GamerGate has chosen a peculiar hill to die on. Yes, this Christmas is the Christmas that the cause to fight for ethics in games journalism is best served with a spicy discussion of child pornography. Because of course it is. People who want to read a more in-depth analysis can go here.
GG has a couple of home bases, one of which is 8chan, the site that gamergate was forced to flee to when 4chan — which will pretty much allow anything — decided not to allow Gamergate discussions anymore. Which is to say, if 4chan is the toilet of the Internet, 8chan is the sewer. 8chan is proud of allowing, as founder Frederick ‘HotWheels’ Brennan describes, a forum where you can post anything that is considered legal in the United States. This includes a lot of stuff that flirts with the line of legal, such as sexualized images of children that may or may not qualify as pornographic.
8chan was funded by a Patreon account, which clears about $1500 a month. For months, GG opponents have been pressuring Patreon to dump 8chan. This week, Patreon did just that, changing their terms of service to disallow projects devoted to harassment, self-harm and encouragement of pedophilia practices. Brennan is working to find a workaround – first by changing the Patreon to be about supporting his cat (this didn’t work but he seems to have identified a more Patreon-endorsed dodge for January), as well as lining up alternative payment sites. In short, this would likely have been a minor hiccup with little consequence, if it wasn’t for that fact that a Gator’s gotta Gate.
The Perpetual Outrage Machine spun up, and after first going into a digression demanding that Patreon cut off the funding for prominent anti-GamerGaters as well, based on what can only be described as laughably bad explanations as to what harassment & doxing actually is. Surprise! All of their named targets are women, and three of them are ‘Literally Whos’ that GamerGate keeps claiming they are ignoring (Zoe, Brianna and Randi), because of course they are. After that, they tried to forcefully claim that the stuff on 8chan (which again, is not on gamergate-related boards) isn’t actually child porn. It just flirts with that line. That skeezy, disgusting line.
For what it’s worth, what’s legal or not doesn’t really matter. It’s up to Patreon to decide which business partners they want to support, and which projects are over the line. Free speech as a concept does not promise you a billing service. Still, Dan Olsen of Foldable Human (he did this anti-Gamergate video a while ago) decided to investigate, and wrote this essay (trigger warning: not safe for work, lunch, sanity, or your faith in man) describing what he found there. KiA and 8chan blew up, eventually coalescing around several key, often contradictory, defenses:
- “It’s not technically child porn.” (As mentioned previously, technicalities don’t have to matter to a partner like Patreon.)
- “Yeah, okay, it’s child porn, but Dan just got sniped some images before the mods could take it down.” (as Dan points out, some of these images had been up for months)
- “Dan probably uploaded it himself to undermine gamergate.” (which would mean that Dan had been setting up this sting for months)
- “Hosting child erotica is legal, but Olsen should go to jail for downloading the images to make his article.” (Dan did, in fact, send this information to the authorities as well).
- “It was anti-gamergaters who drew child pornographers to this site with their articles.” (i.e. the CP wasn’t really that bad until DailyDot gave the site publicity!)
Brennan has contemplated legal action against Patreon. Because lord knows, if you host a website full of questionably legal content, you definitely should invite legal scrutiny. Hell, I can only imagine the FBI has already set it up to be one hell of a honeypot for observation. There have also been rumors that they may set up a charity drive to try to offset this debacle- because nothing ever goes wrong with those.
So yeah, #GamerGate turned a minor kerfuffle and used to it turn the hashtag and their prominent websites about endless discussions revolving around CP. The good news, if any can be found in this vomitorium, is that this has resulted in a lot of wake-up calls — there’ve been a wealth of ‘I’m out’ moments, as more rational members of the cause realize where the Rabbit Hole has led to. Every time this happens, you can observe what remains of the cause get more angry and toxic, and less focused on the actual worthy elements of the cause. Little wonder that the NeoGAF forums gave #GamerGate the 2014 Fail of the Year award.
Hey, did you actually manage to read all of that? Congratulations! Also, I’m sorry. By way of making it up to you, here’s a couple of chaser links from the last couple of weeks.
- Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has personally gotten involved with the Gamergate wikipedia entry, and made it clear in no uncertain terms what he thinks their problems are.
- David Jaffe also lays out his opinions in no uncertain terms.
Thank you.
I’m a relative newcomer to your blog, drawn to it by your GamerGate posts, but enjoying everything else as well.
Sometimes (more often than not), the whole GG mess feels like an episode of “Sick Sad World”.
take care, Happy Holidays.
““Yeah, okay, it’s child porn, but Dan just got sniped some images before the mods could take it down.” (as Dan points out, some of these images had been up for months)”
That’s actually not true. What Canada considers child pornography is different than what the United States considers child pornography.
Because 8chan abides by U.S laws, the images that Dan saved on his computer and redistributed are not illegal in the U.S.
Those types of images however, are illegal by Canadian laws, and because Dan lives in Canada, he technically broke the law for distribution of child pornography in Canada.
So have at it.
How about what regular people consider child pornography?
Doesn’t really matter if it’s technically legal or not, it’s creepy and sick. Much like the rest of GamerGate.
Three quick points:
1) The odds that this will turn into more than an uncomfortable interview is very, very low, and anyone who thinks otherwise knows very little about trying to complete investigations of online shady shit. Olsen found child porn, exposed it and reported it to the authorities.
2) The fact that it, according to even 8chan supporters, is definitely child porn in some territories, including Canada, certainly justifies Patreon’s decision to not want to be involved in a business relationship with 8chan.
3) At the end of the day, the problem with GamerGate has always been that it’s a public relations campaign that is fucking terrible at public relations, They give no shits about the actual optics of anything they do. In this case, GamerGate is arguing that child porn on 8chan is okay because it technically doesn’t cross the line in some territories, but that the only person who deserves to go to jail for it is the person who exposed it and reported it to the authorities. This isn’t just asininely wrong, it paints a picture of #gamergate that makes anyone who thinks that child pornography is appalling want to either flee or condemn them outright.
At the end of the day, GamerGate’s worst enemy has always been itself.
RandomNerd, tip for you:
If you have to justify Child porn with the phrase “Technically its not child porn”, not only have you have already lost both the argument and the moral high ground, you’ve just ensured that you can never win it back.
I think the points are : confuse the audience and making Dan an example for those who don’t fall for GGers sophistry. They are terrorists, they want their opponents to scared to talk, too scared to call their bullshit out, too scared to oppose GG.
Anyways, at this point, many members of GG NEED to be as vicious as possible if they want to avoid paying for their crimes. They NEED to incriminate Olsen, making him an example and using him as a fall-guy for their activities. They need him to do their deserved jail time.
GG want to be untouchable, not having moral high ground. They are monsters.
And is this a good thing? This would be the logical end result of tarring everyone who has legitimate concerns and grievances as “harassers”, “misogynists”, or part of some US right wing cultural-war movement, or at best “useful idiots”. And what are people supposed to learn from this? The lesson appears to be : “Dialogue is impossible”.
I mentioned this before in another post, but the end result of all of this is that any cultural criticism or discussion is going to become impossible in video games as a result of all this. A cultural critic can get up on a podium and give a talk, but no-one is going to dare disagree with them. There will be no debate for fear of media carpet-bombing. The concerns will go double if the speaker is female, and treble if the speaker has ever received “harassment”. Two outcomes will result from this: Enforced cultural hegemony with accompanying resentment, or more likely, the smothering of criticism by a taboo induced wall of silence.
Those wanting to criticize the practices of games journalists of course, will not even raise their heads above the parapet.
This is an enormous problem. And the problem did not come from the greater mass of gamers, with no power or podiums to speak from or to defend themselves or their hobby. It came from the keepers of the podiums, who rejected opposing view, and who smeared anyone holding them with the worst of labels. This continues to this day, and into this very post.
The gamers who were censored, who thought that journalists sleeping with developers was wrong, who were sick of years of being spoken down to and stereotyped, were hounded and smeared across the entire internet. They were “punched down” at by those with megaphones, with connections, and armed with the rhetoric of a culture war that gamers never even knew was being fought.
What is happening to gamers is wrong. Cultural critics seem convinced they are shelling “misogynists”. But all they’re hitting are ordinary gamers.
Hi! Ordinary gamer here.
No they’re not. 🙂
Hi! Ordinary gamer here!
Yes they are.
Only because misogyny is so entrenched in some subsections of gaming culture that ‘normal gamers’ and ‘misogynists’ have a significant overlap. As in ‘misogynist gamers’ is almost entirely contained with-in ‘normal gamers’, not that ‘normal gamers’ is almost exclusively made-up of misogynists.
When people cry “You’re hitting normal gamers!”, they’ve missed the point. Misogynist gamers ARE normal gamers, thus at least a subsection of ‘normal gamers’ will be hit by default.
The rest of us? Well, we’ve been entirely left alone, except by all the slander thrown our way by Gamergaters, decrying us as anything and everything under the sun “SJW scum”, “white knights”, “feminazis”, “betamales”.
This false dichotomy of Gamergate that one is either with them or not a normal gamer is just another weapon they are using in this culture war they have dreamed up and fabricated out of whole cloth.
Please don’t fall for it.
So tell me, how have cultural critics ACTUALLY negatively affected the games you play? Because let me tell you, we’re still making games with tons of sex and violence, and giving them great reviews.
Very good point. I been saying this as well. For all the gloating of how dismal GG looks, the opposition is not really doing any better. Games are not changing. The audience is still getting what they want.
The people clamoring for a change in the games industry are going to be clamoring for a very long time. I don’t really have a problem with the industry and what they produce. I feel their are a wealth of options out there. Hell many games have nothing to do with gender at all.
It is fun watching the SJW crowd rant and rave against perceived slights that frankly most people don’t know about or don’t care about. Just like how many of them apparently now have a problem with big budget movies.
I imagine Hollywood studios will care about them about as much as the big video game publishers do.
Nothing will happen to people who disagree or engage in reasonable critical discourse with cultural critics of games. However, that’s not what GamerGate has ever been about.
Your retelling of the story is revisionist history.
So this whole post is an exercise in stupid and irrational hysteria.
Cultural criticism of video games, and disagreement, often vociferous, will continue, as it always has. Anita will post videos. Polygon will post articles. Many, including this blog, will comment on them. What has lost credibility? Gamergate. They have proven without a doubt that, as a force for cultural criticism, that they are not worth taking seriously, given the stances they have espoused on child porn, ablegamers, harassment, doxing, or even how possible it is to criticize.
Video games journalism, and shady shenanigans by marketing departments, will continue to be reported, as they have for years, by the games press. Gamergate did a terrible job of covering actual scandals in the games industry in the time that they were on the watch. The Shadows of Mordor scandal happened – TotalBiscuit dropped a hint about it, but it was Jimquisition and Kotaku that went into depth about it. The Unity Embargo scandal happened, and Kotaku and Polygon were the ones that owned it. In both cases, GamerGate was too embroiled in petty shit involving Zoe and/or Brianna to bother giving the topics more than cursory attention.
Gamergate was, at the end, terrible at their purported mission. The fact that you, for example, still make allusions to the Quinnspiracy material shows that you are utterly nonserious about what are actual problems inside the games industry. Gamergate is not reflective of the views of all, or even most, gamers. It reflects the views of a tiny minority – the sort of gamers who think that, for example, child porn is okay but attacking a disabled gamers advocacy group because they didn’t accept your invitation to do a charity porno event is not.
Constructive cultural criticism of video games is being made impossible by this kind of increasingly heated rhetoric surrounding it.
There has been a huge failure to realize that Gamergate was an issue which had been building for years, and that the lack of dialogue in the cultural critcism debate was a huge part of that. In fact, there were no debates. None. Rarely was there even an op-ed arguing that perhaps gamers were not as misogynist as cultural criticism was making them appear. I find it amazing that serious cultural critics have failed to see a problem with how their messages were being communicated and received by gamers all this time.
The major problem is the bitter relationship between gamers and games journalists. The entire Quinnspiracy incident exploded because of that relationship.
A senior male journalists sleeping with a indie developer should be seen as an act of exploitation by default, and was. Gamers disgruntled about the hobby being painted as sexist for two years, and who had effectively been barred from disagreeing or debating that argument, were right to feel upset by such a egregious display and defense of such double standards. Ignoring the obvious and painting all gamers who complained as sexist or misogynist only serves to dig the hole of the past two years even deeper.
The problem is not misogyny. The problem is not cultural criticism. The problem is not gamers. The problem is calling everyone who disagrees misogynist, harassers, ableists, or child pornographers. In August, it had gotten to the point where people could not even criticise a genuine sex scandal without all out internet war breaking out. In such an environment, constructive debate on just about anything is impossible.
Actually, if you can criticize without being a jerk, then the people who actually matter (such as game devs, game journalists, and game academics) will welcome the discussion. Game criticism is happening ALL OVER THE INTERNET, from both left-wing and right-wing bents. Polygon is STILL offering cultural criticisms, and has a vociferous discussion forum. As does RPS, BrokenForum, QuarterToThree, NeoGAF, among many, MANY others. Many people, including myself, have had discussions criticizing Anita’s conclusions, and countering others who criticize her. The people who are increasingly getting shut out are the ones who use useless hyperbole to define the problem.
Actually, most of the games press represents the view that things are mostly A-OK in gaming. You can see that on the biggest sites with the largest fanbases, including IGN and Gamespot, who cater to these existing bases. There were plenty of debates about how much violence and misogyny were part of gaming culture, particularly in the Jack Thompson days, and game sites like IGN, Kotaku and Penny Arcade were actually the ones leading the charge.
No, gamergate is a problme of a SUBSET of gamers deciding that they don’t like what a SUBSET of games journalists don’t like. Most games sites still have vociferous readerbases and have been virtually untouched in terms of readercount by the effects of GamerGate.
Grown adults can and do have sex. No evidence has come out that undo influence was given for sexual favors, and at any rate, any publicity given was for a game given away for fucking free. Which is to say, no, this was an excuse to slutshame and wrap it up in a ‘ethics in games journalism’ clothing. This has since been ADMITTED by the people who started Quinnspiracy, including Eron.
The problem is not that EVERYONE has discredited themselves from having their opinions counted for anything. However, if you are proudly part of gamergate and you expect me to take you seriously, you have a seriously uphill climb to make, particularly if you try to say with a straight face that Zoe’s sex life is in any way indicative of any of the very real problems with the gaming press or industry.
If you want to talk about how Anita is wrong, I could even make a thread for you. But if you’re going to bring the same tired, false, or easily dismissed points I’ve seen come out of gamergate for the last 4 months, then you should expect to be mocked quite vociferously, because all of the ‘cultural criticism’ that has actually come from #gamergate has deserved mocking. It’s not a statement of cultural critique – it’s a statement on the quality of cultural critique that GG has offered so far.
The more I read text and comments from GGers, the more I see parallels with the Dreyfus affair.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair
Alfred Dreyfus was French-Jewish artillery officer. In 1894, he was accused of treason. Latter, the absence of proofs incriminating Dreyfus were revealed. France population reacted in 2 ways. The progressives republicans claimed that if there is not any proof of disloyalty from Dreyfus, he is innocent. On the others hand, the reactionaries claimed that the fact that he was Jew was enough to prove his guilt since Jews are backstabbing traitors, and France can’t let a member of a race of traitors free, that would be bad for security and France would look weak.
Sane people see that people have their private live. There was a claim that Zoe had slept with a journalist to get positive review…despite the review not existing. Sane people are seriously annoyed that bogus accusations continue; reactionaries just pretend their accusations are right and claim oppression when they are called on their bull****.
All the actions of GGers show that they care about attacking progressives and put the minorities “where they belong”. Their actions are related to ethics only if they mean that progressives are inherently unethical. That insane
They act oppressed when they are called a hate group despite acting much like every recent hate group.
I’m not even talking about ethics in journalism. I’m talking about the inability to even have a dialoge on the most basic of things.
A senior games journalist DID have sex with an indie dev. We can’t even talk about this without the whole thing blowing up into an internet world war. People need to talk about that. It’s not OK. This is privilege 101 stuff.
You can’t go back down to gamers and criticise their games for exploiting the male gaze when you won’t even let them talk about (possible) exploitation of indie devs. Yet you claim that frank and open discussions can be had on major gaming websites on even more abstract matters like the objectification or the male gaze in games, when even simple things like (actual real life) sex in the industry are off the table. I don’t buy it.
Battle lines have been drawn in gaming, and dialoge of any kind has been made totally impossible as a result. Gamers were not engaged with in a constructive fashion, only alienated and ultimately demonized. Perhaps this is the point of cultural criticism when it comes to gaming, but I don’t see that it’s something very constructive.
As with most discussions with gaters, I end up baffled as to whether they’re deluded or disingenuous. Do you really believe she was sent threats because people thought she was taken advantage of? That the “five guys” meme was because people were worried about her being manipulated? That the massive self-admittedly-manipulative rant about how evil she was was out of pure concern for her safety?
I have read a lot of stuff from gamergate and the quinnspiracy, but this is the first time I’ve seen a hint that someone thinks that it’s actually about protecting indie devs. If you actually believe that, I have this wonderful mostly-dry land in Florida for sale. If you don’t believe it, then why even bring it up?
Although you’re right, “Female indie dev raped by fraudulent reporter ” would be a problem that should be discussed, much more than the “two people have consensual sex and then neither of them does anything unethical because of it” story that appears to have actually happened.
“Gamers were not engaged with in a constructive fashion, only alienated and ultimately demonized. ”
But we were engaged with. That a subset of gamers, who *coincidently* ‘just happened’ to have a whole roster of targets for criticism and abuse that *somehow* were either female or defenders of those females, happened to have misbehaved themselves and been brought to task for misbehaving themselves doesn’t mean that we were all alienated and demonised.
Those of us that say Gamergate for what it was very early on were not alienated and demonised by the gaming industry – but we certainly were alienated and demonised by Gamergaters as “betamales”, “feminazis”, “SJW scum”, “White knights”, and the like. The worst alienation was being accused of demonising and alienation for simply disagreeing with the obvious bias of Gamergate. These false and misguided attempts to conflate being a Gamer with having to be pro-Gamergate are utterly obvious and utterly wrong, both logically and morally, and must stop.
Gamergate failed utterly to constructively address the gaming community that was not ideologically and politically already likely to be on its side, instead preferring to pretend that it was an Us Gamers Vs Them Journalists (even though none of the 5 prime targets were even journalists), when those of us that aren’t of the dudebroguy gaming subset were being entirely left alone, except, that is, by the elements within Gamergate that couldn’t stand to see any gamer stand against them.
Um, no. Zoe’s a grown woman and is free to sleep with who she wants to. Particularly given that there has been no evidence of ‘sex for favors’ of any sort, there is zero need for people to talk about it. The only people who should care are people who were actively sleeping with Zoe or Nathan. And if THOSE people choose to emblazon that shit all over the Internet, they are true assholes.
Gamers were not alienated and ostracized by the games press. A subset of gamers were alienated and ostracized by their own actions of being overly entitled fuckwads who harassed game devs and pundits they disagreed with. Most gamers are still active and welcome contributors to the games scene. Gamergators are not even remotely indicative of the gaming community at large.
“Punished Gamer”? Stop being a fucking professional victim.
You wrote about developers, plural, sleeping with reviewers, plural, and their is an implied conflict of interest that creates damaging things, like untrustworthy review. I don’t know who you are taking about. Could you give names, please?
If you don’t give any names, I consider your post an attack against a generic and undefined « they » that pop out in every conspiracy theories.
Look at how dumb you sound.
Yeesh. And I thought the GG situation was crazy before.
I think a significant part of this is that a lot of people, particularly “moderates,” are currently taking a break from the Great Internet Slapfight of 2014 due to the holidays, as shown by the steep dip in the Topsy stats: http://topsy.com/analytics?q1=%23GamerGate&via=Topsy So the only people left talking about it are those who have nothing better to do even during Christmas week. And yes, I realize what that says about me. It’ll be interesting to see people’s reactions when they come back tomorrow or next week and witness what happened while they were gone.
I think theres a lot of wishful thinking in your title. But then again weve been declared dead so many times by many and we are here still.
You always seem overeager to demonize us for anything that is atributed to GamerGate while ignoring the dozen of wrong things done to us.
Im very biased by pro gg. Do you reralize how biased you are?
It bothers me when unbiased means: “at mid-point between sanity and complete madness”. In real iife, when you strive to be sane, you are likely to have a mostly correct position apply corrections when needed.
Therein lies the problem. There is no “we” that Gamergate is obligated to acknowledge. There is no leadership, and no one is accountable for anything. That’s the difference between a group and a mob.
It is fair to acknowledge a bias against an unruly mob.
I for one, am highly biased against unruly mobs.
There is something that bothers me in some of your links, notably the last one. Maybe is the ex- anarchist in me but I find the claim that the often repeated claim that GG don’t have leaders or representatives to talk to is simply ridiculous. They call their leaders « signal boosters”.
Baldwin, Yiannopoulos and Total Biscuit, among others, are read by many Ggers and they can influence, to some extend, the behavior of Ggers. They are mob leaders and the mob attacks where is its leaders points most of the time. If the leaders said and meant that harassment need to stop, I am fairly certain that harassment would diminish, its currents leaders would lose influence, maybe killing GG
If there is nobody to talk to, is it not because there is not any leaders, is it because GG’s leaders refuse any discussions and want to attack women and any progressives. Leaders want their mob; sanity will cost their mob. Beside, it would out of character for them.
Those who speak loudly for themselves are not leaders. Cults of personality, maybe, but something would need to get *done* for anything to matter. TB speaks for himself. Baldwin speaks for himself. Nero speaks for himself. There’s nothing to rally around, because there is no real leadership to speak of.
The curious thing about gamergate is that it has two kinds of leaders. First off, it has the e-celebs who have discovered the obvious, which is that human nature actually craves leadership, and in the absence of strong, direct leadership, have discovered they can just get the rank and file to dance for them based on pure charisma. These are your Milos, your Baldwins and your Cernoviches. Charismatic idiots are a huge problem for any online community, as they can lead things off a cliff. They are worse for a ‘leaderless’ community, because no one really has the authority to say ‘no, these guys are running things off the rails’.
The second thing is that there are definitely shadow cabal-like leaders, running things from IRC channels. All these fancy op-names you hear about come from these, I suspect. If you want to know more about those, look up what King of Pol had to say about it during his crackup.
The “shadow cabal” stuff is what rarely comes out as being GG-specific actions, and the majority of those identifying as “pro-GG” are oblivious to it until after the fact. So the cabal might as well be the same set of assholes who have ever existed in the shadows, stirring the pot when it suits them to, for lulz. They might be able to get some things done, but GG is a shield to hide behind, rather than a banner to raise high.
First, I think it is disingenuous to draw a tie with child porn to GG. Using what anyone says as a connection to GG is like saying that resent police officer murder is connected to protestors.
GG as far as I’m concerned is a disorganized mess. I may have sympathy to some things they say, their methods are impractical and often abusive. That being said, you trying to tie them to child porn is MSNBC/FOX news like.
GG *made* 8chan. GG only went there because moot decided to mod GG plans on 4chan. GG only exists *anywhere* because people didn’t want to be moderated while they were planning horrible things against people they thought were worthy targets. For the lulz.
The only reason child porn exists anywhere is because someone interpreted lasseiz-faire moderation as an invitation to post child porn. That and I guess there are people who like child porn. And some people like to take glee in the annoyance and hardship of others, without having to take responsibility for stirring the shit. That is to say, some people like the lulz.
That’s the connection, plus a few particular players Damion listed above. You can still think it disingenuous, but irresponsible language in the absence of proper moderation is Fuckwaddery in its most basic form.
Kinda odd that something as silly as GG got banned from 8chan yet much worse things appear on that site.
sry meant 4chan
GG don’t care that there’s child porn on 8 chan. They didn’t move away from 8 chan when it was pointed out, even to cover their own asses. They’ve been defending the fact that it’s there, that paedophiles and child molesters congregate there, and then they’ve been calling “SJWs” the REAL sick ones for daring to point it out. Fuck GG and fuck Gamergaters. At this point I have no problem calling every single one of them women-hating paedophile apologists.
Point 5 in your list is easy, it’s one of the few places in this entire mess we can find evidence of things. Ask Brennan for logs of reports, deletions,bans and board closures from before and after Olson’s article and the hue and cry from the antis. Compare the logs, tell us what you find.
Dan Olsen wrote : “Just had a discussion with a Staff Sgt. at the I.C.E. My article generated over 20 reports against me; all have been cleared as unfounded. ”
https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/552900816634261505
If you think about that, this over 20 attempted murders. I consider this kind of false accusation real attempt at killing somebody.
I think attempted murder is a bit too much of a strong word, but – depending on the country of the reporters – they may have committed various crimes, not least wasting police time and making a false report.
False charges of child pornography are the worse thing you can do while using the legal system and the mere rumors of pedophilia can destroy somebody. If the legal system fails, for whatever reasons, Dan’s life fan be utterly destroyed even if he is found not guilty and he can be outright tortured or murdered in prison if he is, somehow, falsely found guilty. Suicide is also a very real possibility. Fortunately for Dan, Canadian police aren’t reputed to be very corrupt relatively to nearly every other country. False convictions do happen nevertheless.
I don’t care if the odds of a tragic end are small, there was 20 dangerous psychopaths attempted to destroy Dan. You don’t need to be competent to attempt murder, the only planing it, for 1st degree murder attempt, and trying to execute the plan. False charges is ample proof of premeditation and an attempt to act on that premeditation.
The rumors of Dan’s arrest and suicide led me to believe that those who accused Dan were likely to be aware of the deadly potential. They tried to destroy him in a way that wouldn’t incriminate 8chan.
I don’t know about the law but I think trying to push someone to ruin and suicide is outright murder.
I may not be legally correct but I don’t think I am too harsh.