists who scores are on it, rather than the publishers who hold the power. It holds up #notyourshield as a sample of its own diversity, all while upholding people like Milo who don’t believe transwomen to be women. As Lewis suggests – when you shout one thing, but act in an other way, you should not be surprised when people don’t want to hear you.

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I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree with you entirely, but what exactly is your reasoning that the paucity of cogent talking points against #GamerGate is fueling the movement? I don't know for sure, but I assume from my various interactions online that the same biases and reliance on single-stream media that have caused the movement to cohere also serve to exclude conflicting narratives, regardless of clarity and incisiveness. Both the best summaries and the least confrontational summaries that I've read, Deadspin being the most notable of the former, are flooded with comments parroting the same talking points as day one of the movement. There is no change and certainly no consciousness-raising evident there. The best I can say is that there is some more sophistication to how those same points are articulated, but we can source those directly back to 4chan- and Reddit-led efforts to clean up the movement's image. There's no evidence I can find that opportunities for a dialogue have been missed, not without total concession to the reality and legitimacy of #GamerGate's claims.

 

Note that this is just a theory of mine of course, but I'd like to think it's an educated one based on politics in the last decade or so.

 

The thing is, think of the entire thing like a land war between two countries back in medieval days. Sure, at the end of the day you're going to have the cities- the die-hards, those who can't possibly give up the fight unless all is lost. But there's a lot of land between- i.e., the undecideds/uninformed parts of society. These people come from far and wide and have extremely varying points of view of the two sides/cities in question. But whoever gets to them first, whoever manages to talk to them and show their point of view, gets a bit of a hold on the person. Sometimes, it even turns them into a full-on zealot.

 

Now, as more and more people are claimed on one side or the other, you find even the diehards will lose their luster when they see their side losing too much. The closer they are to the battle line, the easier it is to lose the will to fight. The deeper and more secure you are in opinion/knowledge, the more you want to do/say something.

 

Thing is, in this case GamerGate got out there and spoke to those people a lot more than we did. We were a bit elitist about the whole thing, and honestly didn't reach out to the people who just pay attention enough to know what game to get excited about next. There's a variety of reasons behind this(many of them even good), but at the end of the day I really do think that's why it seemed like GG just kept growing and growing.

 

But now, it seems like more are mobilizing on our side, are actually speaking out, getting shit written, educating people as to our point of view. I still don't think it's been done as well as it should, but it's a hell of a lot better than we were doing 3-4 weeks ago. And it shows- sure, there's plenty of GGers still on their side, but I've seen a lot less posts supporting GG across the whole of Reddit in the past couple weeks. And not just because mods are cracking down- even in places like KiA, the fervor isn't quite what it was.

 

Also, many are simply getting tired of the fight- in which case, whichever side is asking less of everyone(which in this case, is us- we just want harassment to stop, after all), ends up winning to them, because that side is inevitably seen as more reasonable by those who are just tired of it all.

 

Sorry for how long winded I am, and how convoluted my metaphor is. It just is how I think of this stuff, though admittedly I've never been in a place of power in any major 'political' wars like this.

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GG only grew louder and louder, not more numerous. If they weren't a small group of people they would have trended on Twitter at some point. Their numbers appear larger because of duplicate accounts and such methods, which makes one think there has to be some honest people among so many. If there were, they would have managed to do the things they claim their movement is about at some point, but they never have.

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GG only grew louder and louder, not more numerous. If they weren't a small group of people they would have trended on Twitter at some point. Their numbers appear larger because of duplicate accounts and such methods, which makes one think there has to be some honest people among so many. If there were, they would have managed to do the things they claim their movement is about at some point, but they never have.

 

This might very well be the case, but I just try not to assume things about the number of people that believe a certain way. I'm too often out of the loop to have any confidence in that without hard numbers of someone who has real evidence either way.

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This might very well be the case, but I just try not to assume things about the number of people that believe a certain way. I'm too often out of the loop to have any confidence in that without hard numbers of someone who has real evidence either way.

Some numbers on GG

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We're against people who honestly just aren't as well-educated in the community as us.

 

...we just didn't provide them what they needed to find landing on our side.

 

Now, we finally are getting more to write about it, and to explain things away, but they're not hitting the hard truths that really tear apart the GG machine... But you've gotta remember- social media is almost exclusively those most heavily involved, and the most likely ones to both get shitty information and then respond as if it's gospel... are those who are involved enough to care but not involved enough to do the homework themselves. And those are the exact people whose job it has always been for the press to educate, and frankly, no one bothered until now. I just hope it isn't too late(and from what I've seen so far, it doesn't seem to be).

 

I don't know I agree there is a large enough audience of gamers who are both passionate about the industry, but not enough to seek more information regarding its largest controversy in some time, to target with a social media campaign. It could have been effective earlier on, but obviously not many people were willing to stick their necks out between the doxing and death threats.

 

Really, the entire thing crumbles when the non partisan see a victor and begin to gravitate. We can't actually target them because they aren't all that interested in cultural priority for the games industry. The most they will do until they see more support from news outlets is reductively denounce harassment (which, you know, is super helpful). I think Gamespot and Giant Bomb are doing a better job at trying to appeal to the apathetic, but its probably easier for them as they weren't direct targets of GG like Polygon. I imagine the last stumbling blocks will be IGN, /r/gaming, and other middle ground news sites.

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Perhaps, but those are some pretty faulty numbers in many ways. I then also look at TB, and in the past week alone he got 6,000 followers. Now, it's pretty difficult to determine how many were GG supporters, but he's been pretty inactive for the last week with him being in the hospital and all. And, he's one of the ones who isn't, well, constantly spewing fairly obvious hate. The 'attractive' option, if you will.

 

I don't have a lot of confidence in the numbers I presented either. I wish I could go back further in time on his account there, but I'm not about to shell out money to see if there's a correlation between the two. I'm just saying that I don't have a ton of confidence in those numbers, since they are more or less with the most extreme voices on the side of GG, and do little to differentiate how many follow ZQ to find something new to not like about her(which if there's one thing the internet's taught me, people love a good outrage).

 

Edit: I'd also add, being able to get $70k to TFYC and $5.5k to that anti-bullying campaign also don't exactly tell me small numbers, though I also fairly doubt the $70k number and feel like the $5k number is a lot more in line with reality, since most everything I've seen TFYC claim so far has been pretty damn close to hogwash.

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Given the amount of MRA language I've seen from Gamergate, I'd bet actual money the real grievance is that gaming has tolerated the presence of people who think that women are evil, because it never came up and there wasn't much reason to change. As gaming has become mainstream, there's been a move to change that, which genuinely does threaten gaming for them as a place where they can safely believe that women are evil and not be challenged.

 

Let me tell you, it's frustrating reading these statements and seeing thoughtless reparroting that Gamergate might well be a movement about ethics in journalism. It never was. It's a smokescreen. We have proof of this. They made it up and we have the IRC logs from when they made it up. All of this information is available. Did they just not look hard enough?

 

Also frustrating: Giant Bomb and others saying 'silence doesn't imply complicity'. You might want that to be true, writer, but we know both perpetrators and victims don't believe it. We know that abusive people justify their abuse because they're the vocal part of a silent majority. We know that victims respond in outsize ways to statements of support, even fairly banal ones (I've been there, I've personally experienced it).

 

And I don't think statements saying 'don't harass people' mean anything because Gamergate doesn't believe it's harassing. It believes it's delivering justice and finally doing something about these evil women trying to take this safe space away from them. Which is why they can be "against harassment" but when someone suggests to prove it by donating to Zoe, Anita and Brianna, they recoil in horror.

 

Also why has no-one interviewed that one guy on NeoGAF who realised Gamergate was a hate group?

 

I'm just quoting this again, even though it's not necessary, because it nails everything I wanted to say.  I actually had to step away from this tonight, lest I say something particularly angrier than I would have wanted to about the Giant Bomb statement, or any of the "but there are a few people with reasonable concerns in gg" statements, or the "there are extremists on the anti-gg" side. 

 

One of the only actual, honest to god claims that the gg crowd has made about one of their own getting harassed was a guy who got fired and claimed it was because anti-gg folks called his boss. 

 

post-33601-0-65917500-1413615078_thumb.jpg

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Perhaps, but those are some pretty faulty numbers in many ways. I then also look at TB, and in the past week alone he got 6,000 followers. Now, it's pretty difficult to determine how many were GG supporters, but he's been pretty inactive for the last week with him being in the hospital and all. And, he's one of the ones who isn't, well, constantly spewing fairly obvious hate. The 'attractive' option, if you will.

I don't have a lot of confidence in the numbers I presented either. I wish I could go back further in time on his account there, but I'm not about to shell out money to see if there's a correlation between the two. I'm just saying that I don't have a ton of confidence in those numbers, since they are more or less with the most extreme voices on the side of GG, and do little to differentiate how many follow ZQ to find something new to not like about her(which if there's one thing the internet's taught me, people love a good outrage).

Edit: I'd also add, being able to get $70k to TFYC and $5.5k to that anti-bullying campaign also don't exactly tell me small numbers, though I also fairly doubt the $70k number and feel like the $5k number is a lot more in line with reality, since most everything I've seen TFYC claim so far has been pretty damn close to hogwash.

That's in line with the numbers given in the link: from around 4000 active GG members up to a maximum of 10,000. Those are small numbers considering the total audience or even Sarkeesian's followers.

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This is pretty old, but I only just happened across it:

post-8096-0-48619300-1413630656_thumb.png

I knew the guy was an idiot, but I didn't realize quite how delusional he is.

Regarding the Giant Bomb post, my most favourable interpretation of the "both sides" stuff is that Jeff is trying to pre-empt the inevitable #NotAllGators nonsense and avoid that tedious sidetrack. Even if that is the explanation, it obviously gives that perspective way too much credence, but at least it would be an intent I can sympathise with.

But perhaps even that's too charitable. Perhaps, just as the gators don't want to face the problems in their favourite medium, I don't want to face the problems in my favourite website. Perhaps I am a ridiculous child.

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I also am still skeptical of the "both sides are too extreme" argument. If there was a #GamerGate advocate getting even remotely the same level of hate as Sarkeesian or Quinn, why do we not know about it? #GamerGate is so much more organized than its many detractors, surely it would be a simple matter to tell 8chan or Reddit their sob story and get it all over Twitter, but instead we have loads and loads of hearsay, like "My friend's cousin was told to go die by an anti-GG Twitter account" and "My brother-in-law's coworker lost his job because of his support of GG," which are impossible to verify but still too many outlets take at face value in the interest of appearing balanced. It's so frustrating, especially because baiting #GamerGate into acts of open misogyny and harassment is as easy as falling down some stairs.

I saw a list of GamerGaters who had been 'doxxed and threatened' a while back, and was going to post it here, but I didn't want to go through TotalBiscuit's tweets to find it. Anyway, I just did (It wasn't that hard to find in the end), so here's the tweet, and the list:

B0AHqmLCcAIF3Lu.jpg

So the reason I wanted to bring this up originally was because of the whole 'there are extremists on both sides' argument, which makes me uncomfortable. The sceptical side of me is all too aware that GamerGate's definition of 'doxxing and harassment' is wildly different depending on whether the person being doxxed and harassed is on their side or not (And the dissemination of misinformation as fact is something they do a lot), so I wonder how many of these are just 'oh someone posted the state that JonTron lives in and then someone else called him a dickhead'. Part of me also can't help wondering whether any of these were actually carried out by the Channers behind GG, because for all of their accusations of Anita's, Zoe's and Brianna's harassment as being False Flags, no-one is more likely to carry out that kind of thing than they are. That kind of thinking is paranoid and unhelpful, though. Mostly I just force myself to take it all at face value, and wonder that if the people who are doing this kind of thing are doing it in the name of 'Social Justice', what can we do to stop them?

 

One of the only actual, honest to god claims that the gg crowd has made about one of their own getting harassed was a guy who got fired and claimed it was because anti-gg folks called his boss. 

 

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We investigated this a few pages back, and discovered that this guy (Who is on the list above) actually made a takeover bid for his company public, which was probably the main reason he lost his job, with the GamerGate stuff having very little to do with it.

 

 

Also InternetArtistocrat is such a tool.

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Also people digging into the 4chan anti-feminist side of Gamergate keep seeing the same names over and over again. Some of the 'doxxing' may have come from known troll sockpuppets; usually anti-feminists are the only ones fooled by trolls pretending to be feminists.

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I've mostly ignored this whole thing, ignorance is bliss, but today I tried to see what it's all about and I can't even come close to wrapping my head around it. Originally this was about people getting wrapped up in gross rhetoric about the Zoe Quinn thing, right? How did it go from there to some crazy internet Jihad (that doesn't seem to have a well defined cause, because everyone you ask gives you a different answer)?

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Basically it's a reactionary movement about keeping progressive thought out of games writing and by extension out of games -- this has been the only consistent theme behind GG rhetoric and activism as far as I have seen. Ethical conflict is used as a smokescreen to justify that, but it's an extremely flimsy pretext when examined closely. Zoe was the catalyst because she's a woman who makes socially-conscious art games.

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I've mostly ignored this whole thing, ignorance is bliss, but today I tried to see what it's all about and I can't even come close to wrapping my head around it. Originally this was about people getting wrapped up in gross rhetoric about the Zoe Quinn thing, right? How did it go from there to some crazy internet Jihad (that doesn't seem to have a well defined cause, because everyone you ask gives you a different answer)?

Basically it has been the process of making up reasons to put dead squirrels in Quinn's mailbox. The main instigators have been throwing out cumulative accusations and then actively promoting whatever gets traction with their mob. Additionally anyone who has publicly supported Quinn or pointed out that this is just a thinly veiled harassment-campaign has appeared on the list of targets and the same process is applied to them. The idea is to basically make it known that if you get in their way or point out the reality of their tactics and intentions, they will incite the mob to comb through everything you've ever put on the internet and look for something to get angry about. If they don't find anything, they'll just make up rumors until one is difficult enough to disprove (or just something that is desirable enough for the mob to believe) that it gains traction. The complexity of the situation is just a cumulation of all the rumors on the increasing amount of gamergate's targets. Since none of the accusations are true or are irrelevant, more and more rumors are started to keep the pressure on.

The influence of the feminist-agenda on game-press was an early accusation that managed to gain traction.

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