4 ms·

The 'harassment' of Anita is the result of a few trolls. Gamergate even identified one troll, a Brazilian videogame 'journalist.' Death threats were sent to Bri

• freebsdgirl 12y ago
  I am really so very tired of seeing people say this. I'm going to explain this once, and I'm only doing this here because despite my reservations over the community, I know that HN is generally a place where people are intelligent enough to realize that words mean things, and those meanings don't usually change because we have feelings. Harassment does not just mean threats. Harassment is not limited to words that contain threats of rape, death, violence, or some other kind of ruin. Harassment means "aggressive pressure or intimidation." Look it up. It's in the dictionary. I have a directory that contains over 70k json files. Each file contains a tweet that mentions my name. These files were generated over the past 6 weeks. Not every mention is negative, nor is every mention about GamerGate. However, a significant number are people from GamerGate that are tweeting negative things at me. Every morning, I would wake up, make coffee, and plop down in front of my computer to see what I had missed. This has been my routine for as long as I can remember. Despite the long-term harassment I've faced, it was not until GamerGate that I would wake up to a seemingly unending stream of hate in my twitter mentions. It's not one person. It's never one person when GamerGate is involved. It's the whole goddamn mob. This is why I wrote ggautoblocker - because there is no block button for a mob. What precisely would you call it when hundreds or even thousands of people direct so much of their time and energy to repeatedly contacting a single person who has never talked to them before with messages of hate, insults, attacks on credibility, and threats of getting that person fired? I would call that harassment. I might even argue that that mob harassment is worse than more serious threats coming from a single person. I don't need to prove anything to you. I don't need to tie anything to GamerGate. That's your hang up, not mine. If I thought you weren't so biased that you would warp data to meet your own ends, I might give you the full list of tweet IDs (distributing the json itself would be against ToS) in the name science. You care far more about your cause than you do harassment in tech, and that's telling. You came here to argue a hashtag that only matters to the people that use it. This is bigger than you.
  • srslack 12y ago
    >you nutjob Great start. >However, a significant number are people from GamerGate that are tweeting negative things at me. Name and shame the harassers. Disagreement, however, is not harassment. If I enter into a very, very large public conversation on a forum, is it harassment if people reply to me specifically because they take issue with my characterizations? >It's never one person when GamerGate is involved. That's because it's an amorphous hashtag that anyone can take up. >I don't need to tie anything to GamerGate. You did. In your blog post. You blamed the harassment of Anita, Zoe and Quinn on GamerGate. It's not mincing words. You said that GamerGate supporters were the ones harassing Anita, Wu, and Zoe. Fact of matter. It's not my cause. I'm just tired of dishonesty. Stopped playing videogames when I was 18, thanks, and don't particularly give a fuck about consumer recommendation media being fundamentally underhanded. I'll stop short of appealing to relative privation: rest assured that this isn't "my cause." Harassment in tech is an important issue. How do we deal with anonymous trolls without burning down the forest?
    • Cushman 12y ago
      I'll take it on good faith that this is not "your cause", and just point out that this comment and others you've made amounts to a far-reaching denial of 'freebsdgirl's lived experience, to say nothing of other women you aren't directly replying to. Your message is clear and unnuanced: "I don't believe you." So, two questions: First, just, why? Do you have any concrete reason to try to second-guess these specific women's first-hand experiences? Second, do you really think that's a good default response to someone who comes to us from a place of vunerability? (Is this the "forest" you're so keen to protect?)
    • geographomics 12y ago
      You are completely missing the entire point to nitpick over a hashtag. Just mentally replace "GamerGate supporters" with "#GamerGate supporters" or even "#GamerGate hashtag users" if you feel that the former is an unfair miscategorisation. The issue here is a disgraceful onslaught of harassment by an abusive mob, not their nuanced opinions on ethical breaches in games journalism.
    • 12y ago