[SomeCallMeTim]

>Grayson covered Quinn without revealing this relationship

You're repeating lies. A quote from the article I linked above:

>But Grayson never reviewed Depression Quest. He once wrote half a sentence about the game, before his relationship with Quinn ever started, but that's it. Critics of Quinn and Grayson have also raised concerns about this Kotaku article [1]—it was written before they started dating.

This has been confirmed directly by Kotoku and Grayson on multiple occasions. Google it.

Please repeat after me: There is no smoking gun.

The entire GamerGate movement is based on lies, misogyny, and anti-feminism. Find a different hashtag if you care about journalism ethics, and stop only blaming the women. The journalist, in this case, was a man, but he wasn't doxed, just Quinn! In other cases it was the female journalists who were harassed. (Not that doxing is ever the right answer! And not that I should even have to explain that...)

No, GG is clearly not about journalistic ethics. It's a group that's attempting to bully people into reporting only what they want to hear -- and they find it easier to bully the women. Charming, really.

Find a new group to defend, or risk being painted with a rather nasty brush.

[1] http://tmi.kotaku.com/the-indie-game-reality-tv-show-that-we...

[Nadya]

>The entire GamerGate movement is based on lies, misogyny, and anti-feminism.

Not true. Although an initial lie may have sparked it - a raging fire isn't started without a lot of fuel lying around to keep it burning.

>Find a different hashtag if you care about journalism ethics, and stop only blaming the women.

We already did that. A different hashtag would do what exactly? Nothing. Other than causing a splinter group, confusion, and easier co-opting of the tag. Or should we go back to #5GuysBurgersAndFries and #Quinnspiracy? Those were things. Those are things separate from #GamerGate (hence the different tag).

>The journalist, in this case, was a man, but he wasn't doxed, just Quinn

In that particular case - and while doxing is wrong - don't pretend "only anti-GG" get doxed. [0] [1] Their is also a stark contrast between how the two sides blame each other. Anti-GG has no problem blaming GG in a heartbeat while GG blames third party trolls and not the opposing side because more likely than not - it's third party trolls.

>No, GG is clearly not about journalistic ethics.

Which is why countless media publishers have adopted or updated their ethical standards and practices from Oct-Jan of last year? Must be some sort of non-pressured, weird, coincidental timing that they all felt the need to disclose their ethical standards. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Complaints to the FTC even caused Kotaku and other publishers to add disclosure for affiliate linking. [7]

Unless you're saying 2-7 have nothing whatsoever to do with #GG? I find that a bit of a stretch to believe.

Their is also the donations and support from 4chan/GG towards TFYC [8] which Zoe Quinn tried to lambaste and media outlets refused to cover. How women-hating of #GG to support female devs when another female dev was shouting down at them.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2tbbkg/a_fi...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOioaFpZ3tU

[2] http://www.ign.com/wikis/ign/Standards_and_Practices

[3] http://www.destructoid.com/a-word-on-ethics-280654.phtml

[4] http://www.gameranx.com/about/

[5] http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/ed...

[6] http://www.eurogamer.net/policies.php?view=how-we-work

[7] http://techraptor.net/content/ftc-forces-gawker-make-disclos...

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fine_Young_Capitalists

[SomeCallMeTim]

>Although an initial lie may have sparked it

Is there a single confirmed case of any issue that the #gg outrage is based on? Between the various topics above (Quinn, femfreq, "We are all gamers now" article) that, at least seemingly, spawned #GamerGate, it seems like it grew entirely from mob rage, and continues along in that vein.

>Complaints to the FTC even caused Kotaku and other publishers to add disclosure for affiliate linking.

Even terrible events can lead to positive results. A particularly bad fire that kills hundreds may get the fire code changed so that thousands will be saved; that doesn't mean that we encourage disasters for the sake of improving safety of those who survive.

The #GamerGate tag is irrevocably tied to all of the hate spewed by people associated with the tag at this point. It doesn't even matter that some people associated with the group may have done some good, because a lot of people carrying that banner spew misogynist crap and other hate speech pretty much constantly. It's not even the doxing that I'm talking about here; I'm just observing that, when I see a #gg tweet in the wild, it is almost universally associated with some form of hatred.

If you come along and tell me that those aren't the "real" GG, that the real GG is only about journalistic ethics in games, why should I believe you when most of what I see associated with the tag is garbage? If you're honestly not a misogynist, then I have bad news for you: Most of the people who tweet using #gamergate are, and you should find a different tag to represent the positive things you are doing, or you will be associated with what they're saying. If you don't mind being associated with what they say, then...well, I have nothing more to say.

[Nadya]

Feel free to take this to email.

>why should I believe you when most of what I see associated with the tag is garbage

I don't ask for you to believe me. I just ask that you don't believe the media. Given they're the ones being criticized, they're incapable of giving a fair representation of the situation. That goes equally both ways, of course. I wouldn't ask you to trust an openly pro-#GG source (like Breitbart) for their opinion on #GG either.

There are a quite a number of neutral opinions to be found but they will not be found in prominent media and will mostly be random people on Tumblr or Medium which can make taking their word on things harder. [0]

>It doesn't even matter that some people associated with the group may have done some good, because a lot of people carrying that banner spew misogynist crap and other hate speech pretty much constantly.

I ask you to look at this [1]. One would have to cherrypick very selectively to get an outlook like that. Which is exactly what the media does.

I haven't been 'active' on the #GG tag in quite some time, you can verify that by checking my Twitter but I still read it from time to time and had a brief few months of high activity.

The harassment I see goes both ways [2] [3] with one side getting a hell of a lot more retweets/favorites for their hatred than the other and the other side having an entire hashtag dedicated to preventing it. I'll let you figure out which side is doing which.

When you try and stop harassment (as I legitimately tried to do on many instances) you get bitched at or blocked or told you're using a sockpuppet to build up PR. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario because the ones controlling the media control the public narrative. Don't call it out? You support it! Call it out and stand against it? You're using a sockpuppet for PR!

>Most of the people who tweet using #gamergate are, and you should find a different tag to represent the positive things you are doing, or you will be associated with what they're saying. If you don't mind being associated with what they say, then...well, I have nothing more to say.

I could say the same thing about #KillAllMen being blasted by feminists and if you're a feminist you're a sexist man hater. Do I think all feminists are a bunch of sexists man haters? No. Hashtags can be used by absolutely anyone and switching hashtags just makes it easier for the media to slander the new, less established tag.

[0] https://medium.com/@Slyly_Mirabelle/a-year-of-gamergate-from...

[1] http://equalityactualitatem.tumblr.com/post/96992331819/on-g...

[2] http://gamergateharassment.tumblr.com/

[3] http://antigamergate.tumblr.com/

[SomeCallMeTim]

>I ask you to look at this [1]. One would have to cherrypick very selectively to get an outlook like that. Which is exactly what the media does.

You don't need to use explicit words to be saying misogynistic things. #notyourshield is also a misguided movement, IMO.

>I could say the same thing about #KillAllMen being blasted by feminists and if you're a feminist you're a sexist man hater.

No, you couldn't really. If you tried to claim that #KillAllMen was actually a women's rights group that focused on bringing out the vote, then even if it had (somehow? facetiously?) been started that way, but then later was co-opted by militant man haters, then yes, I'd say anyone who didn't actually believe in killing all men would need to abandon the use of that tag.

I did a lot of reading and observing of people's tweets on my own timeline before coming to the conclusions I have. I don't see a media conspiracy; I see a single narrative that makes sense based on the data, and that, yes, has been reported on by the media.

Are there crazys on both sides? Absolutely. But I've blocked tons of people on Twitter and elsewhere for making misogynistic comments with the #gamergate tag. And just because they can group together and protect their friends doesn't mean that I would ever be comfortable with a group that demonizes "SJWs."

[Nadya]

>#notyourshield is also a misguided movement, IMO.

How so? It's a direct response to this scenario: http://40.media.tumblr.com/73df4acf6fc05fcdca641f417a7d247a/...

There's a bunch of mostly privileged and mostly white people speaking on behalf of all POC, all trans, all women, etc.

There are two issues with the above, depending on where one stands. One can be seen as "forgetting to include us" ala #WhiteFeminism and the other can be "speaking wrongly on our behalf" ala #NotYourShield

>I see a single narrative that makes sense based on the data

Please cite the data then.

I've gone out of my way to provide actual data that shows the exact opposite, with abuse being <1% while you have yet to provide any data whatsoever other than saying "my position is based on data".

[SomeCallMeTim]

>There's a bunch of mostly privileged and mostly white people speaking on behalf of all POC, all trans, all women, etc.

I think that most of the people in question who have been demonized have been women who have been speaking out about treatment of women in games. Or in Quinn's case, someone who was demonized as a cheater with no redeeming excuse at all (at first -- and what rationale eventually surfaced was shown to be lies).

"Internalized oppression" is a real thing. Not listening to the oppressed is also a real thing. #NotYourShield is misguided because it ignores the first and mocks people who are trying to help because some people do the second. Just because a member of a group doesn't feel oppressed doesn't make the experience any less real for someone else in that group. I've met minorities who have it all and who insist that they haven't encountered prejudice for years, and yet I read other accounts of people who are pulled over and harassed because of the color of their skin. The experience of the first person doesn't invalidate the experience of the second.

>Please cite the data then.

I have, above, several times: personal observations of many tweets with #gamergate combined with boorish claims, plus many different articles by journalists who "dove deep" and tried to find people to talk with about #gg. The "data" you sited was restricted to a few specific "obvious" hate words.

And just because I apparently am a glutton for punishment, I just read the top 100 or so tweets on a #gamergate search. Aside from circlejerk-GG-is-awesome-we-are-the-best posts, most were slams of Anita (misquoting her in several), (proud!) reports of the trolling of Brenda Wu, slams of SJWs, or claims that the media was distorting what happened at SXSW. The last was probably the actions of a single bad actor (or a small number of them? and with all of this anti-terrorism technology in place, why haven't they CAUGHT them?!), but the media loves an easy narrative, regardless of the truth. The rest of the tweets didn't do anything to change my opinion of GG.

What kills me is that, if it's true, entire stated premise of #gg is naive: Journalism has existed in an ethical grey area since shortly after the printing press was invented.

So how do you deal with journalists being too close to those they review? Support good reviewers who are willing to slam games that deserve it.

It won't hurt to get journalists to admit when they're being paid by advertisers, but it won't do any actual good either, because most or all journalists benefit from game publisher money or freebies. If every single review ever has a generic "we may have received freebies and/or advertising from this publisher" disclaimer, what have you accomplished? And specific disclaimers won't ever happen (for logistical reasons) except if it's a publisher like Consumer's Reports that never accepts freebies or advertising. And there are very few of those around.

So what is it again that you're trying to accomplish?

P.S. It is a good thing that people donated to causes that help women and/or minorities. I don't want to minimize that. But the bulk of people using #gamergate are still using it to promote what I would consider negative-for-society ideas (in a Kant/Moral Imperative sense), so I stand my decision to block most #gamergate-tweeting accounts and generally criticize the hashtag.

P.P.S. I am at this point tiring of this discussion. I will cede you the last word if you reply, otherwise it's been an interesting chat. Thanks for keeping it civil. Yes, that's a point in your favor.