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Game Company Receives Complaints About Bad Example Set By '%FEMALENAME' (kotaku.com)
ArenaNet narrative designer Jessica Price was fired last week after she accused a Twitter user of "mansplaining", and adding later "Don't expect me to pretend to like you here." (Her employer characterized this as "attacks on the community.")
So what happened in the week that followed? An anonymous reader writes: A Reddit user indicated he'd been speaking satirically when he posted that "We can probably fire anyone on the GW2 dev team as long we make a big enough stink," and expressed surprise later that no one had disagreed with him. But another female developer told Kotaku she saw a real call to action on 4chan, and that it was followed by angry letters to the game studio she freelances for calling for her firing too, complaining their games had declined since she was hired (along with another woman). The letters also complained her Twitter account set "a bad example for the letter-writer's children, who supposedly play this game." The company's CEO received "a three-digit number's" worth of angry letters -- though "Fifty or so of them glitched out with a lot of variables exposed, including %FEMALENAME."
"A deeper look at the names and emails associated with the letters went to Facebook bot profiles and people whose profiles indicated associations with Gamergate or 4chan," reports Kotaku -- and Brianna Wu made a similar charge on Twitter last week, citing research by a team of volunteers. "The overwhelming majority of people harassing Jessica Price today on Twitter are bots and sock puppets. These are throwaway accounts that are used as toys. Almost no one claiming to be upset is an established, normal Twitter user." The Verge reports that Wu monitored Jessica Price's account, and found harassment "as bad as she's ever seen," blocking at least 600 different accounts.
Another female narrative designer at Arkane Studios says her employer was messaged with a complaint that she'd "verbally abused" a Twitter user -- and discovered a (since-deleted) online petition calling for her firing. And an angry message was also sent to Opaque Space (collaborating with NASA on VR games and training), complaining the company should take responsibility for the "man hating ideals...spread through social media accounts" by their game design lead. "I know MANY people like me, especially women, who have frequent experience with people calling for their employers to fire them for speaking up, speaking out," she posted on Twitter.
The latest furor began with an accusation of mansplaining which a YouTube streamer defended as "my obvious attempt at creating dialogue and discussion", calling it "disheartening" that Jessica Price didn't "correct me in my false assumptions."
So what happened in the week that followed? An anonymous reader writes: A Reddit user indicated he'd been speaking satirically when he posted that "We can probably fire anyone on the GW2 dev team as long we make a big enough stink," and expressed surprise later that no one had disagreed with him. But another female developer told Kotaku she saw a real call to action on 4chan, and that it was followed by angry letters to the game studio she freelances for calling for her firing too, complaining their games had declined since she was hired (along with another woman). The letters also complained her Twitter account set "a bad example for the letter-writer's children, who supposedly play this game." The company's CEO received "a three-digit number's" worth of angry letters -- though "Fifty or so of them glitched out with a lot of variables exposed, including %FEMALENAME."
"A deeper look at the names and emails associated with the letters went to Facebook bot profiles and people whose profiles indicated associations with Gamergate or 4chan," reports Kotaku -- and Brianna Wu made a similar charge on Twitter last week, citing research by a team of volunteers. "The overwhelming majority of people harassing Jessica Price today on Twitter are bots and sock puppets. These are throwaway accounts that are used as toys. Almost no one claiming to be upset is an established, normal Twitter user." The Verge reports that Wu monitored Jessica Price's account, and found harassment "as bad as she's ever seen," blocking at least 600 different accounts.
Another female narrative designer at Arkane Studios says her employer was messaged with a complaint that she'd "verbally abused" a Twitter user -- and discovered a (since-deleted) online petition calling for her firing. And an angry message was also sent to Opaque Space (collaborating with NASA on VR games and training), complaining the company should take responsibility for the "man hating ideals...spread through social media accounts" by their game design lead. "I know MANY people like me, especially women, who have frequent experience with people calling for their employers to fire them for speaking up, speaking out," she posted on Twitter.
The latest furor began with an accusation of mansplaining which a YouTube streamer defended as "my obvious attempt at creating dialogue and discussion", calling it "disheartening" that Jessica Price didn't "correct me in my false assumptions."
At least this time it's all been well documented and understood, so that the attacks on these women seem to have ultimately failed and if anything backfired. These kinds of sloppy mistakes with mail merge apps are nothing new, but unfortunately sometimes the messages look genuine to the victim's employer.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Is anyone really surprised that identity politics only lead to more and broader generalized hatred?
She was fire for insulting the clients, she was not hire to speak garbage in twitter.
These tactics are bad and evil when used by one side, but when the forces of social justice band together to get conservatives silenced or fired, it's ok?
Seems to me they don't like the taste of their own medicine.
P.S. Are you really sure you want to make this woman your test case? I mean, seriously.
What you mean is known under the expression "false flag".
Certainly possible, but let's not deny that there are a lot of toxic people on the internet. Misogyny is real, misandry is also real, although probably without that much supporters. In any way there's a lot of hate going around and tribalism is strongly enough ingrained in people to join in if they feel like they belong to a disenfranchised group. And since we're on the internet, it's not that difficult to find and pick nuts from an opposing group. Then act like they're a prime example of that group and let them do your job for you. Shit flinging starts and that rarely leads to a better outcome. It's usually just more shit flinging. At this point, false flag operations often don't seem to be necessary.
From my perspective, people should perform some reality checks now and then. Distance themselves from the internet a bit and go outside. Look around and see what people around you are doing. Perhaps travel a bit to broaden your horizon. Then judge yourself if the picture your internet communities paint justify all the vitriol that they want you to spew in the actual real and tangible world.
Anything that is merely being said, and not experienced by my own senses, is not real life. All it does, is make you feel bad, about something that is so far out of your control, that you literally cannot even tell if it is real.
Then I noticed, how much of it actually completely does not exist in my world.
All those "wars"...
raging feminist vs neckbears or whatever
americans vs russians
refugees vs nazis
christians vs muslims
you name it.
They were just not happening in *real life*.
This is why the US military forced German civilians to bury bodies in concentration camps after WW2. So that they could experience it with their own senses. It seems that, prior to that, they were all big fans of your philosophy.
Just because you have a vagina doesn't mean you can be a jerk without retribution.
Could this thing be re-written so that it makes a bit more sense? Its like several disjointed story lines melded into an incoherent whole.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
No, the answer is 0): STOP USING TWITTER
How dumb is it to get in text based public flamefests limited to short sentences? The only thing profiting are companies like Twitter who call it "engagement", which drives up ad revenue. Just stop using Twitter for anything. If you really have to use it, use it for entertainment. So called "social media" is not a place for serious discussion - especially not Twitter! The fact that our President uses it is outrageous enough. Just stop using it. Nothing good comes out of it, unless you are a Twitter shareholder.
The topic of discussion and the depth and quality of the subsequent commentary gives me great hope for the future. My hope is that arthropods are back at the top of the food chain again. And the way this discussion and ecological changes are going, they have a good chance. I for one hail our new lobster overlords.
Just the washing instructions on life's rich tapestry
Some idiot brings gender into a discussion on the internet. We don't hate you because you're a woman, we hate you because you're trying to get in our face about being a woman. On the internet. Where you aren't a woman. You're a collection of bytes. Bytes don't have a gender. So shut the fuck up already.
Employers need to stop bending over and letting the mob fuck them in the ass
Maybe we should tell James Damore that?
Seeing how many of them were springing up to defend price, and seeing how easy it is for anybody, male, female, whichever , to set up a fake email campaign and make it look like a badly organized MRA thing, and we know that both side at some point not only boasted they were doxing the other side, but some troll also boasted he made both side fight harder... I am watching such pretend campaign with a wary eye. It could be male incel idiot trully wanting to fire female, it could be troll seeing the great way to shit everywhere and make people reacts, or it could be feminist seeing a great occasion to muck things up by pretending being MRA sending letter. Who knows ? Nobody unless you really catch the one doing it and check what was their reason for it.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
It's great that you've managed to reduce massive numbers of humanity into broad caricatures which you can hate unreservedly. Such attitudes never turn out badly.
Until I see a pastebin
Fuck me, that's your standard of proof?!
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That's a very long post about Price, but she lost her job and bares no responsibly for the mob that used her firing to instigate an attack on other random women.
"Bears", and while she's not responsible for the mob's actions, certainly her actions (and not her being) turn out to have been the trigger for a mob of idiots to go on harassing other women. While I don't condone any of this, it's fairly clear why it happened: Someone threw oil on what turns out to have been a smoldering fire. And now it burns. Whoops.
It's a bit like dropping a smoldering cigarette butt in a dry forest. Many times it'll just go out. Sometimes, even if you stamp it out then walk away, might still cause the entire forest to burn down. If you know the forest is dry, even lighting up a ciggie there is criminally irresponsible. (Hard to grasp concept for some. How about you?)
The real problem here is not one person who was punished for some rude tweets,
For some identity politics-flavoured toxic tweets. It was well beyond mere rudeness. Which explains (but doesn't justify, thanks) the counter-trolling. But I see you mostly post to make your spin stick. Again, "oh, it's AmiMoJo again. Oh well."
it's we have a mob attacking people because of their gender.
That's actually not quite correct. The mob is trolling to see if they can get people fired, which happens to be aimed at females because the trigger happens to be female. If she'd been male then the barrage of bot-complaints would've been against male game designers. I know it's not on your agenda to admit this, but I'll point it out to you anyway.
It's important to publicize it and develop countermeasures so that there are not more victims.
Knowing what's going on ought to be enough. If your employer would fire you without first talking through the complaints then you're better off not working for that employer. In an internet age employers cannot afford to let their valuable human capital up and vanish because some random troll sent a truckload of automated complaints over, well, nothing. If they succumb, the company eventually succumbs.
It would also be great if we could understand the people behind this and their motivations. Some people want to write it off as general trolling, like it's some innate property of the internet that just happens spontaneously, but there is a years old pattern of attacks on women specifically with deeply misogynistic motivations.
Go hang out on 4chan and report your findings, there's a good little researcher.
To be clear: 4chan has "a years old pattern of attacks" against just about anyone, everyone, regardless of any single thing. They'll hate you just so they have an excuse to hate you, until their attention span runs out and then they'll hate something else for a while.
Again, not on your agenda to admit it, but 4chan's history is pretty clear to just about everyone else here.
Using the #metoo hashtag without any further explanation means that you have had a personal experience. If you were just referencing the "#metoo movement", your comment was misleading.
to address inequality? Racism and Sexism really are things. It's not like we've eliminated them completely from human thought and we can just go on our way. Just having laws against racial and sexual discrimination is technically 'identity politics'. Sure, you can take it too far (there's lots of whack jobs on the left and the right wing media spends an unhealthy amount of time reminding us of them) but when somebody's a racist or sexist you don't stop pointing out they're racist or sexist just because a few whack jobs want to cut everybody's dicks off.
Well, we pointed out that Jessica Price was sexist. What more do you want?
These people are "the left" as much as the kkk is "the right".
Nobody likes these people and all her friends who also get harassment are fellow internet warriors.
Odds are they're posting AC because people like you would ramp up the harassment if given some idea where to go.
Honestly, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if a major factor in why men might have it worse is because of douchebags like you, who apparently believe that it's A-OK if men get harassed--which is the message you send when you dismiss their complaints casually, and yes, that can on its own make it worse. Harassment is bad, and if you believe your target and/or motives somehow justify it, you are part of the problem.
Seriously, this sort of thing is part of why I'm not at all comfortable with the anti-gamergate side. What is wrong with you people, that you can't even bring yourselves to say things like "Anybody can be harassed and harassment is wrong"? That shouldn't be controversial, yet it is getting treated like it not only is controversial but is offensive.
You used the #metoo hashtag. You don't seem to have a personal experience.
What kind of experience? Have I been harassed? Of course; who the fuck hasn't. Have I had random internet dipshits try to dox me and get me fired? They didn't succeed, but yeah, quite a few have tried. Have I been sexually assaulted? Absolutely. Only ever by women, too; the few homosexual men who have come on to me over the years were much less presumptuous and understood the word "no" much better than the entitled hetero twats that have tried it.
In the past you have demanded that women make credible and specific accusations, but now when politely asked refuse to provide one of your own.
Except I'm not making accusations. I have no interest in making a fucking federal case out of it. Social Justice Warriors freak out when someone grabs your ass; when it happens to men we just laugh it off. Why would I try to ruin some chicks life just because she was a bit drunk and got grabby? Or because she was horny and misread the signals? Unlike twitters Social Junkie Whales I generally care about people. I might be a dick to you in conversation here but if we happened to meet up in real life and you made an off-color joke or dropped your pants in front of me I wouldn't flip out and try to get you fired. I would either laugh or tell you I'm not interested, and we would move on with our lives. I get no benefit from trying to ruin you; on the contrary, I would be contributing to a toxic culture which insists that every faux pas is an unforgivable crime. I don't want to live in that kind of world so I try not to help create it.
Ah the very least, you seem to be acting in bad faith and got very defensive when I tried to engage with you. Why are you acting this way?
Look, for a Social Junkpile Wanker, you're not all that bad. I mean you're still clearly delusional, looking to be offended, completely unwilling to consider any contrary opinion, and eager to spin things to suit your needs ... but compared to the rest you're actually kinda alright. So do you think that, for once in your Slashdot career, you could stop assuming that people who are being completely honest with you are part of some grand conspiracy to deceive you into who-knows-what? Maybe apply the principle of charity? I know it's hard, but it's worth a try. You might even have a decent conversation for a change.
The solution is to actually pursue equality, and accept that equality of opportunity does not guarantee equality of outcome. *That* is the problem people are having with progressives/SJWs; they clearly don't stand for equality, they want special treatment; to switch who gets the privelege. You can see that in such fantastic claims like "Why color-blind meritocracy is a tool of white supremacy", never willing to address the origins of the inequality, just claiming it's racism and sexism and trying to enforce it at the end by giving special treatment. Setting up justice systems where only what the women feels matters, evidence and elements of crime be damned-- Title IX kangaroo courts, allowing expert witnesses in real courts that literally say 'the womens lies prove she's telling the truth". Turning simple, obvious truths like "men and women may be biologically predisposed to different career preferences" into 'burn the heretics who dare say that', but only ever complaining about white collar, highly paid jobs-- never about the lack of women in waste management or oil rigging-- somehow I don't think it's sexism that's keeping them out of those fields.
All of that is standard progressive/SJW ideology, and it's very alienating to the rest of the left who just want equality. And just watch as this comment gets modded into oblivion for daring to point it out,
I work as a teacher... As such, I have some restrictions on what I can do outside my work... and I never had to sign any document about that...
1) no racist attacks (even if the people in front of me act racist, I CAN'T answer in the same terms) ...)
2) no talks against my school... Even if I see problems with some coworkers, I can't make random posts about it.
3) no talks about coworkers in front of students (the big taboo)
4) no "unrespectable behaviour"... this includes being seen drunk in the public space, unfit clothing (no SM-wear in the street or nazi costume or
and so on...
I guess that requirements imposed on teachers are bigger than those on gaming company... but clearly, what she posted is unacceptable... She was not on the internet as "Jane Doe" but as "Jessica Price, writer at Arena.Net"... As such, she had only two choices : politely avoiding the conflict or blocking the guy and ignoring him...
And now, we see people getting pissed off because she got fired... she deserved it... If she can't control her temper online, she should avoid posting !!!
What is wrong with you people, that you can't even bring yourselves to say things like "Anybody can be harassed and harassment is wrong"?
... Well I'm not a fan of the anti-gamergaters either, but this question is pretty easy to answer: it's deflection. If someone says, "Look, this group in particular is being singled out and harassed." and you respond, "Hm, yes harassment is bad. Before we do anything else, let's all say that harassment is bad." then you are deflecting from their complaint by changing the topic to something which they hadn't really been discussing. The other person was not talking about harassment being bad, there was an implication that we all already agreed on that point, the other person was talking about this particular group being singled out.
It's very similar to the "all lives matter" deflection that some people use against the Black Lives Matter protestors. The point of the phrase "black lives matter" is not the concept that lives should matter or that black people have lives. The phrase assumes that we all agree on those points already and so is talking about something else.