Dear Histrionic Attention Seekers of #GamerGate

I'm specifically directing this at any of the people involved in GamerGate and its related drama who keep claiming that harassment, bile, threats etc. have forced them out of their homes, yet continue to stoke the flames of said drama. Stop. If harassment is bad enough to force you out of your house, I feel terrible for you, I really do. But clearly engaging with the exact same people you claim to be harassing you and continuing the histrionics is only going to prolong your nomadic lifestyle.



When dealing with death threats or other credible threats of that sort, authorities generally do not recommend that the person being harassed responds or gives any further ammo to those attacking them. This might seem like 'giving up' to the saprophytes of the web, but it's actually not. There are two good, pragmatic reasons for it. The first is that it helps to distinguish trolls looking for attention from actually dangerous people. If you report to the authorities and give a minimal response to harassment, the people looking to poke you with a stick will go away. If they're serious, it will continue, but you will be better informed of the severity of your situation and so will the authorities, who get hundreds if not thousands of similar complaints every day and have no way of delineating where trolling ends and genuinely sinister behaviour begins.



The second reason is that responding publicly to grim behaviour, especially if it is a mob of individuals targeting you, encourages other people to engage in the same activity. It is not unlike the way in which media hysteria over school shootings prompts copycats, especially if you have any kind of public profile, say, as a game developer, or a pop culture critic. The last thing you should be doing for your own safety and the safety of those close to you is provoking your harassers further. Report them to the authorities, block them in whatever way you can, and ignore those that continue to get past your defences. Ignoring them will actually make it stop, believe it or not, because it takes away their platform.



Unless of course you don't particularly care about it stopping and are in fact quite delighted with all of the attention that you are getting. In that case, please continue to make investigation by the authorities more difficult. Keep wasting their time, time that could have been spent on actual victims of online stalking, doxxing and bullying, who more often than not don't speak out at all due to the psychological trauma this imposes. Keep tugging on the heart strings of the internet community until every last twang of empathy has resonated from their increasingly loose fibres. Oh, and don't forget to plug whatever financial escapade you're working on while you're at it.

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