Blast of Zenius · @Zennistrad
16th Sep 2014 from TwitLonger
On #GamerGate, social justice, and guilty until proven innocent.
I've been commenting on #GamerGate for a while now on my Twitter account, but I feel that my full thoughts on the issue are not big enough to fit into 140 character messages, so I've decided to go ahead and make a bigger post about it.
In recent weeks I've watched as what started out as a somewhat minor controversy quickly flared up to become what is possibly the biggest and most elaborate flamewar in internet history. And while I have tried my best to see both sides of the issue, I feel that I can no longer hold back how I really feel about this.
#GamerGate, at least in its current incarnation, disgusts me. It is without question one of the most blindingly misguided internet movements I have ever SEEN.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that GamerGate's stated goal, ethics in games journalism, is bad. Games Journalism has a LOT of structural issues and its no secret that there are plenty of glaring flaws in it.
At first I was willing to afford some benefit of the doubt to GamerGate because I truly believed that something good could come out of it, even if it's relation to Zoe Quinn felt uncomfortably close to her personal life. We'd already seen Escapist Magazine revise their ethics policy before the hashtag even started, and that was encouraging since it lent some credence to the idea that GamerGate could do something good. We'd already uncovered some shady dealings with the IGF and Phil Phish, as well as the mass Reddit shadowbans which were admittedly a huge dick move on their part.
However, as the campaign continued and picked up notoriety, I began seeing more and more flaws within the movement. The most obvious ones were the allegations of harassment, which GamerGate claimed were untrue. Another one was that many of the first proponents of the movement such as MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, who are both very vocal anti-feminists, the former arguing that one of 4chan's catchphrases making sexual demands of female users wasn't sexist, and the latter making it abundantly clear that he dislikes anything that resembles feminist criticism. Even in the very beginning, supporters of the movement were trying to find a way to make it about social justice, including Internet Aristocrat's first video on the subject (skip to 19:50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5-51PfwI3M).
Then came Adam Baldwin. Baldwin was the one who coined the #GamerGate tag, and he is something of a notorious right-wing maverick. He stirred up a lot of controversy when he compared the financial realities of same-sex marriage to a hypothetical man marrying his son (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/24/adam-baldwin-gay-marriage_n_4846727.html). And while he did refute the claim, he still came off as a bit of an asshole.
After that, there came the chat logs. David Futrelle of We Hunted the Mammoth/Manboobz infamy posted an analysis of a chat log for an IRC about Zoe Quinn, who started the entire movement (http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/09/08/zoe-quinns-screenshots-of-4chans-dirty-tricks-were-just-the-appetizer-heres-the-first-course-of-the-dinner-directly-from-the-irc-log/). Many accusations were leveled that this chat log either didn't give the full picture or most of the quotes were taken "out of context", but after having read the full text (http://puu.sh/boAEC/f072f259b6.txt), I can't say that they're much better IN context either. Context does not suddenly make a bad thing less bad, all it means is that there are other less bad things surrounding it.
In the log, people frequently made very cruel jokes at Zoe's expense, including ruining her career and driving her to suicide. Much of the discussion is peppered with gendered language like "whore" and "slut", and one user even confessed to tweeting nudes of Zoe Quinn to her defenders. (The most common defense of that is that they were part of a consensual photoshoot: except that the real problem is that the photos are still being spread SPECIFICALLY TO HUMILIATE HER AND HER SUPPORTERS so this defense utterly fails.) People also discussed the doxxing (leaking personal contact information to invite harassment) of a man named Joshua Boggs and his wife.
Last but not least we have the issue of Zoe Quinn and her relationship with both iFred and the Fine Young Capitalists. TFYC were a charity for women that was supposedly doxxed by Quinn, which resulted in a massive backlash from 4chan's /v/, who ended up partially funding their charity. Except, as it was later confirmed by TFYC themselves, she didn't actually doxx them, it was an associate of hers and she had no part in orchestrating the doxx (http://thefineyoungcapitalists.tumblr.com/post/96064216295/on-zoe-quinn-our-last-statement). A second controversy erupted when people claimed that Zoe Quinn lied about donating to iFred because she removed the charity from her website, when it was later proven she did actually donate (https://www.facebook.com/ifredorg/posts/373372282788073). A similar thing happened when the already-infamous Anita Sarkeesian was supposedly forced out of her home by death threats and people suggested she might be lying based on a lack of information from the police, only for it to be confirmed that she DID contact the authorities and was working with the FBI (https://twitter.com/davidahilljr/status/510594440788856833). For a movement that bases itself on "finding the truth", GamerGate seems remarkably comfortable with jumping to the entirely wrong conclusion based on incomplete evidence, completely forgoing "innocent until proven guilty" because their suspicious always trump reasonable doubt.
Of course, one could argue that this isn't representative of GamerGate as it is now. You could argue that people are making more of an effort to call out the shitbags who are in their movement... except this isn't true. At least, it isn't true ENOUGH.
To my knowledge nobody on GamerGate has apologized to either Anita Sarkeesian or Zoe Quinn about their false accusations of lying, despite the very real harm that this kind of unfounded accusation can do. There were half-hearted retractions, but no apologies to the ones who actually needed them.
And even know, GamerGate continues to be virtually overrun with some grade-A assholes. Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart, a conservative news rag, was praised by GamerGate for one of his articles on it (http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/09/01/Lying-Greedy-Promiscuous-Feminist-Bullies-are-Tearing-the-Video-Game-Industry-Apart) and continues to be a major figure in it. This is the exact same person who shortly afterward victim-blamed Jennifer Lawrence for having her private nude photos leaked without her consent (http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/09/01/Who-s-to-blame-for-nude-photos-of-Jennifer-Lawrence-leaking-on-the-internet).
THIS is the man that GamerGate holds up as their ideal of "journalistic ethics." Not because he's ACTUALLY ethical, but because he agrees with them. And he's not the only nutjob on their side. Internet Aristocrat, who kickstarted the movement before it even had a name, unironically compares social justice to 1984 (https://twitter.com/Int_Aristocrat/status/511179000345939969), an argument that reads like an alternate version of Godwin's Law. Other similar arguments have been made (https://twitter.com/NinJayJay/status/511693932200083456) and they tend to receive massive support from GamerGate, both the previous tweet and Internet Aristocrat's tweet have received upwards of 200 retweets and favorites while other GamerGate tweets have to be extremely lucky to make even half that number.
And yet, despite given support to these beliefs, despite choosing to let these people represent their movement, GamerGate claims that it's not about gender. They CLAIM it has nothing to do with feminism and social justice, but everything about their movement, from the public figures they choose to represent them, to the very originators of the movement scream misogyny. And yes, I do mean misogyny in the most literal sense, because the current ideological leanings of the movement support a social climate where women are a disproportionate target of scorn and are assumed to be lying when they speak out about it, while the men receive relatively little scorn. Don't believe me? People in GamerGate don't need to be reminded not to harass or insult Devin Faraci, Bob Chipman, or any of the other prominent male figures against the, but they have to CONSTANTLY be reminded not to make it about Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkeesian or other women.
I can no longer afford to consider myself a neutral party on this matter. Until GamerGate experiences a radical paradigm shift that eliminates the toxic elements (and not just in harmful behaviors but in harmful IDEOLOGY), then I cannot give support it.
Please note that I am not condemning the INDIVIDUALS in this movement or saying that ALL of it is bad. On the contrary, I've met two very nice and reasonable people in it: @LadyFuzztail and @SdoctmdPlays, and although I disagree with their specific stance on GamerGate I do consider them to be respectable individuals with admirable views on equality.
But I do not support the COLLECTIVE identity of GamerGate because it is tainted by an anti-feminist view that implicitly favors the status quo of victim-blaming, abuse, and "guilty until proven innocent" for women. It is a movement that is actively sabotaging its own legitimacy by allowing individuals with toxic anti-equality to become the most prominent voices while the reasonable voices such as @LadyFuzztail and @SdoctmdPlays are either drowned out or refuse to speak out.
And unless GamerGate fixes those issues and fixes them SOON, then the movement is destined to crash and burn.