Update: interested parties may also like this article by Sarah Jeong that talks about some other initiatives being developed by Twitter to improve the state of things

Andrew Sullivan is one of my favorite bloggers of all time. I’ve always loved his stuff, his infamous article on Obama converted me to the ways of hope and change, and the way that he wades fearlessly into any topic. But I fear on GamerGate, him and I see things in a different light, both with his initial entry , and even moreso with his most current alarmist coverage of WAM providing help to Twitter in getting rid of sexist assholes.

Let’s talk about the latter. There are a couple of things here that are overlooked.

1. WAM doesn’t get to ban people. What WAM gets to do is to elevate sexist harassers to the front of Twitter’s queue, at which point Twitter then decides, based on Twitter’s own standards, whether to ban them. This is relevant largely because most twitter reports can take hours, or even days, to get resolved.

2. Twitter is not a public square which must give free speech to all. It is a private network, it is a community that gets to decide and enforce the community standards they want inside of their community. As Wired noted recently in this deeply scarring must-read, companies like YouTube and Facebook spend millions paying people to do the soul-crushing task of deleting gore and dick pics to maintain these cultural values. As I’ve noted previously, massively multiplayer games like Ultima Online and World of Warcraft also invest heavily in maintaining civil and safe community standards, and as a result, MMOs have had huge growth and much better gender mixes than most of gaming. Hell, even Andrew Sullivan himself opted to keep comments on his blog disabled – because his community preferred the polite and educated dissent that had evolved as his community standards. Twitter is completely free to determine how open, or how civil, speech should be inside of their walled garden.

3. Most of these ‘bans’ are not actual bans, but temporary suspensions – they are the equivalent of a ‘time-out’, and we do them in Massively Multiplayer games too. Milo Yiannopoulos was suspended for a mere 12 hours before coming back – an appropriate penalty, IMHO, for his full-day of harassing another user. As we speak, another person suspended at the same time as Milo was just suspended a second time for not taking the hint to not leak private information and financials of competitors. We’ll see soon, I guess, whether you get 3 strikes or two.

4. There seriously is a complete disparity, and especially in #GamerGate, in the documented effects of abuse of social media on Women. Three women – Quinn, Wu, and Sarkeesian – have faced threats so strong they’ve had to involve authorities and leave their homes out of concern for their safety. Several female journalists have effectively fled the field of games, with the tale of Jenn Frank being among the most heartbreaking. Women interviewed on the topic for the Escapist chose to stay anonymous. Yes, women get more abuse, and certainly in gamergate, yes women crack under it in greater numbers, despite being vastly lower in representation in the gaming community. It’s not just gamergate — go through my previous article on this topic and see the astonishingly horrifying stuff experienced by Kathy Sierra, Criado Perez and Adria Richards before #Gamergate was a thing. In the earliest days of GamerGate, Elizabeth Sampat wrote of the vast sense of despair that industry women were feeling – and it’s a tale of weariness, despair, panic and woe. It is completely justified to give this population segment extra attention and support, especially while they are under active attack.

That being said, I’ve spent the last 3 months on Twitter in the belly of the beast debating GamerGate, and I can tell you now that there are still plenty of things to be angry about, regarding how Twitter functions, and how they run their business.

1. Why the hell else is Twitter partnering with outsiders – a non-profit, no less – to solve their community standards issues? Yes, its expensive to keep a community clean, but as mentioned previously, many, MANY other companies building online social spaces have learned the hard way that they need to absorb that cost to maintain the community standards they want. But without WAM, people reporting harassment and doxing (I myself have had my private information published by trolls multiple times) have had to wait hours or days to see their reports addressed. WAM is proving to be necessary and helpful, but they shouldn’t be.

2. Is there any way you can actually stop serial abusers? Here’s a very interesting Kotaku article about the infamous Celebrinando, who holds a very unique place in #GamerGate — both sides agree that he’s a total asshole and needs to go, but neither side can figure out how to make that happen. He’s been banned countless times. He just creates new accounts. Each banning takes hours, sometimes up to a day to occur after reporting, which is a lifetime in the Twitterverse, although I’ve yet to see him and WAM cross paths yet. In the meantime, he posts horrible stuff under the #gamergate tag, which serves to only inflame spirits in a heated and contested discussion – effectively by making #gamergate look far more extreme than they actually are.

3. Seriously, Twitter really sucks. David Auerbach’s article should be considered must-reads by anyone interested in the topic. It’s fine if you’re throwing out pithy oneliners, but it’s terrible for a conversation. There’s no room for nuance. Sarcasm is constantly misunderstood. People constantly bull their way into conversations. The more people in a conversation, the fewer characters you have to play with. And people constantly swarm single targets, assaulting potential them with Jehovah’s-like fervor and determination that the term “Sea Lion” is, thanks to the comic below, passed into common twitter gamer parlance, and now you can get a T-shirt that I can confirm is pretty sweet.

And then there’s the echo chamber issue. I spent a few weeks following a lot of these people to research for my blog. Your entire perception of reality is shaped entirely by who you are following. Since these people follow mostly each other, they constantly see news from each other. Very few voices from the other side break through, and usually only when the other side says something SO stupid that multiple people on your side retweet it. When you’re in the bubble, it seems like a foregone conclusion that everything is going your side’s way.

I then stopped following their top 10 most aggressive posters, largely because I thought I was going to lose my mind, and all of a sudden I was in an entirely different world. You would barely know that #GamerGate was even a thing. But then they all decided to perform something called #OpSkyNet – #gamergate followers don’t take a shit without some sort of creepy pseudomilitaristically named plan – where they all followed each other, and committed to retweeting each other, in an attempt to– well, I’m not sure what, exactly. The resulting noise was so great I had to stop following most of them for Twitter to be a useful tool at all. For them, though, it just makes it seem like their feed is even MORE full of people who agree with their point of view, which just reinforces their fervor towards their cause.

I didn’t used to understand HOW Mitt Romney believed he was winning despite all the polls telling him otherwise in 2012, but now I know. Social media constructed an alternate reality around him, one that was completely convincing and believable. This utterly terrifies me.

And to be honest, the thought that the more unscrupulous assholes of the world might be watching how Twitter has been abused in #gamergate, and taking notes for, say, a major presidential election in 2 years, well– that terrifies me even more.