TechRaptor: A Case Study

Let’s start with some background. Techraptor started making kissy faces with GamerGate when it decided to join in on the early harassment campaign against me. They became further entangled once they had server issues, which GamerGate has blamed on censorship despite any confirmation of such. (Source: The GamerGate-maintained “Quinnspiracy” Page). They’re also listed on multiple “GamerGate Approved” lists (Source: GamerGate.me, Support List Wiki) and are all over the tag (Source: Twitter) Considering all this you can more or less guess the content and opinion of the initial articles they wrote that had joined in the harassment party.

ETHICS

(Source: TechRaptor’s “Zoe Quinn” Tag)

So, how did that end up working out for them?

(Source: TechRaptor’s Founder’s AMA on Kotaku In Action, the GamerGate board of Reddit | archive)

Let’s examine this integrity and these ethics that they credit their success to, because as we all have heard by now, it’s actually about ethics in games journalism. Who better to do it than the primary subject that they decided to launch their success off the libel of, to reach 10k views a day (Source: TechRaptor’s Ask.fm) and from 426 twitter followers the day of the first article they posted to over 6,000 at time of writing. (Source: Twitter)

Please note that 10,000 monthly uniques was the requirement to get an E3 badge in 2011. (Source: Joystiq)

Examining the articles that propelled them to success, not only do they cite an imgur link so hilariously asinine I took it as my new company name, they also host my family’s home address and phone number, use a reddit comment as a single source to publish serious accusations of sabotage (source: TechRaptor), pastebin a competitor’s article to avoid linking to it, and publish articles riddled with basic syntax and grammar errors (source: TechRaptor). They fall into the same category of enthusiast press mentioned before — people writing about games more focused on gaining visibility for their mediocre articles than improving their craft.

They think Death Of The Author is as literal as Gamers Are Dead

None of that even touches on the fact that the articles are presented as fact but written with such an extreme slant, the italics have leaned so far they have fallen over and become underscores.

The most high profile example of this was Zoe Quinn’s claim that Wizardchan raided and doxxed (acquired and revealed personal info) her. That whole affair is best summed up here. Basically, the takeaway from that is that her accusations hold little if any merit at all. What is consistently seen throughout that is how easily she puts herself forward as a victim and asks for consolation from a variety of personalities and sites. Even if you only read the text surrounding the images of her tweets and other communications, you can see this.

Note the encouragement to the reader to ignore any first-hand sources.

To be more fair to them then they ever have been to their subjects, they do have an ethics policy (Source: TechRaptor) which contains next to no attempt at unbiased reporting of news events or even attempting to be fair outside of avoiding undefined “conflicts of interest” and making sure they’re not doing paid reviews. Because these are GamerGate® brand ethics — The Society of Professional Journalists ethics code views presenting truth beyond simple matters of payola and minimizing harm to your subjects as priorities, for contrast. The entirety of TechRaptor’s ethics policy reads transparently as a GamerGate talking points memo — explicit concerns about Patreon, developer relations, and payola are addressed, while the only thing having to do with actually investigating their stories is two sad sentences they have already violated multiple times in the articles they made their bank on by rehosting other people’s work and publishing accusations made in a comment thread on social media as fact.

hmmm.

(Source: TechRaptor’s Ethics Policy)

But hey, three months have passed since they decided to use a mob against a developer as a springboard to propel forward the righteous cause of ethical reporting and proper journalistic standards. Let’s see what they’ve been up to just this last week to check in on that.

First up, we have an article about an IGDA “scandal” by a self-proclaimed neutral writer about developers who she claims were wrongly labeled as harassers and unfairly added to an opt-in twitter block list by people who didn’t want to talk to them.

“Following the recent controversy, where the International Game Developers Association wrongly labeled almost 11,000 people the worst offenders of online harassment, many have spoken out. TechRaptor decided to give a voice to developers to tell their stories.”

(Source: Developers React IGDA Controversy).

How did their fact checking go in the “maybe make sure these devs aren’t doing anything untoward before demonizing a major organization in your field” department go? I’ll even be charitable and not include retweets (though there were a LOT of nasty retweets on all but one of the developers’ streams)

Oh good this one has adopted the avatar of the guy who was too extreme for a chatroom that talked about how to get me to kill myself

Okay… well, maybe that’s just a fluke, sometimes mistakes happen. What about the other coverage this week?

Well, there was this muckracking article by the same “neutral” journalist that was so poorly researched it had to have 3 separate edits to clear up basic fact checking. Not only was the developer not contacted before allegations of corruption were made against her (source: Author’s Twitter), but the edits themselves are baffling at best, intentionally misleading at worst.

Down at the bottom in smaller print than the rest of the article is a link to a primary source debunking the article’s accusations. Disclaimers are usually supposed to be posted at the top or made incredibly obvious to provide crucial information before everything it was meant to invalidate or contextualize. Maybe the accusation in the very title of the article should have been edited. Maybe the article should have been taken down and an apology issued for not only printing something misleading but additionally having not done basic factchecking of contacting the subject before publishing allegations against her. Instead, the author chose to prioritize a clarification about who was having thanksgiving with who in the most visible spot before the start of the original article.

Even then it’s worded like a weird accusation. What is the relevance of three coworkers in a similar subsection of industry who come to the conclusion that a significant portion of critics had — that an award winning game was newsworthy or interesting or worthy — eating a meal together without the developer being involved in any way? It’s turkey. It’s not three gamewitches cackling over a cauldron deciding who gets coverage and who will get cursed with boils this harvest. Why am I reading about this in the first place? Why is this so important it’s bolded and the author hopes it’s visible enough but the developer clearing everything up gets shrunk down and hidden at the very end along with another edit?

Mitu had to reach out to this writer to fix her mistakes. PC Gamer had to reach out to this writer to fix her mistakes. How many people have to reach out to do your homework for you when your website aggressively markets how into ethics it is and the very first rule in the SJP is:

And it doesn’t stop there. An article posted an hour prior to these insufficiently corrected falsehoods was a review of my game that has a special place in my heart as being the most factually inaccurate piece to be published on it, not only about the game but about the subject matter itself.

People who have been affected by depression (like myself and the rest of the dev team) writing about the game is not even remotely uncommon, but again we have a weirdly worded headline that is either awkward and in need of an editor, or is attempting to imply something. Reviews are subjective, and I don’t expect a site so entwined with GamerGate to be fair, but the contents of this article quickly devolve into basic factual inaccuracy — the writer goes from talking about the love interest character Alex as though they were the protagonist, accuses the game of mixing up the two friend characters’ genders when “Amanda” and “Attic” are two different people, falsely states that you can’t open up to other people when those are some of the most common choices, states that you can’t seek help when there are multiple options and combinations thereof (therapy, meds, support network, etc), and worryingly, goes on to push medication as the solution to depression. This is downright reckless advice to be throwing out there as medication reactions vary so wildly sometimes they are only mildly more effective than placebos, [Source], and when side effects can be dangerous or lethal [Source], it is reckless for anyone to advocate for medication across the board. (Source: TechRaptor)

This normally wouldn’t be too big of a deal for an enthusiast press outlet. However, most enthusiast press sites aren’t used as a tool to target and further attack a hate group’s targets while they try to excuse it as collateral damage for the greater cause of the very ethics the enthusiast press site is in violation of. The hit on Mitu and the sloppy review of Depression Quest also violate TechRaptor’s few policies again:

For some reason, links to both Redshirt and Depression Quest are absent. However this very site that was so quick to say that I faked getting raided by the internet to get my game greenlit was happy to promote the game of a Pro-GamerGate developer and include properly attributed links. (Source) The writer even bothered to reach out to her. Compare with TechRaptor’s mishandling of another GamerGate target of abuse, Randi Harper, with the same fact checking mistakes (Source), suddenly being able to dredge up personal information to prove she is a “dubious character” while messing up fact-checking (Source), and incorrectly calling an opt-in block list for social media a “blacklist” (Source). Compare the handwaving of these mistakes that could potentially affect someone’s livelihood in a serious manner as minor with the hit piece put out on yet another GamerGate target, Nathan Grayson, calling a simple citation error on an article that was still properly attributed plagarism. (Source) Consider the patently false allegation against a Wikipedia editor who was not tolerant of GamerGate propaganda of being paid to edit (Source) when the co-founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Goddamned Wales himself said it was over perceived closeness to the subject matter (Source). Consider the writers’ whitewashing of GamerGate’s negative impacts (Source), the fact that they source their information on stories from a reddit board dedicated to GamerGate organization and operations (Source), or that they literally use a picture of GamerGate’s biggest targets as “the opposition” and you may just start thinking they have an agenda to push.

(Techraptor: Source)

Combined with the TechRaptor official twitter account not only being covered in GamerGate’s retweets and taking points…

(Source)

…promotions for GamerGate developer Brad Wardell’s company Stardock…

(Source)

…posts hamfisted, thinly veiled attacks on people targeted by GamerGate and calls it “satire” as if the word was an synonym for “psyche!”(with bonus shot at my sex life and the debunked allegations with the classy Five Guys meme reference)…

(Source)

…and accepts hundreds of dollars from prominent GamerGaters but doesn’t see constantly slanting articles toward GamerGate, not disclosing it on their website, and attacking their targets as a conflict of interest…

And another

This is who is sending them hundreds of dollars

Notice who’s tweets they’re tracking?

(Source: tweetsave.com)

…then not only do GamerGate-promoted outlets fail at grownup journalistic ethics, they fail at the cheap knockoff brand of GamerGate brand ethics too. But much like GamerGate’s support of Milo using their talking points and attacking their targets despite being a corrupt journalist and actively shitting on gamers right before GamerGate, GamerGate is lying to everyone and itself about what it’s about. Through it’s actions, the only thing GamerGate continues to be about is viciously attacking people who’s politics they don’t like. It’s long past time we stop paying lip service to the absurd notion that GamerGate is about ethics that don’t line up with real world expectations, that are built on not understanding the difference between a critic and a journalist, and that they are unwilling to even hold themselves accountable to if it means being able to attack people in the industry they disagree with.

Obviously the industry isn’t perfect and has ethical issues. Ironically, one of the people targeted by GamerGate has laid out some of them quite nicely here. However, GamerGate is addressing none of them and instead wrapped up in running off of baseless assumptions of how the industry works and barely hidden agendas against social progressives.