"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[deleted user]

_

[Bjorn]

There's a responsive commitee to deal with white list requests from anyone who feels they've been caught by a false positive.

 

Okay, that's much better. I don't use it, and haven't done a ton of reading about it (or how it is working in practice).  I didn't know how much human curation was going on with it. 

[Christopher]

I'd argue that it's a poor decision because the autoblocker takes a shotgun approach to blocking that actually catches (and included) a lot of non-gg people, including some of the IGDA's own staff.

 

The person from IGDA Puerto Rico who was blocked was an example of the algorithm working correctly.  He follows every major and many minor figure in gaterdom, many of them serial harassers. If he was just following out of morbid curiosity or to monitor harassment, he could have simply requested removal by contacting White List committee. Instead, he invoked the hashtag multiple times to summon a swarm of gaters to harass Randi and IGDA's central branch.

 

It created a politically awkward situation for IGDA because someone associated with them is an unrepentant gater, but that incident was not an example of the blocker's shotgun approach. It was an example of the blocker doing exactly what it was set out to do. It predicted that he would engage in harassment, and he did. The blocker functioned perfectly, but IGDA was not prepared to deal with the fallout.

 

To be clear, it's true that the blocker's approach does create false positives! This wasn't one of them. If anything, the problem in this case was that it was too accurate, uncomfortably so.

[Bjorn]

Thanks for clarifying that.  I've gone from catching up on this stuff once a day to once every three or four days, so I'm not as informed as I was a few weeks ago. 

[Denial]

Milo also tweeted out a picture of Harper's dead sister photoshopped in front of a Nazi flag "asking" if they were both neo-Nazis.

 

Wait, what?

[Bjorn]

Wait, what?

 

I wasn't able to find an archived version of it for verification, but it's referenced in that storify I linked earlier.

 

Edited to add: Some context for this.  One of the accusations being thrown at Harper is that she's like a Nazi, and her autoblock tool is like putting together a list of Jews in WW2, wherein the gamergaters are the Jews being identified for extermination.  Not fucking kidding.  Hence the Nazi photoshops and accusations. 

 

This would be funny if it wasn't so horrible. Yiannopoulos demonstrates yet again that he's a hack who thinks Encyclopedia Dramatica is a reliable source. He posts a doctored photograph that depicts Harper and her deceased sister in front of a Nazi party flag. He deletes the tweet because everyone can tell it's shopped.

 

[Ben X]

From: Milo

To: Mom

 

Hi mom, are we having sausages for dinner? Here is a photoshopped picture of your dead mother fucking a pig.

 

1 attachment: justaskingaquestion.png

[Henroid]

Jesus jumped up Christ what is wrong with that guy?

[Bjorn]

Apparently TFYC thought it would be a good idea to have a two hour conversation with

about feminism and gaming. I tried to listen to it, but I just can't.

[itsamoose]

I made it through about 8 minutes of that, and it seemed to be going down the same road as all other pro-GG/Anti-SJW stuff does.  I really can't justify in my mind how no one that supports any of these movements ever hears one of these far fetched claims and simply questions its reasoning.  Its like talking with someone who is fresh out of an intro to psychology class and thinks they have some great insight about the human condition because they can recognize a few basic concepts without really understanding them.

[Merus]

Its like talking with someone who is fresh out of an intro to psychology class and thinks they have some great insight about the human condition because they can recognize a few basic concepts without really understanding them.

 

Oh boy that is a thing, isn't it

 

Well I guess I'm shutting up about the Dunning-Kruger effect now

[Synnah]

Mitu Khandaker and Cara Elison came under GG's vomit-encrusted microscope earlier today, because Mitu once supported Cara's Patreon, and then Cara mentioned Mitu's game Redshirt in an article she wrote much later. Mitu wrote a response to the 'allegations'.

[James]

Another woman? What a remarkable coincidence.

[Nachimir]

Two women. A truly remarkable coincidence.

 

My heart sank on hearing about this this afternoon; good response from Mitu. I found it particularly sickening that the techraptor piece that spawned it is headlined "Further Improper Relationships between RedShirt Developer and Games Journalists have Been Uncovered", flip-flopped at the end with a "well there might be no impropriety at all we dunno we're just presenting this to the reader" paragraph, then concluded with "Was this a conflict of interest? Please tell us in the comments below".

 

It's just so fucking stupid and transparently done in bad faith. Stepping back from my emotions, I wonder how far a thing like this can really go now GG has been vilified in mainstream press. Probably still much too far for Mitu and Cara's comfort

[feelthedarkness]

1) Every good accusatory article contains at least three edits, and a request for contact post publishing. 

2) Going after Redshirt is just sad. A somewhat poorly reviewed, and (as near as I can tell) not tremendously successful first time solo developer? It's almost like there is something else about this developer that is of interest to the mob.

3) Even if all the stuff they already corrected was absolutely true, is THIS the threat? Some small time indie game that racked up 16 total metacritic reviews? An honorable mention in some indie game showcase? THIS is what you want to spend your time on? Lets pretend this is awash in utter bacchanalian corruption: the grand collusion still didn't really manage to move any needles. Well fought lil warriors, well fought.

[Bjorn]

I'd be curious to know at this point if there's a silver lining to being targeted by the gg mob.  Like I had actually forgotten about Redshirt, and I was interested in it at one point.  Mitu's blog led me Danielle's positive review of the game.  And any of the Thumbs having good, interesting things to make a game usually tells me that it's at least worth checking out.  So that led me to check Steam, and it's currently on sale.  So I bought it. 

 

This will be the fourth or fifth time gamergate has directly led to me buying a game or supporting someone in some capacity since this shit started.  I have to hope that for all the bullshit people have experienced, that they've gotten something positive from it as well, whether it's new sales, new friends earned through shared bullshit, or something. 

[Nachimir]

I'm hoping we develop more coherent cultural responses to it. I'm not sure what they are beyond publicly expressing support for those targeted; reasoning with gaters certainly doesn't work, neither does arguing with them.

 

The techraptor article was pretty much all sourced from KIA, which inevitably means corrections have started appearing on it. None of it matters, the conclusion was in the headline and none of the gaters or people writing for them seem to understand they're just blowing whistles to call in misogynists.

[CollegeBaby]

So InternetAristocrat (originator of the pre-GG "Five Guys" controversy and premier anti-intellectual assdouche) has quit gatergate and pulled down his YouTube for the foreseeable future. Apparently for finally discovering what the rest of us have known for months, which is that gatergate has turned into everything that it has been protesting against: a sheltered denialist community that has been hijacked by profiteers who only want to exploit rage culture for their own selfish goals. It also appears his Twitter has been taken over by a GG faithful trying his damnedest to make him like stupider than before, although it's hard to tell.

 

In other news, InternetAristocrat also just discovered that humans landed on the Moon. 

 

Seriously though, it seems as if he has had a falling out with other YouTube GGers before this. They suspect this is just excuse-making from him, and he will return with a different alias once he gets bored. Whatever the case, GG is tearing itself apart from the inside and falling further into obscurity.

[Gormongous]

I'd be curious to know at this point if there's a silver lining to being targeted by the gg mob.  Like I had actually forgotten about Redshirt, and I was interested in it at one point.  Mitu's blog led me Danielle's positive review of the game.  And any of the Thumbs having good, interesting things to make a game usually tells me that it's at least worth checking out.  So that led me to check Steam, and it's currently on sale.  So I bought it. 

 

This will be the fourth or fifth time gamergate has directly led to me buying a game or supporting someone in some capacity since this shit started.  I have to hope that for all the bullshit people have experienced, that they've gotten something positive from it as well, whether it's new sales, new friends earned through shared bullshit, or something. 

 

Having put a bunch of hours into it, I don't think that Redshirt is a particularly good game. It also gives me weird headaches. That said, it's a smart idea with several features that someone's bound to like, so I don't know where the accusations of payola are coming. Surely these guys aren't so stupid to think that twenty bucks given to an unrelated project is enough to buy positive coverage of your game from a high-profile video game journalist? Surely.

 

Well, the creator of Redshirt says pretty much the same thing, but answering in good faith, so that's something.

 

Also, I just recently found out that a guy from my alma mater whom I knew peripherally is the creator of the "SJW Autoblocker," which he claims is the largest block list on Twitter with 125,000 accounts. I used to follow him on the private blog server kept for current and former students of the college, but I had to give up because I couldn't stand how toxic he was becoming. Being gay and Jewish, he seems to have come around gradually to the conclusion that life is just a game and that whoever gets upset "loses" said game, so he harasses people constantly while talking about how oblivious/impervious he is. I shouldn't be surprised that he's linked up with #GamerGate (since he publicly concluded a few years back that "social justice warriors" are the easiest to get upset and therefore the best targets for "winning" the game of life) and some people on the blog server have commented that at least his block list will prevent prominent opponents of #GamerGate from getting more attention from stalkers and bullies, but it's really depressing for me to know personally what kind of person is attracted to a hate group.

[marblize]

It's almost like there is something else about this developer that is of interest to the mob.

 

Understatement of the year.

[Bjorn]

Apparently David Gallant, indie dev who made "I get this call every day" and was fired from his day job because of it, had been threatening to withhold Steam keys from people who had previously bought his game but who he could verify were gamergate supporters. Now he's just decided to say fuck it, and not publish to Steam at all:

 

I Get This Call Every Day was greenlit for Steam back in April of 2014. I've decided that I'm not going to bring it to the service. Steam is central to "gamer" culture - the same culture aggressively harassing many of my friends (or being passive when that harassment is happening). I've had enough. I'm not going to contribute to this destructive culture anymore.

[thefncrow]

Ugh. So GG has been harassing Brianna Wu because her dog is dying. That seems like fucking non-sense, I know, but it's a thing that's been happening. Apparently, it's now extended to assholes sending her company's corporate email address photos of mutilated dog corpses.

What the fuck.

Apparently David Gallant, indie dev who made "I get this call every day" and was fired from his day job because of it, had been threatening to withhold Steam keys from people who had previously bought his game but who he could verify were gamergate supporters. Now he's just decided to say fuck it, and not publish to Steam at all:

I think you may have that backwards. The storify has the quote about not putting it on Steam, but that is mentioned as out of date. It sounds like his decision is that he is going to put it on Steam after all, and Steam keys will be given out to any previous purchasers who are not affiliated with GG.

[Bjorn]

Because ETHICS!  Obviously. 

Y'all can listen to Internet Aristocrat's farewell (it's only about 5 minutes long) if you want. You can listen all about his disdain for cunts and whores, and how disappointed he was when gg lost focus on just blindly attacking SJWs.  Also, he quotes Hitler.

[Synnah]

Also, I just recently found out that a guy from my alma mater whom I knew peripherally is the creator of the "SJW Autoblocker," which he claims is the largest block list on Twitter with 125,000 accounts. I used to follow him on the private blog server kept for current and former students of the college, but I had to give up because I couldn't stand how toxic he was becoming. Being gay and Jewish, he seems to have come around gradually to the conclusion that life is just a game and that whoever gets upset "loses" said game, so he harasses people constantly while talking about how oblivious/impervious he is. I shouldn't be surprised that he's linked up with #GamerGate (since he publicly concluded a few years back that "social justice warriors" are the easiest to get upset and therefore the best targets for "winning" the game of life) and some people on the blog server have commented that at least his block list will prevent prominent opponents of #GamerGate from getting more attention from stalkers and bullies, but it's really depressing for me to know personally what kind of person is attracted to a hate group.

 

Hey sweet, I'm on that block list! So are Chris, Jake, Nick, Danielle... and probably most people on these forums, considering all it took for me to get on there was following Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn and Leigh Alexander.

[feelthedarkness]

Haha! I'm on the list! I have 86 total tweets.