(edited to change profile picture)
First diary
In light of Manafort’s (Who was shady at the best) resignation, I thought it important to point out Breitbart News, specifically its large involvement in what has become known as “The Gamergate Controversy”.
This was a time where if you were a woman who was involved in video game development, you were in danger. The culture is still there but not as loud as it was in 2015. Milo Yiannopolous through Breitbart News was one of the loudest voices and publishers of pro-Gamergate propaganda. Yiannopolous is a Breitbart editor and professional agitator (recently banned by twitter for harassment). What Breitbart did in reporting false and deeply hateful items about Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu, Anita Sarkeesian and Felicia Day and others. Essentially setting off a Dog Whistle that resulted in many female victims who’s lives were ruined by a group organized, coordinated and dripping with vitriol.
Writing in The Week, Ryan Cooper called the harassment campaign "an online form of terrorism" intended to reverse a trend in gaming culture toward increasing acceptance of women, and stated that social media platforms need to tighten their policies and protections against threats and abuse. Speaking on Iowa Public Radio, academic Cindy Tekobbe said the harassment campaign was intended to drive women from public spaces and intimidate them into silence
Prof. Joanne St. Lewis of the University of Ottawa stated that Gamergate's harassment and threats should be considered acts of terrorism as the perpetrators seek to harm women and to prevent them from speaking back or defending others.
Milo Yiannopolous, has strong ties to grassroots efforts for the Donald Trump campaign both on and of the web. Near the RNC, he hosted a “Citizens for Trump” rally at Cleveland’s Settlers park. The conservative columnist is even a moderator on the largest online Donald Trump community, Reddit’s r/The_Donald. He also faced a high court order in the U.K. for unpaid wages to workers for his startup blog “The Kernel” in 2013”. -The Daily Beast
in February 2013, Zoë Quinn, an independent game developer, released Depression Quest, an interactive fiction browser game. The game was met with positive reviews in the gaming media, but some backlash developed among those who believed that it had received undue attention. Quinn began to receive hate mail upon its release, leading her to change her phone number and screen her calls. By August 2014 Quinn had been the target of eighteen months of increasing harassment, which had created what The New Yorker characterized as "an ambient hum of menace in her life, albeit one that she [had] mostly been able to ignore" people behind this campaign initially referred to it as the "quinnspiracy
", but adopted the Twitter hashtag
"Gamergate" after it was coined by actor Adam Baldwin near the end of August. Baldwin has described Gamergate as a backlash against political correctness, saying it has started a discussion "about culture, about ethics, and about freedom". Journalists who did not cover the examination into Quinn's private life were accused of conspiracy, and a blacklist circulated by Gamergate supporters.The accusations and harassment were coordinated by 4chan users over Internet Relay Chat (IRC), spreading rapidly over imageboards and forums like 4chan and Reddit.
Sound Familiar?
The controversy has been described as a manifestation of a culture war over cultural diversification, artistic recognition, and social criticism in video games, and over the social identity of gamers. Many supporters of Gamergate oppose what they view as the increasing influence of feminism on video game culture. As a result, Gamergate is often viewed as a right-wing backlash against progressivism. Gamergate supporters claim to perceive collusion between the press and feminists, progressives, and social critics. These concerns have been dismissed by commentators as trivial, conspiracy theories, groundless, or unrelated to actual issues of ethics. Such concerns led users of the hashtag to launch email campaigns targeting firms advertising in publications of which they disapproved, asking them to withdraw their advertisements.
Commentators both inside and outside the video game industry condemned the attacks against Quinn. The attacks included doxing (researching and broadcasting personally identifiable information about an individual) and hacking of her Tumblr, Dropbox, and Skype accounts; she was also subjected to rape and death threats. The release of personal information forced Quinn to flee her home; she explained that "I can't go home because they have been posting my home address, often with threats attached to it".
At a conference Quinn said, "I used to go to game events and feel like I was going home [...] Now it's just like... are any of the people I'm currently in the room with ones that said they wanted to beat me to death?"
One such threat, reported in The New Yorker, proposed that: "Next time she shows up at a conference we... give her a crippling injury that's never going to fully heal... a good solid injury to the knees. I'd say a brain damage, but we don't want to make it so she ends up too retarded to fear us."
University of Oxford research fellow Anders Sandberg observed that the Gamergate debate "has been a train wreck hard to look away from".
He argues that the vituperative nature of the discourse is the result of its origins in imageboard subculture, which values anonymity and promotes the kind of mob behavior, where any publicly stated claim could justifiably result in a wave of hostility. Noting that those rules are "radically different" from other subcultures, the result was that "when the Chan culture touches other cultures of discourse there will be fundamental misunderstandings about the very nature of what a discourse is supposed to be."
So these are the people who are running Trump’s campaign, I call that a dog whistle that goes beyond the ” 2nd amendment people” but every single troll who hates change, hates women, dislikes this culture of equality and are capable atrocities that nightmares are made of.
(Excuse that I borrowed from Wikipedia a lot, the entire article is very large but a good read if you are interested in this) en.wikipedia.org/…
Also
www.buzzfeed.com/...