[lindydonna]

And yet, they performed targeted attacks against a number of prominent women in the games industry, so much that these women had to relocate multiple times for fear of their personal safety.

Interestingly, the FBI got confessions from some of the attackers, and decided not to prosecute. http://www.businessinsider.com/gamergate-fbi-file-2017-2

Just because they didn't have a central organization, doesn't change the fact that it was a movement that caused a lot of damage. In fact, there's a parallel with the Alt-Right.

Many terrorist organizations operate with individual cells who work independently, so that they can't implicate each other. I'd still call that an organization.

[ng12]

> Many terrorist organizations operate with individual cells who work independently, so that they can't implicate each other. I'd still call that an organization.

I'd argue there's a more interesting parallel with political terrorist organizations: they often start out as non-violent groups until subsections radicalize over time, therefore attracting a set of new members who further radicalize the group. Think Hamas, PKK, etc.

It's pointless to argue whether GamerGate was about "ethics in journalism" because there's the set of people who care about that and the set of people who like to threaten women over the internet, and it's not clear which one are "GamerGate" and which ones aren't.

[themaninthedark]

I know of at least one gamergate meetup that had a bomb threat called on it. https://kotaku.com/gamergate-meetup-evacuated-after-apparent...

Would it be fair to paint the critics of gamergate with the same brush?

My best advice is to look at the majority of the people and see how they act, then make your own judgements.

[digi_owl]

Modern day internet "activism" basically, and a legacy of the Anonymous circus.

[ksk]

>Just because they didn't have a central organization, doesn't change the fact that it was a movement that caused a lot of damage. In fact, there's a parallel with the Alt-Right.

Nobody is disputing the facts. The problem comes when people take disparate facts and weave a narrative that supports their own beliefs without any supporting evidence.

>Many terrorist organizations operate with individual cells who work independently, so that they can't implicate each other. I'd still call that an organization.

Only because they have a shared goal. There is no shared goal in gamer gate. The thing called "gamer gate" was filled with crazy and non-crazy people with wildly differing goals and beliefs.

[makomk]

It's entirely possible that the guy the FBI declined to prosecute is this guy: https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/24/8099531/gamergate-jace-co... Roughly the right area and description. In any case, he's a good example of the problem with the whole Gamergate harassment narrative.

Minor details like him not actually being part of Gamergate in any way and his videos being obvious jokes didn't stop the media reporting this as an example of Gamergate death threats against women. Meanwhile, in actual non-media reality Gamergate was split between people who thought his jokes were distasteful but not actually harassment and those who considered them over the line. Then when it became clear he was a fictional character, the narrative changed to one where Gamergate were now threatening him because they'd discovered he didn't really support their harassment of women. Of course, the Gamergate position all along was that he obviously wasn't serious, the fact it was like harassment made him unpopular, and it was still that other internet community sending death threats and harassment. (A community, if I'm remembering rightly, which went out their way to go after a bunch of Gamergate supporters for taking a stand against their harassment.)

The most important thing to understand about Gamergate is this: the entire media (and social media) anti-harassment campaign of the time was primarily about attacking Gamergate and criticism of the game critics in general. Everything else fell by the wayside. All the groups actually doing the harassment went unmentioned. The most powerful, long lasting meme to come out of this fight, "It's about ethics in games journalism", was entirely about crushing the idea that games journalism has ethics problems. About discrediting criticism of games journalism, not stopping harassment or death threats or anything like that.

(The second most important thing to understand is that the media coverage attracted a bunch of hangers-on who wouldn't otherwise have had anything to do with it, and some of them were exactly the kind of people you'd expect to be attracted by that kind of coverage.)