Here it is in a more readable form:

SOCIAL OUTCAST “Y do u attack B@tman? He is BASED! U r a fa-“ Riddler deleted the email, and all the others like it, as prickly hot anger and shame squired through his insides. No point denying it: #CrusaderGate had been a disastrous social media campaign. He couldn’t understand it. It seemed the internet’s idiotic and easily roused rabble could froth itself into a full-fat cappuccino of frenzy over ‘white knights’. But offer it up a Dark one — on a plate! — and you get a soy latte’s worth of indignation at best! Didn’t they understand what Batman had done?

It’s important to remember we see these events through the eyes of Riddler, a supervillain “motivated by a neurotic compulsion to commit crimes based on riddles and puzzles”. If this is not clear from the opening paragraph, it’s clear from the second one, where we feel Riddler’s disappointment. Yes, this is a third-person narration, but the emotions described are Riddler’s own.

Of course, sometimes authors use the third person narrative and the protagonist’s reactions to sell their own reflections about the world. I am not entirely convinced a Rocksteady’s writer would like to use a mentally deranged villain to do so, though.

Still, it’s a possibility, but that does not really change things much, so let’s continue.

I assume the first confusion comes from the fact that #CrusaderGate is described as “a disastrous social media campaign”. However, that’s not because the campaign itself was wrong — although, coming from Riddler, we can assume it was — but because it did not work. People who get outraged about “white knights”, did not take the Riddler’s “dark knight” bait.

It’s not like people were totally indifferent. Most of them did not care indeed (“you get a soy latte’s worth of indignation at best”), and the rest disagreed with Riddler in what the reference shows as a caricature of a gamer/channer/Internet user (“Y do u attack B@tman? He is BASED! U r a fa-“).

That’s why the campaign was “disastrous”. Simply, it has failed.

The other confusion comes, I guess, from the fact that no one — well, except those who see a #*Gate and automatically assume it’s a jab at the hashtag or the nod towards it — can quite decipher who is who in this piece.

Riddler starts the #CrusaderGate hashtag, so is he a #GamerGate metaphor? Nothing points to that. He is an outsider who tried to stir things up using a medium he does not quite understand or knows. The “idiotic and easily roused rabble” are obviously not his friends. Riddler is not a part of this group, and never was, hence the title “Social Outcast”.

So maybe it is the “idiotic and easily roused rabble” that is #GamerGate? After all, Riddler supplies them with something new to get outraged about — the #CrusaderGate hashtag — hoping it will catch on. The rabble — remember, we’re using Riddler’s perspective — is outraged about the white knights, so hopefully they’ll be just as outraged about Batman?

But if that is the case, then does not that paint #GamerGate as reasonable people who saw through the bullshit and, to Riddler’s utter disappointment, mostly ignored the mentally deranged villain’s activism? Is that what the #GamerGate’s opponents want to go with?

To me, there are three options here. Either the Rocksteady’s writer had a plan for a certain social statement but did not quite know what they were doing and the metaphor got out of hand and became muddy, or this is a jab at everyone, or this nothing else but simply a pop culture reference in a fictional story (as such references make it easier for us to understand the protagonist’s struggle). After all, this is not the only #*Gate mention in the game: