Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life

by Zoe Quinn

I finally cut all ties to my abusive ex in an attempt to heal and move on. But abusers hate nothing more than losing their ability to control you. If I no longer cared what he thought about me, he’d have to attack the things I did care about—my friends, my career, and my art.

my ex posted a sprawling manifesto, just shy of 10,000 words, detailing the ways in which I was a whore on multiple websites dedicated to my industry, but not before workshopping it with friends in order to cause the most possible damage to my career and sanity. The post was immediately taken down for being wildly inappropriate,

he moved his masterpiece to the parts of the web populated by people who are recreational life-destroyers. It spread like wildfire. Thousands of people who had never heard of me before rallied around his banner and took up the crusade, latc...

My home address and phone number were discovered and distributed, leading to 5 a.m. phone calls from strangers detailing the ways they planned to rape me and people bragging about leaving dead animals in my mailbox. Nude photos of me were dug up, printed out, jizzed on by strangers, and mailed to colleagues, friends, and family.

Using the same techniques that are used to spread hoaxes or viral in-jokes, the mob began running coordinated “operations” with the goal of destroying my life from every possible angle while rebranding their abuse as a crusade for “ethics in games journalism” to attract new members and obfuscate the repugnant behavior by disguising it as a consumer revolt.

My personal disaster metastasized into the phenomenon known as #GamerGate: a new front in the full-blown culture war over the heart and soul of the internet itself.

The thing about systems? They’re predictable, and anything that can be predicted can be disrupted, dismantled, and destroyed.

I started hyperventilating in the cramped stall. The relationship with Eron had been brief, intermittent, and unhealthy. I

making pictures of cats go viral and using the power of anonymous mobs to devastate the lives of people they’ve deemed worthy of their hate.

The Manifesto was almost 9,000 words about me that could have been boiled down to just one: “slut.”

The Manifesto was carefully crafted as a call to arms against both an adulterous whore and something allegedly more insidious. It

So he gave a community that loves a witch hunt a woman on whom to take out their insecurities, gift wrapped to the stake with kindling at her feet.

My Wikipedia page had been edited: it now included a time of death, coinciding with my next scheduled public appearance. My friends and I reverted it, only to find ourselves in a tug-of-war with numerous would-be vandals, removing anti-Semitic slurs, swastikas, and threats from my page all night. The comments sections on my blogs and games were targeted. All of the sites I used—to keep in touch with my global network of friends and loved ones, the places that are a fundamental part of my life—were now flooded with messages threatening to rape me and telling me to kill myself.

who told me otherwise was just pretending out of pity. I was nothing more than a fat, ugly slut.

now abusers were flooding it with damaging messages, trying to get vulnerable people to kill themselves. Multiple people stepped in to help me delete those messages, and then those people quickly became new targets for the mob.

I’m still plagued by constant threats and living in relative hiding. The abuse spread outward from me, devouring everyone I’ve ever been close to, and sometimes total strangers, for “crimes” as minor as being seen with me at an industry convention or simply sharing my name. GamerGate

I’ve been forced to watch as hackers tracked down almost everyone I’ve ever known, including my father, high school classmates, and former employers. I’ve read their lengthy discussions about how to drive me to suicide and the merits of raping me versus torturing me first and raping me afterward. I’ve watched major corporations bow to them in fear while those with less resources take risks to do the right thing and suffer for it.

The next day, the girl told everyone at school before I had really even processed what had happened, so I ended up vehemently denying it and closing myself off (sorry, Amanda). I had new-girl mystery for all of four days before being marked as a weird lesbo slut.

place like Bareback Exchange, a forum for people who get off on transmitting STDs to as many people as possible, often without consent. For every community of angsty kids who pretend they are secretly vampires, there are seven different forums of white nationalists who sincerely believe that Jewish people are secretly vampires. For every geeky and silly toy collector’s community, there are forums full of dudes collecting upskirt photos of random women and girls who had no idea they were about to become porn.

“Stormfront users have been disproportionately responsible for some of the most lethal hate crimes and mass killings since the site was put up in 1995. In the past five years alone, Stormfront members have murdered close to 100 people.”

Before embarking on a shooting spree that killed six and injured fourteen, Elliot Rodger posted a video on several internet forums dedicated to hating women, discussing the deeply misogynist and racist motives for his rampage. He namechecked one of these sites in his manifesto, saying he had discovered

full of men who are starved of sex, just like me.” The forum had “confirmed many of the theories I had about how wicked and degenerate women really are.”

told about dealing with online abuse is wrong, but the misconception that “trolls” will just go away if they’re ignored is possibly the most damaging.

This kind of behavior is not just about terrorizing you; it’s about control. It’s about making you want to disappear, instilling fear, and limiting your possibilities. It’s about punishing you for stepping out of line. It’s about isolating and hurting you in specific ways to provoke a reaction.

my attackers’ dream was to get me to stop “feeding the trolls” and shut up. They didn’t want to tease me; they wanted me gone. That first night brought countless forms of harassment—the

But this was somehow more insidious—he wasn’t just continuing his abuse; he was crowdsourcing it.

My ex bragged publicly about how he designed the Manifesto to exploit the key things that make online content go viral, weaving in jokes and memes the way corporate brands do when they’re trying to court a young, tech-savvy demographic.

The same techniques that people have used to organize important grassroots movements like Black Lives Matter can be used by people trying to destroy someone.

The ones that were especially vicious were rewarded (in social media terms) with likes, shares, and people joining in on the abuse.

This phenomenon is often referred to as “dogpiling.” The cool remix culture that facilitates the spread of fanart and memes suddenly becomes a powerful tool to hurt someone.

Photos and videos of you are Photoshopped to label you a whore or to make you look uglier or fatter and then shared the s...

The “Five Guys Burgers and Fries” meme that The Ex had created was easily co-opted by other people, who made reams of almost propaganda-like ima...

The chatroom participants worked as a team to try to discover personal information about everyone connected to me, referring to it as “digging” and sharing form letters and tactics on how to best alert anyone in my life that I was a horrible slut.

They even orchestrated plans to donate to various charities specifically to make themselves look like concerned citizens and not a mob of people trying to get me killed.

The problem is that the algorithm isn’t terribly concerned with the actual content, just with the fact that whatever it is, it’s popular—because the algorithm doesn’t know the difference between negative and positive attention

Without any moderation, the algorithm started suggesting conspiracy websites and tabloids in place of actual news at an alarming rate.

The last few times I shared videos of my cats on my private, locked-down Facebook account, my friends complained in the comments about how the Facebook algorithm had begun suggesting that they check out a blog post some weirdo wrote accusing me of trying to infect people with HIV.

Paradoxically, the overly simplistic view of “popular = high quality” prevents the system from serving its purpose of suggesting content the user might actually want.

Content-neutral algorithms can turn the internet into a popularity contest in which the people who want to see you fail are the only ones motivated to vote.

These pundits are community leaders of a sort—they validate feelings and provide guidance. Internet Inquisitors position themselves as authority figures and truth tellers; they confirm the mob’s hatred, paranoia, and insecurities and direct it toward the nearest combustible witch on their radar. They serve as morale boosters, assuring the mob that they are correct, that their path is righteous, and that it’s the world that’s wrong (or in this case, the person they’re offering up as a sacrifice). Without leadership, a ragtag group of people who make being an asshole their hobby will usually fall apart from infighting or get bored in a short period.

Blue Skull Guy and a few other Internet Inquisitors even workshopped some of their videos there to optimize their content to suit the mob’s tastes.

Generally speaking, the bigger the following someone has, the less interested a service is in banning them.

but it’s hard to understand why episodes of Game of Thrones are wiped from places like YouTube within nanoseconds while chronic abusive users are allowed to flourish.

Just two months before GamerGate, 4chan had an “operation” aimed at harassing black feminists on Twitter with the hoax hashtag #EndFathersDay by creating fake accounts and pretending to be black feminists to infiltrate their ranks.

The issues MRAs spend their time fighting about tend to skew closer to “Why can’t I legally hit women?,” “Rape shouldn’t be a criminal offense,” and occasionally simply hissing the word “bitches.” Survivors of domestic violence and rape are some of their favorite targets.

number and would back off. In the quiet of the tiny room, I could hear grown men on the other end, asking if I could come suck their dicks if they promised to give my game a good review or screaming their “Five Guys” meme into the

It might sound trivial, but it was wrenching to delete so much of my life, like burning photo albums to make sure no one saw a private note written on the back of one photograph. In my haste, I deleted the account that hosted the award-nominated trailer I had made for Depression Quest, which I no longer had the backup for and is now gone

life. If I chose to vanish off the internet, it wouldn’t stop friends and loved ones from getting phone calls from strangers. Like a virus, doxing spreads to them, and they become collateral damage.

The first thing he did after getting served was to go on a neo-Nazi’s podcast and tell them whom I was dating now, providing Alex’s full name and what he did for a living. The mob quickly went to work, uncovering the name of the studio for which Alex was about to go work and then brigading everyone for whom that studio had ever worked with threats and more-legitimate-looking

Then there’s the anger. Anger at the people who did this to me, anger at the people who sat back and watched it happen, anger at the smug fucks who decided to turn a profit on it. It wasn’t just the Internet Inquisitors, either.