A credible case: Gamergate enabled the election of [Redacted]?

[TygrBright]

From Vox

What we still haven’t learned from Gamergate

And in the same way that none of those years of escalating online assaults against women prepared us for Gamergate, somehow, the formation of Gamergate itself didn’t prepare society for the cultural rise of the alt-right. The journalists who did anticipate that Gamergate could and would morph into something worse were, by 2015, drowned out by the general cultural idea that Gamergate had somehow “failed”— even though it was a movement inherently meant to scale and grow. Somehow, the idea that all of that sexism and anti-feminist anger could be recruited, harnessed, and channeled into a broader white supremacist movement failed to generate any real alarm, even well into 2016, when all the pieces were firmly in place.

In other words, even though all the signs were there in 2014 that a systematized online harassment campaign could lead to an escalation in real-world violence, most people failed to see what was happening. Gamergate ultimately made us all much more aware of the potential real-world impact of online extremism. Yet, years after Gamergate, despite increasing evidence suggesting a connection between online violence against women and real-world violence — including mass shootings — many corporations and social media platforms still struggle to identify and eradicate extreme forms of violence against women from online spaces.

For instance: In early 2019, Valve, the parent company of the online game platform Steam, allowed a game called Rape Day, in which the object of the “game” was to rape women, to stay up in its store for days before finally removing it. Despite all of its algorithmic tweaking, Twitter is still abysmal at identifying and taking action against rape and death threats on its website. The 2019 murder of 17-year-old Bianca Devins, a well-known Instagram user, carried a disturbing online component that involved her killer posting graphic online photos of her death. The photos rapidly went viral, including on Instagram and Twitter, which were both largely ineffective at curbing their spread.

This failure to act has serious consequences, because many of the perpetrators of real-world violence are radicalized online first. In 2018, the International Center for Research on Women identified online gender-based violence as “an emerging public health and human rights concern” and linked it to a growing number of mass shootings, noting, “Failing to detect and deter technology-facilitated GBV is a missed opportunity to prevent deadly consequences offline.” Other research has found that more than half of the US’s mass shootings involve the targeting of an intimate partner or ex-partner, and many of the most recent mass attacks involve a perpetrator who displayed or threatened violent behavior toward one woman or multiple women, either online or off. In the past year alone, multiple mass shootings have had an element of misogynistic or domestic violence targeted at women.

But, of course, since it's just the Patriarchy being the Patriarchy, it'll get dismissed as usual.

wearily,
Bright

[Karadeniz]

1. Rape Day. What kind of sicko promotes that?

[Blue_Tires]

2. bookmarking for later