http://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Gamergate_claims&diff=1587662&oldid=1587661

https://archive.is/X75r5

Continued from:

https://medium.com/@infiltrator7n/a-point-by-point-analysis-of-rational-wiki-s-list-of-gamergate-s-claims-part-1-2249404f6a97#.ml8j6pz5u

https://medium.com/@infiltrator7n/a-point-by-point-analysis-of-rational-wiki-s-list-of-gamergate-s-claims-part-4-f3a88b5f87f#.uwat1fj4i

Gamergate is about ethics in video game journalism

The only thing you really need to know about this claim is that Gamergate, as a whole, sent not one but two reporters from Breitbart to accuse video game journalists of being agenda-driven and unethical.

And what are you trying to imply by this?

Gamergate has had almost no impact on gaming journalism, despite claiming to be a movement totally centered around the same.

Citation needed. You don’t count all the disclosures publications that refused to make them now make, all the awareness that even official game companies have confirmed about how one sided propaganda has scared them into self censoring, and all the shit Gawker and it’s other verticals have caught for being scummy assholes to not freakin matter?

To parrot the lede of this very article I’m analyzing right back at it’s writers: What alternate universe do you guys live in?

Despite this, they’ll proudly tell of the myriad successes they’ve had in improving ethics. And by ethics they mean attacking websites that publish subjective reviews that discuss social issues within the game rather than entirely objective technical reports on the game’s graphics or playability.

Because, for the most part, unless they clearly state their purpose is social critique, that’s what their jobs SHOULD BE. It’s not the social critique GGers mind, it’s the fact it was forced on us without our consent and we were being told to shut the fuck up by people like Leigh Alexander when we complained.

RW, let’s be rational: Wave a red flag in front of bull, and what do you think will happen.

And further, as I said in another article I wrote, there is a time and a place for presenting such critique, and it should be done in publications geared for audiences receptive of such writing. Forcing it on people who don’t care has frightened game companies into self censorship by their own admission and caused a shit ton of avoidable drama.

In fact, let me present a rational argument: The Mary Sue has a very feminist POV about everything, including games, but they make that clear up front, and that does not offend me, because their bias is declared up front, their writers declare the same about themselves, and you read their work under the knowledge it will carry that perspective.

There is NOTHING wrong with that.

By contrast, Kotaku claims to be a gaming news site, but that means you cover NEWS, not opinions, and when MGSV came out, I wanted to know about the game itself, not to be beat over the head with how sexist the character of Quiet was, and if they really wanted to talk about that, they should have made a separate article apart from the gaming news that stated it was an opinion piece up front. Shoehorning it into what otherwise should have been objective news about the game’s release was offensive because fans wanted to know about the game itself, not to be beaten over the head with a guilt trip.

Point out the lack of representation of anyone who is not a straight white man in a video game, and prepare to be called a racist by the “consumer revolt” that only cares about consumers that share in their groupthink.

Like the same crowd that slagged off The Witcher 3 for remaining true to it’s own source instead of pleasing a bunch of people who cried racism?

One, you need to make some citations, and two, considering how damn hard our opposition has worked it’s ass off to silence speech they don’t like, you guys have massive brass balls to claim GamerGaters (WHICH ARE FOR FREE SPEECH AS YOU GUYS ADMITTED EARLIER IN THIS VERY ARTICLE) are the villains here.

Zoë Quinn had sex for good reviews

Claim As shown by the “Zoe Post”, Zoë Quinn slept with Nathan Grayson so that he would favorably review [sometimes replaced with “positively cover”] her game, Depression Quest.

Alright, I’ll give RW credit here. I always found this dubious when I first heard of it, don’t think her sex life deserved to be dragged through the mud, and found the shitstorm raised over it incredibly disgusting.

Rebuttal This argument, first known as the “Quinnspiracy”, gave the first impetus for what would be Gamergate and was disproven almost immediately. A glaring issue is that Depression Quest was free; if collusion occurred, it made no profit. And while getting publicity might be nice, it’s questionable whether the articles in question would have substantially achieved that. Grayson never wrote a review for Depression Quest at Kotaku (as confirmed by leader Stephen Totilo)

More fairness to RW on this: They are right on this, and the source cited bears out the claim. A secondary source verifying it would be great, but to their credit, the facts reflect reality on this one.

The opinions I dissent on. Even if a game is free, it’s still unethical to not disclose your bias when promoting it in any fashion (to whatever degree), because a journalist is supposed to remain as impartial as possible, and when they can’t they need to make disclosures about possible bias upfront to avoid later accusations of influence peddling and corruption. Again, RW, let’s be rational here: GamerGate could have died in the womb had that been done up front by anyone involved.

or at Rock, Paper, Shotgun (as confirmed by Josh Wirtanen).

Again, source reflects claims, could use additional verification from total third parties, but it does cover the facts correctly.

What Grayson did was write a list of video games that mentioned Depression Quest as one of the games and an article sourced from several people’s blogs, one of whom was Quinn. Despite this, all were written before Quinn and Grayson ever dated. Either Quinn travelled back through time (common SJW powers) to have sex to get a mention in a list to get publicity, or Gamergaters are full of shit. Even Eron Gjoni, who published the “Zoe Post” blogpost that was the sole source of evidence fpr the “Quinnspiracy”, rebutted the claims: There was a typo up for a while that made it seem like Zoe and I were on break between March and June. This has apparently led some people to infer that her infidelity with Nathan Grayson began in early March. I want to clarify that I have no reason to believe or evidence to imply she was sleeping with him prior to late March or early April (though I believe they’d been friends for a while before that). This typo has since been corrected to make it clear we were on break between May and June. To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature.

On this, RW and I have no disagreement whatsoever. Even Eron Gjoni does not claim the accusation being debunked true, and since, let’s face it, he’s the founder of this whole mess to some degree, at least where all the ethics issues began if nothing else, RW succeeds admirably in debunking this without invective, blatant bias, or even being unbelievable assholes about it.

In short, to RWians reading this, good job on this section.

Conflicts of interest and crowdfunding

Claim Video game journalists should disclose conflicts of interest with regards to donating money to Kickstarter or Patreon crowdfunding campaigns.

Before we go on, I concur.

Rebuttal This seems to be one of the only vaguely cognizant claims Gamergate has because at first glance it sounds like an actual ethical breach. “Conflict of interest” is one of those things that is really important when it comes to fair and balanced reporting.

Again, concur.

However, Gamergaters’ understanding of what constitutes a conflict of interest couldn’t be any further from the truth. Gamergate has dutifully attacked crowdfunding services used by the indie game developers that they so despise such that someone in Gamergate registered the URL HipsterWelfare.com as a redirect to Patreon’s website.

Alright, fine, that’s in shitty taste, granted, but it could use citations for this assertion. Besides, tried the URL, doesn’t work as a redirect.

Of course, when anyone affiliated or parallel to Gamergate uses these services, then there’s no problem at all with their usage. Basically, Gamergaters have the idea of a conflict of interest (when it comes to crowdfunding) entirely backwards. The donor to a Kickstarter or IndieGoGo or GoFundMe does not tangibly benefit from other people donating to the same campaign. Particularly when it comes to crowdfunding campaigns for video games, the donation is at best a pre-order. The donor has bought a product and does not benefit financially or tangibly if they tell other people to donate. This may result in the campaign being funded, but the donor does not gain anything beyond what they originally paid for. This goes doubly for Patreon as the donor doesn’t tangibly benefit in any way from other people supporting the same person. The Society of Professional Journalists, who (as of going to press) are currently being courted by Gamergate, discusses the following:

First, let’s cover a bit of a reveal here: (as of going to press). Basically, this claim has not been updated since it was added to their article, and given this is an ongoing topic of hotly contested interest, it should have been updated as more information presented itself, suggesting this is a claim from early on they were going to debunk they never updated for later information.

Also, while they make some convincing arguments here, one dissent: If you are a journalist or press agent favorable to the creator, yes, there is an ethical issue, since you have vested interest, whether for a good story, money, or simply to please a friend, to make sure the product sells, and it prejudices you with a bias if you shill for donations to the product and later give it favorable coverage.

Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility.

Checked out, direct link to SPJ ethics.

All of these constitute conflicts of interest. But nothing remotely comes close to resembling buying a pre-order off a Kickstarter as they haven’t obtained anything for free. A food critic doesn’t gain anything from giving a glowing review to a restaurant where the food was to their liking. It’s only a problem if the restaurant paid or bribed for a good review.

And Gamergate has yet to prove this has happened with independent video games (it certainly was a problem when Jeff Gerstmann got fired from GameSpot for heavily criticizing Kane & Lynch and it certainly was a problem while Geoff Keighley was surrounded by bags of Doritos and bottles of Mountain Dew while talking about Halo 2), particularly when their biggest claim of a conflict of interest has been debunked since everything started. This is, however, the only place that Gamergate has allegedly made any headway against what they perceive are ethical violations. That’s why Jenn Frank was driven out of the industry because even though she did include a disclosure she supported Zoë Quinn through Patreon, the editors of The Guardian (an actual newspaper) didn’t think it was worth mentioning and cut it out.

It bears mentioning they later restored it in the interests of full disclosure, apparently reconsidering that decision as possibly unwise.

Gamergate is also why both Kotaku and Polygon came up with policies regarding Patreon donations for their writers.

But RW, you claim above, quote “Gamergate has had almost no impact on gaming journalism, despite claiming to be a movement totally centered around the same.”

Are you claiming you lied?

Several writers also discussed how they dealt with handouts from the major publishers, which would actually constitute conflicts of interest,

We need the opinions of other writers as well, this is just one article, more verification of this point could not hurt at all.

ut Gamergate didn’t seem to care as much as it doesn’t directly affect indie devs as much as attacking Patreon does. Gamergate’s definition of a conflict of interest seems to be “Tweeted at person once 3 years ago” or “is acquainted with”. And often these “conflicts of interest” are only discovered after someone says something negative about Gamergate, initiating the 4chan-style “background check” of tweet archive hate diving to find anything to use as a “gotcha”.

RW, let’s not throw stones in glass houses here. While analyzing your own points, you guys have dug up some pretty questionable shit which you immediately tried to fling on GamerGaters to prove they were full of shit.

If it’s wrong for them to dig up dirt to throw on people they don’t like, it’s wrong for you too.

GameJournoPros

Claim “The expose of the GameJournoPros mailing list shortly after the Gamers Are Dead articles all but confirmed suspicions that gaming journalism was full of collusion and pushed narratives,” Gamergate Wiki

This needs another link, it’s dead.

Rebuttal GameJournoPros was a mailing list set up by Kyle Orland of Ars Technica just to be able to let people at other websites keep in touch, possibly to even bounce ideas off each other and suggest new freelance writers to hire.

Covers the facts as presented by the source, needs independent verification.

The whole list was leaked by Gamergater William Usher who felt that the list was trying to push a media narrative for whatever reason; he had his access revoked from the list at some point and no longer felt “honorbound” to keep the promise to Orland that the list’s discussions should remain private.

Checked source, bears out claim, needs verification with another source, but I more want to point out a hypocrisy here, RW.

You have many articles in which you celebrate whistleblowers. This guy decided to blow the whistle on something he saw as unethical, but just because it’s a topic you want to debunk, this doesn’t make him a villain by default. Hell, you guys had your own spy on Conservapedia who dumped their discussion group logs and you lapped that shit up and lauded it as high comedy.

Everyone else from the outside looking in saw the list as completely benign in nature. Orland noted that he did suggest that they come together in support of Zoë Quinn after “The Zoe Post” made its rounds, but others in the group dissuaded him from this idea, as they should not invade on her private life.

Source bears out the claims, verification from another would be great.

James Fudge of Game Politics also wrote about his experience on the list with regards to a thread at The Escapist’s forums where there was intense discussion of Quinn’s sex life, and in his experience he thought letting that thrive would only cause problems, but The Escapist’s Greg Tito did not take the advice from him, or Polygon’s Ben Kuchera.

Sources are generally good, independent sources as secondary verification would be good, but this is factual. One minor complaint, the Forbes link I had to access by the Wayback Machine, the current link goes to Forbes main page.

The only people seeing any issue with GameJournoPros are Gamergaters who were already prejudiced to think there was something resembling collusion and corruption going on, despite every single discussion of Zoë Quinn within the mailing list being contradictory and not at all pushing an agenda. With regards to the “blacklisting”, that comes from the discussions on GameJournoPros with regards to Allistair Pinsof and his work at Destructoid regarding Chloe Sagal. Sagal had attempted to fundraise money for an upcoming surgery, which she had said was for removing metal shrapnel due to a car accident, but was actually for a sex reassignment surgery. When IndieGoGo pulled the campaign due to what was thought to be a fraudulent transaction, Sagal had attempted suicide, and Pinsof was one person to talk her out of it. At some point prior to this, she had confided in him that she was transgender. Pinsof wished to include this in an article on Destructoid, but was ordered not to by the site’s founder Yanier Gonzalez. He tweeted about it, regardless, leading to his termination from the site. When the GameJournoPros emails were leaked, there were emails from Gonzalez to the group asking what should be done with regards to Pinsof’s outing of Sagal, and there were suggestions he should be fired for it. Later, Destructoid’s editor-in-chief Dale North wrote to the group that Pinsof was looking for work and that it would probably be a bad idea to hire him after what he did.

WOW, this covers a lot of territory, a lot of it confusing, but the source is factually cited. This definitely needs independent verification of its facts to eliminate any doubt, but it is factual.

One dissent: GGers were predisposed to think something corrupt was going on thanks to the Zoe Post and and the later leak of the GJP discussions. If said conspiracy was overblown, fine, it would seem some facts about it have been proven by RW to be erroneously interpreted, but let’s be fair, they had reason to suspect something at the time.

Gamergate ate this up and tried to push it with a hashtag #PinsofInterview when he spoke to Gamergate publishing house extremely pro-Gamergate website TechRaptor, but most of his claims were found to be bullshit, including the new claims that there was corruption in the Independent Games Festival and that Phil Fish (who was already run off the Internet by Gamergate) had been fraudulent with a friend. Kotaku’s Jason Schrier revealed Pinsof had never been blacklisted, and had fielded freelance work for Kotaku after he had outed Sagal. The award that resulted from alleged corruption at the Independent Games Festival was a joke award. And also Fish’s friend denied anything Pinsof said about himself in the interview.

Okay, this needs independent verification, but they do report the facts as declared on that Kotaku article, but again, independent verification due to bias concerns would close any room for debate here.

Pinsof also seemed to take back everything he said in the interview after his narrative was torn down. So to sum things up, Allistair Pinsof was not actually blacklisted for having outed Chloe Sagal as transgender, which is still a shitty thing to do,

We need to pause here for a second to hammer a nail through some bullshit right here: If someone lies about something involving money and an aspect of their private life, and a crime of graft or other illicit financial activity happened as a result, someone’s feelings do not trump the public right to know about someone having committed a criminal act. Feelings do not trump the law, and while Sagal being transgender otherwise not be a matter to be splattered against the windshield of public opinion otherwise, money was falsely raised for matters that truthfully pertained to them being transgender, so their transgender status was relevant to the crime being reported, and the public has every right to be informed of what a criminal does and what motives had a role in the illegal act.

And if it embarrasses them, tough shit: their feelings do not trump the public interest regarding violations of the law.

and defying a direct order from a boss is something that leaves a mark on your resumé. And he lied about other stuff he apparently secretly knew. Claims that Kevin Dent was censored as a result of the group are flawed; all that had happened was that a journalist had asked others to stop quoting him due to a number of grossly bigoted comments he made, calling a woman a “tranny”, a “bimbo”, and a “malignant Rihanna.”

You cite a TUMBLR blog here, RW. Didn’t I already mention how poor this sort of citation is without more formal verification?

It would be difficult to argue that choosing not to give positive press to someone who acts like an unrepentant creep and harasses women is unjustified any more than choosing not to give positive press to David Duke would be unjustified.

So anyone who acts like shit to women is as evil as white supremacy is what you argue, more or less.

Furthermore, Kevin Dent reportedly stated that he didn’t even care if people stopped quoting him. And after all this, pro-Gamergate gaming websites TechRaptor, GamesNosh, and NicheGamer turn out to have their own mailing list in the same vein as what “GameJournoPros” was.

Fascinating, but this needs independent verification from a source other than Twitter.

Objectivity

Claim Gamergate stands for objective game reviews. Rebuttal “Objectivity” is thrown about in multiple ways in Gamergate. One way seems to regard the way to review video games, such that the people in Gamergate, who believe they are speaking for all people who play video games, wish to solely know the technical aspects of the video game and do not care about social commentary of its story. They want to know if it plays well, if it has good design, if its free from bugs and glitches, and for some reason they are focused on the framerate.

Very good RW, you describe how most gamers not hung up on social justice issues think.

Video games, like all other forms of entertainment, have become art, and these factors don’t necessarily come into play when criticizing something for it being a work of art. Of course then we get to the crux of the issue when it comes to the social commentary. Gamergaters seem to believe that criticism of the content of the video games’ story is somehow a demand for a change.

Given the recent censorship of their own games companies like Capcom have admitted to as a result of such social commentary being seen as such by them, GamerGaters have a valid point here.

This is, of course, still tied to the fact that they think video games should only be technical objects, where criticizing broken software often evokes a change to the software. Criticizing the lack of non-white characters in The Witcher 3, knowing full well that the original work of fiction includes a foreign nation implied to have non-white people in it,

Two issues here. One, both are Polygon articles, they need independent sources to vet their claims, and two, RW, let ME, as a game dev myself, describe what you are saying to game developers:

You are saying because the possibility certain races not represented in a game could be, there is something wrong with not including them.

All due respect, as a developer myself, go fuck yourselves if you don’t like my decision to consciously avoid including Asian ethnic groups in my RPG Maker remake of Dragon Quest 1. The original source did not have anyone other than white European styled characters, and while I fudged matters somewhat and included a few Mediterranean looking characters, I otherwise felt it didn’t fit my artistic vision to include certain ethnic groups, and if you want to give me grief for that, shove your complaints up your ass and simply not play it if that offends you. You have every right to complain regardless, but I have every right to not give a shit.

is not at all the same as demanding that CD Projekt Red immediately add black people to the video game in a free patch (although a free expansion to the game did include such content, and CD Projekt Red’s co-founder Marcin Iwiński did allude to Polygon’s reviews when speaking to Kotaku as something that as developers they should not judge but rather listen to the opinions provided).

Cite another source to back this up, please.

Raising criticism that video games use storytelling elements that negatively portray women is not at all a desire to ban these video games. Constructive criticism with social commentary is not a demand made at gunpoint.

Tell Koei Temco that. DOAXBV3 will never officially see America thanks to this shit. I’m not tore up about it, but this crap you’re touting scared them badly enough they don’t want to take the risk, screwing over those who think the complaints raised by the social justice crowd are full of it.

The other side of the “objectivity” coin is rooted in an almost universal misunderstanding (one that transcends Gamergate) that objectivity in journalism means neutrality bordering on a balance fallacy. Objectivity in ethical journalism is investigating what actually is the truth behind a story, not that both sides deserve equal coverage when one side is almost certainly wrong in their interpretation. This holds particularly true when all the investigation and demands for equal coverage from the objectively wrong side only prove what the journalist had determined in the first place.

Two things, use another source to back up your point, and let me take the hypocrisy you just argued for and lay it bare for you, RW:

You argued in the section before giving developers grief over not having ethnic groups or certain portrayals of women represented is perfectly fine, and if that results in them not selling their products to certain markets or censoring their own work to please you and your like minded travelers, then the people who got pissed off and screwed over were simply wrong in their opinions because you got the changes you want since their side was wrong, the truth of which was evident in the change you got, so the pissed off people just need to accept they are wrong and get over it since the journalists did their job of determining the pissed off people were less valid than the opinion the journalists came to in dissent?

Leigh Alexander argued for this exact same kind of fascist bullshit, and I’m not buying it from you guys any more than I bought it from her.

Intel sided with Gamergate

Claim Intel sided with Gamergate and pulled ads off of Gamasutra! This proves Gamergate is right! Rebuttal Gamergate successfully pressured Intel, among other companies, to cease advertising campaigns on whichever website Gamergate as a whole was most upset with at the time. These suspensions were less than a month at the most. Because of Gamergate, Intel decided to budget $300 million to counter the lack of diversity in the tech industry. Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency organization is one of the many entities involved with this endeavor.

One, link to external sources instead of link whoring yourself in a debunking article, RW, you are trying to help people see the futility in GamerGate’s position, not preach to the choir, right?

Otherwise, not a bad point to argue, I’ll give you that.

Tyler Wilde and Anne Lewis

Claim Tyler Wilde positively reviewed Ubisoft games because of his conflict of interest, without disclosing it. Because of Gamergate, PC Gamer has changed its policy and now prevents collusion! Response In short: Very little to no positive reviews happened. Very little to no conflict of interest existed. Very little to no policy change occurred. In long: Tyler Wilde, executive editor at PC Gamer, wrote an op-ed about the use of the term “PC Master Race” and how the video game community should stop using what was effectively Nazi terminology.

Alright, cites the source reasonably well, needs verification from another source, but as a PC gamer, let me educate you on what the term “PC Master Race” refers to in reality:

It’s NOT Nazi referencing, and it never has been. PCs have the ability to show games that are on consoles with much higher graphical fidelity, offer the easier possibility of modding, and superior performance, as consoles have limited power and often have to make sacrifices that PCs can go above to show off higher quality.

For example, most Bethseda games on consoles are about their Medium Quality defaults on consoles, whereas on PC they can look and performance much better assuming once has a properly tricked out gaming PC.

I can play Fallout 4 on Ultra with a few minor performance mods for example thanks to this.

I personally think anyone who takes the “PC Master Race” thing as anything other than a tongue in cheek joke is taking the term too seriously, but it’s never had Nazi connotations, something, had RW done a little research, they would have discovered for themselves, and while GamerGaters were pissed, I would be too given the ignorance on display.

Gamergaters responded by digging up anything they could in his personal life to make his SJW opinion null and void. They thought they struck gold when they found he was dating Anne Lewis, a Communications Associate at Ubisoft (she wrote for Ubisoft’s public blog), and demanded that PC Gamer punish Wilde, as they found he had written reviews on Ubisoft games and believed (yet again…) that there was a sex-for-reviews scandal. Or in their words,

“”PR from ubisoft found out that one of their communications girls[Anne Lewis] was fucking a writer at PC Gamer [Tyler Wilde]. Made her an offer she couldn’t refuse, therefore made him an offer he couldn’t refuse…and that is how the article got written.

Ubisoft was sick of the negative attention they were getting from here, therefore, via an employee that was fucking a writer, commissioned a hit-piece against /r/pcmasterrace.

— GamerGhazi,

Could you guys actually back this shit up with something other than a source that amounts to an anti-GG gossip column? I mean, damn, you want to prove your point, right? Then verify that Ghazi post with more neutral evidence even skeptics would find hard to argue.

Totally logical, right? I mean, getting a bad rap from a single subreddit is definitely worth getting a sex-commissioned hitpiece.

So you confirm you are basing this crap entirely off unverified by neutral sources social media posting.

RW, this is embarrassing, I know you guys can make better arguments than this.

PC Gamer later clarified that Wilde and Lewis had met each other while they were both working at PC Gamer’s owners Future US and then Lewis left for a position at Ubisoft. After this point, PC Gamer took Wilde off of reviewing Ubisoft games, but they did not include a disclosure on any other coverage he made for Ubisoft products. But in response to Gamergate’s “sleuthing” of what was never really considered a conflict of interest, PC Gamer did minorly shift policy on disclosures by requiring them if there may be some tenuous relationship with a subject or simply removing the writer from covering that company or game. This officially stopped Wilde from writing about Ubisoft at all. Mind you, Lewis never worked on any of Ubisoft’s games as a designer or developer; she was writing for their blog.

The facts are sourced properly at least, needs neutral verification.

Some critical of Gamergate criticized PC Gamer for caving to Gamergate pressure, saying that it legitimized the group’s actions.

You source the tweets of open opponents, can you back them up with verification in more formal publications? Again, you want an airtight argument, remove any room to have your argument criticized.

Gamergaters also dogpiled on Wilde after the disclosure change was made, claiming that he was attempting to hide the truth by updating his Facebook profile to remove a video of himself discussing Watch Dogs. If he was going for censorship, he certainly could have, say, taken down all the articles on Ubisoft he’d written; and if said video was produced as a conflict-of-interest-filled hit piece, surely it should be removed? Which is it, GG: should the content stay online, and be a conflict of interest, or be taken off, and be censorship?

This is supposition that the sources do not help to prove or disprove and for which the sources are of tertiary benefit at best. Also, mind sourcing where and when this dogpiling occurred? You want to show GamerGaters are the assholes here, where is the evidence that yes, they are assholes?

FTC disclosure guidelines

Claim #1 The FTC revised the guidelines because of GamerGate!

Response #1 The guideline change was already underway before Gamergate was around.

Submit some proof for this with dates and times please, your word is not an argument, RW.

The common response is to claim that that Gamergate did, indeed, have an effect on the FAQ.

Gamergate got this FAQ change by frequently asking questions.[citation NOT needed]

Cute, sarcasm, but how the hell does this prove your point?

Claim #2 The FTC has Gawker in its sights

Response #2 In the interview the claim stems from, Associate Director Mary Engle pointed out examples of native advertising on BuzzFeed, Wired, and Gawker (note the re-ordering in one of the KiA posts). Engle then said that they’re not “inherently deceptive.”

Claim #3 The interest in FTC guidelines shows that Gamergate is about ethics.

Response #3 …So long as it appears to hurt their opponents. (see Claim #2)

Alright, fair arguments based on facts that are mostly cited properly, but, as always, additional verification make for airtight arguments.

Gawker

Claim We told you about Gawker! Hulkamania’s gonna run wild! Rebuttal Gawker Media owns Kotaku, one of Gamergate’s bêtes noires. Their namesake website Gawker is a celebrity gossip tabloid. Currently, they are embroiled in two major controversies that have nothing to do with Kotaku or writer Sam Biddle who pissed off Gamergate to spawn “Operation Baby Seal” after he called them a bunch of nerds.

One, note the past tense. Granted, at least one of the controversies is not entirely over, but this was not updated since it initially occurred. Two, Kotaku is a vertical of Gawker, and due to the financial and management ties between the two entities, and since both have committed ethical breaches that have been confirmed in various media outlets, ANYONE could be rightly mad given the known facts about said offenses, but apparently, if I read your assertion correctly RW, it’s only bad if it’s GamerGaters raising the stink, right?

Hitler hated smoking and thought it unhealthy, is he wrong simply because he’s Hitler?

Professional wrestler Hulk Hogan sued Gawker Media in 2012 for hosting parts of a sex tape from when he was in an affair with the wife of a former friend. The suit is seeking US$100 million in damages, which might force Gawker Media into bankruptcy.

Proper citation here, this matter is on public record and easily provable even without secondary sources.

On July 16, 2015, Gawker published an article allegedly outing the CFO of Condé Nast after receiving information from a gay porn actor he had allegedly hired as an escort. It was met with universal condemnation, leading to its retraction, but not before Gamergaters tried to latch onto the outrage.

Sources check out, but time to take you to task for another fallacy, RW. You again assume because GamerGaters “latched onto” something even you admit was wrong, they were wrong to do so.

Consider this: Someone you hate reports a murderer and helps bring them to justice, but you hate the very air that person breathes. Is your hate so strong you’d rather they remain silent than perform a public service by helping bring a murderer to justice simply because you resent the idea that person you utterly loathe might do something worthy of praise?

On August 3, 2015, Gawker published an article containing Donald Trump’s cell phone number, arguably in response to Trump publishing Senator Lindsey Graham’s number previously.

Again easily provable and on public record.

Gamergate has decided to basically use these news stories as weapons against Kotaku simply for existing on the same website. They haven’t been able to find anything resembling a breach of ethics by the staff at Kotaku so they decide to use these actual reprehensible actions at Gawker as a front for their war against Kotaku.

One is the parent of the other. Merely focusing on Gawker’s indiscretions would have had effects on their subsidiary publication if in nothing other than a fiscal sense, so this is a bullshit complaint akin to arguing stabbing the hydra that is generally aggressive in the heart is wrong if only one of the heads committed an offense.

That’s bullshit because even if that’s true, the head is attached to the body of the hydra, and since we cannot simply judge a body part of a crime while not punishing the rest of the body (even cutting off the offending limb could kill or cripple the rest of the body), that argument is nonsensical.

And this is all done while hypocritically ignoring their own actions that mirror Gawker’s. One of the earliest things Gamergate did was use Zoë Quinn’s nude photos against her,

Most if not all those nudes come from porn shoots she did, many of which if not all existed prior to GamerGate. Their use was in shit taste, but false parallel here. Hogan’s tape was gained by provably illegal means still being adjudicated in a court of law. Quinn’s nudes have not received the same scrutiny and their is no legal proceeding then or now against any party accused of doing similar to Quinn as was done to Hogan.

acquired as illicitly as Gawker Media acquired Hulk Hogan’s sex tape, and Gamergate spends an inordinate amount of energy in outing their transgender critics, even people only considered transgender as a result of Gamergate’s conspiracy theories against them.

This redirects to an internal link that does not seem to exist anymore, so what the hell does it refer to?

Anti-Gamergate is mean

Note that having an evil enemy doesn’t make one a hero.

RW, let’s be fair here. GamerGate is not perfect by any means, but neither are it’s opponents. Both are movements filled with humans, faulty and mortal, prone to acts of glory and destard, and both with the choices of doing good or doing evil.

Neither side can claim sainthood, but to pretend this point is even valid when both sides are filled with humans prone to fault is beyond stupid to even bring up.