Zoe Quinn and Randi Harper have both been described as ‘anti-harassment advocates’ by NY Mag writer Jesse Singal. Singal’s article suggests that Candace Owens was deluded in her conclusion that Quinn and Harper were instigating harassment against her. Primeape is Quinn’s secured twitter account.
‘Anti-harassment advocate’ Harper to Owens: ‘you are a fucking idiot’ http://archive.is/u6WRE
Zoe Quinn had begged Candace Owens to put an end to her plans for Social Autopsy. After an e-mail exchange and phone call with Quinn, Owens received a veiled threat direct to the personal e-mail address she had given Quinn. Owens believes Quinn and Harper coordinated harassment against her.
Jesse Singal has enough of a relationship with Quinn that he was one of the followers of her secured twitter account since at least September 2015.
Singal did not disclose his relationship with Quinn in either his NY Mag article or to Candace Owens when he reached out to her for comment.
Zoe Quinn leaked the private e-mail conversation between Candace and herself to her 300+ followers.
Jesse Singal knew about this.
(Where I found the additional comments added to the screenshot https://twitter.com/SoulessGinger8/status/723506516066598912)
Jamie Walton of the Wayne Foundation -
This is the exact type of cronyism that began GamerGate. Journalists being far too comfortable with subjects of their articles without disclosure; a clique closing ranks and attacking others to deflect from their own misdeeds.
Zoe Quinn presented a private e-mail exchange from a woman who didn’t know anything about her, who was not in any sense a threat to her, to her followers for the purpose of mocking and derision. Singal had a relationship with Quinn, was following Zoe’s private account, knew of the e-mail leak, and he did not mention a word of this in his article. He pretends as though, between Harper being abusive to Owens openly, and Quinn leaking e-mails, that this is all perfectly normal behavior not worthy of note from a pair of anti-harassment activists.
The Zoe Post reveals an emotionally abusive relationship in which Zoe constantly lied to Eron Gjonji, cheated on Eron with multiple men and would use emotionally charged language to shift the blame onto Eron. She also used the threat of suicide against Eron. Understanding the Zoepost.
Interview with The Fine Young Capitalists, a company set up to help women in game development.
A person who worked with Zoe relays how she claimed to have killed a person -http://archive.is/mUmXS
You can read about Zoe’s activity on helldump in her own words.
What if GamerGate is a movement that treats media with the skepticism it deserves? What if the gaming press made a mistake in rallying around Zoe Quinn, and any one else ensuring that discussion was censored? What if Eron was trying to warn you about her? What if her and her allies are every bit as bad as they say their opponents are, and have been cashing in as they do it?
This handful of bad actors - Quinn, Harper, Grayson, Alexander, Kuchera, among other ideologues , and click bait artists, through their cronyism, shameless question begging sensationalism and virtue signalling, have perpetuated a false moral panic against the gaming community for years. Mass media bought in.
We have been asked by mass media to trust this person. And when we say we don’t, if we dissent from their narrative, we get labelled harassers, sexists, a hate group, on and on.
GamerGate is a microcosm of a much larger problem with media. Every single day these supposedly reputable establishments give us reasons NOT to trust them. They deserve our skepticism. When media was banging the Iraq war drum it was obvious to any one that an outlet like Fox News had a focused agenda to push. The fact is, this is true of all major media outlets. They all have fallible people who fail to fact check, they all have friends to cover for, they all have their own agendas to push, and so they all need to be treated with skepticism. This is why GamerGate archives everything.
The same media that is telling you to believe Zoe Quinn is telling you that the gaming community and wider geek community is laden with misogynists, many of whom are intent on driving women out of gaming altogether, and video games contribute to sexist attitudes. This is a false moral panic, constructed by a handful of people, a convenient scapegoat to label dissenters from their narrative as terrible human beings and to use emotional manipulation for profit. The false moral panic against gamers is no less absurd than the belief that Dungeons and Dragons will make kids suicidal. Consider the implications of Randi Harper’s GGAutoblocker.
Randi Harper passes around the GGAutoblocker under the guise of anti-harassment in order that people can block thousands of strangers. This is how you create an echo-chamber. If you subscribe to a block bot, you are handing your brain over to whoever created the bot, you are allowing them to decide for you which ideas to listen to.
GamerGate is diverse across all spectrums of gender, race, and sexuality, with a wide variety of political views from the people who have supported it; though the data shows GGers mainly identify as liberals, and take classic liberal positions, such as support for freedom of expression, and support for gay marriage. GamerGate is a consumer movement that arose from frustrations with an unethical gaming press. Framing disagreement in general as abuse and harassment, and framing groups of people as hate groups allows press organizations like the Guardian to justify censorship, and has allowed the silencing of genuine people with real concerns regarding the role of media and our freedom of speech. This is especially concerning with political interests that desire greater control over online discourse. GamerGate takes a stand — we fight for our right to dissent against these narratives.
Take Leigh Alexander, one of the main journalists responsible for attacking the gaming community, who lost the trust of the gaming audience to such an extent that she no longer writes for gaming press. Now, she writes for the Guardian. Along with Graham Linehan (who helped create Father Ted and The It Crowd), they singled out a young disabled man to make fun of his appearance, publicly, on twitter.
Linehan later apologized, but accused Cyborgwolf of being part of a hate group. When you have a group of affluent journos and writers convinced that they have acceptable targets, how do we know at that point it’s not them that’s the hate group? Perhaps when we get passed the lies, what we find is that their case against gamers, and against GamerGate has always rested on a house of cards, and that they themselves display vile behavior. Linehan will stalk facebook profiles to shame people publicly. He did this because he was called a cunt, even though he calls people cunts in his online arguments. He has directed sexist insults at women and falsely accused women of being men on numerous occasions. They’re definitely real women.
Consider the implications of this false anti-gamer moral panic, this far reaching media scandal, in light of the fact how rarely the gaming community, whether they take the GamerGate tag or not, are given a platform for delivering a counter-point to the moral panic.
Why is the gaming community skeptical of Anita Sarkeesian?
Even just disagreeing with Anita is framed as harassment against her on the basis of her gender, rather than simply disagreement with her position. This is a form of kafkatrapping. Anita has often been held up, never critiqued, by mainstream media. Her positions on this and many topics can easily be interrogated, and this example is quite typical of the type of moralizing positions Anita will take regarding video games. The concept that there is anything whatsoever harmful about violence in video games is a topic that has been long considered as settled by the wider video game community, and with good reason, since Jack Thompon’s crusade against violent games failed in the early 2000s, and the vast counter-evidence. There is also strong evidence against Anita’s narrative that games contribute to sexist attitudes. We have to have the right to at least disagree with the moral panic narrative. Between pleading for interference from the UN against youtube videos, to labeling those that disagree even mildly as sexist harassers, to tight media relationships, our right to dissent is being undermined.
GamerGate has had to beg and plead to be heard, to make their case, because of the perception created by these outlets. Eventually, the Society of Professional Journalists listened.
You’ll notice the dim view the SPJ panelists take towards Gawker. GamerGate cost Gawker millions before Hulk Hogan delivered the final leg drop.
The gaming community is at the front line on the current debate on online freedom of speech. This is a topic of importance to any one that values free speech and expression as it displays the means by which authoritarians can stifle not just the speech of gamers, but any one else that ends up disagreeing with a media outlet or a particular clique with strong enough connections.
When considering the scale of media that failed to report on this topic accurately, the overall scandal is comparable to the video nasties moral panic. It’s unfortunate how many generations seem to fall into this trap.
The handful of journalists that have covered this topic well.
Allum Bokhari - http://gamepolitics.com/2014/12/29/editorial-gamergate-political-attitudes-part-1-movement-right-wing/
Ashe Schow - http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/disrupting-a-false-media-narrative-what-next/article/2570506
Erik Kain - http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/12/16/what-gamergate-is-actually-about/#134e742666f7
Cathy Young - http://observer.com/2015/10/blame-gamergates-bad-rep-on-smears-and-shoddy-journalism/
Milo Yiannopoulos -
Update: Milo has been accused of acting unethically by people who worked with him on his Privilege Grant.
The media had all the facts they needed from the beginning to realize they were being manipulated. Quinn, Harper, and Singal have given us all the material we need as an opportunity to look at the topic fresh. All the media had to do was listen to gamers. #GamerGate on twitter, the KotakuinAction subbreddit, any one else who’s chipped in since August, 2014. I wouldn’t be able to put an article like this together without the collective work of GamerGate.
I’ll leave you with what I said in the comments of the Rubin Report, plus additions:
GamerGate is a fascinating, multi-layered phenomenon involving tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people, and the media completely failed to research it in their coverage. The Guardian ran a headline that GamerGate is a last grasp at cultural dominance by angry white men, and all anyone had to do was go to youtube or twitter, search women of gamergate, notyourshield, and know the media fucking lied. This is one of the reasons I go to straight to the comments section of an article because you’ll often find people in comments sections who know more about the subject than the ‘journalists’ writing the articles, people will call them on their shit. On the ethics front, GamerGate successfully made their case to the SPJ, they got the FTC to act on Gawker’s native advertising, and you won’t hear one word about that in the mainstream media. I’m a lifelong liberal and the left wing press has fucking failed, pandering to the easy narrative of women under peril and misogynist gamers. Milo is right. On the internet, the distinction between left and right doesn’t mean what it used to, Anita Sarkeesian and Jack Thompson are both authoritarians, and the rest of us opposing them are cultural libertarians standing up for classical liberal values.
At this point, I don’t believe I will be satisfied until we’re given a platform in the mainstream to correct the record. While many of these concerns can be addressed outside of the GamerGate name, and the false moral panic affects gamers as well as developers in general, it’s worthwhile correcting the record as far as GamerGate is concerned. GamerGate is a consumer movement that rightfully treats media with skepticism. GamerGate fact checks and archives everything. They’ve created a remarkably effective information network. I’ve found them to be wonderfully creative, intelligent people. The media did wrong by this amazing collection of odd balls and thinkers. I will never let the people who perpetuate this lie get away with it. And that is the spirit of what I mean when I say I am pro-GamerGate.
Your Media Lies to You - GamerGate and Skepticism, by KaineDamo.
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Disclaimer: I had concerns regarding Candace Owens and her Social Autopsy project which I explore in further detail with a follow-up article.
