Breitbart on Gamergate (with Garrulous Digression)

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Breitbart on Gamergate (with Garrulous Digression)

An article by one Noah Dulis at Breitbart’s Big Journalism too startling not to share:

Supporters of the GamerGate movement have been working tirelessly to hunt down those who would use their banner to cause personal harm—all while the media continues to claim that GamerGate members are either participating in or indifferent to the harassment of women in the gaming industry.

On Thursday, Salon published a column titled, “#Gamergate is really about terrorism: Why Bill Maher should be vilifying the gaming community, too.” In the article, the author correlates GamerGate to the actions of fundamentalist Islamist terrorists: “putting statements from your garden-variety Islamic extremist side by side with the kinds of threats Sarkeesian and others have received, it’s clear these two groups share some similar attitudes toward women.”

While the thrust of the article is focused more on what the author perceives to be a double standard in the treatment of the Muslim community as a result of the actions of jihadists, it furthers the idea that GamerGate is a hate movement with no place in any discussion of transparency and ethics in the gaming industry and press. In doing so, it shows how the media is so invested in demonizing GamerGate that it is silencing the best ally in combating online harassment: GamerGate supporters themselves.

Meet Margaret Gel.

Margaret is an avid GamerGate supporter and has been working along with others since the movement’s inception to protect both supporters and critics of GamerGate from harassment and abuse online. Margaret credits Twitter user @LetsSailHatan for coming up with the platform that has allowed anyone concerned with online threats, doxxing (the revealing of personally identifying information), and harassment to identify and shut down such trolls on Twitter: the #GamerGate Harassment Patrol.

“You show us who’s harassing, attach the words ‘#GamerGate Harassment Patrol’ to the tweet, and we in #GamerGate all report them at once,” Margaret explained. “We’ve gotten accounts suspended in less than 15 seconds this way: it’s VERY helpful for erasing dox that people post of others.”

“Anyone sending threats is not welcome in #GamerGate,” she continued. “We have random people come in and use the tag to send death threats. We don’t want them, we don’t need them, and we are watching to make sure that their crimes are reported to the proper authorities.”

“If you report harassment and include the exact words ‘#GamerGate Harassment Patrol’ in your tweet, it shows up here, and many of us see it,” Margaret explained. “As long as I’m at my desk, I keep a window showing the tag open. All it takes is one retweet and even more people see it, more people report it, and the account gets suspended.”

Margaret herself has been a victim of harassment, having received “two rape threats and two death threats.” She has also been doxxed, but she noted that when it happened on the image board 8chan, the community responded quickly to protect her: “No one else in the thread wanted anything to do with the person posting the dox: they didn’t approve of the posting of dox; they swore at the person who posted my dox.”

“The staff of /gg/, the ones who moderate it, protected me, removing the dox in record time. They deleted my dox in FIVE MINUTES,” she stressed.

Margaret’s experience is hardly unique as a GamerGate supporter. She provided me with extensive documentation of death threats, doxxing, and harassment committed against GamerGate supporters, all of which can be found in a growing catalog at the Twitter account @TheBattleAngel. The point of doing so isn’t to justify a never-ending back and forth of attacks between supporters and critics of GamerGate but to highlight the discrepancy between the media’s attempts to mischaracterize GamerGate based on the actions of extremists while ignoring critics of GamerGate engaging in the same type of behavior. “I’m more infuriated that there are so many people who keep getting death threats, and yet the media keeps on saying that THEY are the terrorists,” she said.