Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life

by Zoe Quinn

The problem is that you fundamentally cannot shame someone who is proud of what they are doing.

The principles of covering and studying online abuse in journalism and academia are the same: center the victim, prioritize consent, and treat them as a partner instead of a subject or a spectacle.

The goal should be to report and analyze the larger issues at play, not simply to profit off people’s desire to consume other people’s suffering. Shining a light on something has to be done the right way, because there’s a fine line between raising awareness of a serious problem and creating misery porn for easy traffic.

There are no “bad guys” or “good guys”—only the impact we have on others, and we have to take extreme care to examine what that impact is when trying to make things better. When you think you’re the good guy, it’s easy to lose sight of the wrongs you’re committing.

By dubbing them “those people,” we are also explicitly setting ourselves apart as if we aren’t one of them and thus can’t be part of the problem. Therein lies the most common trap we fall into when trying to make the internet a safer place: framing it as a war of good people versus bad people instead of looking at acceptable and unacceptable ways to treat each other. “Good people” get off the hook for doing bad things, while “bad people” aren’t considered worth understanding or empathizing with and aren’t encouraged to progress, evolve, and do better.

The inverse of dehumanization is empathy.

Do not let your desire to help outweigh the needs of those you’re helping.

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