| >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? |
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.