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.
Damion,
While you are correct that WAM only gets to escalate reports, not actually ban users (or suspend); you have to agree that putting an agenda driven group in charge of such things is a sure fire way to skew the system towards that agenda. They’ve even stated they will be escalating things that fall outside of the Twitter guidelines.
Yet, Geordie Tait is still not suspended or banned that I know of, despite the fact that he is calling for gas chambers and final solution tactics (and as someone who has lost over 90% of those with my last name during WWII to both the Holocaust and Stalinist practices in Eastern Europe afterward, you can guess where I stand on that– right now, every single person in the world born with my last name is a blood relative). Isn’t hate speech or calling for mass murder something that can be banned on Twitter?
Why have they not escalated any reporting of him, or others saying any woman supporting GG should be forced to have abortions, men should be sterilized, etc.? Because they agree with the overall agenda.
Any agenda driven group having that much influence is asinine. I don’t care if it’s far left, far right, or the Illuminati/Lizard People/whatever conspiracy theory we can name having that much control. It’s all bad news all around… unless you happen to fall on the good side of that agenda.
As to echo chambers… you do realize the echo chambers exist on both sides, right? As an example, how many people still recite the things Wu said about 8Chan being created just for GG, when a 5 second Google search will show it was founded in 2013? Even a recent Slate blog parroted that exact same narrative.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/11/10/gamergate_not_effective_in_its_campaign_against_mattie_brice_and_the_igf.html
“Gamergate organizers at 8chan—a site set up for Gamergate after 4chan booted them”
The blog is 3 days old. The author just recited Wu’s telling of 8Chan as if it were fact. That Wu herself has been told, numerous times, that the site was founded before GG has little bearing… she just moves the goal posts and says that it was still GG under a different name when it was founded.
And people still recite that as some sort of fact.
And that’s just one example of the echo chamber that does exist on the anti-GG side.
Let’s not forget the narrative controlling echo chamber in the gaming media. They never mention that doxxing and threats are happening to both sides (I’m still fairly confident the doxxing and such is third party trolls doing it to both sides to get their rocks off). Where is the reporting that a GG supporting college professor had students vandalize her place of work? Where is the reporting of Boogie2988’s wife getting threatening phone calls after he was doxxed (and he’s more neutral than anything else)? Etc.
It won’t get reported, because the echo chamber and ideology says that if they don’t report on it, it doesn’t exist. As Chu pointed out in his interview with Packman (paraphrasing here) “they don’t deserve a voice.”
And that sort of totalitarian attitude is pervasive in the Social Justice circles. Shame. Silence. It’s common. Dissenting opinions aren’t to be tolerated and must be purged so that others cannot hear them.
Remember, free speech isn’t about protecting the views that we like. It’s about protecting the voices of people who have differing views from being silenced for those views.
I don’t have to follow, listen to, or agree with anything Sargon, Milo, Wu, Sarkeesian, etc. say. They have the right to say what they want. I have the right to disagree, publicly or privately (I do so more privately). I don’t have the right to silence them; and they don’t have the right to silence me.
WAM as escalators of reports is a bad idea, overall. One of their members even tweeted out something that shows they have a very specific target group (GG supporters, even if moderates, like me). They have an agenda. And that agenda says fuck the rights of the Constitution if they don’t agree with what is being said.
Trust me; I was a game media person for over 10 years. I know there’s shady and downright unethical shit that goes on between major publishers and gaming sites. I’ve seen it, first hand… even been threatened with blacklisting from a now out of business publisher. And now it’s spread to the indie scene, where it’s easier to make friends with the developers because the developers are often their own PR people as well. (As a note, I stopped working for the site I worked with before the indie scene blew up and the site is now defunct.)
It’s led to conflicts of interest, emotional and financial. It’s led to agenda driven click bait articles. It’s led to, now, controlling the narrative.
But, I’m just one voice. I speak for no one else but myself. No one speaks for me. I can agree with and disagree with things said by the same person, because I have my own mind and free will.
I do my own reviews. I post them up on YouTube. They get barely any views, but that doesn’t matter. If just one person finds my reviews generally mesh with their own opinions, and they decide to come to a review I do of a game to see if it might be worth it to them… well, that’s all that matters. The thousands of dollars I have already spent on equipment and games is worth it, just for that. And the thousands more I have to spend to get a new recording and editing computer will also be worth it (since my current one died while I was in the hospital in August).
I’ve said to people who started following me that I will not just agree wholeheartedly with everything said, by either side. Listen and Believe isn’t how I work, even if I generally agree with someone most of the time. I do my own searching, my own checking. I am the final say in what I choose to agree with. The only echo chamber I have to deal with is the echoes of things in my room as I go to sleep.
“Gamergate organizers at 8chan—a site set up for Gamergate after 4chan booted them”
Surely she was referring to /gg/ the board, yes? Poorly phrased, but that part’s true.
And there remains a vast world of difference between someone expressing dislike for a group as a whole and directly attacking one person in particular: “I would love it if all Republicans had heart attacks” is not harassment. Tweeting at a single person “I hope you have a heart attack” is.
The reason why WAM is needed is because women and minorities get more, and more vicious harassment, than do anyone else. And I’m sorry, but while of course nobody deserves to face harassment or abuse or doxxing, there is not a single GGer who has faced the overwhelming dogpile of bullshit that Wu, Sarkeesian or Quinn have.
But that bullshit is not because they are women. But because their opinions are stupid and loud. Because they swam right the fuck inside a shitstorm, Moby Dick style.
That is why they got that “vicious” harassment. Any public figure would have gotten it.
100% false. Women get more vicious harassment than men do online, period.
Also, there are documented instances of men and women saying similar things, and the women are the ones who get dogpiled.
So, even though the games industry is something like 85% male, the fact that ALL of the people driven from homes and out of the careers is because they are women making ‘stupid, loud’ comments?
Seriously, that’s a non-serious answer.
As far as I know, the only developer who can be said to have been driven from the industry as a result of this shitstorm is Phil Fish, a man.
But for some reason even GG opponents never seem to remember him. I’d like to think that there’s a reason for this other than him not fitting the “war on women” narrative, but I have a hard time coming up with one.
There is a difference between being driven out of your career and stamping your feet and leaving in a huff.
How many times has Mattie Brice been “driven out” of games? You’d think that’s a thing that could only happen once, but it’s happened at least twice!
Phil Fish was not driven out. He chose to leave after his constant trolling backfired. At any time he could have simply stopped trolling.
Erik Kain has had the shit beat out of him multiple times, not just by random internet people but by his peers, flat out telling him they hope his career tanks. (Sometimes from people in a position that could help make that happen) He could have left and claimed he was driven out – he didn’t.
Whether or not a person is “driven out” says more about their particular personality than the objective reality of what happened to them.
To some degree the same is true of reactions to threats. Some people leave their homes and publicize it, some people leave their homes and don’t publicize it, some people don’t leave their homes.
The fact that some people loudly flounce off on Twitter doesn’t illustrate much other than that Twitter is a melodramatic medium.
If you haven’t already read it try and find a copy of ‘Irrationality’ by Stuart Sutherland.
I can’t quote directly as my copy is out on loan to a friend, I really should pick up another copy.
It has a chapter on the dangers of committees and the way the group dynamic tends to polarise itself, the less charismatic wanting to be on the inside of the discussion and so appease the leader.
In many respects the same dynamic within any closed group of self interested yes-men.
Any opposing views by effect tend to be forced to extremes.
Or something like that 😉 I really wish I had the book to quote from, or at least refresh my hazy memory.
1)so… This is what OpSkyNet is about. I’m speechless
2) their reaction toward Intel giving back ads on Gamasutra is laughable. That Intel would go bacm was totally predictable: The backlash, the excuses, the insider’s tweets… It was just a question of time before Intel would go back. YET! In their world, it seems totally implausible. And they are now advancing “proofs” that Intel did NOT give ad money back to Gamasutra that strangely remind me of the old days, when they were trying to find “proofs” that Anita had made up the threats against her.
And now they want a confirmation from Intel. Even if they had one, they would disregard it. And BTW, they are NOT entitled a confirmation by Intel.
Really.
This is just sad to say the truth. This group has a global mental age of 6.
In the war between the Tumblr echo chamber and the 4/8chan echo chamber, this is like… a victory for Tumblr?
The way people in the so called ‘social justice’ movement troll innocent people:
http://www.dailydot.com/geek/benjanun-sriduangkaew-revealed-to-be-troll-requires-hate-winterfox/
And yes, I wholeheartedly agree to the rest of the premises. Online communities doesn’t scale because of constants like the Dunbar’s number. We are not ready to talk in a respectful, personal way to the whole world.
OpSkyNet is a response to fallout over the reliance on so-called “e-celebs” like KoP. Basically, since GG is supposed to have “no leaders,” the de facto leaders have been those with the loudest voices – on Twitter, this is defined as those with the most followers. So OpSkyNet is supposed to be a way to increase the volume of the “common” GGers’ voice within the movement (especially those that only joined Twitter for GG and so don’t already have a following built up) by having them follow each other. I think it’s a really interesting idea, though it does as you say have the side-effect of creating a larger echochamber.
That is interesting…. from a ‘state of Gamergate’ point of view. It’s a direct response to the idiocy of last week – as much as I ragged on them, silencing or at least reducing the impact of them is a good thing.
But yeah, I don’t think it’ll pan out in a positive way. I’m not the only one who stopped following gamergaters on twitter because of it (I now use KiA and other sources to keep tabs on things).
Damion, what I’ve done is set up a private Gaming Twitter list just composed of people who comment on #GamerGate, whether pro or con (admittedly, it is mostly pro). Because it is private, the users don’t know they have been added to it which is good because that announcement can prompt the user to either block you or, more often, start a GamerGate debate with you. You’re the only one who can see a private list.
In general, because I follow almost everyone back and that’s a pretty large number, I have found lists to be the best way to follow conversations and I refer to them every daily. They do work out to be their own echochamber but you can view the list when you want to, it’s not like folks are in your regular feed.
I do follow and am followed back by some GGers, the ones who don’t assault people and aren’t always using “battle” language. But for the more strident voices, private Twitter lists are ideal.
I meant “every day”. Oops!
Gee Liz, sounds like you’ve got a nice little echo chamber going! Well done you.
The thing is, for ordinary usage, Twitter’s “echo chambers” are a feature. The ordinary user is just engaging in idle chit-chat, and doesn’t want to engage in deep debates.
But echo chambers breed groupthink, and it becomes actually distressing to have that groupthink disrupted. Even if the groupthink is provably disconnected from reality, it will be defended, even by those that are consciously aware of the disconnect from reality. Cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, ingroup identity, sunk cost fallacy, a whole host of fundamental human features become pathological when bubbles collide.
–Dave
The whole idea of the “sea lion” has itself become idiotic twitter snark.
The original comic is funny but it doesn’t really make sense when applied to twitter. If someone replies to you on twitter they aren’t interrupting your breakfast or other normal activity, they are interacting with you specifically on Twitter. If you want to eat your breakfast just eat it and stop checking Twitter.
Accusing someone of being a “sea lion” is now just whining that you said something stupid in a public forum and someone else responded – exactly as the forum is intended to be used.
It amazes me how many people fundamentally don’t understand what Twitter is. If you only want to talk to your friends don’t send public Tweets – that’s not how Twitter works. If you say something in public people may respond – that’s no “sea lioning” it’s how the system is designed.
Posting on Twitter is not an open invitation to a forensics competition. No one is under any obligation to engage anyone else. If someone tells you they’re not interested in a debate or not to reply to them, it’s common courtesy to disengage and move on.
Yes it is. Twitter is not meant for private conversations. it is literally built to send everything you say or tweet out into a huge network.
You are under no obligation to respond to anyone. You can always turn your twitter. But if you honestly think no one can see what you say, you’re a fool.
Milo didn’t deserve to be suspended, period. WAM is just a method of abusing and spamming the report function to get anti-feminists banned from twitter.
No one needs to be reminded that Twitter is private and isn’t subject to the first Amendment. Every fucking time I see anyone say any bullshit like this it’s just some smug bastard saying “They can ban whomever they like.” No shit. It’s just a way of avoiding the substance of the discussion. Their freedom doesn’t mean that it’s conducive to free and open debate, doesn’t mean that the bannings are actually in accordance with their terms of service, and doesn’t mean that the report function isn’t being spammed by an ideological group that has more interest in promoting 3rd wave feminist ideology than in broadly protecting women or ending harassment in general.
Hey, Brianna Wu gets more harassment than you do? Again, no shit. She has ten times as many followers as you do, she gets retweeted about 100 times as often as you do.
Jonathan McIntosh acts surprised that he gets less abuse than the Feminist Frequency twitter account, when he has 4,000 followers, and @femfreq has over 200,000. He’s extremely lucky to get something retweeted 100 times, while she regularly gets something retweeted more than 1000 times.
It’s as if some people are just oblivious to numbers.
Take anyone with tens of hundreds of thousands of followers, like Jim Carrey, have them say some really stupid and inflammatory shit, like Carrey’s not so long ago ignorant bullshit regarding the 2nd Amendment, and watch at how many retweets that person gets from like-minded ignoramuses, and how much vitriol that person inspires.
So, in the future, compare people who post similarly inflammatory things, with similar numbers of followers and retweets, and then see how your numbers stack up. Until then, I’m just not going to accept anecdotal evidence that women have it so much worse.
Now, do they have it worse? They might.
Perhaps they cry wolf all the time because they’ve received so much real abuse that they are extra-sensitive. We are certainly less likely to #listenandbelieve because we’ve seen so many documented cases of their crying wolf and being deliberately inflammatory.
And, hey, I hope you enjoyed getting accused of “mansplaining” to a woman for disagreeing with her based on information you’ve received from other women. Don’t you love false accusations?