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FBI Confirms Open Investigation Into Gamergate
v3rgEz writes In a terse form letter responding to a FOIA request, the FBI has confirmed it has an open investigation into Gamergate, the loose but controversial coalition of gamers calling for ethics in gaming journalism — even as some members have harassed and sent death threats to female gaming developers and critics.
Which ones are they investigating? The drama-mongers or the drama-mongs?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'd be willing to bet that all the threats were fabrications, but I'd also be willing to bet that having charges filed against said fabrications would do a world of good.
At some point, someone, somewhere, somehow, for some reason will actually carry out such a threat and then everyone will be in a world of hurt. Its better if one or more of these provokers have the book thrown at them as an example to the others before that happens. The online culture of flooding death threats, personal harassment and defamation has gotten so out of control, the old adage of "just ignore it" literally does not work anymore.
They weren't. A few women were criticized for their low quality argumentation and/or poor ethics and behavior, however.
There's a big difference to a general attack on women because of their sex and criticisms towards specific women for their actions, which the anti-gamergate side refuses to acknowledge. The former may or may not be misogyny (depends on the motive for the generalization), the latter certainly is not. The rest of it boils down to long term corruption in the media, from supposedly game focused, gawker-owned rags spending too much time on 'social justice' and attacking their readerbase, to the obvious bias in the mainstream media coverage (not that the mainstream media has ever really gotten gaming). Whenever a group becomes this large and amorphous, there are bound to be a few crackpots in the mix (and the feminists are quick to trot this excuse out when one of their group gets a little too blatantly misandric for the good of the their image) who say stupid shit. These comments really shouldn't be taken seriously, but today's media loves to drum up the fear angle by implying that those crackpots make up the majority position and people fall for it. Law enforcement loves it because it gives them justification to demand larger budgets and more unchecked power.
So in other words, IT'S A CONSPIRACY!
Given that there's nothing resembling membership rolls or a roster for gamergate, much like occupy and anonymous, anyone can claim they're part of gamergate and say whatever they want. And given that the birth cries of gamergate were basically textbook misogyny and harassment, it's pretty much impossible to separate the two.
Has it? So what's more believable:
It's a giant conspiracy by media types to set up false harassment fronts against professional victims to make gamergate look bad.
or
Gamergate was full of assholes who continue to act like assholes and don't like it when their targets push back rather than simply accept being harassed into silence.
By far one is much simpler, and hews much closer to the truth despite gamergate apologists denying and deflecting.
Slashdot's coverage of Gamergate has been abysmal. Every other summary has followed the template "harassment, misogyny, threats, harassment, misogyny, threats . . . oh btw Gamergate."
/. thread about the Gamergate scandal itself: the journalistic lapses, the universal news media blackout and user forum/comment censorship (including reddit and 4chan of all places), and the still-ongoing coordinated smear campaign that was launched on August 28 with the "Gamers are Dead" shotgun blast of hit pieces. All of those milestones should have gotten at least one article here each.
Sad as it is, this shitty summary is still the most "unbiased" simply because it straightforwardly mentions the movement as the topic of the discussion. The attempt to imply that the FBI said they were investigating pro-Gamergate people has already been destroyed in the comments (thank fuck users are still in control of the discussion here).
Four months later, there still hasn't been a single
..and yet here you are, posting anyway. Thing is, the tempest entered the teapot from outside. Games are just one of the newer fronts on a much larger, ongoing cultural conflict.
Large amorphous groups like gamergate (and yes, feminist groups and organizations as well) all have a few crackpots making threats. I am sure a few will be found, but that does not alter the legitimacy of the arguments made. I wouldn't be so quick to believe what three letter agencies put out either, especially since they are beholden to political bodies with interests in specific outcomes for the sake of image.
I hope not, it's been a pretty good label to identify the importance of a "crisis". As soon as -gate is added, you know you can skip the story without missing anything worth your time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There is no media blackout because the media does not care. How could you even condense this whole shit show down into a one minute news story? Outside of the gaming community nobody really cares.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Calling something "social justice" does not immediately relegate it to obscurity. "Social justice" is just a term to mean "admit less-than-stellar behavior towards minorities or the underrepresented, and earnestly try to improve it". Unless you'd call Rosa Parks a SJW you really should stop trying to use terms like that pejoratively - it makes you look like a tiny-minded, scared child, who is worried their favorite toys aren't as awesome as they always thought, and lashes out at anyone who might point that out to them.
Excellent summary. What it boils down to is that some people were criticized, and they defended themselves by claiming these were attacks on their gender. The reason is plain and simple: They could not credibly defend themselves against the criticism itself, so they used misdirection and made it a gender-issue. Predictably, a lot of people with no clue whatsoever about what was going on then jumped on those criticizing, as apparently criticizing a person of female gender is an attack on them all...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
epyT-R, I also seem to remember you making many utterly misogynistic posts in the past, such as "women shouldn't/can't be scientists" and so on, so it's not really surprising that you'd be complaining about people calling other people out for being narrow-minded and intellectually lazy. When you're being socially unjust, I guess people looking for social justice are your enemy, hence your tirades against them.
Aaww you actually think calling somebody an SJW is an insult.
Being an SJW is pretty much the plot of every good action movie or series ever made. The A-Team were SJW's, MacGuyver was an SJW... dude, being an SJW is the ultimate real-man thing to do !
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
No one cares either.
Some Media Whores got some attention. BFD.
The game we play didn't come out this year, in some cases, this millennium.
I guess someone, somewhere, cares about these "Journalists" enough to send death threats; I can't possibly see why.
New games are horribly crippled compared to the past; It would be nice to see a new shooter without micropayments, and including a level editor.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
ALL OF THIS.
This is exactly why Gamergate exploded in numbers.
It all started out attacking some awful excuse for a game on Steam that attempted to be deep and meaningful, but ended up being awful.
Then, the developer cried "sexism!" and played the victim card SO HARD.
Then friendships were found between a few reviewers and her, which caused an even larger shitstorm.
Then the rest of the bullshit happened, fake relationships, fake harassment, fake death threats, fake screenshots attacking and threatening to attack her (like those faked images from uh, wizardchan or whatever it was, OBVIOUSLY forgetting archivers exist) and so on.
The claims that only white fat virgins were pro-gamergate, shot down, and then them saying images were faked, how people were PAID and so on. YES, SERIOUSLY. PAID. This is how far these morons will go in order to try squash any criticism against them.
OH, let's not forget where she publicly attacked a charity to get more female developers in to games dev, that bit ALWAYS ends up forgotten.
I sat and watched that crap as it was happening, her and her group of friends all gloating about their success on twitter during it all.
The ONLY people that have genuinely been harassed during this are all the people supporting gamergate, all by her and her group of "hacker" buddies doxxing everyone that even shows any negativity to her movement, or follows the people in question.
People have been fired. People have been accused of rape. People have had massive amounts of shit sent to their houses that they never wanted, I'm sure some people even got swatted.
People against GG that were in positions of power elsewhere, such as game jams, were threatening to give all games by male teams bad reviews, RIGHT ON TWITTER, then came that delusional terrible programmer that wrote the blocklist for twitter and got trolled by allowing a troll himself on the whitelist! And who did that block? Oh yes, literally anyone that followed anyone relating to GG, or mentioned GG, so, loads of people that had nothing to do with it, because "gotta silence everyone!", you know, because censoring things on your computer means NOBODY ELSE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD CAN SEE IT. (this is the sort of people we are dealing with here)
I seriously do hope the FBI find those fake threats and the few possibly real threads that seem to be coming from a guy in Brazil. (probably a botnet node)
This shit really needs to be dealt with already since the only people suffering are gamers.
These people aren't gamers, Anita couldn't even mention a single game in an interview when she done an entire piece on game sexism. How pathetic. (not to mention every single one of her points were destroyed many times over)
But of course, let's not forget, this is just attacking females.
All those females that are actually guys employed at many news sites, or post on twitter. I can literally name 4 females in gamergate and the rest are guys that are hitting double digits now. Soggy knees indeed.
I notice that all your links are to poorly made YouTube videos. Taking the first one, the links you claim back you up are actually just links to more YouTube videos, a document on Google Docs that is unverifiable, a seemingly unrelated WaPo editorial about a spat between journalists and bloggers, and a Gamasutra article that they clearly state was written by community member and not their own staff and which seems to be mostly irrelevant.
Your claims are built entirely on top of other unfounded claims and extremely weak evidence. That basically sums up the entire GamerGate movement, from the original lies about Zoe Quinn onwards. There are some genuine issues with games journalism, although why that surprises anyone I don't know because no aspect of entertainment journalism has much credibility, but those points are lost in a sea of bullshit now.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC