4 ms·

Gamergate's entire "mission" is highly questionable.

malvosenior 8y ago
Do you think that because of all of the biased media reports about it? That's literally what it's about (as is the topic of this thread). Social media, new media and old media being politicized, cliquish and dishonest. That Vox and Gawker are viewed as more reputable than Breitbart gets to the very heart of what Gamergate was about (IMO).
- TarpitCarnivore 8y ago
  At its surface I will take Vox reporting over what Breitbart puts out there. Much of the Breitbart stories I have read operated on FUD by taking the very smallest bit of information and conflating it into something far worse than what it is. Gakwer & Vox are not without their flaws, especially Gawker. Gamergate is the perfect example of how media & reporting can be twisted into whatever narrative people want to make. The fact that it evolved into what it did is all the proof you need. If it was ever about "ethics in journalism" they would have never championed YouTuber's and people with 0 track record of journalism. Not to mention they continue to prop up people with known histories of questionable behavior (Cheon, Moriarity). The very fact that much of their 'theory' was based in journalist talking to each other is laughable.
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    I agree that Breitbart is trash, but I disagree that Vox and Gawker are any better. The issue is that everyone is allowed to say that Breitbart is trash, Wikipedia can ban it... But while many people know that Vox and Gawker are also trash, there are many institutions and platforms that will prop them up as reputable (such as Wikipedia). That double standard spurred a lot of Gamergate's energy. Putting "ethics in journalism" in quotes says a lot, the whole thing was nothing but media meta-commentary (ethics in journalism).
    - TarpitCarnivore 8y ago
      Well I did fully acknowledge that Vox & Gawker are not without their problems. And if we break down Gawker to be ALL of Gawker a big problem of trust their is their Kinja contribution system, but some writers within the smaller groups (Kotaku, Gizmodo) have done good reporting. Wikipedia stated the reason they removed Brietbart was due to its "unreliability". That means they did take the time to explore BB as a source to validate the claims. If Vox and the entire Gawker network were "unreliable" I'm sure they would do the same. I put it in quotes because it was a statement the GG latched on to to claim as their whole reasoning. However countless doxing & harassement attempts, specifically towards some women, prove otherwise. Again, one of their big tent pole arguments was that gaming press (which in reality is relatively young) had a mailing list they all communicated on. Which is just ludicrous to use as "collusion" b/c it assumes all press operates in a black box with no communciation. There is a double standard in press reporting, but it is not some thing that is exclusive to gaming. There's a clip of Rooster Teeth slamming another press outlet for their review of Fallout while all three of them (Rooster Teeth) are decked out in Fallout gear. I can assure many more YT personalities are getting free gifts from companies to promote & review, but not disclosing as such. There is a new practice now of seeding games to these personalities early to help drum up hype around games. This is precisely the ethics situation you claim, but that's if you assume YT should be considered press (it's not). Someone who was contributing to IGN just got ratted out for plagarizing and IGN, after investigating, removed every piece of their content. By GG standards of IGN they're some unethical place and would have never done this. So yeah, GG in itself is a double standard and completely unreliable in their message.
      - CM30 8y ago
        Just going to say that quite a few GamerGate forums covered the IGN story, praised IGN for getting rid of the guy and basically slammed the hell out of Filip Miucin for copying other people's work. https://old.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/search?q=Filip+Miucin https://old.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/search?q=Filip+Miuci... The idea that they're quiet on actual ethics issues while making a mountain out of a molehill on localisation ones is false. As for collusion, well it's questionable whether it occurred, but at least a bit suspicious that many sites suddenly turned out their audience mid controversy. Imagine if someone else did that. Like, an agency dev called their clients morons online, or a retail worker said their customers were malicious/trolls/sociopaths to their face. Would they still have a job? Probably not. But that happened, it shouldn't have happened, and it's being justified somehow. It's also worth pointing out that quite a few smaller sites and YouTube channels with GamerGate... tendencies or neutrality are actually pretty damn reliable, and that most aren't exactly Breitbart or fake news esque. Stuff like Techraptor or Niche Gamer or what not isn't exactly unreliable. Stuff like SidAlpha's YouTube channel isn't unreliable. The issue is that what Wikipedia considers a reliable source is very much tilted in the large corporation/academia direction and misses the point in what reliability actually is. This isn't the 60s/70s/80s/whenever when being reliable only meant being a full time employee for a major newspaper or television network or publishing your work in an academic context. Many smaller blogs and creators (even under pseudonyms or anonymity) have equally good or better records now, and standards should change to accomodate that.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  GamerGate was founded on lies, and I see no reason to trust anyone who continues to be taken in by those lies. If you're really concerned about ethics in games journalism, stop marching under the banner of a group founded to harass some guy's cheating ex. A rundown of the facts, again: Eron Gjoni publicly claimed that his girlfriend Zoe Quinn, an indie game developer, had cheated on him with a bunch of guys, who he named. Most of these guys were other indie game developers. One of them was a writer for Rock Paper Shotgun, who had once mentioned Quinn's game in a single paragraph of a larger article about indie games, months before he allegedly slept with her by Gjoni's own account. Some right-wing gamers immediately spun this into a narrative that Rock Paper Shotgun and several other sites they didn't like were corrupt and trading positive coverage of left-wing developers for money and sex. This narrative was wildly successful and wound up drawing in a bunch of people who were legitimately concerned about ethics in games journalism, and somehow didn't grasp the agenda behind it. Consider Milo Yiannopoulos, a Breitbart reporter who "infiltrated" a game-writer forum, cherry-picked their discussions about how to respond to the harassment campaign, and spun them as sinister censorship. Yiannopoulos is a frequent supporter of literal, self-described Nazis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos#Leaked_Breitbart_emails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos#Leaked_Breit... But many were and are completely taken in by his article--I still see people posting it to justify GamerGate.

Do you think that because of all of the biased media reports about it? That's literally what it's about (as is the topic of this thread). Social media, new media and old media being politicized, cliquish and dishonest. That Vox and Gawker are viewed as more reputable than Breitbart gets to the very heart of what Gamergate was about (IMO).

TarpitCarnivore 8y ago
At its surface I will take Vox reporting over what Breitbart puts out there. Much of the Breitbart stories I have read operated on FUD by taking the very smallest bit of information and conflating it into something far worse than what it is. Gakwer & Vox are not without their flaws, especially Gawker. Gamergate is the perfect example of how media & reporting can be twisted into whatever narrative people want to make. The fact that it evolved into what it did is all the proof you need. If it was ever about "ethics in journalism" they would have never championed YouTuber's and people with 0 track record of journalism. Not to mention they continue to prop up people with known histories of questionable behavior (Cheon, Moriarity). The very fact that much of their 'theory' was based in journalist talking to each other is laughable.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  I agree that Breitbart is trash, but I disagree that Vox and Gawker are any better. The issue is that everyone is allowed to say that Breitbart is trash, Wikipedia can ban it... But while many people know that Vox and Gawker are also trash, there are many institutions and platforms that will prop them up as reputable (such as Wikipedia). That double standard spurred a lot of Gamergate's energy. Putting "ethics in journalism" in quotes says a lot, the whole thing was nothing but media meta-commentary (ethics in journalism).
  - TarpitCarnivore 8y ago
    Well I did fully acknowledge that Vox & Gawker are not without their problems. And if we break down Gawker to be ALL of Gawker a big problem of trust their is their Kinja contribution system, but some writers within the smaller groups (Kotaku, Gizmodo) have done good reporting. Wikipedia stated the reason they removed Brietbart was due to its "unreliability". That means they did take the time to explore BB as a source to validate the claims. If Vox and the entire Gawker network were "unreliable" I'm sure they would do the same. I put it in quotes because it was a statement the GG latched on to to claim as their whole reasoning. However countless doxing & harassement attempts, specifically towards some women, prove otherwise. Again, one of their big tent pole arguments was that gaming press (which in reality is relatively young) had a mailing list they all communicated on. Which is just ludicrous to use as "collusion" b/c it assumes all press operates in a black box with no communciation. There is a double standard in press reporting, but it is not some thing that is exclusive to gaming. There's a clip of Rooster Teeth slamming another press outlet for their review of Fallout while all three of them (Rooster Teeth) are decked out in Fallout gear. I can assure many more YT personalities are getting free gifts from companies to promote & review, but not disclosing as such. There is a new practice now of seeding games to these personalities early to help drum up hype around games. This is precisely the ethics situation you claim, but that's if you assume YT should be considered press (it's not). Someone who was contributing to IGN just got ratted out for plagarizing and IGN, after investigating, removed every piece of their content. By GG standards of IGN they're some unethical place and would have never done this. So yeah, GG in itself is a double standard and completely unreliable in their message.
    - CM30 8y ago
      Just going to say that quite a few GamerGate forums covered the IGN story, praised IGN for getting rid of the guy and basically slammed the hell out of Filip Miucin for copying other people's work. https://old.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/search?q=Filip+Miucin https://old.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/search?q=Filip+Miuci... The idea that they're quiet on actual ethics issues while making a mountain out of a molehill on localisation ones is false. As for collusion, well it's questionable whether it occurred, but at least a bit suspicious that many sites suddenly turned out their audience mid controversy. Imagine if someone else did that. Like, an agency dev called their clients morons online, or a retail worker said their customers were malicious/trolls/sociopaths to their face. Would they still have a job? Probably not. But that happened, it shouldn't have happened, and it's being justified somehow. It's also worth pointing out that quite a few smaller sites and YouTube channels with GamerGate... tendencies or neutrality are actually pretty damn reliable, and that most aren't exactly Breitbart or fake news esque. Stuff like Techraptor or Niche Gamer or what not isn't exactly unreliable. Stuff like SidAlpha's YouTube channel isn't unreliable. The issue is that what Wikipedia considers a reliable source is very much tilted in the large corporation/academia direction and misses the point in what reliability actually is. This isn't the 60s/70s/80s/whenever when being reliable only meant being a full time employee for a major newspaper or television network or publishing your work in an academic context. Many smaller blogs and creators (even under pseudonyms or anonymity) have equally good or better records now, and standards should change to accomodate that.
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
GamerGate was founded on lies, and I see no reason to trust anyone who continues to be taken in by those lies. If you're really concerned about ethics in games journalism, stop marching under the banner of a group founded to harass some guy's cheating ex. A rundown of the facts, again: Eron Gjoni publicly claimed that his girlfriend Zoe Quinn, an indie game developer, had cheated on him with a bunch of guys, who he named. Most of these guys were other indie game developers. One of them was a writer for Rock Paper Shotgun, who had once mentioned Quinn's game in a single paragraph of a larger article about indie games, months before he allegedly slept with her by Gjoni's own account. Some right-wing gamers immediately spun this into a narrative that Rock Paper Shotgun and several other sites they didn't like were corrupt and trading positive coverage of left-wing developers for money and sex. This narrative was wildly successful and wound up drawing in a bunch of people who were legitimately concerned about ethics in games journalism, and somehow didn't grasp the agenda behind it. Consider Milo Yiannopoulos, a Breitbart reporter who "infiltrated" a game-writer forum, cherry-picked their discussions about how to respond to the harassment campaign, and spun them as sinister censorship. Yiannopoulos is a frequent supporter of literal, self-described Nazis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos#Leaked_Breitbart_emails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos#Leaked_Breit... But many were and are completely taken in by his article--I still see people posting it to justify GamerGate.