[freebsdgirl]

I am really so very tired of seeing people say this.

I'm going to explain this once, and I'm only doing this here because despite my reservations over the community, I know that HN is generally a place where people are intelligent enough to realize that words mean things, and those meanings don't usually change because we have feelings.

Harassment does not just mean threats. Harassment is not limited to words that contain threats of rape, death, violence, or some other kind of ruin. Harassment means "aggressive pressure or intimidation." Look it up. It's in the dictionary.

I have a directory that contains over 70k json files. Each file contains a tweet that mentions my name. These files were generated over the past 6 weeks. Not every mention is negative, nor is every mention about GamerGate. However, a significant number are people from GamerGate that are tweeting negative things at me.

Every morning, I would wake up, make coffee, and plop down in front of my computer to see what I had missed. This has been my routine for as long as I can remember. Despite the long-term harassment I've faced, it was not until GamerGate that I would wake up to a seemingly unending stream of hate in my twitter mentions. It's not one person. It's never one person when GamerGate is involved. It's the whole goddamn mob. This is why I wrote ggautoblocker - because there is no block button for a mob.

What precisely would you call it when hundreds or even thousands of people direct so much of their time and energy to repeatedly contacting a single person who has never talked to them before with messages of hate, insults, attacks on credibility, and threats of getting that person fired? I would call that harassment. I might even argue that that mob harassment is worse than more serious threats coming from a single person.

I don't need to prove anything to you. I don't need to tie anything to GamerGate. That's your hang up, not mine. If I thought you weren't so biased that you would warp data to meet your own ends, I might give you the full list of tweet IDs (distributing the json itself would be against ToS) in the name science. You care far more about your cause than you do harassment in tech, and that's telling. You came here to argue a hashtag that only matters to the people that use it. This is bigger than you.

[srslack]

>you nutjob

Great start.

>However, a significant number are people from GamerGate that are tweeting negative things at me.

Name and shame the harassers. Disagreement, however, is not harassment. If I enter into a very, very large public conversation on a forum, is it harassment if people reply to me specifically because they take issue with my characterizations?

>It's never one person when GamerGate is involved.

That's because it's an amorphous hashtag that anyone can take up.

>I don't need to tie anything to GamerGate.

You did. In your blog post. You blamed the harassment of Anita, Zoe and Quinn on GamerGate. It's not mincing words. You said that GamerGate supporters were the ones harassing Anita, Wu, and Zoe. Fact of matter.

It's not my cause. I'm just tired of dishonesty.

Stopped playing videogames when I was 18, thanks, and don't particularly give a fuck about consumer recommendation media being fundamentally underhanded. I'll stop short of appealing to relative privation: rest assured that this isn't "my cause."

Harassment in tech is an important issue. How do we deal with anonymous trolls without burning down the forest?

[freebsdgirl]

>Great start.

Yeah, I edited. I'm exhausted and probably shouldn't be overly insulting when I don't even know you. You're kind of just another person piling onto a tired point, though.

>Disagreement, however, is not harassment.

I would never claim that disagreement is harassment. Until recently, I had never even used the word harassment to describe what has happened to me, and believe me, I've been in plenty of disagreements.

>>I don't need to tie anything to GamerGate.

>You did. In your blog post.

Yes, I did. But I don't need to keep proving it.

Do you understand what happens when a woman claims to be harassed by GamerGate? She's asked for proof by a minimum of 30 people, none of which know how to look at replies to a tweet to see that they are just piling on. None of them look for context to see if proof was already linked. Dead serious. This is what happens.

In the event that proof is supplied, there's only a few results I've ever witnessed.

- Gaters claim that the screenshot was faked. They grab mspaint and draw red lines that somehow supposedly disprove things through timestamps and broken logic that I can't even begin to follow.

- Gaters claim the troll is not associated with GamerGate and has never been a part of GamerGate, so it's not their problem. I am not sure who the gatekeeper of GamerGate is, but as far as I know, it's a hashtag, a hate group, and possibly a cult. The organization behind GamerGate is a poor approximation of the late stages of Occupy Wall Street, where every mentally unstable person with a cause was showing up and shoving pamphlets in tourists' faces. There is no barrier to entry. If someone claims to be a supporter of GamerGate, and they use the hashtag, I'm going to believe them.

- Gaters say "OK, reporting him!" and that's the end of the story for them. That's the most they want to do. Never mind that reporting someone for harassment has to be done by the person being harassed. The form for reporting harassment won't even let you fill it out if you state that the harassment was directed at someone else, last I checked.

- Gaters link a 90 minute YouTube video of some dude on his couch explaining why Anita Sarkeesian is the devil. Or a YouTube video of thunderf00t.

I started out by supplying proof early on, until I saw this pattern emerging. Now, I've taken a stand. I refuse to provide any more proof, because my story is otherwise verifiable, and I don't have a reputation for crying "harassment!" when that's not the case. Quite the opposite. It took me this long to go public with what happened.

GamerGate is small beans, and I would have nothing to gain by lying about being harassed by them. For one, they are anonymous. I have actual names of people that have harassed me over the years. Why wouldn't I go after them instead? Could it be because GamerGate isn't the issue, but the culture is? Maybe GamerGate is just a symptom of a larger problem. Maybe that's the point I was getting at all along. Subtext.

[srslack]

>Yes, I did. But I don't need to keep proving it.

It's a bit different when we're talking about a blog post versus twitter conversations, no? You made the assertion that GamerGate supporters were responsible for all of that harassment.

>Gaters say "OK, reporting him!" and that's the end of the story for them. That's the most they want to do. Never mind that reporting someone for harassment has to be done by the person being harassed.

ToS violations should cover that, right? Maybe that's what they're talking about.

I'm sorry that you got harassed by ED, weev, and a bunch of other no-lifes. I'm not sure how it's supposed to be fundamentally dealt with, however. Therein lies the problem.

[Cushman]

I'll take it on good faith that this is not "your cause", and just point out that this comment and others you've made amounts to a far-reaching denial of 'freebsdgirl's lived experience, to say nothing of other women you aren't directly replying to. Your message is clear and unnuanced: "I don't believe you."

So, two questions: First, just, why? Do you have any concrete reason to try to second-guess these specific women's first-hand experiences?

Second, do you really think that's a good default response to someone who comes to us from a place of vunerability? (Is this the "forest" you're so keen to protect?)

[geographomics]

You are completely missing the entire point to nitpick over a hashtag. Just mentally replace "GamerGate supporters" with "#GamerGate supporters" or even "#GamerGate hashtag users" if you feel that the former is an unfair miscategorisation. The issue here is a disgraceful onslaught of harassment by an abusive mob, not their nuanced opinions on ethical breaches in games journalism.