http://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Gamergate_claims&diff=1587662&oldid=1587661

https://archive.is/X75r5

Continued from:

https://medium.com/@infiltrator7n/a-point-by-point-analysis-of-rational-wiki-s-list-of-gamergate-s-claims-part-1-2249404f6a97#.ml8j6pz5u

https://medium.com/@infiltrator7n/a-point-by-point-analysis-of-rational-wiki-s-list-of-gamergate-s-claims-part-5-5dcd3a971ef#.pebc5wggd

Anti-Gamergate is a unified counter-movement

Claim Anti-Gamergate is its own movement set on bullying, harassing, and attacking Gamergate just like Gamergate bullies everyone else

Rebuttal Opposing and criticizing Gamergate does not make someone part of a unified “anti-Gamergate” mob. There is no central organization or culture in opposing Gamergate. In the same way, not all critics of the Westboro Baptist Church are part of a centralized Anti-WBC movement, because there’s no central organization or culture in attacking the WBC. Lumping every critic of a mob into one unified group attacking the mob is the definition of a persecution complex, and is often employed by cults and conspiracy theorists seeking to isolate their members from outside influence that might dispel their bullshit. There is some level of organization against Gamergate, in the /r/GamerGhazi subreddit, the #StopGamerGate hashtag on Twitter, and general support for Gamergate’s various targets like Zoë Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian.

I love the continued use of the word “mob” to describe GamerGate, as if that’s “bad”. RationalWiki itself calls it’s management model a mobocracy, so this is a rather hypocritical use of that word by their “Mob”.

Otherwise, this is fairly accurate.

That said, none of these groups are large or centrally-organized, certainly not to the extent that Gamergate’s raids, doxxes, and false flags are and have been. Nearly all of non-internet media has turned against Gamergate, and yet effectively none of them are part of an “anti-GG” group. And of course, being against Gamergate is in no way being in favor of a “corrupt” video game press, because Gamergate has next to nothing to do with its lofty claimed goals of improved “ethics in video game journalism”. This little fact didn’t stop their current journalist buddy from wondering why no one wanted to serve as the “anti-Gamergate” side of his debate panel.

Alright, claim bears this out, but dissent with the opinion:

At the time this was written, GamerGate was nigh universally shit on, but is that still true NOW? If so, fine, If not, then acknowledgement some non internet news organizations have changed their stance needs to be added.

Anti-Gamergate is anti-journalist

Claim When a neutral journalist went on /r/GamerGhazi, they banned him because they hate journalists!

Rebuttal Brad Glasgow (the aforementioned journalist) originally came to Reddit to see that someone had posted a previous article of his to /r/KotakuInAction, and began to talk to posters there. He never saw his article posted to /r/GamerGhazi, so he took matters into his own hands.

One minor quibble, why can’t this link to the source? The Ghazi link adds context, yes, but which can’t it link to the primary source and secondary sources for debunking and context?

His statements in /r/KotakuInAction reflected that he was leaning in Gamergate’s favor; a moderator of /r/GamerGhazi pointed out that his article was terribly flawed, misrepresented the original data it covered, and solely served to satisfy Gamergaters and others who think there is a gender divide in desired entertainment, as well as how completely misinformed he has been about Gamergate, particularly when several dozen more reputable news agencies covered it before he did.

Fine, fair enough, but cite sources of the news agencies calling him out as well. The Ghazi link is not bad in and of itself, but citing secondary sources to support it just verifies the Ghazi link’s claims.

Glasgow was ultimately banned from /r/GamerGhazi for falsely representing his own stance on Gamergate, which was belied in the article he had wanted to post.

More Ghazi links. Again, cite from the horse’s mouth for verification and context as well.

None of this went into Glasgow’s article where he “polled” /r/KotakuInAction for their opinions on what Gamergate was actually about. Instead he claimed that “anti-Gamergate” was just as paranoid about journalists as Gamergate. GamerGhazi and those critical of Gamergate don’t hate journalists, Brad Glasgow. They just don’t like you and your obvious bias.

This was just unneeded, irrational bullshit. If the above links and cited evidence proves your claims, this ending paragraph is just being spiteful just to be spiteful, and whoever wrote this was just being a petulant, mean spirited jackass, especially since if they already made their point without using insults, then this was just excessive douchebaggery.

Gamergaters are harassed, too

Claim Gamergaters get harassed, too, so that makes aGG just as bad! Rebuttal While many people within Gamergate claim that they have been harassed for their participation within it, it would seem nearly all harassment of Gamergaters comes from other Gamergaters.

“King of /pol/” was doxxed in September 2014, and initially blamed it on “anti-Gamergate”, but later admitted it came from Gamergaters and blew the whistle on various organizers of the mob.

Okay, source seems good enough, could use supplementary verification.

Liana Kerzner brought to light the sexist attacks she received from Milo Yiannopoulos shortly before Yiannopoulos and Ethan Ralph of The Ralph Retort viciously attacked her together on a piece on Ralph’s blog.

Source bears out, need verification, and according to conversations recently had with Ryulong, he/RW refuse to link to The Ralph Retort and Breitbart because they dox people, but in this case, even Kerzner admits she wasn’t an angel in this, and if you want to prove Milo and Ralph are assholes too, you need to cite their own words, even if only through archive links. And no, I think the excuse for why they don’t is horseshit, because they are leaving room for their debunking to be criticized for telling only one side of the story and leaving out crucial evidence to make their debunking hard to assail.

“Internet Aristocrat” claimed fairly early on that he had been doxxed by people on 8chan.

Twitter link, needs verifying citations.

Dan, the owner of indie gaming site Mangotron, had early on given preferential coverage to Gamergate, only to be doxxed by Gamergaters chasing a conspiracy theory.

Needs supplementary verification, but decent enough starting point.

Lizzy Finnegan, a.k.a. @lizzyf620, was also doxxed by Gamergaters (or rather 8channers on /baphomet/) and abandoned the mob(although apparently not permanently).

r/KotakuinAction link, needs verification, more pejorative use of the word “mob”, but I’ll admit being pleasantly surprised this admits the users on /baph/ may not be actual GGers. Props RW, thanks for including room for reasonable doubt here.

Disturbed lead singer David Draiman supported Gamergate early on as he thought it was an anti-censorship movement, only to be inundated by antisemitic attacks for asking his new Gamergate followers to denounce perceived antisemitism from Trevor Noah.

Needs verification via other sources, but checks out.

One of the moderators of 8chan’s /gamergate/ board revealed that he had been doxxed by Ethan Ralph and abandoned the mob as a result.

Mind sourcing this at all?

Michael Koretzky, the regional director for the Society of Professional Journalists’ southeast U.S. region, planned an event called “AirPlay” for Gameraters to get their story (allegedly their story on ethics in video game journalism) to actual journalists. However, his decisions in setting up final plans resulted in being berated by Gamergater and intended AirPlay panelist Oliver Campbell and then reported the vitriolic responses to what he had to say concerning his conversation with Campbell. Somehow, this has not deterred him from letting AirPlay go on.

Sources check out, just needs outside verification.

The Japanese indie game group Roninworks had supported Gamergate (as they operate out of 2ch which is where the Japanese right wing netizens congregate), but abandoned the mob after harassment from American Gamergaters like Margaret Gel, a.k.a. @_icze4r, and Slade Villena, a.k.a. RogueStar.

Needs verification, but otherwise checks out

Margaret Gel herself blew the whistle on how Gamergate only wanted to use her to suit their narrative, particularly after she was SWATed, and in turn was subject to multiple racist, sexist, and transphobic attacks on 8chan.

Ghazi link, verify using outside sources.

The syringe!

Claim aGGers sent Milo a syringe in the mail. Rebuttal In September 2014, Milo Yiannopoulos reported having been sent a syringe in the mail, and automatically decided to tag his photo with #Gamergate.

Checks out, verification links would help.

He had been pressed on the matter a month later and responded by saying he had thrown it out rather than give it to the police because he didn’t want to make a spectacle out of it.

Again, checks out, but given it’s a r/KotakuinAction link, definitely verify it with another source.

Translation: “I’m not one of those SJW feminazi professional victims.” It’s easy for Gamergaters to say that someone opposed to them sent Yiannopoulos this syringe. It makes him a victim and bolsters their cause. There’s one small snag to their plan. The syringe was sent to him after he had written an editorial attacking drug addicts. This only proves that Milo Wagner Yiannopoulos really likes pissing people off and revelling in the base reactions.

And this is more needless bullshit. You want to debunk the syringe story, RW, you were doing fine with the citations, just add a few more to verify the story, you’re good. This shit was just totally unnecessary.

For example, you are claiming dry thatch, when left out in the sun, will catch fire. Fine. Then don’t throw gas on it to make it happen faster, because you are just proving you can’t make your case stand on it’s own without an outside incendiary exponent being added.

“Claire Schumann”

Claim aGGros go after their own! Just look at what happened to Claire Schumann! Rebuttal The Claire Schumann case is an odd one. She is someone Gamergaters claim to have been harassed off of Twitter after arguing with Randi Harper, at which one point Harper responded, “you made your gamergate bed, now get fucked in it”. Jay Allen uncovered a strange history of posts made by “Claire Schumann” leading up to the argument with Harper. Anyone outside of Gamergate largely considers the account to not have been sincere in its creation and usage, if not being a total sockpuppet account as as soon as hypocrisy was uncovered, Claire Schumann’s account was deleted on more than one occasion, usually after “she” got caught.

Storify links, need verification with other sources.

One Gamergater in particular even admitted that they had planned the entire altercation between Harper and Schumann because they hate Harper and wanted to make two “antis” fight.

Again, verify with another link to harden your case further and backcheck the information. Seems legit enough, it just needs verification.

Bomb threats!

Claim Two Gamergate meetups were disrupted by bomb threats. Those anti-gamers must have done it!

Before we go on, I’m going to speak up in defense of opponents of GamerGate for a moment.

There is no proof any opponent of GamerGate had anything to do with either outside of possible (yet unproven) motive, and in the case of the first one, some circumstantial evidence based on the infamous “It ends tonight” tweet quote by Arthur Chu.

I still defend Chu to this very day because there is nothing else proving his guilt, and he does not deserve a false accusation when that’s all one can bring to the table as evidence, and I will continue to defend his good name in that regard unless actual evidence proving his guilt ever comes out.

Until then, and I address all GGers here: quit acting like he’s already been proven guilty. Yes, I know, I can’t stop the jokes, not going to try, it’s a fools errand, but quit citing he’s guilty in any serious context, so far that bullshit and we all know it.

As to the second, we still don’t know who is responsible and I’m not pointing fingers.

Rebuttal It is true that bomb threats disrupted a Gamergate meetup in Washington, D.C., and the AirPlay panel in Miami.

Decent sources, add more for verification

Gamergaters have zero evidence connecting these acts to anyone legitimately opposed to Gamergate.

Very true.

Meanwhile, both threats can be traced back to posts on 8chan, and the threat at AirPlay can be traced back to the same guy who went after former Gamergate supporter @pixelgoth as well as Brianna Wu and Randi Harper.

One is an archived 8chan link, the others are Twitter links, they need verification from other sources.

Non-existant claims

Gamergaters are fond of long lists of “harassment”. Not that we aren’t — ours are just based in reality.

The lede here is already assuming GGers are full of shit. Fine, This page is to prove it, but don’t spell out how people are supposed to think in advance, let the evidence prove your case.

“A Gamergater appears to have been doxxed”In this instance, there is literally no evidence presented. Yet Gamergaters still rejoiced at their comrade’s loss.

KotakuinAction links, got outside verification?

In other instances, apparent false flag planning posts were made in public on 8chan’s various boards,

Twitter link of noted anti-GG opponent, you definitely need to verify this another source.

while they constantly accuse everyone else of perpetrating false flags. THIS IS IT. WE FUCKING WON.

They fucking lost it and now we can really claim the moral high ground.

Goddamnit, RW, remember what I said about throwing petrol on dry thatch? Let the evidence make your fucking case, quit being such massive fucking dicks and leading people to that conclusion, they are smart enough to come to that conclusion if you leave compelling evidence.

Interestingly, evidenceless posts like this are quite common in “harassment” lists. “Eleanor Varrot”Varrot is a favorite because it allows Gamergaters to say that “[s]upporters of #gamergate have been victim of targeted racial and gender based attacks so severe that even women brave enough to build girls schools in pakistan [Eleanor Varrot] are afraid of revenge attacks.” Here’s the Twitter conversation:Eleanor Varrot: I built schools for girls in Pakistan despite threats of death but apparantly I hate women because I’m a gamer #GamerGate

J Belmont: You should use the #notyourshield tag too, it’s for women/minorities to amplify their voice.

Eleanor Varrot: I’m afraid of being doxxed, sorry :( these people actively target who they consider “gender traitors” or apostates

Varrot has not actually been doxxed, yet this is evidence. Somehow.

Interesting and quite possibly compelling, but the sources fucking suck, verify them with other sources.

Completely unrelated to Gamergate whatsoever

Eliza SuttonSutton is a favorite because she was doxxed on Twitter by Rebecca Watson, who’s got some publicity, and has spoken against Gamergate. Here’s the post in question:skepchicks: Wow. Online troll @Ellesun who started rumor that @pzmyers had an STD is Eliza Sutton, a doctor at @UWMedicine (linked article) This post was greeted with contempt by some, who created a petition to prevent Watson from hosting an event at an upcoming conference. The claims of several supporters of the petition are incorrect. It should be noted that Sutton had previously stated her name online, though this doesn’t excuse the doxxing. The most obvious problem with Gamergate claiming this as harassment is that Sutton isn’t, to our knowledge at least, a Gamergate supporter. The only remote connection to Gamergate is that Rebecca Watson is a feminist who was previously embroiled in another online controversy with a -gate suffix regarding feminism and women’s place in a field dominated by men.

Three problems with this RW. One, over half the sources are really bad and need verification. Second, as the section title suggests, it’s barely if at all related and comes off as a very petty pissing match that was included because GGers were mentioned, and finally, it has a leading conclusion that refuses to let the evidence speak for itself and instead makes assumption for the reader, with condescending BS and more gas on the dry thatch.

Wizardchan

First Claim Zoë Quinn claimed that she was harassed by Wizardchan users. This resulted in several stories attacking Wizardchan, which is a forum full of depressed people. Rebuttal Wizardchan had a thread attacking Zoë Quinn for gathering popularity while Wizardchan users were left in obscurity. They claimed that she had only become popular as a result of her gender. Quinn tweeted about the thread, and it is entirely possible that a third-party troll sent harassing calls to her. Quinn has been called a liar over this, but a misunderstanding does not make someone a liar. The stories that popped up attacking Wizardchan are not her responsibility. Also, Wizardchan is not a board for “depressed people”. It’s for the MRA-adjacent “incels” named after the 4chan meme that 30-year-old virgins become wizards; 8chan’s Fredrick Brennan used to own Wizardchan but he admitted he had to voluntarily give up the position after he lost his virginity. Second Claim The post on Wizardchan attacking Zoë Quinn was made by Quinn herself to drum up publicity. IP checks confirm this. Back to Rebuttal How do they know her IP? Was the IP confirmed as being from her city? Anyone could say “IP checks confirm this” and not give any evidence. Of note, the claim that the IP correlates to Quinn comes from Brennan, who in fact did not own Wizardchan at the time of the original attacks on Quinn, so there’s no way for him to even properly know any technical details as to what was going on there.

Over half the sources for this are very poor, one being a freaking Imgur link, and all need more neutral verification and as well as links to to the alleged assholes own words wherever possible, if only to vet the claims.

And just to answer Ryulong’s objection about not sourcing mean people who dox and harass, one problem: You want to show people what an asshole looks like, you spread the cheeks of the ass and show people the hole itself instead of just giving a dance around the subject description of it. Yes, crude analogy, and yes, the sources might be cruel, but you want people to take your evidence at face value and you want to utterly demolish any doubt about your credibility, then you’ll want to risk hurting feelings to prove the hole between the cheeks of the alleged asshole is indeed an asshole.

“Google Helldump”

Claim Zoë Quinn used Something Awful’s Helldump board to dox and SWAT “Based Lawyer” Mike Cernovich. Rebuttal Helldump 2000 was an internal callout board for Something Awful so users could suggest bans to the site mods for rule violating creeps like trolls, racists, and pedophiles, but also furries for some reason.

One, your source needs verified. Second, while not directly pertinent, there is a reason for SA hatred of furries, including why would show a lack of ignorance on SA itself.

Its rules were very specific in what users were allowed to do in digging up dirt on prospective bans, but personal information (i.e. doxxing) was strictly forbidden. We emphasize was here because SA shut down Helldump in 2009, six years before Cernovich began spreading these claims.[205] The only proof Gamergate has of anything tying Zoë Quinn to Helldump is a single joke she made in 2012 and admitting she used to post on SA. Either Zoë Quinn has obtained the SJW powers of time travel or Cernovich and all of Gamergate have been caught in a lie that they persistently stick to.

Two things, your sources suck, verify them. Second, can you guys make a single argument WITHOUT a leading conclusion? Seriously, if you have good evidence, it makes your case for you, quit trying to make damn sure people follow a party line.

Unless this is just propaganda dressed up as a rebuttal of claims, in which case just admit to it.

Modeling profile

Claim Zoë Quinn says she faked harassment on Twitter! It says so on her old modeling profile!

Rebuttal Quinn ceased using an erotic modeling website years before Gamergate existed. This is where Gamergaters have found all of the photographs of her that they use as evidence against her for whatever reason. Shortly after the harassment she received, her profile was hacked, and “faking harassment on Twitter for shits and giggles” was added under the interests entry (“game journos” was also added under “turn ons”); Twitter wasn’t even founded during the time Quinn was using the website in question, and she didn’t become a game developer until 2011. The original poster on Reddit later took down the post (which moderators on /r/KotakuInAction had labeled “verified”) and then admited it was more likely the account was hacked.Clearly, SJW time travel powers at work, yet again.

Every last source is Twitter or Reddit, needs verification.

“Gamers are dead”

Claim Anti-GG writers, via the “Gamers are dead” articles, popularized harmful stereotypes of gamers as misogynistic white males!

Rebuttal Proto-Gamergate’s attacks on Zoë Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian sparked a couple of writers to pen essays on how toxic the gamer community is despite how mainstream, and lucrative, video games have become. Every article about this basically said that the “gamer” demographic, that is a single straight white guy, was obsolete and video game publishers should stop catering towards what was now a niche market.

For once, not going to bitch about RW’s sources here, they did a good job for once.

Gamergaters claimed that they were outraged that these websites were perpetuating a harmful stereotype that gamers were all single straight white guys. Except each and every article said the exact opposite: that video game players are from all walks of life, so the “gamer” stereotype should be shelved. Claim “It is suspected by many that, due to the timing of these articles, both in the quick succession of which they were released and in the midst of an unresolved scandal, the articles were an act of collusion.”

Dead link, needs fixed.

Rebuttal Claims of collusion fly in the face of the fact that two articles came first and almost all of the others were reactions to the originals. Further, nobody accuses ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc., of collusion and corruption for running similar news stories on other topics. It’s called the media cycle.

Mind citing some sources to make this argument?

Quinn DDoS’d and doxxed The Fine Young Capitalists

Claim Zoë Quinn DDoS’d TFYC’s website and doxxed their members, including leader Matthew Rappard.

Needs verification.

Rebuttal Quinn did none of these things. What she had been doing was discussing and criticizing TFYC’s rules for their competition with a friend over Twitter, and later with the person behind TFYC’s account. The traffic caused by their discussion unintentionally crashed TFYC’s website due to inadequate server capacity rather than an intentional attack. Also, she didn’t post anything about Rappard herself.[108] Quinn and Rappard (and by extension TFYC) had later reconciled over what had happened, and Quinn even offered to serve as a consultant for the competition. This all changed when Gamergate was underway, and when Rappard decided to reopen old wounds and use Gamergate to fund the failing crowdfunding campaign for their project. Quinn even provided proof that Rappard was willfully lying by providing more context to emails that he had already leaked, and pointing out how he sought out GG figurehead Internet Aristocrat to back him up in his latest character assassination.

Both links are Storify, need verification. Also, leading conclusions again, the evidence is not allowed to speak for itself.

Leigh Alexander is racist

Claim Leigh Alexander, author of one of the “Gamers are dead” articles, is racist.

Rebuttal Gamergate dug up any dirt they could on Leigh Alexander and likes to present a handful of old tweets she made to call her racist; one of these tweets consisted of lyrics from a Nicki Minaj song.

Verify this with a more neutral source.

Brianna Wu hates autistic people

Claim Brianna Wu’s use of an autistic child to represent Gamergate is hateful!

Rebuttal A fan of Wu’s game (not Wu herself) made a meme including a stock photo of a generically angry child. The stock photo was separately used in a PowerPoint template by autism “charity” Autism Speaks, and this was found by a Twitter user (who did post a correction a couple of months later.).

Aside from needing verification from non Twitter sources on the facts, not too shabby.

ISIS!!!

Claim Anti-Gamergate supports ISIS. Rebuttal Apparently DAESH utilizes the open source BlockTogether.org tool that Randi Harper’s Good Game Auto Blocker uses. Because no one opposed to Gamergate has ever denounced DAESH’s use of the tool or ever addressed it, Gamergaters assume that “anti-Gamergate” must support DAESH. This is further “supported” by the fact that no one “anti-Gamergate” is on DAESH’s blocklist while a large number of Gamergaters are. The website hosting the blocklist check was registered in June 2015 and only seems to be getting any traction in the first week of July 2015. And this is only being passed around in Gamergate circles. If anything, someone forked Harper’s project on Github and didn’t bother to cut out the Gamergate-specific content. Also projection.

One blog, rest are Twitter links, verification please. Also, while the conclusion is a tad leading, it is a legitimate possible argument, but needs citation to stand on its own.

Censoring video games

Claim SJWs like Anita Sarkeesian want to censor video games!

Rebuttal Anita Sarkeesian’s video series is about introducing feminist analysis to the layperson by applying it to negative portrayals of female characters in video games, as others have done for other media. All she is arguably saying is that video games could have better stories that depict female characters as more than helpless prizes for the hero, just female-coded versions of the male character, or as prop pieces to be sexualized or abused. She does not want to censor video games. People can criticize things that they enjoy. She clearly likes video games, because she certainly wouldn’t be spending the past 3 years of her life playing them and critiquing them only to suffer the hugest reactionary backlash possible if she didn’t. It’s also why she’s dedicated looking at positive portrayals of women and negative portrayals of men. Her later criticisms of the new DOOM game met with similar derision, despite not addressing anything to do with feminism in her tweets about it at E3 2015. When Gamergate irrationally got angry at her statements, her cowriter Jonathan McIntosh literally wrote “No one wants to ban DOOM”. Gamergaters have decided this is a red herring for their true intentions of censoring video games when it is more like a request to praise and promote video games that do not rely on excessive fantasy violence. Claim They got Hatred taken down from Steam Greenlight but we put it back on! Rebuttal Destructive Creations, the studio behind Hatred, has played Gamergate like a fiddle. They intentionally released an edgy trailer in order to drum up controversy.

WOW, quite a lot here, source bears this out, but needs verification.

Valve was perfectly in its rights to drop Hatred from its greenlight service.

Needs verification.

Nowhere does it say that people petitioned for it to be removed. However, that didn’t stop Gamergaters from complaining about “censorship” (something a private company is not doing) and it got put back.

Needs verification.

Criticism of the dev team’s apparent support of Islamophobic and white nationalist groups

Needs verification.

only pushed Gamergate to further support the game to spite “SJWs”. They even began requesting the addition of “SJW” NPC targets (including Sarkeesian).

Compelling, needs verification.

All this was clear by its release,

Decent sourcing.

when Hatred was one of the top selling games, despite reviews panning its barely existant story and shoddy gameplay.

Again, decent sourcing.

Not satisfied with this, Destructive Creations tried to foment more controversy by region locking their game from Germany and Australia, as they never bothered to try to get their game rated by Germany’s USK and Australia’s Classification Board.

Needs verification with another source.

False flags

Claim Anti-GG engages in false flag operations in which they doxx their own or claim to be part of Gamergate while spouting hateful comments.

Rebuttal This is projection with no actual evidence. False flags are a part of chan culture. As a result, many cases of doxxing see a decent amount of people claiming they’re false flags. However, when it comes to proof, prominent GG supporter Jason “@j_millerworks” Miller has been the only one shown to be engaging in false flags, and various boards are awash with threads telling people to “infiltrate the SJWs”. A false flag template was even found on 8chan’s Gamergate boards to cast blame on “anti-Gamergate” for a doxxing.

A Twitter and Reddit link, both in need of more neutral verification.

Just plain old libel

Claim “we aren’t the ones defending domestic abusers, scam artists, bullies, racists and pedophiles” Rebuttal The above was said in response to someone criticizing Gamergate for pulling in Cathy Brennan with their bullshit (as she saw fit to repeat the claims against Sarah Nyberg because she hates trans women). This is apparently being said of “anti-Gamergate” but oh how hypocritical Gamergate is.

Eron Gjoni is a domestic abuser, not Zoë Quinn. He physically assaulted her and has spent more time than anyone should on trying to exact his revenge on her for the breakup after their 5-month relationship fell apart and has explicitly said he tried to rekindle their relationship to get more dirt on her for “The Zoe Post”.

Needs additional sourcing.

Gamergaters have also forked over tens of thousands of dollars to Gjoni to fund his legal battles against Quinn’s restraining order and gag order with the promise of a sequel to “The Zoe Post” as a reward for the masses.

Needs more neutral verification.

Davis Aurini and Jordan Owen’s The Sarkeesian Effect requiring $15k a month to make (which even then they only got half of what they wanted),

Needs more neutral verification.

the Honey Badger Brigade’s crowdfunding to hire a disbarred lawyer for their suit against Calgary Expo,

Needs much better sourcing, this is just an imgur link.

Slade Villena’s continually crowdfunded game FleetCOMM which still hasn’t been released, attempts to raise money for Sarah Nyberg when the only person involved is a Gamergater, BasedGamer requiring $50k to start up what is a user-submitted video game review site, and 3800 people funding TFYC when only 3500 people at best own copies of Afterlife Empire all reek more of scam artistry than the insults Gamergaters constantly fling at Anita Sarkeesian when she puts out exactly what she said she was going to, albeit at a schedule she had to readjust due to her budget being vastly expanded and spending time and energy into reporting her death threats to the FBI.

To paraphrase Pulp Fiction: “SOURCES MOTHERFUCKER, DO YOU USE THEM?”

Gamergaters seem to think Sam Biddle really wanted to push them into lockers when they’ve spent the past year attacking people that even so much as say they don’t like Gamergate.

Could you source this please?

Gamergate started off on 4chan’s /pol/, a haven for neo-Nazis, and yet they claim that there are racists in whatever monolithic “anti-Gamergate” they think exists. Usually this refers to that one Anita Sarkeesian quote about feminism in Japan of no provenance other than a proto-Gamergater that modern Gamergaters like to juxtapose with a photo of a mushroom cloud. Or they’re referring to reviewer Ian Miles Cheong who had been derided for months as a neo-Nazi because Gamergate dug up chatroom logs of as a teenager making tasteless anti-Semitic jokes. They stopped that when he became a Gamergater after he disagreed with Polygon’s reviews of The Witcher 3.

Verify your damned claims with better sources. Also, IMC became a neutral by his own admission, unless he updated that claim, in which case you need to source it.

8chan has boards dedicated to literal child pornography. The site was founded long before Gamergate because child pornography was rightfully banned on 4chan. When people pointed out the child pornography exists, Fredrick Brennan said he wouldn’t do anything about it because he respects “free speech” (despite the fact as a privately owned entity he is fully allowed to make any rules he wants regardless of Americans’ rights to free speech which only means they can criticize the government without threat of imprisonment). When Dan Olson reported on how 8chan’s moderators don’t do shit with regards to the child porn boards,

Needs independent sourcing.

Gamergaters attacked him and claimed he was a pedophile for calling out the rampant pedophilia on the site, and accusing him and “SJWs” of planting child porn on the boards, despite the boards existing long before Gamergate. This is defending pedophiles, Gamergate. They also attack Sarah Nyberg because Gamergate hacked her website and found chatlogs nearly a decade old where she made claims of being a pedophile, but she has since said was her and her friends making 4chan-style trolling jokes at each others’ expenses. She doesn’t defend what she said in jest, and neither does anyone else who saw through Gamergate’s smear job with help from “”ethical”” Breitbart journalist Milo Yiannopoulos, but acknowledges Gamergate’s hypocrisy in attacking her for what she says is insincere when that’s their defense for their own similar statements with regards to pedophilia and racism. It also doesn’t help them when Twitter accounts with anti-semitic and racist screennames spread the attacks on her, nor did rape decriminalization advocate Daryush Valizadeh and weev. All of the police reports on Olson were dismissed as were any made against Nyberg, for which she was in direct contact with a lawyer and the police who were handling her case. Meanwhile, 8chan got taken down from Google for hosting child porn.

Aside from a link to Nyberg’s own defense, none of this shit is sourced at all.

The projection is incredible as always, Gamergate.

More leading conclusion shit. RW, are you THAT worried your arguments can’t stand without leading people by the nose?

The UN wants to ban video games because of SJWs!

Claim The UN report Cyber Violence Against Women & Girls: A Worldwide Wake-Up Call uses anti-gaming rhetoric and Anita Sarkeesian supported it! Rebuttal Gamergate is getting its panties in a knot over a single citation in a single sentence in this 70 page report by the UN Broadband Commission. This one citation was written by Michele Steinberg, one of Lyndon LaRouche’s cronies. This one citation used to source one sentence about the normalization of violence in video games, that is immediately followed by a statement that such discussion is related to but not within the scope of this one report, apparently automatically invalidates the whole of the report in Gamergate’s eyes. The citation may be shit but at least everyone can recognize that. Gamergate is also only mentioned twice in the whole report, and that’s in reference to both Zoë Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian being women who were attacked online. And Gamergate obsessing over this report on how to stop cyberviolence, and how it could allegedly be considered censorship of them, says more about them than it does about the report.

Claim Cyber-harassment/Cyber-violence isn’t a thing, there’s no real life consequences! Rebuttal In essence, the use of terms like “harassment” and “violence” are essentially elevated terms of “bullying”, and on that note, considering the vast number of people who have been victims of cyberbullying (Amanda Todd and Tyler Clementi as the most prominent examples), it’s downright silly to claim that there can never be real-life consequences, since it can force people into changes in their own personal life, such as having to employ security to take you to places (as is currently the case with Sarkeesian), fearing for your life when people dox you or turn up at your place of work threatening your life (the latter of which happened with Randi Harper) and of course can make you so miserable that you may feel compelled to suicide, as has happened to numerous cyberbullying victims.

Claim Sarkeesian is saying stuff like calling her a “liar and “she sucks” is harassment and wants to censor it! Rebuttal While the phrasing was admittedly poor, when we consider that some of the examples of calling Anita Sarkeesian a “liar” includes mass-brigading her with baseless, long-debunked accusations of her being a “scam-artist” and a “fraud” as well as claiming that she’s doxed herself and that she’s faked threats against her, then hell yes that’s an example of harassment. Similarly, the ways that members of Gamergate have used to tell Sarkeesian that she “sucks” have included pretty much every female gender-specific insult under the sun, as well as threats of assault, rape, and murder, not to mention attempting to hack her Kickstarter and YouTube accounts, doxing her to the point where she had to flee her home, and threatening places where she is due to speak with massacres unless she doesn’t appear. This is the kind of so-called “freeze peach” that she and Zoë Quinn want to root out. Frankly the sorts of people who engage in such vile harassment absolutely deserve to face dire consequences for their actions, and the fact that these people want to protect that kind of free speech says a hell of a lot more about them than it does about the people they claim are “culural authoritarians”.

Claim Why is the UN focusing on this when there’s REAL violence going on in other parts of the world?! Rebuttal This is the fallacy of relative privation in action, a standby of MRAs. Humanity is capable of focusing on more than one problem at once, and since there are many real victims of cyber-harassment, that fact is compelling enough to treat it as a problem that should be resolved.

Aside from sourcing the report itself, cite some sources for the refutation of the claims you are making.

The /r/ShitRedditSays Doxxing of JonTron, Boogie2988, et al.

Claim In September 2014, Anti-GG users of the Reddit subforum /r/ShitRedditSays (SRS) doxxed five people for carrying pro-Gamergate views. This is particularly heinous as one of the people doxxed, Boogie2988, was a kindhearted YouTube comedian decidedly neutral about Gamergate.

Rebuttal The main piece of evidence claimed to prove this conspiracy is a screenshot of a now-deleted post on Pastebin with the SRS IRC address at the bottom of the page. Pastebin is a service to which anyone can post text anonymously. No IRC logs, SRS posts, etc., have been found to support the allegation that it was posted by members of SRS, and circumstantial evidence indicates the doxxing is more consistent with a false flag operation to get SRS banned than a malicious act by SRS, as a user on /r/KotakuInAction who regularly logs chats on the /r/ShitRedditSays IRC room mentioned that they could not find any instances of the unusual slang found in the dox, and it tends to be an exceptionally unwise choice to physically associate oneself or one’s organization with something like this by signing it.

The evidence for this just sucks, with one KIA link and one image link. This shit needs better sourcing dammit.

RationalWiki is colluding with anti-Gamergate, in a shady (yet alluring) secret organization of internet-controlling thugs!!1!

Hellz yes we are.

Sarcasm, how lovely, but considering David Gerard and Ryulong are members in good standing with r/GamerGhazi (which the link for this goes to), they have good reason to believe this.

Common objections to this page

It’s biased against Gamergate!

True (much as citable reality is). Yet that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, just as being biased for Gamergate doesn’t make something wrong.

It’s a debunking, so of course it has bias, RW rightly points that out, and in a decent concession to the other side, admits the reverse may not be wrong by default.

The problem is “much as citable reality is”.

RW, as discussed in this part and earlier parts, a lot of your sources lack verification, are heavily biased with no verification of their facts with other sources and are very bad or incomplete sources to begin with, and a few are even dead links. It’s not as disgraceful as that UN report was (including links to the hard drive of it’s creator), but in some spots it’s damn close, and if you want to make this claim less bullshit, tighten up the sourcing, it’s terrible as is.

See SPOV. It’s incomplete! Lying by omission!

This page is a work in progress; give it time. If you feel a claim isn’t covered here, add it.

People have tried, RW, but the page has been protected to certain editors, dissenters get chased out, and I consider myself damn lucky I haven’t been thrown out yet because I tipped what appear to be some sacred cows. I want to extend my thanks Ryulong for being much nicer in his litany of dissents than I expected, you were far more gracious than I expected, thanks for that as well as your honesty, but even on RationalWiki they have complained the GG claims page is one of the RPP (Ryulong’s protected pages), so forgive skeptics if they find this claim hard as hell to believe.

Those aren’t my claims! Not everyone in Gamergate makes the same claims; enough do that they are necessary to rebut. Some claims lack a quote and citation because, again, this page is a work in progress. It’s written by close-minded ideologues!

Nobody ever thinks they’re closeminded, and it’s very difficult to prove. If RationalWiki’s sole objection to Gamergate was “GG is totes closeminded”, would that change anyone’s mind?

No. But as I found in discussions with Ryulong, he admitted up front certain sources are not cited in any way because they are mean, dox people, or are from places they consider utterly unreliable, even if those sources (like Breitbart) are utterly central to the argument at hand. Having them on hand even if you disagree with every word is just arming yourself with knowledge to seal holes in your argument. Depriving yourself because you hate them, THAT’S closeminded.

It doesn’t allow outsiders to edit it!

This is a publicly edittable wiki. See that edit button? Click it. And if you’re reverted (which means an editor thought your edit was dumb), take your proposed edit to the talkpage. We only censor with love!

I haven’t tried to add a single edit to those pages because I am nowhere near stupid enough to believe this, and no one else with a brain and eyes is either.

It’s on RationalWiki, which was hijacked by SJWs

If there was a hostile takeover, we didn’t notice.

BULL. SHIT!

Let me use evidence from your own wiki, okay?

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Category:Social_justice

Quite a lot here, so the subject is well represented if nothing else.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Social_justice

Holy shit, what a whitewash. The entire thing discusses all the positive virtues of it, and the criticism section is very muted, and ends with a positive endorsement of it than actual criticism.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Social_justice_warrior

You are full of shit if this entire page is not proof you don’t have an SJW presence. The whole fucking thing is a massive SJW whitewash fest, deploring the term as a snarl word with no justification, lumps MRAs and GGers in the same category (I am not an MRA while I am a GGer, FYI), and is filled with snark and derision of anyone who criticizes SJWs while glorifying everything they do.

The see also links are also telling, with half the redirects being to the Manosphere, which is another way of referring to MRAs, shat on in the lede

See also the “biased” objection. More like IRRATIONALWiki! “But I thought this was supposed to be RATIONALWiki!” Drink!

And we end with the most fucking childish thing ever. Look, I know, RW is full of snark, but mocking people who call you out instead of defeating their arguments rationally makes you look more like petulant assholes than rational individuals, and reasonable arguments can be made without resorting to blatant asshattery.

— — — —

Conclusions

— — — —

Now that this is over, here’s the Good, Bad, and Ugly.

Good: Some sections do employ rigorous sourcing with verifying citations, point out some legitimate flaws in the GamerGate arguments, and when the facts are strictly adhered to and evidence allowed to speak for itself, the case made is logical and compelling. Some arguments are made with clear appeals to logic without being massive assholes about it and are quite compelling as well.

Bad: The sourcing for most of this is a massive trainwreck, with a half dozen or so dead links, a lot of content that is just image links, a ton of Twitter/Reddit posts lacking verifying citations, and a lot of heavily biased sources (for and against) that need a less partisan source that verifies the basic facts present to vet the claims and neutralize accusations of partisanship in the debunking process.

Ugly: There is a lot of bile in this, with a lot of leading remarks that are clearly trying to steer the reader to a conclusion instead of letting the evidence speak for itself. In some cases, they even manage to taint the good evidence by being so vicious and vile it’s obvious the minds of the authors were already made up and they were apparently insecure others wouldn’t see it the same way they insisted on leading readers by the nose in the most petty manner possible, which is insulting to the intelligence of the prospective readers. As verified by Ryulong in his objections to my earlier parts, certain sources like links to Breitbart and The Ralph Retort were deliberately not included due to being mean, “doxxing”, or just being “unreliable”.

To this, I rebut: Fucking cowards.

I don’t object to the anti-GG sources you included because they are mean, I object because they need other sources to verify their basic facts to vet them against claims of being one sided. And is RATIONALWIKI, dammit. Sometimes truth hurts, but the only rational thing to do is own up to it, however painful it might be.

As for “doxxing”, don’t bother using that as a defense when you will let sources hostile to GG dox drop IPs and usernames, make bald accusations, and otherwise spew venom at GGers, but won’t host pro-GG sources doing likewise, even if it proves your damn case. Running like a bitch from sources you can use to prove GGers are the assholes you claim is just protecting the alleged assholes by not challenging WHY they are assholes and have no defense for their actions. You want to rip down the arguments, then you need to put the arguments on display despite your objections if only so you can use their own words as evidence to burn their BS at the stake.

As for “unreliable”, bitch please. You include links to Tumblr, Reddit, and Twitter without independent sourcing of the claims made, and since those media platforms can have content deleted, forged, or modified, you need to make damn sure a secondary source can vet what they say so in the event they go down or are changed, you can cover your own ass if nothing else with secondary confirmation.

Given the pisspoor lack of doing so with your “reliable”sources, your arguments against linking to sites that hurt your feelings are just excuses to avoid seeing mean words, even if by confronting them you can vindicate the people who were hurt by them, therefore stopping the pain those words caused, so I’m tossing down a gauntlet here:

Do you really care about confronting these alleged lies, proving their falsehood, and getting justice for those you claim were hurt by them, or are you going to let them stand, continue to raise questions, and prolong the suffering?