How To End Online Harassment

Presto Vivace sends this excerpt from an article at the Kernel, titled 'With Gamergate, it's not enough to ignore the trolls.' Gendered bigotry against women is widely considered to be "in bounds" by Internet commenters (whether they openly acknowledge it or not), and subsequently a demographic that comprises half of the total human population has to worry about receiving rape threats, death threats, and the harassment of angry mobs simply for expressing their opinions. This needs to stop, and while it's impossible to prevent all forms of harassment from occurring online, we can start by creating a culture that shames individuals who cross the bounds of decency.

We can start by stating the obvious: It is never appropriate to use slurs, metaphors, graphic negative imagery, or any other kind of language that plays on someone's gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. Not only is such language inappropriate regardless of one's passion on a given subject, but any valid arguments that existed independently of such rhetoric should have been initially presented without it. Once a poster crosses this line, they should lose all credibility.

Similarly, it is never acceptable to dox, harass, post nude pictures, or in any other way violate someone's privacy due to disagreement with their opinions. While most people would probably agree with this in theory, far too many are willing to access and distribute this humiliating (and often illegal) content. Instead of simply viewing stories of doxing, slut-shaming, and other forms of online intimidation as an unfortunate by-product of the digital age, we should boycott all sites that publish these materials.

Comments

Re: here we go

[Pino Grigio]

Yes, it's perfectly acceptable to do that to men, especially white heterosexual men. You see according to feminist theory we didn't just invent the modern world, we're also responsible for everything that's wrong with it.

Re:Trolled by Soulskill

[AmiMoJo]

GameGate isn't interested in journalistic standards, except as an excuse to legitimize it's harassment of women.

If GG is about journalistic standards, why is it all based on lies? The original lie was that a journalist slept with a game designer and then wrote a positive review of her game. It didn't happen, the review doesn't exist, the only time he even mentioned one of her games (in a long list of 50 indie games) was before they got together. Surely GG should be eager to correct this misconception and get the truth out, but instead keeps repeating the lie.

Then there are all the lies about Anita Sarkeesian. They seem to think she is some kind of master scam artist playing the long-con. Unlike most Kickstarter scammers she actually delivered the things she promised to (a series of videos) instead of just running off with the money. There are numerous fake social media accounts pretending to be her, and GG has woven some of their lies into its own narrative, e.g. the fakes picture of $1000 shoes she is supposed to have bought with the Kickstarter money, or the fake "leaked" transcript where she claims games with difficult controls are sexist.

If GamerGate gave a shit about journalistic integrity it would start by being truthful itself. Instead those using the #GamerGate tag keep repeating the same old lies in the hope that they will become accepted truth.