14 ms·

Game developer Brianna Wu leaves home after death threats for supporting women

79 points by fredfoobar42 12y ago

sremani 12y ago
This is totally tragic and unacceptable. I hope the troll is met with punishment he/she deserves. But I am wondering - is our reaction to them is empowering these trolls. Its better to be safer than sorry. This is truly disturbing.
- LandonAB 12y ago
  Yeah, I am wondering the same thing. When they hide behind anonymity (cowards) what the hell can anyone do to A) support these women and B) stop these people from creating a new account and repeating the behavior.
  - adnzzzzZ 12y ago
    Here's a different perspective on anonymity that I think few people appreciate or even consider http://kazerad.tumblr.com/post/99022123468/shepherd-of-the-masked http://kazerad.tumblr.com/post/99022123468/shepherd-of-the-m..., which also might point to a solution to the problem you mention.
throwawayGG 12y ago
It's interesting what a chilling effect the evil "gamergate" people have. By making it clear they target anyone who stands up for women in gaming or for freedom of press they have intimidated people who would usually be up front in their support for the people attacked. I hope someone can come up with a sensible strategy for dealing with these trolls. I'd like to see real-world consequences. The article indicates there are "some well known names" involved in the group. Who are they and what companies do they work for? (Written from a throwaway, which says a lot doesn't it?)
- uvTwitch 12y ago
  This narrative you're pushing here is a very hard sell considering this is one of their most prominent banners: http://www.nichegamer.net/media/2014/09/gamergate.jpg http://www.nichegamer.net/media/2014/09/gamergate.jpg Being the interenet, there are naturally aggressive and violent people who will throw harassment around. With regard to this issue, it is downright false to claim that they originate from, or are encouraged by, any one camp, as there are examples of harassment originating from both sides. One of the more prominent journalists writing articles supporting gamergate was mailed a syringe filled with mystery liquid; far from a friendly gesture. There are, however, a lot of people who wish to paint gamergate as woman-hating trolls - the kind of people in the media who have a lot to lose, who always pick up on these sort of outliers and point to them as the bulk of the movement, to try to distract the public from the real message of gamergate, which is that they want proper ethics and integrity in gaming journalism, not 10/10's for games made by your friends, or articles brazenly insulting your readership.
  - PhasmaFelis 12y ago
    It's great that you're interested in promoting journalistic integrity, and not in attacking women. Why, then, don't you start a movement that can credibly claim to support those goals, instead of rallying behind one that was created to attack one woman for completely made-up crimes against journalism? I would love to see someone do this. Corruption in games journalism is a real problem. But it's not a problem that I've ever actually seen a #GamerGate fan attempt to address except when they were spinning it to attack Zoe Quinn or her supporters.
    - imanaccount247 12y ago
      >instead of rallying behind one that was created to attack one woman for completely made-up crimes against journalism? I've seen this statement quite a lot, where exactly are people getting this idea from? #gamergate was started by Adam Baldwin, specifically to address corruption in games journalism and the collusion of media outlets in trying to silence discussion of it. The roots of it go back to /v/ having been convinced game journalism is corrupt for several years. See their musical tribute to games journalism from a year ago for an example (or the dewrito pope meme): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr7u1tWsGBk&list=PLAX8JHUJcFR2gh_WG3YJBITuO-tODVCcJ&index=23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr7u1tWsGBk&list=PLAX8JHUJcF... >But it's not a problem that I've ever actually seen a #GamerGate fan attempt to address Have you ever looked? They have tons of information, they organize out in the open (it was on github until their repo was removed due to complaints), where everyone can see and contribute. #gamergate supporters have been harassed and threatened and Milo was even sent a syringe full of something unknown. Why do people paint such a dishonest picture of this whole thing?
PhasmaFelis 12y ago
Ms. Wu's bitterly sarcastic tweet pretty much says it all: > The police just came by. Husband and I are going somewhere safe. > Remember, #gamergate isn't about attacking women.
- imanaccount247 12y ago
  The question is, why does "#gamergate" get the blame for this? This trend of vilifying any group one disagrees with based on the actions of individuals with no indication they are even connected to the group is pretty disturbing. Remember when Jack Thompson got death threats? Remember how it was not acceptable to pretend "gamers" were at fault for that, but rather the individual people committing those crimes were at fault for their own behavior?
  - PhasmaFelis 12y ago
    Because #gamergate is a name that was created to attack one woman based on completely spurious claims. If you really care about corruption in games journalism (and I do) then it makes no sense to continue rallying behind this banner that was tainted from the start.
    - imanaccount247 12y ago
      >Because #gamergate is a name that was created to attack one woman based on completely spurious claims. No it was not. Again, where are people getting this bizarre idea? It was created by Adam Baldwin, on twitter, specifically about games journalism and the game websites silencing discussion of games journalism. It seems really hard to believe that these constant claims that #gamergate was started to attack someone (who?) is all honest ignorance rather than deliberate dishonesty.
    - EvenThisAcronym 12y ago
      That doesn't make any sense. "Some people said before that Gamergate was about harassing women, I guess this woman must've been harassed by Gamergate as well, although there is no proof, and Gamergate supporters decried the threat and reported it, which is all they could do."
chaostheory 12y ago
My question is how crazy jerks are able to find addresses for targets they want to harass? Simple public record searches? I think in this age, having a very common first and last name combination helps protect your privacy.
- XorNot 12y ago
  Internet anonymity died when the net went mainstream. Most of us have public profiles which are explicitly linked to your real life identities. Where we've lagged is deciding how we deal with pseudo-anonymous harassment. This has probably been an issue longer then the net though: stop and think for a moment just how utterly ridiculous it is that people can call you on your telephone, but don't have to disclose the phone number they dial from (i.e. so you can't just block them trivially). I somewhat suspect communications policy of the future needs to, at the very least, enforce the idea that big providers have to take some steps to allow easy selective filtering of contacts.
uptown 12y ago
The way Twitter handles these types of incidents needs to change as well: https://twitter.com/StuHorvath/status/520750049702473729 https://twitter.com/StuHorvath/status/520750049702473729
- gojomo 12y ago
  Are you certain? What exactly do you propose Twitter do? Twitter is not a real-space police force and in many cases does not have true-identity information. It's possible that a faster move against threat-originators, through action like a ban on their Twitter account, would do one or both of (1) escalating their misguided anger; or (2) limiting evidence-gathering by real authorities. Also, note that new Twitter sign-ups are very easy. That's a policy which overall provides benefits to Twitter and many Twitter users, especially newbies. But it means that it's trivial for griefers to circumvent simplistic account bans. So it may be better that they keep abusing via the one account, which collects evidence and can be blocked/muted by reputation, than they burn through the namespace with short-lived throwaway accounts. It's a bit like managing antibiotic resistance with bacterial diseases. Sure, if you have a killer formula, deploy it and fix the problem. But if all you've got are incremental amelioration and escalation mechanisms, you need to use those very carefully to avoid training-up even worse malevolence. Practice game theory, not knee-jerk symbolism.
  - acdha 12y ago
    A few simple things which would help and are easy to implement: 1. Stop auto-discarding abuse reports which aren't from the target of an attack. Right now, Twitter won't investigate a credible death threat unless you say you're the target. 2. Limit new accounts ability to send messages to people who don't follow them 3. Apply blocks to email addresses, requiring griefers to churn validated addresses rather than reusing them 4. Give you better filters for notifications: i.e. currently there's no way to have it default to only notifications from people you follow so you can't avoid seeing crap unless you use a bookmark. Similarly, filtering out messages from new accounts you don't follow or which don't have n followers in common, etc. etc. would reduce the dog-pile effect. 5. Allow friends to help: auto-block/mute accounts which people you follow have blocked (specific people, threshold, etc.); hide tweets which people you follow have flagged as annoying / abusive; etc. There's a ton of interesting opportunity to use the social network for good here. None of this is perfect but increasing the frictional costs matters a lot for this kind of thing when they're only in it for fun. A lot of prior art from the email spam prevention world applies here as well – the main thing is simply that Twitter's management clearly don't care to make any significant investment in this area.
annandvirk 12y ago
Things like this make me feel physically uncomfortable. How do you even deal with something like that?
ps4fanboy 12y ago
This is no different than fringe radical feminists attacking people on the internet, I dont have a link but there was an incident of a grown woman doxing a 13 year old kid. If that doesnt make all feminists bad then this shouldnt make all gamers bad at least apply consistent logic and standards.
- throwawayGG 12y ago
  I think you might lack a little perspective here. Radical feminists attacking people is NOT the same as someone threatening to go to a persons house, rape and kill them, and then proving they know where the person lives. "ps4fanboy". Hmm.
  - ps4fanboy 12y ago
    Sorry to be clear by attacking I meant threatening peoples safety in much the same way. My username is caricature so I am not sure why you are trying to attack me based on it, very childish. Just a single example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Pizzey#Overview http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Pizzey#Overview "Pizzey has been the subject of death threats and boycotts because of her research into the claim that most domestic violence is reciprocal, and that women are equally as capable of violence as men. Pizzey has said that the threats were from militant feminists." No sane person would suggest because of this that all feminists support this action. Why is it ok for you to say the same about Gamers?
  - Gigablah 12y ago
    "throwaway". Hmm.
brandonmenc 12y ago
This sort of thing makes me glad I quit playing video games 20 years ago. What an absolutely toxic scene. Games were an escape, but I feel that's been ruined because you have to deal with so many real people, both in-game and in the "community." I wonder how many other people avoid getting (back) into games because of that.
- Gigablah 12y ago
  That's a surprise, because I'm able to enjoy my video games without feeling any connection to the "scene" whatsoever.
gojomo 12y ago
The out-group homogeneity bias, it runs deep in everyone loudly discussing these issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity
fenomas 12y ago
Just a meta-question, but is there some kind of flagging/downvoting system on HN that's hidden to newer users? It seems odd that this thread quickly fell off the top page, below older posts with fewer upvotes.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- uvTwitch 12y ago
  HN is weighted towards preventing an influx of new users having an effect on the voting of comments and articles - precisely to avoid the effect that an new influx of pro-gg or anti-gg users would have on the story or comment score.
- whyenot 12y ago
  > is there some kind of flagging/downvoting system on HN that's hidden to newer users yes.
orionblastar 12y ago
Before anyone jumps to any conclusions these threats are anonymous and nobody knows if they are tied to any group. There have been a series of feminists who make fake Twitter accounts to threaten themselves and later on were proven to be hoaxes for attention. http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/womens-rights-activist-charged-with-rape-threat-hoax-on-face http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/womens-rights-activist... http://www.goingyourownway.com/mgtow-lounge-main-forum/rok-article-anita-sarkeesian-fake-2826/ http://www.goingyourownway.com/mgtow-lounge-main-forum/rok-a... http://www.returnofkings.com/42602/did-anita-sarkeesian-fake-death-threats-against-herself http://www.returnofkings.com/42602/did-anita-sarkeesian-fake... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErGcBxMpgwA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErGcBxMpgwA Apparently they can create all of the fake Twitter accounts they want, sign out, and take a picture of it 12 minutes later. Then log back into the account and delete all of the history. The news media just has to believe them, because they believe that these anonymous people are behind death and rape threats to everyone. Even if the Twitter accounts doing the threats have the same IP as the feminist's accounts. Sometimes the police catch the feminists and arrest them for filing a false report. http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/false-claims-of-rape-and-harassment-are-now-employed-by-activists-as-tools-of-social-change/ http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/false-claims-of-rape-an... This fake rape and fake death threats and fake sexual assaults are nothing new: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case Feminists will keep doing this stuff to get popular, and attention, and speaking gigs, and sell books and promote blogs and websites. They think by faking this stuff they raise awareness for it. With this past history of hoaxes, it is hard to tell with each new case of harassment if it is real or just another hoax for attention. If real she and her family have my deepest sympathies, if fake she will be found out eventually I guess?
- valas 12y ago
  You don't do yourself much favor in this discussion when you post links to returnofkings.com or avoiceformen.com :-)
  - imanaccount247 12y ago
    The source of a fact does not matter. Your post is the very definition of ad-hominem.
demachina 12y ago
I have no interest in taking sides in #gamergate but it should be pointed out that someone trying to make #gamergate look bad could have posted the threats on twitter. As heated and complex as this dustup has become you really can't take anything at face value any more. Its become a pretty intense propaganda war by both sides, or maybe all sides, so unless you have posts from a verified account or video of someone saying something you should take just about everything else with a grain of salt. Its pretty naive to think anyone knows the true motives of someone posting with a probably throw away twitter account.
wu_wu_wu 12y ago
Harassing women is NOT okay, in any form. That said, Brianna is extremely inflammatory and vitriolic in her speech. She doesn't help her cause, at all. Of course, no one will notice that, or care one whit.
- irv 12y ago
  oh, she was asking for it! well, that changes everything.

79 points by fredfoobar42 12y ago

This is totally tragic and unacceptable. I hope the troll is met with punishment he/she deserves. But I am wondering - is our reaction to them is empowering these trolls. Its better to be safer than sorry. This is truly disturbing.

LandonAB 12y ago
Yeah, I am wondering the same thing. When they hide behind anonymity (cowards) what the hell can anyone do to A) support these women and B) stop these people from creating a new account and repeating the behavior.
- adnzzzzZ 12y ago
  Here's a different perspective on anonymity that I think few people appreciate or even consider http://kazerad.tumblr.com/post/99022123468/shepherd-of-the-masked http://kazerad.tumblr.com/post/99022123468/shepherd-of-the-m..., which also might point to a solution to the problem you mention.

throwawayGG 12y ago

It's interesting what a chilling effect the evil "gamergate" people have. By making it clear they target anyone who stands up for women in gaming or for freedom of press they have intimidated people who would usually be up front in their support for the people attacked. I hope someone can come up with a sensible strategy for dealing with these trolls. I'd like to see real-world consequences. The article indicates there are "some well known names" involved in the group. Who are they and what companies do they work for? (Written from a throwaway, which says a lot doesn't it?)

uvTwitch 12y ago
This narrative you're pushing here is a very hard sell considering this is one of their most prominent banners: http://www.nichegamer.net/media/2014/09/gamergate.jpg http://www.nichegamer.net/media/2014/09/gamergate.jpg Being the interenet, there are naturally aggressive and violent people who will throw harassment around. With regard to this issue, it is downright false to claim that they originate from, or are encouraged by, any one camp, as there are examples of harassment originating from both sides. One of the more prominent journalists writing articles supporting gamergate was mailed a syringe filled with mystery liquid; far from a friendly gesture. There are, however, a lot of people who wish to paint gamergate as woman-hating trolls - the kind of people in the media who have a lot to lose, who always pick up on these sort of outliers and point to them as the bulk of the movement, to try to distract the public from the real message of gamergate, which is that they want proper ethics and integrity in gaming journalism, not 10/10's for games made by your friends, or articles brazenly insulting your readership.
- PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  It's great that you're interested in promoting journalistic integrity, and not in attacking women. Why, then, don't you start a movement that can credibly claim to support those goals, instead of rallying behind one that was created to attack one woman for completely made-up crimes against journalism? I would love to see someone do this. Corruption in games journalism is a real problem. But it's not a problem that I've ever actually seen a #GamerGate fan attempt to address except when they were spinning it to attack Zoe Quinn or her supporters.
  - imanaccount247 12y ago
    >instead of rallying behind one that was created to attack one woman for completely made-up crimes against journalism? I've seen this statement quite a lot, where exactly are people getting this idea from? #gamergate was started by Adam Baldwin, specifically to address corruption in games journalism and the collusion of media outlets in trying to silence discussion of it. The roots of it go back to /v/ having been convinced game journalism is corrupt for several years. See their musical tribute to games journalism from a year ago for an example (or the dewrito pope meme): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr7u1tWsGBk&list=PLAX8JHUJcFR2gh_WG3YJBITuO-tODVCcJ&index=23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr7u1tWsGBk&list=PLAX8JHUJcF... >But it's not a problem that I've ever actually seen a #GamerGate fan attempt to address Have you ever looked? They have tons of information, they organize out in the open (it was on github until their repo was removed due to complaints), where everyone can see and contribute. #gamergate supporters have been harassed and threatened and Milo was even sent a syringe full of something unknown. Why do people paint such a dishonest picture of this whole thing?

PhasmaFelis 12y ago

Ms. Wu's bitterly sarcastic tweet pretty much says it all: > The police just came by. Husband and I are going somewhere safe. > Remember, #gamergate isn't about attacking women.

imanaccount247 12y ago
The question is, why does "#gamergate" get the blame for this? This trend of vilifying any group one disagrees with based on the actions of individuals with no indication they are even connected to the group is pretty disturbing. Remember when Jack Thompson got death threats? Remember how it was not acceptable to pretend "gamers" were at fault for that, but rather the individual people committing those crimes were at fault for their own behavior?
- PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  Because #gamergate is a name that was created to attack one woman based on completely spurious claims. If you really care about corruption in games journalism (and I do) then it makes no sense to continue rallying behind this banner that was tainted from the start.
  - imanaccount247 12y ago
    >Because #gamergate is a name that was created to attack one woman based on completely spurious claims. No it was not. Again, where are people getting this bizarre idea? It was created by Adam Baldwin, on twitter, specifically about games journalism and the game websites silencing discussion of games journalism. It seems really hard to believe that these constant claims that #gamergate was started to attack someone (who?) is all honest ignorance rather than deliberate dishonesty.
  - EvenThisAcronym 12y ago
    That doesn't make any sense. "Some people said before that Gamergate was about harassing women, I guess this woman must've been harassed by Gamergate as well, although there is no proof, and Gamergate supporters decried the threat and reported it, which is all they could do."

chaostheory 12y ago

My question is how crazy jerks are able to find addresses for targets they want to harass? Simple public record searches? I think in this age, having a very common first and last name combination helps protect your privacy.

XorNot 12y ago
Internet anonymity died when the net went mainstream. Most of us have public profiles which are explicitly linked to your real life identities. Where we've lagged is deciding how we deal with pseudo-anonymous harassment. This has probably been an issue longer then the net though: stop and think for a moment just how utterly ridiculous it is that people can call you on your telephone, but don't have to disclose the phone number they dial from (i.e. so you can't just block them trivially). I somewhat suspect communications policy of the future needs to, at the very least, enforce the idea that big providers have to take some steps to allow easy selective filtering of contacts.

uptown 12y ago

The way Twitter handles these types of incidents needs to change as well: https://twitter.com/StuHorvath/status/520750049702473729 https://twitter.com/StuHorvath/status/520750049702473729

gojomo 12y ago
Are you certain? What exactly do you propose Twitter do? Twitter is not a real-space police force and in many cases does not have true-identity information. It's possible that a faster move against threat-originators, through action like a ban on their Twitter account, would do one or both of (1) escalating their misguided anger; or (2) limiting evidence-gathering by real authorities. Also, note that new Twitter sign-ups are very easy. That's a policy which overall provides benefits to Twitter and many Twitter users, especially newbies. But it means that it's trivial for griefers to circumvent simplistic account bans. So it may be better that they keep abusing via the one account, which collects evidence and can be blocked/muted by reputation, than they burn through the namespace with short-lived throwaway accounts. It's a bit like managing antibiotic resistance with bacterial diseases. Sure, if you have a killer formula, deploy it and fix the problem. But if all you've got are incremental amelioration and escalation mechanisms, you need to use those very carefully to avoid training-up even worse malevolence. Practice game theory, not knee-jerk symbolism.
- acdha 12y ago
  A few simple things which would help and are easy to implement: 1. Stop auto-discarding abuse reports which aren't from the target of an attack. Right now, Twitter won't investigate a credible death threat unless you say you're the target. 2. Limit new accounts ability to send messages to people who don't follow them 3. Apply blocks to email addresses, requiring griefers to churn validated addresses rather than reusing them 4. Give you better filters for notifications: i.e. currently there's no way to have it default to only notifications from people you follow so you can't avoid seeing crap unless you use a bookmark. Similarly, filtering out messages from new accounts you don't follow or which don't have n followers in common, etc. etc. would reduce the dog-pile effect. 5. Allow friends to help: auto-block/mute accounts which people you follow have blocked (specific people, threshold, etc.); hide tweets which people you follow have flagged as annoying / abusive; etc. There's a ton of interesting opportunity to use the social network for good here. None of this is perfect but increasing the frictional costs matters a lot for this kind of thing when they're only in it for fun. A lot of prior art from the email spam prevention world applies here as well – the main thing is simply that Twitter's management clearly don't care to make any significant investment in this area.

annandvirk 12y ago

Things like this make me feel physically uncomfortable. How do you even deal with something like that?

ps4fanboy 12y ago

This is no different than fringe radical feminists attacking people on the internet, I dont have a link but there was an incident of a grown woman doxing a 13 year old kid. If that doesnt make all feminists bad then this shouldnt make all gamers bad at least apply consistent logic and standards.

throwawayGG 12y ago
I think you might lack a little perspective here. Radical feminists attacking people is NOT the same as someone threatening to go to a persons house, rape and kill them, and then proving they know where the person lives. "ps4fanboy". Hmm.
- ps4fanboy 12y ago
  Sorry to be clear by attacking I meant threatening peoples safety in much the same way. My username is caricature so I am not sure why you are trying to attack me based on it, very childish. Just a single example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Pizzey#Overview http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Pizzey#Overview "Pizzey has been the subject of death threats and boycotts because of her research into the claim that most domestic violence is reciprocal, and that women are equally as capable of violence as men. Pizzey has said that the threats were from militant feminists." No sane person would suggest because of this that all feminists support this action. Why is it ok for you to say the same about Gamers?
- Gigablah 12y ago
  "throwaway". Hmm.

brandonmenc 12y ago

This sort of thing makes me glad I quit playing video games 20 years ago. What an absolutely toxic scene. Games were an escape, but I feel that's been ruined because you have to deal with so many real people, both in-game and in the "community." I wonder how many other people avoid getting (back) into games because of that.

Gigablah 12y ago
That's a surprise, because I'm able to enjoy my video games without feeling any connection to the "scene" whatsoever.

gojomo 12y ago

The out-group homogeneity bias, it runs deep in everyone loudly discussing these issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity

fenomas 12y ago

Just a meta-question, but is there some kind of flagging/downvoting system on HN that's hidden to newer users? It seems odd that this thread quickly fell off the top page, below older posts with fewer upvotes.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
uvTwitch 12y ago
HN is weighted towards preventing an influx of new users having an effect on the voting of comments and articles - precisely to avoid the effect that an new influx of pro-gg or anti-gg users would have on the story or comment score.
whyenot 12y ago
> is there some kind of flagging/downvoting system on HN that's hidden to newer users yes.

orionblastar 12y ago

Before anyone jumps to any conclusions these threats are anonymous and nobody knows if they are tied to any group. There have been a series of feminists who make fake Twitter accounts to threaten themselves and later on were proven to be hoaxes for attention. http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/womens-rights-activist-charged-with-rape-threat-hoax-on-face http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/womens-rights-activist... http://www.goingyourownway.com/mgtow-lounge-main-forum/rok-article-anita-sarkeesian-fake-2826/ http://www.goingyourownway.com/mgtow-lounge-main-forum/rok-a... http://www.returnofkings.com/42602/did-anita-sarkeesian-fake-death-threats-against-herself http://www.returnofkings.com/42602/did-anita-sarkeesian-fake... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErGcBxMpgwA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErGcBxMpgwA Apparently they can create all of the fake Twitter accounts they want, sign out, and take a picture of it 12 minutes later. Then log back into the account and delete all of the history. The news media just has to believe them, because they believe that these anonymous people are behind death and rape threats to everyone. Even if the Twitter accounts doing the threats have the same IP as the feminist's accounts. Sometimes the police catch the feminists and arrest them for filing a false report. http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/false-claims-of-rape-and-harassment-are-now-employed-by-activists-as-tools-of-social-change/ http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/false-claims-of-rape-an... This fake rape and fake death threats and fake sexual assaults are nothing new: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case Feminists will keep doing this stuff to get popular, and attention, and speaking gigs, and sell books and promote blogs and websites. They think by faking this stuff they raise awareness for it. With this past history of hoaxes, it is hard to tell with each new case of harassment if it is real or just another hoax for attention. If real she and her family have my deepest sympathies, if fake she will be found out eventually I guess?

valas 12y ago
You don't do yourself much favor in this discussion when you post links to returnofkings.com or avoiceformen.com :-)
- imanaccount247 12y ago
  The source of a fact does not matter. Your post is the very definition of ad-hominem.

demachina 12y ago

I have no interest in taking sides in #gamergate but it should be pointed out that someone trying to make #gamergate look bad could have posted the threats on twitter. As heated and complex as this dustup has become you really can't take anything at face value any more. Its become a pretty intense propaganda war by both sides, or maybe all sides, so unless you have posts from a verified account or video of someone saying something you should take just about everything else with a grain of salt. Its pretty naive to think anyone knows the true motives of someone posting with a probably throw away twitter account.

wu_wu_wu 12y ago

Harassing women is NOT okay, in any form. That said, Brianna is extremely inflammatory and vitriolic in her speech. She doesn't help her cause, at all. Of course, no one will notice that, or care one whit.

irv 12y ago
oh, she was asking for it! well, that changes everything.