"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[Bjorn]

Apparently Goobergate is using all its sockpuppet / bot accounts to mass report people on Twitter now for - get ready for it - spam. It kinda seems like the final cries of the beast, flailing its limbs around, trying to give one last "fuck you" to everyone. And yet it is ironically silent.

 

 

Apparently accounts are getting temp banned left and right, not clear where all the report flags are coming from. KiA is blaming it on anti-gg or a third party (of course).

[Gormongous]

Wu did a two hour special with journalist Glenn Fleishman to address all the accusations leveled at her 

 

http://5by5.tv/isometric/26

 

I'm an hour and a half in and I'm a little disappointed in this interview. Fleishman is not a very good interviewer, repeatedly talking over Wu to make points that are often too broad or too trite to further conversation. Wu, on the other hand, has a variety of strong opinions, but is spending a lot of effort to depoliticize them in a way that's ultimately distracting.

[namman siggins]

I agree with Fleishman comment. Not only talking over her, but constantly interrupting her too. Fleishman, with all due respect, just keep quiet and let Wu talk.

 

I agree, but as it goes on, Wu moves away from that depoliticizing. Sadly, that's towards the end and she doesn't move away from it totally. Then again, Wu has almost always been like that since I first come across her work.

 

[syntheticgerbil]

So who the shit is this Mike Cernovich guy and why is he famous? I tried to look it up but it seems like all of my points of reference for why he's a big deal comes from his embarrassingly bad website or people making fun of things he wrote on the website. He's a lawyer, so he's probably not famous for that. What has he done other than have a huge fucking neck?

[Denial]

Notable only for Gamergate, I think - before that a minor-league PUA and juicer salesman.

[Bjorn]

Holy shit, one of our friends showed up as gamergate for Halloween!

[Erkki]

Lol. What the hell is that hanging thing?

[Brannigan]

a child gate

[Blambo]

Fitting.

[Flynn]

So who the shit is this Mike Cernovich guy and why is he famous? I tried to look it up but it seems like all of my points of reference for why he's a big deal comes from his embarrassingly bad website or people making fun of things he wrote on the website. He's a lawyer, so he's probably not famous for that. What has he done other than have a huge fucking neck?

 

He's doing pro bono lawyer work for Zoe Quinn's ex (who wrote the thing that fired GamerGate off). He also paid to get access to her court documents and then posted them, then hired a private investigator to look into her, etc.  

 

He also got a lot of GamerGate fame by challenging the Gawker guy who made the bullying comment to a boxing match.  This was widely celebrated as a heroic deed (tweeted out by Total Biscuit for example) and he went all in on this tactic and started bullying people with charity donations: https://storify.com/x_glitch/when-the-gamergate-mob-targeted-anil-dash-for-no-r

[tegan]

Because if there's two things that inspire the idea of heroism when it comes to gaming controversies, it's incompetent lawyers and challenging critics to boxing matches.

[Problem Machine]

He's the Uwe Boll of douchebag video games industry satellite personalities!

Oh, wait.

[Denial]

Still not really sure I understand what's going on here. The only name I recognize is Anil and from what I understand he was an unrelated journalist who Cernovitch attacked over nothing.

 

Kinda - Anil Dash isn't a journalist - he's a technologist and blogger, which makes his targeting by Cernovich even more inexplicable. Sarah Jeong is a lawyer and writer on the political left who had previously Storified her trolling of Gamergate. David Auerbach is a Slate technology writer, who has been been getting a lot of love from Gamergate for his pieces - he wrote the "How to End Gamergate" piece that Chris Plante was describing as "reverse shot journalism", since it basically proposes the press prostrate themselves before Gamergate and do everything they want, at which point the moderates will be satisfied, and the only people left will be the harassers.

 

The things I found funny were a) Auerbach for some reason asking Sarah Jeong to extract an apology from Anil Dash, and Jeong very wisely asking not to be involved, Dash then saying "OK, sorry, have a good night", in effect, and the florid "thank you for apologizing and rescinding that slander" in response - which struck me as a classic of that very overwritten "I said good day!" style you often get in Internet arguments - and c) the subsequent charge of the Gate Brigade, deploying their customary lingo - "ableism", "trust fund baby" and so on. It just felt like a microcosm of several different forms of Twitter horror in one continuous stream - the random tagging in of a mutual acquaintance, the "how dare you, Sir" language and the attempts at Social Justice Judo from the Gaters.

 

That said, everyone else who's seen it just finds it incomprehensible or depressing, so I may have ODed on GG at this point.

Meanwhile, the Gaters are currently lovebombing David Pakman, who was taken to task by Zoe Quinn for apparently both refusing to take no for an answer to his request for an interview and for doing so publicly (he has apologized, and said that Hootsuite gave him her tweets in reverse order, so he didn't see the request to go private until it was too late.).

 

This is a tactic that has worked before - finding someone whose adherence to the "let's address both sides" golden mean has prompted irritation from people who have been the subject of harassment by Gamergate, and trying to persuade them to say more nice things about Gamergate in exchange for relentless positive reinforcement and extra hits. It has worked before as a tactic, but it feels like it probably gets harder to pull off the closer to full-time staff journalism you target.

[Ben X]

Can't help but be nervous about this - Reddit crowdfunding

[deleted user]

_

[Ben X]

Let's hope that's as egregious as it gets...

[miffy495]

a child gate

 

Even more fitting, where I'm from we just call them "baby-gates".

[Brannigan]

baby wall

[Nappi]

Holy shit, one of our friends showed up as gamergate for Halloween!

 

Amazing!

[Merus]

GG is casting its shadow over PAX Aus - there's been one reported sighting, but people (including musical acts) have mentioned it at panels.

 

Someone has a Zoe&Anita&Leigh&Brianna shirt.

[Henroid]

Anita's involvement in this is so weird. It was like a week and a half after the Zoe thing broke out, she just so happened to have an episode of Tropes vs. Women ready. It fired up (what would become) GamerGate, she said they were as usual full of shit, and also relayed how she can relate to what was happening to Zoe in that it was just attacks on women. Which GG spun as "Anita got herself involved for attention." As if she needs permission to comment on something happening to not her.

 

Also, is that ZALB shirt pro-ZALB or anti-ZALB?

[Henroid]

Also,

 

 

Edit - Also also,

 

[JonCole]

I started playing The Secret World and they ask you for a "nickname" which I guess is effectively a username. I tried anything I could think of, NPCs from all of my favorite games, cool TV show characters, etc. I tried probably... 50 different things that were all taken. By the end I was relatively frustrated and putting in random stuff. There was no confirm screen or anything when I actually made one that worked. Unfortunately, my username in TSW is...

 

Gamergate.

 

FML

[Twig]

Hahaha. that's beautiful.

[Denial]

I feel like in the Gamergate version of the Secret World the black ooze is the hero, and the Templars, Illuminati and Dragon are ivory-tower elitists whose politically-motivated reviews are damaging the sales of the Orochi Corporation's products...