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Wait, all you've suggested is that the movement began by means of an incorrect conclusion; but you havent shown anything regarding the rest of your claim: if those participating believed in the mistaken conclusion, and were enraged by that conclusion (the game journalism ethics part of it), then it wouldn't make any sense to describe it as "100% founded on harassing women".

Your proof is not at all sufficient for your claim

gamergate was not a thing till people decided to link two groups together. The second group is a group of assholes who like to harass women or really anyone on the internet they don't like. Nobody is going to defend them here, and there isn't a way for the first group to NOT be linked with them since news articles keep linking the two for obvious sensational reasons.

>Just for the record: GamerGate was 100% founded on harassing women.

>Some well-meaning people have taken GamerGate's message at face value and been motivated to expose actual ethical issues. That's laudable, but doing it under the GamerGate banner devalues the entire message.

You seem to have back pedaled from your original absurd claim. That's progress I guess.

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Its hard to find any neutral source that aggregates all the factual information. Does this website cover everything? Do you have an alternate source?

http://thisisvideogames.com/gamergatewiki/index.php/Timeline...

> You seem to have back pedaled from your original absurd claim.

Not at all. The GamerGate movement began with people looking to punish Quinn for her infidelity, and people who already hated her game jumped on the bandwagon to invent conspiracy theories to explain why it was well-reviewed. These people jumped to the demonstrably false conclusion that she had traded sex for reviews, and that narrative, unfortunately, went mainstream, and caught the attention of people who legitimately cared about journalistic ethics and weren't aware of the previous facts.

And that's still continuing--you see a lot of well-meaning people in this thread who are still not aware how much of the sex-for-reviews narrative and the GameJournoPros narrative are outright lies.

> Its hard to find any neutral source that aggregates all the factual information. Does this website cover everything? Do you have an alternate source?

That site may work as a timeline, but whatever your position, I think we can agree that GamerGate's own wiki is not an unbiased source.

I don't believe that because someone holds a different point of view, they automatically lack integrity.

"GamerGate" wasn't about anything in the sense that there were no goals, leadership, or organization. It's a lot like the "Alt-Right", it's a movement that only exists because the media reported that it did.

A group is defined by its members. Thousands of harassers claimed to be acting for GamerGate. You can't sweep that under the rug just because there was no formal leader.

And yet, they performed targeted attacks against a number of prominent women in the games industry, so much that these women had to relocate multiple times for fear of their personal safety.

Interestingly, the FBI got confessions from some of the attackers, and decided not to prosecute. http://www.businessinsider.com/gamergate-fbi-file-2017-2

Just because they didn't have a central organization, doesn't change the fact that it was a movement that caused a lot of damage. In fact, there's a parallel with the Alt-Right.

Many terrorist organizations operate with individual cells who work independently, so that they can't implicate each other. I'd still call that an organization.

> Many terrorist organizations operate with individual cells who work independently, so that they can't implicate each other. I'd still call that an organization.

I'd argue there's a more interesting parallel with political terrorist organizations: they often start out as non-violent groups until subsections radicalize over time, therefore attracting a set of new members who further radicalize the group. Think Hamas, PKK, etc.

It's pointless to argue whether GamerGate was about "ethics in journalism" because there's the set of people who care about that and the set of people who like to threaten women over the internet, and it's not clear which one are "GamerGate" and which ones aren't.

Modern day internet "activism" basically, and a legacy of the Anonymous circus.

I know of at least one gamergate meetup that had a bomb threat called on it. https://kotaku.com/gamergate-meetup-evacuated-after-apparent...

Would it be fair to paint the critics of gamergate with the same brush?

My best advice is to look at the majority of the people and see how they act, then make your own judgements.

It's entirely possible that the guy the FBI declined to prosecute is this guy: https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/24/8099531/gamergate-jace-co... Roughly the right area and description. In any case, he's a good example of the problem with the whole Gamergate harassment narrative.

Minor details like him not actually being part of Gamergate in any way and his videos being obvious jokes didn't stop the media reporting this as an example of Gamergate death threats against women. Meanwhile, in actual non-media reality Gamergate was split between people who thought his jokes were distasteful but not actually harassment and those who considered them over the line. Then when it became clear he was a fictional character, the narrative changed to one where Gamergate were now threatening him because they'd discovered he didn't really support their harassment of women. Of course, the Gamergate position all along was that he obviously wasn't serious, the fact it was like harassment made him unpopular, and it was still that other internet community sending death threats and harassment. (A community, if I'm remembering rightly, which went out their way to go after a bunch of Gamergate supporters for taking a stand against their harassment.)

The most important thing to understand about Gamergate is this: the entire media (and social media) anti-harassment campaign of the time was primarily about attacking Gamergate and criticism of the game critics in general. Everything else fell by the wayside. All the groups actually doing the harassment went unmentioned. The most powerful, long lasting meme to come out of this fight, "It's about ethics in games journalism", was entirely about crushing the idea that games journalism has ethics problems. About discrediting criticism of games journalism, not stopping harassment or death threats or anything like that.

(The second most important thing to understand is that the media coverage attracted a bunch of hangers-on who wouldn't otherwise have had anything to do with it, and some of them were exactly the kind of people you'd expect to be attracted by that kind of coverage.)

>Just because they didn't have a central organization, doesn't change the fact that it was a movement that caused a lot of damage. In fact, there's a parallel with the Alt-Right.

Nobody is disputing the facts. The problem comes when people take disparate facts and weave a narrative that supports their own beliefs without any supporting evidence.

>Many terrorist organizations operate with individual cells who work independently, so that they can't implicate each other. I'd still call that an organization.

Only because they have a shared goal. There is no shared goal in gamer gate. The thing called "gamer gate" was filled with crazy and non-crazy people with wildly differing goals and beliefs.

> Just for the record: GamerGate was 100% founded on harassing women. The "ethics in games journalism" thing was only ever a front to build popular support, which unfortunately worked. I'm happy to post more details if you're unconvinced.

GamerGate wasn't coordinated enough and lacked the centralized leadership to have been "founded" for a purpose or be a "front" to achieve specific clandestine goals.

From what I gather, it was sort of like Occupy Wall Street in that there was really no there there besides a vague ethos shared by the people who took up its flag to pursue their disparate pet causes.

/s/founded/formed

Now, is the rest of the statement true?

> Now, is the rest of the statement true?

No, clearly not. There are a lot more problems with the paragraph than can be solved by a simple substitution.

The root problem is that it's very hard (almost impossible) to make statements about the whole of an uncoordinated, loosely defined group that are both specific and true. Also, when you think you can easily make such statements, it probably doesn't mean that you're right but rather your thinking is being driven by biases and group-prejudice.

Saying that GamerGate lacked leadership is wrong. It had multiple important figureheads that directed the movement over time, starting with Eron who turned a personal affair into an open-internet vendetta under the guise of 'ethics in video games' (of which the reviews and corruption people claim simply does not exist).

It blew up from there as many people became leaders of multiple subsections of GamerGate, many of whom we see today in the alt-right parts of the internet which I am sure is entirely coincidental. The difference between Occupy Wall Street and GamerGate is that GamerGate rallied behind multiple different leaders which would push the the movement towards various directions. This was all stuff I saw from personal experience.

Eron posted a blog post venting about how his ex-girlfriend who was being held up as a feminist success story had treated him in an abusive manner as well as cheated on him.

He did nothing to direct Gamergate, most of what I saw him post in the early days was trying to put the cat back in the bag.

Both of those statements would be objectively wrong. The first being that not only did he shop around the story at multiple places, but he ended up posting it on 4chan and the like because he knew it would be the perfect place to incite trolls. He was banned from multiple forums due to posting his rants.

The second was that he was constantly active in various chat channels encouraging and pushing the movement forward while lying about his claims that he was trying to back away from it.

That is interesting, I didn't know that Eron posted it on 4Chan. Any evidance for that? I know it first went out on Tumbler and was posted to SA and Penny Arcade: https://actionagogo.com/2014/09/09/a-narrative-of-gamergate-...

http://antinegationism.tumblr.com/

I would also be interested in seeing any logs of Eron in the chat servers, I was never on those so I only saw what was posted to Reddit.

https://idledillettante.com/2014/12/06/eron-gjoni-hateful-bo...

This blogpost from 2014 has multiple examples of Eron posting under a trip on 4chan as well IRC logs.

Thank you, I was there in the beginning and I had seen the nastiness on both sides. I don't see where it was Eron who originally posted on 4chan but it does look like he did respond to the 4chan thread.

The author of that post says that Eron abused Zoe but has not provided any evidence, do you know of anything to back that up? All the evidence that Eron posted was never denied by Zoe afik.

> (of which the reviews and corruption people claim simply does not exist).

It is a well known fact that game companies pay people to write positive reviews.

One example (Microsoft): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeHjN4oWVfk

Yes, that aspect of corruption I agree exists.

However, that was not the claims of corruption and reviews made during the course of GamerGate (ie that Zoe had slept with reviewers for positive coverage). None of GamerGate dealt with the actual issues of corporate influence on reviews and the policies thereof.