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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37916 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Part 1/4

Recently, someone sent me a video about GamerGate made by BreadTuber Ian Danskin in 2021. The video in question is his talk to UC Merced about "digital radicalism" using GamerGate as a case study. Here is the link to the video and here is the link to the transcript of the video, posted on his Tumblr.

It's truly shocking how many errors and misrepresentations there are in it. There are so many I can't and won't cover them all, but I do want to highlight the most notable ones.

Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.

Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.

I'm genuinely not sure where he's getting the idea that Gjoni posted to 4chan. Not even his supposedly "too comprehensive" RationalWiki source detailing the timeline of GamerGate states that Gjoni posted it on 4chan - it just states "Eron Gjoni publishes "The Zoe Post" on Wordpress, accusing Zoe Quinn of infidelity. This time the post is shared to 4chan's boards /b/, /v/, /pol/, and /r9k/." One of his other sources claims Gjoni attempted to sic 4chan on Quinn, but this claim is not cited.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Gamergate

According to The Zoe Post, here Gjoni’s side of it:

“If you take my recommendation to opt against the TL;DR — yes, this is written almost entirely in shitty metaphors and bitter snark. It’s a post about an ex, and the tone reflects its intention as the starting post for forum threads entitled Cringe-Worthy Break Up Stories on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, because I figured it would be best to announce on friendly communities in innocuous ways. Penny Arcade and Something Awful deleted those threads, so now this blog stands alone. I will not take it down, because I know the information is important, even if what I have omitted means you never might."

"And no, I never posted this to 4chan.”

https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/

There is, however, another page on RationalWiki which states that "After he got banned from Penny Arcade and Something Awful, he shared with 4chan's /r9k/ and /pol/ who then decided to call her a "whore" and a "cunt".[1][2] How non-misogynist."

https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Gamergate_claims&diff=1587662&oldid=1587661

RationalWiki posts two sources to "prove" that Eron Gjoni shared with 4chan's /r9k/ and /pol/. However, none of their sources prove at all that Eron Gjoni shared it - others rehosted what was removed from other places as posted by Gjoni, but he himself did not provably rehost on the chans himself.

https://archive.is/qrS5Q

https://archive.is/QIjm3

The tone of these chans is very 4chan, meaning it's not amazing. However, I found no evidence suggesting Gjoni sanctioned or approved of either.

I'd also add that Gjoni has stated repeatedly that the reason why he posted them on Penny Arcade and Something Awful was because they had positive views of Zoe, not because they had a history of harassing her.

"I chose the Penny Arcade forum because all mentions of Zoe there have been positive. I chose the Something Awful forum because Zoe used to visit there a lot before making DQ, and they like her in a "we knew her before she was famous" sort of way."

https://old.reddit.com/r/SRSGaming/comments/2ef26g/what_all_that_zoe_quinn_stuff_was_about_2nd/cjz8hb2

"She was a regular on Something Awful. And they like her in a "we knew her before she was famous" sort of way. Which is why I chose Something Awful as one of the two boards to drop this one."

https://web.archive.org/web/20141204063637/https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BxRecBCIAAEIcOG.png

Then, Danskin goes on to make this bombshell of a claim:

What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.

Now, his source for this is the Boston Magazine hit-piece on Gjoni, entitled "Game of Fear". Here is the link (to an archive page, since I would rather not give clicks):

https://web.archive.org/web/20221008092349/https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2015/04/28/gamergate/

Reading it is incredibly funny, actually. There's not a single piece of evidence presented in the article in favour of these claims (because they're based on interviews), and the tone reeks of exaggeration and editorialising. But I'd think if you're going to try to use Gjoni's own statements to impugn Gjoni, I'd think looking at Gjoni's actual statements would be a better source for that instead of accounts of his statements that are filtered through a lens of journalistic bias.

Here's Gjoni's two-part commentary on the Boston Magazine article, entitled "What The Hell Is Journalism Even". As far as I can tell, it is still unfinished to this date, but what exists seems to demonstrate a clear pattern of falsehood and misrepresentation in the Boston Magazine article.

https://antinegationism.tumblr.com/post/117661182576/what-the-hell-is-journalism-even-part-1

https://antinegationism.tumblr.com/post/117729753311/what-is-journalism-even-part-2-zachary-jasons

Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest.

Incorrect. This is a really big error. Here's what Gjoni actually says the "typo" is in his edit to the Zoe Post:

"There was a typo up for a while that made it seem like Zoe and I were on break between March and June. This has apparently led some people to infer that her infidelity with Nathan Grayson began in early March. I want to clarify that I have no reason to believe or evidence to imply she was sleeping with him prior to late March or early April (though I believe they’d been friends for a while before that). This typo has since been corrected to make it clear we were on break between May and June. To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature."

https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/

So as you can see here, Gjoni was not correcting a section in the Zoe Post which stated that she slept with Nathan Grayson for a good review of Depression Quest. He was correcting a typo which made it seem like they were on break between March and June instead of May and June.

In fact, he literally couldn't have retracted the statement that she slept with Nathan Grayson for a good review of Depression Quest because not a single sentence in The Zoe Post ever states that in the first place. Even when you go back to the earliest archive.org snapshot of the Zoe Post (all the way back in 16 Aug 2014), no such claim is made.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140816104303/https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/

The only mention of Depression Quest he made is contained within his later edit identifying the typo, and the purpose of him mentioning it was to caution people to be careful when making claims about the conflict of interest.

Even Nathan Grayson himself admitted that Gjoni did not state in his post that Quinn traded sex for reviews.

https://archive.is/pNJvE

Given the centrality of The Zoe Post to the whole thing, this mistake is incredibly damning. It establishes that Danskin hasn't even read the Zoe Post. You would think that someone speaking at UC Merced about the Quinnspiracy and Gamergate would have at least read one of the Quinnspiracy's central documents, but this seems to imply that he's simply obtained his information from predictably slanted secondary sources.

Here's a link to Part 2 of this post, in case it gets buried under the replies.

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