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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37929 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.

Gamergate always seemed like a lot of the two sides talking past each other, and this post strikes me as no different.

The counter to "there's lot of ethics problems in videogame journalism" was never "no there aren't", it was "duh, everyone knows that; no one takes videogame journalism seriously. Why are you harassing women about it?".

  • -15

Gamergate always seemed like a lot of the two sides talking past each other

Sure, I think we would disagree on which side is doing most of the "talking past".

The counter to "there's lot of ethics problems in videogame journalism" was never "no there aren't", it was "duh, everyone knows that; no one takes videogame journalism seriously. Why are you harassing women about it?".

This sane-washes the anti-GamerGate stance. The general anti-GamerGate stance, exemplified by Danskin, was not "well, there are ethics problems, but harassing people is a step too far", it was the stronger claim that "You people are misogynists who are just using ethics as a cover for your misogyny". Often, it does in fact veer very close to claiming that there was nothing to complain about ethically, as evidenced by Danskin's dismissal of the idea that there was an ethical conflict of interest in the Quinn/Grayson case.

As to why people got harassed, it's because it's the internet, and everybody who's even remotely controversial gets harassment. The mistake of anti-GamerGaters is to characterise basically the entirety of the harassment as being ascribable to GamerGate, when there were a large number of third parties that existed to stir shit. It, furthermore, also ignores that GamerGaters also received harassment and threats during that whole kerfuffle, and ignores their actual attempts to stop harassment. Cathy Young expounds on that argument here:

There was certainly some appalling harassment toward Quinn, Sarkeesian (who canceled a university lecture in October 2014 due to an email threatening a massacre), feminist game developer Brianna Wu (who received a death threat mentioning her home address after she mocked and trolled GamerGate), and some other people, not all of them women. Web developer and GamerGate opponent Israel Galvez was targeted by a fake 911 call that resulted in a visit from a SWAT team, a scary tactic known as “swatting.” But several caveats are in order:

(1) None of the criminal or severe harassment was ever tied to anyone known to be involved in GamerGate.

The FBI spent months investigating GamerGate-related harassment; as documents show, it ended up only issuing warnings to one man who admitted sending an email threat as a “joke” and to another who had made harassing phone calls to a woman with whom he had argued in a chat room. Neither was a known GamerGater. And, while the FBI found evidence that some of the harassment around GamerGate originated on 8chan, a site known as a GamerGate hub, some of it was linked to the forums on Something Awful, frequented by anti-GamerGate, anti-8chan posters.

When GamerGaters blamed the harassment on outside trolls, it looked like an excuse or a far-fetched conspiracy theory. But Kerzner, a neutral GamerGate observer, agrees that “there was a sizable number of third-party trolls that caused the vast majority of the really bad stuff.” There was at least one fairly well-documented instance in which the swatting of a GamerGate critic was traced — according to The Verge, hardly a GamerGate-friendly publication — to a troll from an 8chan board dedicated to “general anti-social mayhem,” where “users joked about Gamergate supporters ‘taking the fall’ for the attack.” A November 2015 post by a notorious troll known as “Wild Goose” also appears to confirm the existence of a troll nest that went after “SJWs” and “gaters” alike.

(2) While the harassment related to GamerGate was quite real, there was also a drastic failure of journalistic skepticism in reporting it.

Of course, questioning people’s reports of being victimized by harassment and threats is something that should never be done lightly. But honoring that principle shouldn’t preclude basic fact-checking.

For instance, in late 2014 and early 2015, there were scary reports of a GamerGate “psychopath” named Jace Connors who had made a series of videos threatening Wu; one of them featured knives, another a man in a skull mask. The most bizarre one showed Connors ranting dementedly against Wu after crashing his car, supposedly on his way to her house.

In February 2015, the videos were revealed to be a satirical prank; “Jace Connors” was actually sketch comedian Jan Rankowski while the man in the skull mask was one of his sidekicks, and the purpose of the videos was to troll and mock GamerGate. Yet more than two months after this disclosure, the skull mask video was still described as an instance of horrific GamerGate harassment in a Boston Magazine article.

More oddly still, Wu’s own New York Times op-ed last month asserts that GamerGaters “shot videos wearing skull masks” and displaying knives they threatened to use against her. When I reached out to Wu for comment, she initially replied that she received “many” such videos and that only GamerGaters themselves had ever claimed they were satirical — even though Wu herself was quoted commenting on the hoax in a February 2015 article in Verge. In a subsequent email, Wu reiterated that she was sent other videos matching the description during that time; however, none are mentioned on her Twitter timeline. (The closest is a screenshot of a tweet with a photo of what looks like a boy wearing a skull mask and holding a toy gun, and with a threat to kill Quinn, Sarkeesian, and Wu.) It seems likely that the reference in the op-ed is to the debunked “Jace Connors” incident.

(3) At least some of the portrayal of GamerGate as a harassment campaign had to do with speech that, while arguably unpleasant, was not threatening.

This speech ranged from polite but persistent unwanted attempts at debate (nicknamed “sea-lioning,” from a 2014 web comic) to video blogs criticizing someone’s work.

(4) GamerGaters themselves were targets of serious harassment, a fact hardly ever acknowledged in the mainstream media (with a few exceptions such as David Auerbach, then at Slate.)

A number of GamerGate supporters were doxxed (i.e., had home addresses and other private information posted online) and reported threats. In 2015, two offline GamerGate events I attended — a meetup in Washington, DC and a panel examining the pro-GamerGate side of the controversy at a Society of Professional Journalists conference in Miami — were disrupted by bomb threats that forced evacuation of the building. This received virtually no coverage.

Given that GamerGaters were defined as the “bad guys” in social justice discourse, many supposedly right-thinking people felt free to engage in startlingly hateful invective toward anyone involved. In November 2014, Geordie Tait, a Bay-area writer for the gaming website Star City Games, posted a series of tweets literally calling for a Holocaust of GamerGaters; when criticized for trivializing the Holocaust, he responded by saying that the Holocaust was “not as bad as what women have suffered.”

Even people who were not GamerGaters but were seen as too GamerGate-friendly (or even too neutral) were sometimes targeted. YouTuber John Bain, a popular video game critic known under the nickname “Total Biscuit,” who strongly condemned harassment but also took the view that GamerGaters had some valid concerns, said that he was inundated with abusive messages while undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer, including messages wishing for his painful death. (Some GamerGate critics also vilified Bain after he succumbed to cancer last year.) Kerzner was a victim of false rumors intended to undermine her career — rumors that chat transcripts disclosed in 2016 seemed to confirm came from anti-GamerGate activists.

(5) Many GamerGaters not only denounced harassment toward their opponents but actively tried to curb it.

Early on, some members launched a “#GamerGate harassment patrol.” In October 2014, Kotaku reporter Jason Schreier, a strong GamerGate critic, acknowledged on Twitter that GamerGaters were rallying to report a troll who was doxxing journalists. In a Kotaku article a month later, Schreier credited GamerGaters with tracking down a man responsible for a string of threats to Sarkeesian (though he still suggested that the climate created by GamerGate had probably egged the perpetrator on).

https://archive.is/W9YFk

I appreciate your usually well-supported MRA-ish arguments, but isn't this below your pay grade? Endlessly litigating who said what about whether he posted his own stuff on fourchan, going through all the rationalwiki sources and so on, does it really matter all that much?

I think far too much ink has already be spilled on that subject for something so trivial. Best case, it's about ethics in game journalism, and I don't even care about that.

Was gamergate your first time, is that why? For me, elevatorgate holds that special place in my heart. I'll always remember it fondly, but I know I have to let it go.

I appreciate your usually well-supported MRA-ish arguments, but isn't this below your pay grade? Endlessly litigating who said what about whether he posted his own stuff on fourchan, going through all the rationalwiki sources and so on, does it really matter all that much?

What?

Recently, someone sent me a video about GamerGate made by BreadTuber Ian Danskin in 2021.

Yeah, so some guy said the other guy posted his rant on 4chan , and op meticulously went to work debunking that conclusion. Don't get me wrong, one side is more wrong than the other, but both are wasting their breath. If he did post his zoe relationship retrospective on 4chan at the time, would it make the smallest difference to any of the participants? This is meta-commentary of refutations of disagreement about things that don't matter in the slightest. But whatever, we can't all be interested in the same things, carry on if it makes you happy.

If he did post his zoe relationship retrospective on 4chan at the time, would it make the smallest difference to any of the participants?

This objection could be made to refuting anything, whether current or not. If you refute something, it's probably not going to make any difference to the person whose post you've refuted. And the people on your side already know the truth, so it won't make any difference to them either.

I don't think so. If rationalwiki released a video of gjoni beating quinn, that would matter quite a bit. Or I don't know, clear proof of video game journalists selling articles for sexual or monetary favours. Whether gjoni posted his tale to 4chan otoh, is not central in any way.

I agree that whether Gjoni posted to 4chan or not isn't particularly central. However, the 4chan thing is a very small portion of what I wrote - the post of mine is broken up into 4 parts. Part 1 is an introductory section which exists mostly just to demonstrate the sheer carnival of trivial-but-damning errors that Danskin makes, errors that shouldn't exist when you're speaking authoritatively on the subject for a university. The meat (and the primary point of making this post) is part 3 and 4, which demonstrates that Grayson and Quinn had a glaring conflict of interest that went completely undisclosed when he was reporting about her.

With regards to your other question about whether GamerGate was my first time, yes, it was my introduction to the culture war, and admittedly it has a special place for that reason alone. I still think, however, that it's important not to let your culture war opponents define the historical narrative in the way they want, even on seemingly small things like GamerGate. Ceding ground to them like this gives them the ability to smear you later on and justify increasingly censorious behaviour towards those who oppose them, and at this point I'm adopting an approach of not giving an inch where I don't think it's warranted.

Finally, GamerGate is not in any way my main focus and it is also not something I'm going to be writing about often. This thread is probably the last top-level thing I'm going to be writing on it for quite a while.

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