Gamergate: a misogynist harassment campaign disguised as consumer revolt – The Verge

Congresswoman Katherine Clark announces cybercrime enforcement training bill at SXSW

2016-03-12T16:09:18-05:00

Representative Katherine Clark (D-MA) has announced a new federal bill to ramp up cybercrime enforcement training for police departments and create a national resource center that hosts a cybercrime-specific library. Clark announced the bill at a SXSW panel about how law enforcement and the tech industry can work together to bring down online trolls.

The proposed legislation, called the Cybercrime Enforcement Training Assistance Act, would establish a $20 million annual federal grant for state and local law enforcement agencies to train police officers, prosecutors, and emergency dispatchers in identifying and prosecuting cybercrimes. The f …

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SXSW cancels Gamergate-related panels after ‘threats of violence’

2015-10-26T18:54:41-04:00

The Gamergate controversy is causing even more problems - this time with two panels at next year's SXSW festival. Earlier today, activist and programmer Randi Harper tweeted that the organizers of SXSW had canceled a panel called "Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games," presented by Harper, IBM Watson interaction designer Caroline Sinders, and writer Katherine Cross. The reason? It was drawing too many threats.

In fact, SXSW looks like it's decided to steer clear of anything potentially Gamergate-related at all. A few days ago, a group called the "Open Gaming Society" announced a panel called "A Discussion on the Gaming Community." While …

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Gamergate scandal convinced 4chan founder Moot to leave the site

2015-03-14T11:32:02-04:00

This past January, when Christopher "Moot" Poole announced that he was stepping down as chief of online message board 4chan, he was vague as to what had led to his decision. But Rolling Stone's David Kushner reports that the extremely volatile "Gamergate" movement gave Poole the resolve he needed to leave the site he founded.

In an interview, Poole says that when both Gamergate and a separate controversy surrounding a number of nude celebrity photos came to life on 4chan last September, it was "probably the most stressful month of my life." As he explains, "Week after week after week after week, there's this new controversy … I kept getting …

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Rep. Katherine Clark wants the FBI to crack down on Gamergate and online threats

2015-03-11T13:11:05-04:00

Gamergate and online abuse have officially made it to Congress. Yesterday, Rep. Katherine Clark (D-MA) published a letter to the House Appropriations Committee, asking it to call on the Justice Department to crack down on internet harassment, including the rape, murder, mass shooting, and bomb threats that have been leveled against women (and some men) in the video game community. Clark represents Boston-based game developer Brianna Wu, who has been the target of a sustained hate campaign; in an interview with Jezebel, Clark said communication with Wu led to a "disappointing" meeting with the FBI in February. "This is clearly just not one of …

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DDoS attack targets Femsplain on International Women’s Day

2015-03-08T15:57:54-04:00

Feminist blog Femsplain was taken offline earlier today by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, according to the site's founder, Amber Gordon. She tells The Verge that the site was offline for roughly three hours before service returned intermittently late Sunday afternoon on the East Coast. The timing seems far from random: today is International Women's Day.

This is what a DDoS attack looks like in case you were wondering. pic.twitter.com/0xS9KzvGqn
- Amber (@missambear) March 8, 2015

In a tweet, Gordon - best known online as @missambear - shared a screenshot showing the massive influx of traffic from the DDoS attack. Such attac …

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A violent, delusional Gamergate psychopath is actually a comedian’s terrible hoax

2015-02-24T12:22:10-05:00

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One of the weirdest and most disturbing moments of Gamergate - the point where a "former future marine" named Jace Connors apparently crashed his car in an attempt to locate developer Brianna Wu - is looking like a hoax. So instead of a schizophrenic gamer threatening people online, it's actually a sociopathic comedian.

Connors, also known as parkourdude91, has been a fixture of internet mockery since 2012, an over-the-top Internet Tough Guy who referenced having schizophrenia. Roughly a month ago, he posted a furious video initiating "Operation Wupocalypse," a nebulous character assassination (and possibly literal assassination) plan that …

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The Law & Order Gamergate episode manages to be even more depressing than Gamergate

2015-02-12T11:49:21-05:00

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The Gamergate controversy is, to some extent, a fight over whether all art is political. Supporters hate longtime target Anita Sarkeesian, for example, for finding sexist messages in things that are "just for fun." So it's fitting that a lowbrow, sensationalist show like Law and Order: SVU inspired weeks of ideological debate by announcing an episode about gendered harassment in the gaming world. Nobody ever thought it would be good - SVU exists in a genre that's famously awful at depicting technology. But in its own cartoonish way, it was going to help set the political narrative.

If Nightline's Gamergate segment was a broad non-fictional …

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Law & Order is sending Ice-T to investigate Gamergate-style harassment

2015-01-30T01:10:33-05:00

The Gamergate movement, irrecoverably linked to the online harassment of women in the games industry, has drawn the ire of Joss Whedon, Patton Oswalt, Seth Rogen, and a number of other celebrities. But people who doxx, SWAT, and threaten women on the internet are set to face their biggest challenge yet in early February - Ice T.

The TV detectives get involved after a woman is assaulted at a convention

The rapper, actor, and Body Count vocalist, who plays Odafin "Fin" Tutuola in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, is set to delve into the world of internet harassment in an episode of the show set to air on February 11th. The episode, titled "Int …

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Wikipedia denies ‘purging’ feminist editors over Gamergate debate

2015-01-28T09:59:17-05:00

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Gamergate is breaking Wikipedia. Since August, Wikipedia's article about the controversy has been divisive on a scale normally reserved for unjust wars and global warming. Gamergate supporters have been "boycotting" the site for months because of perceived bias, and co-founder Jimmy Wales has had limited luck in communicating with them. But over the past week, it's been getting heat from the other side of the aisle. The Guardian and others reported that five editors opposed to Gamergate had been banned from editing any page on "gender or sexuality, broadly construed." The site's Arbitration Committee decision meant that "not only do the Game …

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Here’s what Anita Sarkeesian’s harassers do with the rest of their Twitter time

2015-01-28T09:44:45-05:00

Back in 2012, feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian posted a massive wall of furious, dismissive, or actively threatening YouTube comments that people had left on her proposal for a video series about female characters in games. At the time, this harassment wasn't exactly unprecedented, but it seemed bizarre and singular - how could a fairly mild video about narrative tropes draw such pure hatred? Three years later, it's become practically routine, and Sarkeesian has posted a week's worth of equally angry and depressingly similar Twitter messages.

Obviously, this is a biased statement. A more objective reporter would concede that the entire camp …

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