Doxing Victim Zoe Quinn Launches Online "Anti-harassment Task Force"

AmiMoJo writes: On Friday, developer and doxing victim Zoe Quinn launched an online "anti-harassment task force" toolset, staffed by volunteers familiar with such attacks, to assist victims of a recent swell of "doxing" and "swatting" attacks. The Crash Override site, built by Quinn and game developer Alex Lifschitz, offers free services from "experts in information security, white hat hacking, PR, law enforcement, legal, threat monitoring, and counseling" for "victims of online mob harassment."

They have already managed to preemptively warn at least one victim of a swatting attempt in Enumclaw, Washington. As a result, the police department's head e-mailed the entire department to ask any police sent to the address in question to "knock with your hand, not your boot."

Comments

Better Late Than Never

[Kunedog]

Gamergate's Harassment Patrol has been decrying, detecting, and reporting such behavior for months, no matter which side it came from. Glad to see someone from the anti-GG side finally express willingness to follow their lead (this is an anti-harassment operation and not just a partisan anti-Gamergate PR stunt, right?).

Re:Three Cheers for Zoe Quinn

[Anonymous Coward]

curious too. but i've got to say, it's sad, but i find it all too easy to believe all the folks involved in this mess are generally horrible people. most allegations are very likely patent nonsense all around, and yet... i still find myself concluding that i am so glad i don't know any of them, or anyone like them. there aren't two side to annoying dipshit.

Re:Three Cheers for Zoe Quinn

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone made a couple of posts on Wizardchan an off-topic comment about Zoe Quin being the cause of their sorrow and calling for revenge. No one did anything at all. Zoe and her clique got Wizardchan (a lonely guy support group) harrassed by falsely claiming these posts on a site she doesn't even go to were harassment from a hive of terrible neckbeard misogynist nerds.

More? Google "The Fine Young Capitalists" - These are feminists who ran a gamejam to get girls into game development / design and it was shut down by Zoe and her clique of slanderous trolls. The #GamerGate folks of /v/ and /pol/ on 4chan found out (they who supposedly hate women) and so they got the feminist pro-women gamejam funded.

I ask you, Presto Vivance, what evidence have you ever sought out about the #GamerGate affair? Would you believe KKK propaganda that they are fair and just and just want to inform you of the "inherent evils of blackness" without fact checking? No? Then why would you believe SJW propaganda that they are fair and just and just want to inform you of the "inherent evils of maleness" in games without fact checking?

It wouldn't matter if I posted any evidence showing ties to SA forrumites, or links to anything else, since you don't matter, you aren't interested, you don't fact check, can't do a single google search and instead beg for facts on slanted media outlets like Slashdot. But you've got to be kidding me if you think, "She's no fucking saint" isn't spot on.

Re:Slashdot stance on #gamergate

[russotto]

I'm starting to think this gamer gate is just another grouping of right wing nuts.

No, that's been researched. GG is mostly left of center. This is authoritarian left (SJWs like Quinn, Alexander, Grayson, McIntosh, Chu, etc) vs libertarian left (GG).

Re:Three Cheers for Zoe Quinn

[bloodhawk]

Doesn't mean she deserves harassment. Condemnation maybe. Harassment no.

Very true, but the same can be said of her victims.

She doxxed people as well...

[Karmashock]

... So I really don't see why she's in any moral position to judge anyone else that doxxes.

I forget who it was, I think it was a civil rights lawyer from Los Angeles... so we'll hear more about this as that breaks down.

But ol' Zoe has some esplaining to do.

"Quinn ruined lives", yeah right

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, she may not have been a great girlfriend for Eron Gjoni, but any actual ruining of his life happened because he wrote up that massive attack article on her and posted it to a bunch of discussion boards that had already been harassing Anita Sarkeesian and other feminists in gaming. Zoe will probably date other people in the future, though perhaps he dissuaded a few potential boyfriends from bothering with her, but anybody would have to be out of their mind to date him, because of how he treats his ex-girlfriends, and if I were in the gaming business (or whatever business he's in now), I'd have more sense than to hire him.

Re:"Quinn ruined lives", yeah right

[Anonymous Coward]

Zoe Quinn is a predatory abuser. That's why he didn't have a good relationship with her, and all he did was speak out about this so other people could be aware of it.

Re:"Quinn ruined lives", yeah right

[LaurenCates]

As someone who's both read "The Zoe Post" and who has been in abusive relationships before (which is ultimately how she came to my attention, not the gaming stuff), let me offer a different perspective.

It seems to me that Quinn was a rather nasty piece of work. Putting aside anything to do with gaming journalism, I'd say she was a full-on sociopath. And it isn't misogyny to point out that she was an emotional abuser. Based on everything I've seen, and lack of refutation on her part, or anyone else's for that matter, to the contrary, I can't even give her the benefit of the doubt.

Now, you can err on the side of "personal business, don't air dirty laundry" here, but the thing about sociopaths is that they know there is always someone around the corner to manipulate.

Maybe what Gjoni did was wrong, and maybe the response to it was disproportionate (and NO, I am not anti-GamerGate; in fact, I have a problem with every single woman who's come out and said "it must be GamerGate" every time they are threatened...I am a believer in personal responsibility, and with that comes assignment of personal responsibility to others as well).

BUT, let me pose this question: how do you fitfully punish a sociopath so that the consequences take real effect? Particularly since emotional abuse is difficult to prosecute and damn near impossible when it's a woman committing the offense (yes, dammit, women CAN be abusers, and it is deeply frustrating when I see so-called "feminists" hide behind "misogyny" and the "weak little woman" stereotype to get out of jail free; it's truly funny how feminism is about equality but not at all about personal responsibility)?

Well, if you let a sociopath know that there's nobody left to manipulate, that they ALL know now what your game is, maybe they have incentive to change, to seek help, to become better people?

It's a dream, of course. It's a dream of abuse victims like me. That abusers have no outlets left. That all potential targets are now on their guard and won't play the game. That abusers get frozen out and realize that it is upon them to change. That there's a true reckoning involved, not more potential victims down the road.

You may not like what Gjoni did, that's certainly your right. But remember, when you deal with sociopaths, the ideal of a polite society flies right out the window.

Re:It Remains a Journalism Scandal. Deal With It.

[Anonymous Coward]

The central allegation no-one made?

"They claim it was for a review but there's no review!" is the oldest of the cover-up's lies. It was for EXPOSURE. And in an article on -50- upcoming Twine games, Depression Quest was
a) the only game sourced for a screenshot, despite being an unattractive text adventure
b) used as inspiration for the title of the article
c) mentioned first
In merely ONE of his several articles mentioning what is frankly a cripplingly unimpressive game even for Twine.

So sure, you can count cheating on someone five different times (constituting rape by your personal definition), isolating them from their friends, inducing panic attacks when they rightly suspect your infidelity, and any of the rest of the abusive acts found in the Zoepost as "not a great girlfriend for Eron", I guess implying that some people LIKE being abused?, but that's not really going to remove Grayson's positive coverage for a dev who has cheating with him, it's not going to have her not sleep with an IGDA staffer who is now in bed with a known harasser's anti-harassment (of her friends, I don't trust her involving "white hat hackers", someone who criticized her is getting doxxed inside 3 months GUARANTEED) initiative, and it's not going to have a reddit mod not delete 15,000+ comments after she made the personal request to censor the discussion by email.

It will still be an ongoing consumer revolt regarding the anti-consumer nature of the gaming press as it stands, including its backroom collusion with Silverstring Media and their ideological partners. A lot of the people watchdogging the press now don't even know who Chelsea is. Keep pushing your genetic fallacy though, it certainly created a temporarily effective smokescreen in the beginning.

I don't normally bother using Slashdot, so forgive my lack of login. ThisIsFrigglish on Reddit, if you'd like to follow up directly.

Re:Slashdot stance on #gamergate

[LaurenCates]

I've waffled for years about whether or not I should consider myself a feminist, especially considering the personal stakes involved (female, engineer).

The GamerGate business shoved me the hell out of it, particularly since I have Atheism+ bullies as friends-of-friends. They're the type who are not gamers, have done no research into gaming journalism, but sure-as-hell sided with Quinn without so much as a lick of involvement in gaming culture (or science fiction, BDSM, Heavy Metal music, etc...).

They're the kind of SJWs who squat on any subculture with whom they can come up with a beef that on the surface looks like sexism, and rely on the subculture under scrutiny to be too far into the realm of "the other" for normal people to disagree because of stereotypes. So, people without the time or the inclination to research, or find it terribly inconvenient just fall in line, or in the case of ABC's Nightline profile last week, just keep mentioning things in the same breath to reinforce the association without there actually being a tangible association to make.

(I defy anyone who watched Nightline's "harassment in gaming story" to truly PROVE that gaming culture as a whole is really behind the harassment without cherry-picking examples from games.)

In all fairness, harassment is wrong, and Quinn should not have received it, but the correct response would have been "find the individuals responsible and hold them responsible to the fullest extent of the law", not "WAAAAAH! Neck-bearded man-children want to keep me...umm, US, I mean, US, that's right, WOMEN out of gaming because they hate WOMEN. MISOGYNY! MISOGYNY!", while using their sympathetic media friends to bolster their story.

Victims, of course. Victims who happen to have the media on their side already.

They aren't gamers. They just want the moral high-ground over low-hanging fruit.

And that's lazy. That's not hard work.

Feminism, if it were truly about the equality that women just don't have yet, should be about hard work. About changing the perceptions of what women are and what women want, not about scolding men until they're cowed into the "right" way of thinking by blunt-force messaging or peer pressure.

So, I'm a gender egalitarian, and anti-feminist. There.