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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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It's sadly telling that this dude gets mad at the presence of a trans man in his video game and then directs that anger toward trans women. Makes me wonder if he actually played the game long enough to learn who the trans interloper in the mist actually was.

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It's sadly telling that this dude gets mad at the presence of a trans man in his video game and then directs that anger toward trans women. Makes me wonder if he actually played the game long enough to learn who the trans interloper in the mist actually was.

 

Watching him fumble through a historical argument and then a social one about how women should wear their hair, I strongly suspect that he's just not particularly bright and no amount of gameplay experience would have provided him with sensible justifications for his rage.

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It still amazes me (though it really shouldn't) that people like that can so completely flip out over the presence of people unlike themselves in a game, and still not approach the idea that maybe people who don't ever see people like themselves in games might have a legitimate complaint.

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Twitter is implementing a new core feature: sharing blocklists, which is what powers the GG Autoblocker.

 

Naturally, in order to communicate the existence of this new feature, Chris Plante, formerly of Polygon and The Verge, had to throw the people who wrote third-party blocklists under the bus.

 

(The author of the GG Autoblocker has been working with Twitter, and has shipped a third-party tool using the new Twitter functionality that is intended to stop dogpiling.)

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Where's the bus under-throwing?

 

The service is a welcome addition to Twitter, which in the past left mass-blocking to homespun, unreliable solutions.

 

Update June 10th, 5:15PM: Randi Harper, the creator of Good Game Auto Blocker, reached out on Twitter that the above comment about "homespun, unreliable solutions" could be seen as a slight on her work. I'd like to clarify that comment was about a solution I rely on created by a personal friend solutions that is rough to say the least, but gets me through the work week. Good Game Auto Blocker, or GGAutoblocker, is a system similar to what Twitter has now created — though created long before Twitter's recent update. It allows users to block a shared list of Twitter accounts tied to GamerGate. I tried a solution that allowed people to share block lists last fall that may have been GGAutoblocker though I can't say for sure; I tried many solutions, none of which prevented the unrelenting flood of hate in my Twitter stream. Harper's new work is Shields Up. Here's how she explains it: "Shields Up aims to mitigate the flood of tweets that can inundate a user when a single account publicly mentions their twitter handle. Instead of using a follower list as a source for accounts to block, we build our list based off of interactions such as retweets of the offending user." It's a smart solution, different than Twitter's approach, and you can find the beta at Github.

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Oh weird, I just totally missed that. I think the italics of the update made it register as a canned post script. I caught the original comment, about the unreliable third party blockers, but I swear I've seen Randi Harper herself saying GG Autoblocker was an imperfect solution, hence my confusion (though I guess Harper taking exception to the comment makes me think twice about that). 

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Watching him fumble through a historical argument and then a social one about how women should wear their hair, I strongly suspect that he's just not particularly bright and no amount of gameplay experience would have provided him with sensible justifications for his rage.

But that's the thing though - we want to believe that people who buy into this shit are all uneducated, "stupid" people but that's so not even close to true. Smart people buy into horribly shitty, bigoted justifications all the time. We can't keep passing it off as the educated elite suddenly buy into better ideas - look at Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is by no means a "moron" but he still says shitty awful crap every single day. He wrote what was considered the main treatise on atheism for chrissakes, and yet he's no more logical than the next nerd on Facebook when it comes to Islam or feminists.

 

*I put all those terms in scare quotes because I really don't like denigrating people's intellect. 

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Well, there's a couple of things going on here; intelligence, achievement and self-awareness are all different things. Dawkins has very little self-awareness. This guy may or may not be 'smart' but he's likely got little self-awareness. Whether that's because it's beyond him, or because he clearly doesn't need it because he's awesome (aka Dunning-Kruger effect), we're probably not going to be able to tell from a post.

 

In my experience, the most insufferable people tend to be of somewhat above average intelligence, enough to know they're smart, but not enough to know they're not exactly in the top 1%.

 

Either way, I doubt it matters because I reckon BioWare looked at that, held their head in their hands, and then got on with what they want to make.

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Well no, the point I'm trying to make is that the two are not related when this is structural inequality. Everyone is soaking in this garbage. It doesn't matter how smart you are.

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Yeah, to me, the assumption this is just the ignorant is nothing more than a pleasing thought.  It's basically the same thing as "These are all teenagers" excuse.  Because (in both scenarios) no, they're not.  Presumably, some are, but that's not everyone.  It's not the real problem.  It's just pleasing to think that way because it gives the person a way of dismissing the actual problem. 

 

"They're just teenagers, they'll grow out of it." 

"They're just ignorant, education will make it go away over time.".

 

It's a lazy route towards justifying one's total disengagement as being the rational thing to do.

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Well no, the point I'm trying to make is that the two are not related when this is structural inequality. Everyone is soaking in this garbage. It doesn't matter how smart you are.

 

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the systemic problems with misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia are due to a lack of intelligence. I was just trying to have fun with the clear idiocy of that one specific post, where the dude rolls out utterly banal arguments to justify his own boner-feelings about women. Education is probably the long-term solution, not because it raises intelligence but because it raises awareness, and it's only by the unceasing efforts of people like you to educate by raising awareness that the arc of history bends towards justice at all.

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The service is a welcome addition to Twitter, which in the past left mass-blocking to homespun, unreliable solutions.

 

Update June 10th, 5:15PM: Randi Harper, the creator of Good Game Auto Blocker, reached out on Twitter that the above comment about "homespun, unreliable solutions" could be seen as a slight on her work. I'd like to clarify that comment was about a solution I rely on created by a personal friend solutions that is rough to say the least, but gets me through the work week. Good Game Auto Blocker, or GGAutoblocker, is a system similar to what Twitter has now created — though created long before Twitter's recent update. It allows users to block a shared list of Twitter accounts tied to GamerGate. I tried a solution that allowed people to share block lists last fall that may have been GGAutoblocker though I can't say for sure; I tried many solutions, none of which prevented the unrelenting flood of hate in my Twitter stream. Harper's new work is Shields Up. Here's how she explains it: "Shields Up aims to mitigate the flood of tweets that can inundate a user when a single account publicly mentions their twitter handle. Instead of using a follower list as a source for accounts to block, we build our list based off of interactions such as retweets of the offending user." It's a smart solution, different than Twitter's approach, and you can find the beta at Github.

 

Erm... Good Game Autoblocker? Is that what the GG stands for there and not... well... GamerGate?

 

EDIT: Huh.. Ok. It's Good Game Autoblocker, I guess! Did not know that.

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Does anybody know to what extent exactly Twitter has been working with Harper and other folk over this? I saw some anger going around that they built something of their own instead of just hiring either her or whoever is behind BlockTogether, but I don't know how accurate that is.

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I'm sure most people here have seen this but just in case, Austin Walker posted a crackin' article about the position of critics in the games media.

 

Edit, well I don't have the excuse of using a phone, I was on a PC and failed to have a good look to see if someone else had posted it and they had, oops. Sorry Problem Machine.

 

 

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I'm sure most people here have seen this but just in case, Austin Walker posted a crackin' article about the position of critics in the games media.

I was actually thinking of posting about that but wasn't sure if someone else already did (and I'm on a phone so searching is awkward). It was a really good article that I think made a lot of really good points that seem obvious at first, but they're things that need said because they aren't always obvious...and having an article that says them so very well is, I think, a really useful and great thing to have and point people to when they miss the point of criticism and what critics are all about.

I've probably worded this horribly since I'm typing on a damned phone.

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I don't think that "homespun, unreliable" comment was throwing anyone under the bus. Any external solution is going to be unreliable, because Twitter could patch it out any day.

 

Unfortunately, this is still a pretty poor solution. Crowdsourcing moderation is dumb.

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Even if it wasn't pointed at Randi directly, it definitely speaks with a pretty condescending tone. Blockbot, GGAutoBlocker have been doing the heavy lifting of Twitter moderation for years because Twitter literally didn't acknowledge that it was a problem until very recently. The bigger issues though were that long-term abusive members that were tied to an identity could be filtered out but what about someone malicious who can make tons of throwaway accounts? That's something Twitter has to combat themselves. 

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I know that it's probably never going to happen, but KiA being banned would just be... *kisses fingers like a chef* 

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With the new of Twitter sharing it's block lists to block harassment and this Reddit news, today is looking relatively good?

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