Gawker’s Moment of Truth
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Edit: I made no mention of movements and have no hidden agenda. My concerns for journalistic ethics are sincere. Kotaku and other games journalist web sites have associated any criticism of these concerns with unrelated harassing activities from typical internet bullies that falsely claim to represent the people that voice those concerns, but are ultimately unrelated.
I stand by my statement. The fact remains that there are journalists that have reported on games without disclosing financial or personal ties to the companies or developers representing those games. I invite you to set aside the politics and evaluate the facts.
Edit: When I posted this, the parent comment was only 2 sentences long.
> Not to mention the complete lack of journalistic ethics on Kotaku. They frequently post articles about games they have financial or personal ties to, without disclosure.
You assert that this is a "valid point", but I believe a better characterization would be that it is an extremely broad, unsourced claim.
Posting sources would have felt like an attempt to hijack the discussion to steer it towards a specific industry's problems, rather than focusing on Gawker and Kotaku's association with the parent article's reported moral failings. Given the amount of discussion following my comment I can see that the topic is important or interesting enough to merit posting the sources, however I am currently away from my personal computer where I have access to the communities and resources to be able to provide those sources.
If you are truly interested in the subject, later this evening I will post another reply to this comment with sources and articles.
1. People who are in fact concerned about the sorry ethical state of game journalism.
2. Trolls and jerks who have jumped in to cause trouble, mostly by attacking women in groups #3 and #4.
3. The game journalists whose ethics are being called into question.
4. Assorted "social justice" activists. They showed up because the original spark that set all this off was a lying, vindictive open letter from an ex-boyfriend of female developer, accusing her and some journalists of unethical practices, and that caused the developer to receive some very inappropriate comments. The letter was fairly quickly discredited, but the incident did get may fired up to do something about long standing unethical game journalists, which had long been something people were annoyed about but never got organized enough to do anything about, which is what led to the formation of group #1.
5. Group #1 includes many female gamers. Many of them have been receiving death threats and rape threats. It's not clear if these are coming from people in group #4, or if there is a distinct group of trolls and jerks similar to #2 but who have decided to attack #1 instead of #3 and #4.
Currently:
• group #1 is concentrating on fighting #3, and trying to keep #2 out.
• group #2 is attacking #3 and #4, and trying to make sure #1 gets blamed.
• group #3 is trying hard to make sure people don't consider the points #1, by making sure to cover all the activities of #2, which they attribute to #1, and ignoring group #5's activities.
• group #4 is fighting group #2's actions, which they often attribute to group #1.
• group #5 is fighting the women in group #1.
There may be other groups. The women in group #1 maybe should be considered a separate group, because in addition to fighting #3, many of them are also fighting #4.
If I've made any mistakes leave a comment.
[2] https://github.com/Noelkd/GamerGateGraphiz/blob/master/Gamer...
[3] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Noelkd/GamerGateGraphiz/ma...
People care /way/ too much about video games. Just don't get involved.
As I gather from the Wikipedia entry, gamergate is a hate group, so by definition anyone who's a part of it is a bully. I mean, saying gamergate is for "journalistic integrity" is like saying the KKK is "anti crime" because they may have, on occasion, lynched people who actually performed crimes. But since the KKK is only anti crime if said crime was committed by a black person -- and then their reaction is not one of protest but of violence -- you can't say that the KKK's stance on crime is "important". Similarly, gamergate only happens to be enraged -- and violently so -- not about journalistic integrity in general (or even in video-games coverage), but only when they sense that integrity happens to coincide with the interests of women. They promote journalistic integrity just like the KKK fights crime -- namely they make up a conspiracy to fight, and may on occasion, by total chance, happen to be partly right (in their claims, not in their actions, of course).
Also, while most people are born into Islam (or convert to it because of some of its many ideals) people choose to join the KKK -- or gamergate -- only because they identify with a rather singular feeling: hate towards the movement's intended victims. One is not born a gamergater, and neither does one become a gamergater simply for believing that journalists should hold themselves to a higher standard.
What I don't understand is, while the KKK may not like or endorse the "hate group" designation, they are well aware that they're not really crime fighters. Are gamergaters confused about that point?
EDIT: While reading more about gamergate I came across the term SJW, which stands for Social Justice Warrior, which is something gamergaters are apparently against. How can a group of nerds be against social justice warriors? Are they against Batman? Do they hate Professor X?
I made mention of ethical failings regarding journalism in video games. I never purported to be a part of a movement, and have no significant history of harassment, hateful comments, or any personal hatred for anyone involved. But by bringing up the subject, I am immediately associated with that "group" and shouldered with the actions of anyone else who has ever expressed a similar opinion.
I have an opinion, and it is important to me. I only ask that judgments of my character be based on my own words and actions.
I don't judge your character -- I don't know you -- but I think we can all fairly criticize your judgment in this particular discussion.
Some of those outraged people went on to do truly horrifying things (doxxing, threats, etc.); but, as nailer pointed out in another comment, so did some from the "anti-gg" crowd, though their acts were not highlighted. Like vdnkh pointed out, there is a stark double-standard of accountability to which the two sides are held.
Further, the "GamerGate" crowd has been routinely generalized, and people are all too-happy to ascribe alternative motivations to their grievances (sexism) instead of listening to their actual statements. It reminds me a lot of how terrorists are portrayed--"they hate us for our freedom!", when really there's a larger geo-political structure that causes some to pursue violence. It's easy to get the public at large to dismiss an idea/movement through such means (manufactured consent.)
Now, there probably are sexist feelings at the root of many of their members' concerns, but focusing just on that while ignoring the problems they point out--even if most are spurious/fictitious--is counter-productive. Engaging, open dialog is the best way to influence/change minds.
Crowds -- either the baddies or the goodies -- aren't outraged by allegations of pre-marital impropriety. In fact, no one is really ever outraged by a scandal, let alone a sex scandal (unless it concerns Silvio Berlusconi) or "scandal" in this case. Whenever you see people outraged about any scandal -- be they sex-starved, sugar crazy gamergate nerd supervillains or buff, handsome, superhero SJWs -- they are simply using a "scandal" as an excuse for their agenda, whether that agenda is that of the gamergater Magneto or Professor X, the ultimate SJW.
Finally, don't confuse civilized moderation with censorship, and please understand that all hate groups claim to have "grievances" (you really think the KKK doesn't?). Intelligent people don't listen to those grievances because they range from being blown-out-of-proportion, through conspiracy-theory-nuttiness to downright idiocies. Gamergaters are neither terrorists nor Marxists. They are not part of a larger geo-political structure, but from what I gather, they may be a part of a large group who can't get a date to the junior prom. They don't have an "idea", they're kids having a tantrum, and kids having a tantrum don't get "listened to"; they are told to shut up and grow up.
Their "concerns" are exactly the same as the KKK's concerns over crime. If you however, are concerned over crime, I strongly suggest you don't listen to the KKK -- you should listen to the KKK only if you hate blacks. Similarly, if you have concerns over journalistic integrity, talk to some adults about it; there's no need to listen to some shrill kids.
There are movements that are concerned over issues -- and those may or may not have some bad actors -- and hate groups that simply target people they hate (and they hate those people not for what they do, but for who they are); those hate groups are all bad because that's what they want to be. Gamergate is clearly the latter. The comparison between them and political movements with real ideologies and actual ideas is misplaced.
By what basis do you make that assertion? Can you read their minds?! This seems like a pure, basic composition fallacy to me.
> alleged lapsed ethics served women
The lapses were mutually beneficial, and there was harassment against the men involved as well.
> and hate groups that simply target people they hate (and they hate those people not for what they do, but for who they are)
Then why were these 'hate groups' active before the allegations were made, if they all truly only target people for "who they are" and not "what they do"?
> Gamergate is clearly the latter.
Again, by what basis do you make that claim? Are you just listening to the media reports that emphasize the harassment perpetrated by a segment of the GG crowd (while conveniently ignoring the harassment other GG members receive from anti-GG ones?)
> The comparison between them and political movements
I'm not comparing the movements themselves, but how they're marginalized in order to suppress their message and become vilified in the minds of the public.
I know them by the fruits of their labors, as they should be known.
The concerted attacks on Anita Sarkeesian--an academic, not a journalist--and Jenn Frank--a writer of opinion articles, not a journalist--and a handful of others who just happen to be loud and female and mostly not-journalists but still just so very unethical, we promise, prove the mistruths in those the declarations of intent, be it from outright liars who are participating to the useful idiots who cover the brigading scum.
> The lapses were mutually beneficial, and there was harassment against the men involved as well.
Yeah, Nathan Grayson totes had to flee from his home and completely uproot his life.
Wait, no, the other thing.
You've just stated exactly my point!!! Not everybody that identifies with GG has malicious motivations, they're just "useful idiots" who need to think more critically about the statements they ingest. Hence my complaint about over-generalization: if you outright vilify people and call them names, they'll only get defensive and be less likely to consider critiques.
> Yeah, Nathan Grayson totes had to flee from his home and completely uproot his life.
I never meant to imply that the distribution was equal, and I acknowledged previously that there were lots of goons acting completely reprehensibly ("Now, there probably are sexist feelings at the root of many of their members' concerns").
I have stopped entertaining the notions of people who want to hurt my friends, and the people who want to defend them. Changing minds is a nice-to-have, but putting a stop to the bad behavior is a necessity. So at this point I think that it is sufficient to beat them. Which has already happened; they've already, individually and in aggregate, lost the battle to dominate the industry, to freeze out people who want to cater to people who aren't young white males. The GamerGate people will have their sinecures and their friendly developers (which is why the shirt-rending screaming about "SJWs" is hilarious, it's not like the industry is going to stop making games for young white males), but as a whole, they've lost, and I'm okay with not really making nice-nice to them as they fade to irrelevance.
Seriously, if you're ignoring one side being horrible but not the other, that's endorsing harassment and threats.
But all of that--yes, literally (who), all of that--is secondary to this: on the big, important things, they're right. American culture is profoundly racist and sexist and video game culture is worse than average. Games are built largely to pander--not even just your average "catering"--to young white males, and even as a young(-ish) white male that kind of sucks. This is something we should talk about. This is a real thing.
What isn't a real thing is the straight-up fiction told by Eron Gjoni that led directly to destroying a woman's life. What isn't a real thing is the catastrophic misreading of a couple of articles about the sublimation of "gamer culture" (what a joke) into the mainstream. "'Gamer' is meaningless because everybody plays games" turned into, in the minds of some very scared and very small people, "fuck gamers they're dead." The request for more representation in games permuted somehow into "no representation for people like us", even though there's literally (who) no way on God's green earth that video game publishers would not still and forever cater to that population. "Some people who like games and make games hang out with and know some people who like games and write about games" turned into ethics in games journalism, while, all along and completely unmentioned, IGN et al, with their million-dollar ad spends (not necessarily corrupting, but a sort of bias that none of the GamerGate talking heads mention), and the straight-up YouTube payola schemes (you know, actual corruption) have gone unmentioned, almost certainly because they aren't "anti-GG".
So even setting aside the bad behavior that overwhelmingly comes from one side of the aisle, we are starting at a position of fundamental reasonableness versus fundamental unreasonableness.
Some of the people involved are people I would characterize as extremists, others to a large degree just bad actors. And if the criticisms actually were "FemFreq makes stuff up for attention," I'd probably honestly be partly in agreement. But it's not, it's really not. In the heart of hearts of the people doing this shit, it's that women and minorities are elbowing their way to the table and the specter of loss of relative privilege is scary so we'd better fight back and the only way we know how to fight back is to try to make them give up by making it not worth the damage to their lives.
The fact of the matter is this: you lose when you start trying to hurt people. You just do. That, in the rhetoric you don't actually care about, there's a point to be considered actually and truly stops mattering when you are attempting, as a group, to hurt people in a concrete and tangible manner. A GamerGater being socially shunned for his retrograde bullshit is not the same as a normal person being forced from her--invariably her--home because of death threats toward her and her family. This is not the False Equivalency Zone, and you will find no takers here.
Bomb threats--prove it. Cites, please.
Doxxing, yes. And the people involved have, by and large, been thrown out of the communities they purported to champion.
Syringes, though. Syringes. It's cool that you're giving up on your false neutrality, though; going to bat for Milo Yiannopoulos and his sterling reputation for honesty about anything tips your hand.
I am done with you. HAND.
> Then why were these 'hate groups' active before the allegations were made, if they all truly only target people for "who they are" and not "what they do"?
(I assume you meant "weren't", right?) Well, history teaches us that oftentimes there's a lot of pent-up anger in people that only rises to the surface -- in the form of mob violence -- in response to a trigger, which takes the form of an accusation of some illicit action taken by the mob's victims. For example, many pogroms against Jews were incited by some incident[1][2] (usually fabricated, sometimes partly true, sometimes blown out of proportion). Same goes for lynch mobs in the US. That's just how mob violence works.
Also -- and this is very obvious, but I think I'll be amiss if I don't explain this point, you say:
> while conveniently ignoring the harassment other GG members receive from anti-GG ones?
You imply symmetry where there is none. In civilized society, it's perfectly acceptable to harass members of hate groups. In fact, it's a civic duty to do so. The KKK and the SPLC are not two equal-but-opposing sides. The former is a hate group while the latter isn't. When one harasses the other it's mob violence; if it's the other way around it's common sense.
Also, the "harassment" against members of the hate group (although, again, I'm not familiar with the details of this seventh-grade kerfuffle) is often just calling them out for what they are. While clearly moronic villains, unlike in comic books, they don't appreciate and accept their villainy because they're morons. In their delusions they are misunderstood mavericks, and calling them out for the idiot brutes that they are makes them feel harassed, when, in fact, it's just that their behavior has no place in sane human society.
And before you cry out, "I'm just a nonconformist with unpopular opinions, and the majority calls me a hate group because their PC minds can't stand original thought" let me give you a little advice. If you have two sparring groups, it's quite easy to tell which is the hate group baddies and who are the goodies -- and it has nothing to do with the majority. If one group has too many people you wouldn't want your daughter to date -- that's the hate group[3]. And if many sane people tell you you're part of a hate group, before arguing with them, try to think very hard if they may be right, because they probably are. Another tell: if a group refers to social justice as a negative -- they're the bad guys.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krak%C3%B3w_pogrom
[3]: If you think about half the population would be fine with their daughter dating people in one group and half with the other, then you may have a simple case of two opposing political movements.
It's 100% bullying and misogyny mixed with some extreme right wing politics. I'm a strong critic of Islamists, but the comparison with Muslims is insulting.
There is no "double standard". A thug is a thug, regardless of the excuse for their aggression. There is nothing ambiguous about the obvious enjoyment they get out of terrorizing people.
Amongst those who want to promote journalistic integrity, Gamergaters are the fundamentalist terrorists.
Gawker is like a tabloid without the scruples. We don't need to read tea leaves to see that.
Video games are a $10+billion dollar industry, however, and Kotaku is a major publisher in that industry which may be directly funding many of Gawker's other "journalistic sins".
I get the impression you are discounting Kotaku's actions or my bringing it up primarily because the subject is video games. If you have a poor opinion of that hobby, it may be affecting your judgment.
Bullshit reporting is bullshit reporting no matter the subject and mentioning their bad coverage of a hugely popular subject is absolutely relevant to the conversation.
Um, ahem, hackers, downvoters, internetizens, lend me your ears. Or eyes, fuck it.
Let's assume for a second that GamerGate is awful. Some nontrivial proportion of the "movement" are bigoted trolls who threaten people over the internet, violate their privacy, and drag down the tenor of discourse on messageboards they inhabit.
But consider that just maybe Kotaku actually has a pretty bad policy about conflicts of interest. How is someone supposed to post about this? 'Zikes didn't mention GamerGate. He didn't claim to support the movement or try to whitewash people's actions. All he did was to complain about article quality on a website which, for the record, I haven't read in months and have no opinion of (the only videogame I still play is Super Smash Brothers).
Are we so tribal that simply expressing a view associated with a dishonorable group of people leads to some downvote-heavy flamewar about them? As I clicked "reply", 'Zikes's comment was black. When the textbox had loaded, he was downvoted into the grey. Calm down, people.
It's certainly a polarizing topic.
While I have little sympathy for the company, I think the 1st amendment ramifications of this will be big no matter what the outcome of the trial.
While yes, there is a lot of linkbait trash, there are relevant original articles to tech (e.g. http://gawker.com/remember-brands-can-turn-your-dumb-tweets-...) that get caught by the filter. At the least, I haven't seen any of the former being submitted.
Anyways: the site is better off with the blunt-force ban on Gawker articles. There might be occasional worthwhile things there, but most of the stuff that isn't worthwhile is poison.
The original "articles" are few and far between.
Unfortunately instead of speaking "truth to power", it often just throws shit at power just for the hell of it.
Dan Lyons attempted to restart Valleywag but due to personal reasons it was short lived.
Valleywag has been dead since.
Most of those articles are reposts from elsewhere on Gawker as well.
Kind of a weird decision to just let it... die. I mean, valleywag's name branding has considerable value, if they just employ folks who keep on writing articles that valleywag always had, it would work well.
Biddle fancied himself a tech Jon Stewart, but really he was the crazy guy on the street yelling stuff at people walking by. His distain for everything and everyone tech was palpable.
I had hope when Dan Lyons took over (given his brilliant Fake Steve blog), but his choice in low-brow posts were incredibly disappointing. He said he wouldn't stoop to those levels, and then instantly did. I suspect he was pressured into it, and left because of that.
At its best, Valleywag is a sorely needed insiders view of our culture. At it's worst, it's absolute garbage.
Now I suppose we have things like @StartupLJackson on Twitter, or Silicon Valley on HBO to fill that void. (Not so coincidentally, Dan Lyons is a writer on the show.)
Not linking to it.
They and literally a thousand other news organizations, including Newsweek, NBC News, The Guardian... There's no doubt Gawker is a pox, but in terms of uselessness and vulgarity it's not really an outlier.
Newsweek was never a great publication, but whatever it was, it's not that anymore: it was sold to the Daily Beast, stripped for parts, and then spun back out and acquired by another company.
Although the former scenario is assuming there's any type of editorial control at any of these orgs, which is probably mostly a relic of times gone by.
The double standard.
Sounds like the complete 100% opposite of journalism.