"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[Bjorn]

What kind of asshole wouldn't enjoy a room full of play-doh?

[Apple Cider]

I'd go to town on some fucking play-doh. Rich coming from the guy who has an RV that looks like the van from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

[Henroid]

That Milo guy, @Nero on Twitter, posted revenge porn to the Breitbart website. Not linking because duh, but it means

1) He's a douchebag as always

2) His employer approved it for posting

[syntheticgerbil]

Maybe he should rent us all a humongous tour bus of play-doh on gamergate monies.

[James]

That Milo guy, @Nero on Twitter, posted revenge porn to the Breitbart website. Not linking because duh, but it means

1) He's a douchebag as always

2) His employer approved it for posting

3) Journalistic ethics

[itsamoose]

What does AGG stand for? A quick Google search told me it means cool, which kind of turns the intent of that tweet on its head.

[Bjorn]

anti-gamerate, because gg needs to pretend that there is an equal and organized opposite force to them. 

[Apple Cider]

I'm going to take an unpopular stance on this - because while in general there's not an equal and organized opposite force to them in general, there are a small group of people who spend their days chronicling, documenting and generally keeping tabs on what GG does. Gamerghazi is part of this, and a dedicated core of people on twitter are like this. Their general tweets are screencapping what GG is doing and while it is useful in some ways, particularly for those who are being harassed by them, a lot of it is men who have made a cottage industry in hassling GG people, or rather "dunking on nerds" and getting into long drawn out pointless fights with GG people for reasons I can't fathom. To look good? To do something easy rather than combat systemic issues? Who knows. 

 

All I know is that I pointed out how exhausting it is to see men spend their entire day getting into public fights with GG where it seems like their notoriety and popularity (and yes, some men have gotten VERY popular on just this alone) are based on fighting another group of men with marginally different politics than them, and I actually got harassed by aGG men about it because how dare I. My twitter got screencapped and RTed to show how I "hate women's work and dealing with harassment" despite specifically talking about men's role in this and that I am also a harassment victim, many years before GG came out even. That's not terrifying at all, having "allies" who feel that it's their duty to "protect you" turning on you, men who have never spoken to you at all other than to get mad at you that day alone and then talk about you like they know you and how much you're a shithead. 

[Bjorn]

I'm not going to disagree with you about that, and I'm not nearly as active on Twitter as you are to see how this stuff is playing out day to day.  I was under the impression that gamerghazi was down to just a small group (there's barely a dozen posts a day there). 

 

My thought was just that the anti-gg that gamergate thinks exists is radically different from whatever the organized, regularly active anti-gg element is that does exist. 

[Problem Machine]

Yeah I've seen complaints about aGG from several people I'm inclined to listen to in addition to yourself: Veerender Jubbal and vivian_games are the ones I can recall offhand. I guess some people are more interested in being seen to be righteous than in actually trying to make things better. Well, I guess that's an easy trap for anyone to fall into, but it's gross.

[Mangela Lansbury]

On top of being terribly ineffectual in their presumed purpose and sometimes directly harming people they claim to be protecting, the existence of people whose online presence is defined as oppositional to GamerGate further legitimizes GamerGate as an entity and solidifies their presence as a group. This doesn't apply to people like Anita Sarkeesian or Leigh Alexander, who obviously are opposed to the existence of GamerGate, because they are women who you can interpret as presenting as opposing GamerGate merely as a product of their work against higher level, systemic problems in culture and gaming, but rather applies to people who spend a disproportionate amount of time only documenting and talking about the fact that GamerGate is bad without ever seeming to engage with the higher level problems that allowed that kind of ideology to form and be accepted as a valid point of view.

[Gormongous]

However inappropriate and unpalatable their actions might sometimes be, I don't think that the small core of people documenting the actions of #GamerGate are actually responsible for creating or perpetuating #GamerGate's delusions of an equal-but-opposite opposing force. When people who identify with #GamerGate talk about AGG or whatever, they invariably refer first and foremost to the support networks of people like Anita Sarkeesian or Zoe Quinn, which "oppose" #GamerGate simply by making their intended efforts of stalking and harassment more difficult. Basic database activity, even accompanied by polemic, doesn't seem to set off #GamerGate the same way, probably because they identify with the essential impulse there.

[Deadpan]

I think it's fair to say anti-GG is a thing, but also to say that it's pretty different from what GG means when they say that. Their concept manages to somehow be simultaneously be too broad and too narrow I think, since they think that just about anyone who speaks favorably of one of their targets is then part of some organized resistance force or secret cabal, but are also convinced that they speak for the silent majority of the games community or maybe all of society with their regressive politics (which may be uncomfortably close to the truth I guess).

 

I don't think keeping tabs is bad necessarily, not just for how it may affect "the conversation" around this, but also just as a coping mechanism. I get the impression that srhbutts for instance is mostly doing it at this point to shout to the world that "Look, this shit is STILL going on" and if that helps deal with the stuff she would have gotten anyway, then why not. Definitely something where us allies should be thinking carefully about whether what we're doing is helping or just showing off though.

[Problem Machine]

...but are also convinced that they speak for the silent majority of the games community or maybe all of society with their regressive politics (which may be uncomfortably close to the truth I guess).

 

Fortunately that doesn't seem to be the case

 

[Vainamoinen]

Fortunately that doesn't seem to be the case

 

Doesn't convince me at all, unfortunately. As with the recent study (Breuer et al.), the phrasing of the questions could render that data totally unusable. Phrasing matters. Gamergate supporters have all too often said that they're all for inclusion both in their games and in front of the screen.

 

As a gamergate supporter, you can absolutely welcome diversity in games!* 

 

* as long as the game isn't based on any kind of historical era, wasn't meant to be a more Tolkienesque fantasy, isn't about sports, doesn't try to make an SJW political message out of it, doesn't force you to play anything but a straight male white main character (or 'gives you that option' respectively), as long as time honored game franchises are not changed in any perceivable way and 'gamer girls' offer themselves as willing girlfriends and/or fuck buddies.

 

 

 

 

In other news: The Sarkeesian Effect makers have split up again! This time, it's serious.™

 

Cringeworthyness galore upon watching Owen's video. He's apologizing to Anita Sarkeesian for his partner Aurini, who wanted to 'reveal' in this film how Anita clearly was sexually abused by her father. Now that would have upped the inherent harrassment quite a notch... but seriously, even Owen can't really ignore that by its title alone, that 'documentary' is intended to be harrassment and harrassment only.

[Problem Machine]

Certainly that attitude is out there, but I'm skeptical that the numbers behind it are anywhere near big enough to skew poll results.

 

Oh well, hard to say. There's certainly a lot of noisily regressive elements out there, and it's sometimes hard to tell whether their presence is inflated by that noise or representative of a silently supportive majority.

[Henroid]

And then Mark Kern made tweets about Randi Harper supporting ISIS through the ggAutoblocker, then he backpeddled and deleted the tweets.

 

I wish I was exaggerating but like... he said it. And despite deleting comments the internet never forgets.

 

[Deadpan]

What's the story on how a blocking tool is supposed to help ISIS here? My mind is boggled.

[brkl]

They'll block the FBI and then they can't spy on them.

[Gormongous]

What's the story on how a blocking tool is supposed to help ISIS here? My mind is boggled.

They'll block the FBI and then they can't spy on them.

 

I mean, I assume that brkl's mostly right. By using the auto-blocker, ISIS is able to hide its activities from the keenest minds on the internet! Something something puritanical SJWs are basically jihadists anyway.

[Vainamoinen]

 

In the top 100 of things gamergate supporters are likely to forget, "It was proven that Anita Sarkeesian contacted the FBI for death threats" is probably somewhere among the first 30 entries.

 

I wonder if Kern's similar claim here will ever be considered worthy of gamergate investigation.

[Reyturner]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the "autoblocker tech" just comparing one list of names to another list of names and then sending an API call that blocks the overlap? 

[BobbyBesar]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the "autoblocker tech" just comparing one list of names to another list of names and then sending an API call that blocks the overlap? 

Sorcery!

[Reyturner]

Seriously though, the most(?) charitable reading I can give this is that GG understands very well how ill-equipped law enforcement is for dealing with the type of harassment they gg trades in and how poorly it understandings the internet and the thought is that, if they mention Harper's name and work in relation to ISIS enough times, it'll trigger some kind of NSA scrutiny to... you know, harass her. 

[Mangela Lansbury]

Really weird seeing Max Fisher, who covers foreign affairs for Vox, tweet about how GamerGate is bombarding him because he said something about whatever that weird Reddit drama over the weekend was.