Last night, Twitter finally got serious and banned the Godfather of the Gamergate Manchildren, the Liberace of Alt-Right Demagoguery from their service. Sadly, after two years of him cheerleading targeted abuse on individuals, Twitter took action only because his target this time is famous, which made his exploits well-known.
But let’s back up. There’s two sides of #GamerGate. There’s the underinformed side who believes that GamerGate actually has something to do with Ethics in Games Journalism. These people are typically naïve about how the industry works or even what ethics in journalism actually means, but if this is where GamerGate actually ended, they would have been ignored and moved on.
The problem is that there’s the other side of GamerGate, and that is the culture warriors who started GamerGate as a new front in the culture war against, you know, progress being made. In particular, these were the people who used GamerGate to heap abuse on known, strong-voiced women in game development such as Zoe, Anita, Randi and Brianna, as well as attempted to shut down anything that would be considered progressive commentary about the games industry. The actions of these dipshits did serious damage to the games industry and its relationship with the fans. The actions of these dipshits is why no serious member of the Games industry treats GamerGate with anything short of utterdisdain or disgust.
Milo Yiannopoulos has long been the leading voice of this festering stew of misogyny and hate.
Milo doesn’t give two shits about games, and neither does the people he leads. Two weeks before he claimed the baton and jumped to the front of the Parade of Misogynistic Basement Dwellers, he actually described gamers as being ‘wierdos in yellowing underpants’. He only has two things that are actually important to him:
- Bashing feminists.
- Defending being an antisocial fuckweasel on the Internet as ‘free speech’.
That’s why the ‘alt-right’ defenders of freedom keep expanding their fight to dumb causes, particularly causes that are perceived as ‘social justice warriors’ attempting to expand the influence of feminism to all corners of the galaxy. This spicy stew of misogynistic and reactionary game fans, mens rights activists and white supremacists have been a ready-made army for Milo’s cause, and that cause is that they should feel free to load Leslie Jones’ mailbox with truly offensively racist shit, and that if Twitter attempts to address this problem, they are abridging their free speech.
This is an absurd argument that you’d either have to be an idiot or a full-blown shitbag to believe. In truth, the first amendment does not apply to private companies. You are free to say what you want, but you can’t be compelled to publish other people’s sick and twisted shit, and a company like Twitter is free to create and foster the atmosphere online that they want for their online culture.
Three other thoughts:
- My Twitter feed is full of obnoxious gamergate and other alt-right shitheads trying to cherrypick examples of people who were NOT banned and compare them to that of Milo’s lesser crimes. Other than the fact that they typically pick minor namecalling to compare to rank sexism, it also ignores the fact that Milo has a record of Twitter malfeasance that extends more than two years in the past. In January, Twitter shot a warning shot over his bow by removing his verification status, which hurt his fee-fees so much that he raised a stink about it in the White House briefing room. He clearly ignored the point that Twitter was seeing this as a last chance for him.
- There are other idiots that claim that Milo was banned for being ‘gay’ or being a ‘conservative’. This is bullshit – Twitter is still full of gays, conservatives and conservative gays who use Twitter without fear every day. More to the point, what Milo keeps trying to argue is that racist and sexist puerile bullshit is the equivalent to ‘conservative’ thought. True conservatives should be appalled and disgusted by this attempt to hijack their political belief system with this sewage.
- It is depressing that it took an assault on a major Hollywood star to force Twitter to finally take action. Milo and his channer sewage farmers have been engaging in this sort of pathetic bullshit for years now, and it only became unacceptable once Leslie Jones put it on the front page of CNN.
Meanwhile, Milo’s fanbase has responded with the only way they know how to – harassment.
The best way to convince Twitter that we are not a bunch of harassers is to go to their office and harass them pic.twitter.com/EoDPxKQDw6
— 9 V O L T (@9_volt88) July 20, 2016
Can we get Blizzard Entertainment’s “silence” option for Twitter, now??? Seriously, I don’t use the service because the ranters there are so over the top, it’s like a front row seat at some Gamergate meeting. -_-
I think there is a third thing important to Milo, which is actually the only one: himself. He’s a self-aggrandizing, self-promoting weasel who, I’d bet, doesn’t believe anything he says, as long as he gets a reaction. A professional irritant with neither a cause he believes in (besides himself) nor morals. I’m not denying the harm he causes to anyone coming within his reach; but whatever he espouses at any given moment, he’d betray it tomorrow if he could see an advantage to himself in doing so, or just for his own enjoyment. (As you pointed out, he hated gamers just weeks before he threw his weight behind GG.) Right now he’s all about the alt-Right and Trump, probably because he boards trains knowing they’re about to wreck (as seen these past few days in Cleveland). But he doesn’t care about collateral damage.
On Milo’s checkmark: I’ve always said before that Verified on Twitter should mean that you are who you say you are — and nothing more. And on this, taking away Milo’s Verified was a mistake — whatever else you can say about him, he was who he said he was. Don’t make it a good conduct medal: that’s why there are terms of service. Milo should have been kicked off Twitter at that time; instead, I saw the removal of his checkmark as a slap on the wrist which just played into his professional-victim routine. He gained followers as a result of the ensuing controversy, which, knowing the person at stake, Twitter should have seen coming.
I do remember there was an article at Breitbart back in the day which made the claim that if you were a celebrity, you could get away with a lot more than an average user. (In that specific case, Breitbart said it was a “an assistant on ‘Community’ creator Dan Harmon’s podcast” telling people on Twitter to kill themselves. Which is kinda setting the bar very low for “celebrity” status, if you ask me, but Bokhari, who wrote the article, was adamant that there was such a double standards.) And who did it take to finally ban Milo, after he had run through countless no-names and got away with it every time? Another celebrity, associated with a film that has been turned into a cause célèbre, another front in the culture war, even though it just looks the usual piece of Hollywood garbage (based on the trailers anyway, because I have no intention to see it) regardless of the sex of the main characters.
On the subject of Ghostbusters, I’m just as dismayed by James Rolfe (aka the Angry Video Game Nerd) who appeared surprised to discover that Hollywood has no artistic integrity, as by the progressives (gad, will The Mary Sue ever stop with this relentless drivel?) who embrace the new Ghostbusters as a feminist breakthrough even though it’s a cynical, insincere ploy designed in a corporate boardroom because the new chart on the wall conclusively demonstrates that Diversity Makes More Money. Should the contrary be someday proved just as conclusively, though….
It’s been almost a year since the Florida SPJ conference on GG, which was probably the last sign anyone still took GG seriously on its claims of Ethics. But where was the glorious Games Industry to oppose GG? A few individuals, indie designers or a few others in probably middle hierarchy. But the Industry itself? We saw how Nintendo responded in the Rapp affair. We saw all the canned responses about “inclusiveness” and “diversity”, but nothing beyond lip service. At the end of the day, they still wanted to sell their games, and Gaters, after all, were good consumers.
No, Damion, the Industry did not nearly do enough, and whatever it did, it only did for the PR. And I still think they saw some merit in GamerGate, regardless of what little they said against it. Ethical bullshit involving studios and the gaming press are the proverbial side of the barn that GG misses because it chooses to fire at something else altogether. GG, I have said it before and I will say it again, has managed to make impossible an actual discussion of journalism ethics in the video games press, because it has dragged in all that culture-war baggage. But opponents to GG have done this as well, rallying around unworthy sites just because those sites regurgitated political positions compatible with theirs.
In my world, The Mary Sue is just the progressive version of The Escapist (that is, the old Escapist, before the Macris-Vanderwall wrecking crew started bulldozing the last vestiges of its erstwhile decent reputation): garbage tailored to a specific demographic for the purpose of selling stuff.
In fact, there’s a new Polygon piece suggesting how little the industry is doing to fight harassment: http://www.polygon.com/2016/7/22/12256114/how-are-games-companies-dealing-with-online-abuse
It would rather not talk about the issue at all. Never mind that one of the few companies which did respond to Polygon is CCP, whose flagship (and only?) game openly caters to online sociopaths.
I suspect that anyone who came too close to GamerGate, for or against it, have lost something in the process. What I’ve lost is what little interest I still had in video games. The industry reaction here confirms why.
I cannot agree more. well said!
Seems Gamergate like issues are not just an American issue 🙁
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-37018916