Game developer Brianna Wu leaves home after death threats for supporting women

The problem has never been about Zoe Quinn.She can f$ck whoever she wants.

The issue is so called "game journalists" f$cking Zoe Quinn then writing articles about her praising her work,funding her through Patreon,and not disclosing the fact that they are also f$cking her.

The issue is "game journalists" colluding in google groups to push a leftwing political agenda that has NOTHING to do with gaming,not even because they believe in that agenda,but because they profit from it directly. This "webpress" has basically become a PAC,there is no difference.The way they opperate,the way they are funded,they have a plateform and they use it to push political bullshit.

It's about corruption.It's about a small elite of journalists and crooks, that knows each other,conspire to drive a political agenda,that is fundamentally extreme and is hurting the independent gaming industry and the independent gaming press.

And yes even leftism or feminism can be as extreme as conservatism or any -ism.

That's all.

Zoe's disgruntled ex-partner decided to publicly air a lot of dirty laundry after he'd discovered she'd been unfaithful to him. This is childish behavior, but the thing that caught people's attention was his claim that she'd intentionally slept with the editors of gaming publications to receive positive coverage, which turned out to be true.

Caught with their pants down, instead of doing the decent thing and apologizing, the editors in question rallied their friends, and published articles decrying gamers as woman-hating children, and declaring that they were 'dead' and 'over' - essentially, insulting their audience for daring to accuse them of poor ethics.

This was understandably offensive to previously loyal readers, being attacked because of their hobbies, and so the movement was born - coined #gamergate by Adam Baldwin, but helmed by none.

Images like that banner were created as a response to the repeated attempts to discredit the movement as nothing more than a woman-hatting harassment campaign, as was the sister hashtag #notyourshield, in which plenty of minorities of all genders showed their support, and disproved the claims that it was just a bunch of hateful white men.

re: your links. Gawker Media are well known as having a vested interest in painting gamergate as a hate movement; their site Kotaku plays host to one of the accused PR-for-sex journalists, they have posted numerous attack pieces, and in return have had several of their sponsors pull out due to gamergater's emails. They are desperate to paint gamergate as a hate campaign, because they badly want it to go away and stop hurting their revenue.

Gamergaters generally want people to stop focusing on women's sex lives, and pay more attention to the actions and lack of integrity of the journalists involved.

Social Justice Warriors are vilified because of their fanatical, hateful, exclusionary behavior. They are called 'warriors' and not 'advocates' for a reason.

If you can only see gamergate as an excuse for misogyny, then I'd say you're only looking for that, and ignoring anything else you find, because poor behavior like that is universally condemned within the movement.

I've seen this statement quite a lot, where exactly are people getting this idea from? #gamergate was started by Adam Baldwin, specifically to address corruption in games journalism and the collusion of media outlets in trying to silence discussion of it. The roots of it go back to /v/ having been convinced game journalism is corrupt for several years. See their musical tribute to games journalism from a year ago for an example (or the dewrito pope meme): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr7u1tWsGBk&list=PLAX8JHUJcF...

>But it's not a problem that I've ever actually seen a #GamerGate fan attempt to address

Have you ever looked? They have tons of information, they organize out in the open (it was on github until their repo was removed due to complaints), where everyone can see and contribute. #gamergate supporters have been harassed and threatened and Milo was even sent a syringe full of something unknown. Why do people paint such a dishonest picture of this whole thing?

https://twitter.com/Totalbiscuit/status/520247895996395520

The logs aren't for the fainthearted because people say stupid things and spout memes, myself included. But everything is there.

Trying to say "look! it's in the logs!" then linking to thousands of lines of text is kind of silly.

The logs will also prove that the logs Zoe Quinn is spreading around are cherrypicked and edited. But that would require actually reading thousands of lines of text, which I'm sure neither you nor anyone willing to listen to the opposing viewpoint is willing to do.

The "secret club" is on rizon, in the #burgersandfries channel, and yes, we kept the old name. You're free to drop in and chat any time.

I would ask the rhetorical question of why journalists continue to focus on claims of gamergate members harassing women, and give no lip service to the gamergate claims of poor journalistic integrity, and a lack of ethics.

and over the firing of Jeff Gerstmann over his Kane and Lynch review: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Gerstmann

The reason this incident blew up is that, when people complained about it, journalists who were friends of the accused decided to publish a series of attack pieces painting gamers as nothing but woman hating adult children in response, thus igniting the current fire.

Good! That is the police's job, not random internet mobs. Look how well internet vigilante justice has worked out every other time. What we do see is exactly what we should see: them condemning this garbage regardless of who it happens to. Oddly enough, we don't see the "journalist"/indie side condemning the #gamergate supporters being sent threats and even syringes full of mystery liquids.

Actually I can. That group of people acts as an enabling environment, making the behaviour seem less extreme to those associated in that group.

Do you seriously not have any moral qualms about lying about millions of people and claiming they target and intimidate people?

I don't see these "millions of people" actively working to make sure the person making those threats is found and brought to justice.

I'll condemn that behaviour all day (behind the safety of my throwaway account)"

The actions of a few do not invalidate an entire group of people.

Take a step back, and realize that you are literally using the same exact argument as islamophobes.

And no, I'm not saying this behind the safety of a throwaway account because I'm not afraid of you, or random internet trolls willing to call me names.

None of your suggestions are going to do anything but aggravate the offender further, which is the entire point of the post you've replied to.

It's like suggesting Snapchat monitor and deny underaged teens from from taking suggestive photos.

The "We only review…" message is bad UX, after someone has already gone through multiple steps, but it doesn't necessarily mean the report has been auto-discarded. The fact that their form lets you submit them at all suggests it might be used as a secondary signal – just one that doesn't guarantee a formal 'review' and response. And Twitter might be offering this partial-but-disappointing path to collect data for some other future opening to third-party flagging.

Still, third-party flagging brings its own problems. If it triggers anything automatic, it gets abused for other group-persecution/censorship purposes. And if it always requires staff review, it'll waste a lot of staff time on harmless joking between friends. So I don't blame Twitter for currently setting a 'bright line' bound on what level of seriousness (target reporting) triggers staff involvement.

2. Limit new accounts ability to send messages to people who don't follow them

This is a plausible idea and I wouldn't be surprised to see some form of it soon, as a user-enabled option.

Note, though, that it still disadvantages good-faith new-users, as well: the person who was moved to register to message someone would now have a frustrating, "you're-not-good-enough-to-message-them" experience. How many hundreds or even thousands of good-faith interactions would you be willing to prohibit, to prevent a few episodes of nastiness?

3. Apply blocks to email addresses, requiring griefers to churn validated addresses rather than reusing them

This seems reasonable. Are you sure Twitter isn't already doing this?

4. Give you better filters for notifications: i.e. currently there's no way to have it default to only notifications from people you follow so you can't avoid seeing crap unless you use a bookmark. Similarly, filtering out messages from new accounts you don't follow or which don't have n followers in common, etc. etc. would reduce the dog-pile effect.

Another reasonable idea I wouldn't be surprised to see soon.

5. Allow friends to help: auto-block/mute accounts which people you follow have blocked (specific people, threshold, etc.); hide tweets which people you follow have flagged as annoying / abusive; etc. There's a ton of interesting opportunity to use the social network for good here.

Also reasonable, if all the pesky details can be hammered out. Note some of these features are being enabled by 3rd-party apps like 'Block Together' (blocktogether.org). I'd expect the best ideas to eventually work their way into the official Twitter offering.

But it's actually quite hard for Twitter to rapidly innovate in this regard, because users are very ornery about slight changes in such options. Case in point: last December's attempt to change 'block' to be more of a 'mute'. Every tiny change in moderation capabilities triggers controversy, and even things that don't work very well, but become loved as a security blanket, will be hard to roll-back once enabled. Hence the lack of any big, crowd-pleasing moves by the platform proprietor.

I definitely agree with you that frictional costs are important: incentives matter, and driving up the costs and dampening the rewards will help minimize (though not abolish) bad behavior.

I'm unsure if wisdom from spam battles will be applicable, though. A determined and deranged abuser isn't playing a bulk numbers game, like a spammer, who is just hoping some profitable percentage of spam sneaks through and 'converts'. The abuser is instead focusing on few targets, more like a spear-phisher, and hand-crafting all the abuse. So quite different tactics may be required.

No it was not. Again, where are people getting this bizarre idea? It was created by Adam Baldwin, on twitter, specifically about games journalism and the game websites silencing discussion of games journalism. It seems really hard to believe that these constant claims that #gamergate was started to attack someone (who?) is all honest ignorance rather than deliberate dishonesty.

It's not even an ad hominem, though, because the credibility of your sources is at the core of your argument. returnofkings and avoiceformen have a storied and well-covered history of being astonishing shitheads towards women and doing everything in their (meager, thankfully) power to turn the clock back to 1950 or thereabouts. They have an inherent bias, and a real real disgusting one, that makes them immediately incredible. It's like citing Andrew Wakefield on autism--you aren't entitled to the respect of having an argument when you don't have an argument based on reality.

There isn't enough there to the spittle-flecked, cheeto-dusting link parade to argue about. It's prima facie nonsense being peddled by people with much, much more of an axe to grind than anyone on the "other side" that you (strangely) fear; there's no serious coverage of this sordid stain on a hobby of mine that's pro-#GG except from people whose entire worldview is predicated on being anti-women. And you know it, which is why you would rather blow the whistle and hope the ref stops the fight because--gasp!--somebody used a fallacy.