Leaving this story here as a message to the people I love in #GamerGate and also as a way to leave helpful information on the #GamerGate experience as a whole.

My handle is @ItalyGG. I joined #GamerGate to fight against baseless slander campaigns from certain media/groups against people.

I supported and still approve of this. Innocence before proof is a fundamental ideal that is not up for debate, and I’m still up in arms against biased journalism.

Sadly that was also the same reason I was forced to drop from GG. Irony got me for good. My final review of GG is quite positive, but here is the whole story for context.

Problems for me came when Angry Joe started taking shots at GG.

First he came in saying we need leaders, change hashtags, that we’re toxic etc:

I don’t believe the above needs commenting since almost all GG considers these opinions to be terribly wrong.

The problem is that when people showing him how leaders are bad, changing hastags doesn’t do anything etc, he moved the goalpost to attacking GG saying that we are sexist, harassers and other things.

This is absolutely nothing new to us isn’t it? It’s not like we had this conversation hundreds of times already or anything.

I decided to take up defense of GG so I asked for evidence of these claims. He tried to move the goalpost and other weak fallacies, I kept pressing on the evidence requirement.

Joe’s weak attack ultimately fails and he has to admit he had no proof GG did any of that stuff.

At this point I agreed with it and wished him a good day.

I had gotten back to my stuff but eventually I discover that being disproven on his bold accusations got Angry Joe very angry, so much he decided to post smears about me supposedly “attacking him”, “hating him” and other ad hominem by making a cherrypicked Frankestein collage of my tweets and making it seem like I threatened him.

I immediately proved him wrong by showing that I did tell him the post was a joke I made hours earlier in a totally unrelated conversation, and that he was told it was a joke yet still libeled me as a threatener. Of course if he refuses to delete the tweet libeling me I will contact the authority and get them to do it.

As a result, I have been dogpiled for over 2 hours by his fans (he cared to tag me on his post so I would get a dogpile from AJSA).

I didn’t even flinch. I mass blocked his rabid fanboys.

What killed me is how at this point part of GG believed his story, dismissed me as guilty-before-evidence and refused to look at the proof in an attempt to get Joe on their side.

Not all GG did this, I got a fair amount of support from the rational GG.

But enough people dogpiled and slandered me, the same guys who shat in the face of every single other guy who put their face in support of GG;

The smears above might be founded or not, but this tendency of part of GG to devour anyone publicly defending them is making it very hard for people like us to support GG openly.

You can temporarily slow down this phenomenon with blocking (that’s what most of us do), but ultimately trying to put your face to defend GG only leads to being ostracized more and more and having to block more and more. Having to defend from the media and certain corrupt personalities is already taking a toll on us, but having to constantly defend myself from the very people I’m spending time, money, emails, calls and meetings defending is just out of my reach.

I think GG should learn to trust and defend each other more, especially those who are willing to risk their reputation, status and money for the greater good of main-tanking corruption on the #GamerGate main lines.

I’m still happy I managed to get a lot of stuff done for GG.

Getting the Italian press to take the GG side, revealing corruption, getting neutrals to see evidence and join us, partecipating in the charities, and other stuff. My girlfriend also loved the whole anti-SJW side of the battle.

Thanks to everyone who enjoyed the ride with me, supported evidence and decried falsehood while being adamant on these positions.

I’ll support #GamerGate while not being directly associated with it and still fight the good fight on my followers and with my other sources, and hopefully join a better, more tight-knit #GamerGate one day.