In a well-balanced article (very unusual from major media) “#GamerGate – An Issue With Two Sides,” Allum Bokhari writing for TechCrunch tells the whole story–including the censorship imposed by popular discussion sites like Reddit. If you want to catch up on the controversy (which is directly of interest to gamers, but also a very interesting example of influence-peddling and media censorship by politically-correct SJWs), read the whole thing, but here’s some tidbits:
The hashtag campaign has opened up a chasm between the gaming press and their audience. Currently standing at close to a million tweets (over twice that of #Destiny), #GamerGate shows no signs of stopping. A related tag, #NotYourShield, has cleared 120,000. But what lies behind it? Why did it come about? And why are people so angry?
If you were to believe Tadhg Kelly, it’s a reactionary, right-wing movement of white, male gamers trying to protect their hobby from an invasion of women and minorities. On the other hand, the games editor of Cinemablend claims it is a multi-gender, multi-ethnic uprising against corruption and nepotism. Meanwhile, David Auerbach of Slate suggests that it is simply a predictable and justified response to a press that regularly professes to hate its own readership.
These competing opinions are hard to unravel, because they are a symptom of something that has up till now been blissfully absent from the world of gaming.
It’s politics.
I should know. I work in politics for a living. Gaming was once my escape, but unfortunately, this no longer seems to be the case….
These awful, anonymous misogynists have ploughed close to $23,000 into The Fine Young Capitalists, a charity project to help women design video games. Not only that, but they created an entirely ordinary, non-idealized female role model to be used as a character in their videogames. Those bastards!
Anti-gamers would like to characterize the current divide as one between inclusivity and exclusivity, but reality will always confound this narrative. Men, women, minorities, left-wingers, right-wingers, and even feminists have taken the side of GamerGate in recent weeks. It’s hard to find a movement that is more open to diversity – both of opinion and background.
This is in stark contrast to the intolerant lock-step of their opponents, who have sought to shame and browbeat developers and other journalists into accepting their worldview.
One of the reasons why TFYC’s popularity continues to grow among gamers (and decline among their opponents) is precisely because they do not use these methods. Despite holding almost identical views to the ‘Social Justice Warriors’, they find themselves excluded from the activist clique due to their relatively tolerant attitudes. They are against attacking gamers’ current choices, preferring to create new ones alongside them. They do not seek to ferment fear and panic, or shame existing developers into altering their design process. They don’t want to ‘change the world’ – they just want to add to it….
When I began writing this article, I was pretty sure that GamerGate was a serious and multifaceted enough issue to write about. Enter Julian Assange, answering a question on GamerGate-related shadowbans on Reddit, confirmed it beyond all doubt:
It’s pathetic. But censorship by companies control privatized political space is now almost a norm. Facebook is implementing its own “laws” for social behaviour and politics. Even Twitter has now folded; censoring for example, leaks about the New Zealand prime minister just this week and some time ago banning Anonymous Sweden after a request from that country. High volume publication + control of publication by powerful organisations = censorship, all the time. We have to fight to create new networks of freedom. The old and powerful always become corrupt….
GamerGate is a warning of the perils of unaccountable and secretive moderation systems. The initial days of the controversy saw false DCMA notices, a culling of 25,000 user comments on Reddit, and a mass-banning of users on neoGAF. Users continue to be shadowbanned on Reddit. Even 4chan’s /v/ board initially prohibited threads on the topic.
I was personally shadowbanned on Reddit for linking to an especially bash-y story from the politically correct side; I posted it because it was such a good example of propaganda. It was several days before I noticed I had become a non-person there (“shadowbanning” is devious, because instead of blocking your activity there, it simply makes you invisible to everyone else–including hiding all your previous posts from everyone but you. So you look at your account and have no idea why no one is responding to anything.)
Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations
[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]
The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.
Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”
Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.