Haven meaning free#
Perhaps we could have quashed these kernels of hate with better forum moderation, more serious attention to the problem of misogynistic harassment, and less reliance on the longstanding twin internet wisdoms of “prioritizing free speech” and “starving a troll” until they go away. It’s tempting to wonder if we could have stopped Gamergate before it happened, in the years before it coalesced into a systematized movement. Gamergate ultimately gave way to something deeper, more violent, and more uncontrollable. The hate campaign, we would later learn, was the moment when our ability to repress toxic communities and write them off as just “trolls” began to crumble. The media, tech platforms, the niche internet communities these reactionaries came from (places with marginally obscure names like 4chan, 8chan, and Voat, for instance), the corporations they easily manipulated, and the general public, who seemed to take it in as nebulous online noise no one properly identified Gamergate as a major turning point for the internet. But what Gamergate had that those previous movements didn’t was an organized strategy, made public, cloaking itself as a political movement with a flimsy philosophical stance, its goals and targets amplified by the power of Twitter and a hashtag.Īgain and again, throughout 2014 and afterward - and, really, well before that, as women in online subcultures withstood years of targeted harassment - many failed to understand and assess what Gamergate was. “Part of why Gamergate happened in the first place was because you had these people online preaching to these groups of disaffected young men,” he said. Robert Evans, a journalist who specializes in extremist communities and the host of the Behind the Bastards podcast, described Gamergate to me as partly organic and partly born out of decades-long campaigns by white supremacists and extremists to recruit heavily from online forums. Harassment and misogyny had been problems in the community for years before this the deep resentment and anger toward women that powered Gamergate percolated for years on internet forums. The harassment occurred under the social media hashtag “ Gamergate,” which is still a hotbed of debate and anti-feminist resentment today. If you never really understood what Gamergate was to begin with, here’s a brief refresher: In the fall of 2014, under the premise that they were angry at “unethical” games journalists - a lie that persists today - thousands of people in the games community began to systematically harass, heckle, threaten, and dox several outspoken feminist women in their midst, few of whom were journalists. But the media’s insistence that Gamergate would end helps explain its endurance, and why the movement ultimately coalesced into the larger alt-right movement that partially fueled the election of President Trump. One writer predicted that 2015 would be “the year everyone forgot about Gamergate,” noting that it “is still around as a twitter hashtag and a forum topic, but the relevance is waning from its peak in the fall. Soon after I recapped it, other publications wrote about Gamergate as if it were more or less over, too.
Haven meaning Offline#
The editor wanted a piece that framed the entire event in the past tense, even though the hashtag was still going strong, the women it targeted were still being harassed, and supporters were planning offline actions to take place at upcoming geek conventions.
Haven meaning full#
Sparked by a single blog post published in August 2014, Gamergate was still in full swing when an editor asked me, as a reporter who covered it since the very beginning, to write a “recap” of it near the end of that year. As a movement, it showed the trend toward systematized online harassment and increased ideological polarization that emerged in the latter half of the 2010s.Īs it was happening, many members of the media were quick to dismiss it. Still, Gamergate was arguably a watershed moment and learning experience for many future Trump supporters. Hey, if you wanna say GamerGate led to this without acknowledging that GG was a symptom of the larger systemic bigotry that has always existed, an extension of DV, and the failure of online platform holders to act right, I really don’t appreciate being used like that!!- zoë “thot pockets” quinn January 6, 2021
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