As the March kickoff for the weeks-long 2016 South By Southwest festival approaches, its disparate sections—music, film, and interactive—have begun announcing confirmed panels, speakers, and showcases. SXSW Interactive appeared prepared to host a panel about the hot-button topic of online harassment and abuse, but that plan changed on Monday when a festival director officially announced that the panel, along with another tangentially related panel, had been canceled due to allegations of "numerous threats of on-site violence."

SXSW Interactive director Hugh Forrest posted the news at the festival's official blog, though Forrest didn't confirm whether the threats were linked to both panels that he confirmed received the axe: "SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community" and "Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games." After describing SXSW as a home for "diverse ideas," Forrest also described a desire to maintain "civil and respectful" dialogue.

"If people can not agree, disagree, and embrace new ways of thinking in a safe and secure place that is free of online and offline harassment, then this marketplace of ideas is inevitably compromised," Forrest wrote. "Maintaining civil and respectful dialogue within the big tent is more important than any particular session."

The Level Up panel would have included Online Abuse Prevention Initiative founder Randi Harper as a panelist and was advertised as "a panel from experts on online harassment in gaming and geek culture, how to combat it, how to design against it, and how to create online communities that are moving away from harassment."

Harper posted an alleged copy of a cancellation e-mail sent by SXSW organizers that included similar language to the public statement. The private e-mail went so far as to mention "sessions... that focused on the GamerGate controversy," though Harper pointed out that her panel's description never used the G-word.

Meanwhile, the description of the SavePoint panel included topics such as "the current social/political landscape in the gaming community" and "the journalistic integrity of gaming’s journalists" without clarifying what social, political, or ethical viewpoints would be addressed. One of the panel's creators, Perry Jones, posted openly at Reddit's KotakuInAction last week to ostensibly link the panel to the GamerGate hashtag. He wrote:

Why is the panel not just called "#Gamergate?" A comment below said it best. While we aren't explicitly a GamerGate organization, we do hold many of the movement's beliefs; unethical gaming press, free speech, free creativity, and breaking the "white gamer" stereotype. We share these beliefs, but we aren't stupid. We know that much of the mass media has portrayed GG in a very negative light, and our fear was that any submission with the name #GamerGate on it would be discarded immediately. So before we even drafted the idea we came up with a clever sounding title that could draw attention.

We have reached out to SXSW with questions about the nature of the threats, along with the seeming disconnect between a panel about online threats being canceled around online threats, and we will update this report with any response.