Fellow writer, SJW, and friend of the author Veerender Jubbal (@Veeren_Jubbal) has left Twitter following months of harassment from the #gamergate online hate mob. Jubbal had been targeted since last fall, after coining the popular hashtag #StopGamerGate2014. He quit this week after Photoshopped tweets were circulated by his detractors, attempting to smear Jubbal for comments he never made.
An example of the fake Tweets circulated through #gamergate about Jubbal are embedded here. What I find particularly ironic about this example is that it was forwarded to @_icze4r, former head of the now-defunct "#gamergate harassment patrol." (From what I understand, _icze4r stopped trying to promote a self-policing, non-doxxing culture within #Gamergate after she herself was doxed and SWATed.)
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says he wants to fix the harassment problem on Twitter. But Jubbal had been targeted for harassment for over half a year, without any action taken by Twitter Support. For Jubbal, Costolo's promise to make things better is a hollow one indeed.
For Jubbal, a Sikh and man of color, this latest episode of harassment was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. A month previously, Jubbal was sent hundreds of images of the Twin Towers falling from #gamergate harassers.
Jubbal was repeatedly harassed because of his religion and race. He was harassed by #gamergate talking heads like Roguestar as well as little fish in the rank and file. Jubbal's harassment never seemed to end, with those covering the harassment giving their stories titles like "Gamergate members harass Veerender Jubbal for being Sikh Again", or "Gamergate members never stop harassing Veerender Jubbal". Jubbal was even harassed on his birthday.
The racially charged agita directed at Jubbal was so omnipresent that it's difficult to even divide it into discrete episodes. As Maxwell Tolvo, one of the people covering as it happened wrote back in December:
Gamergate is still harassing Veerender and tweeting at him and filling his mentions. I sort of feel like I can just make a new storify every few hours of them tweeting at and bothering Veerender Jubbal, because they just don't stop.
Veerender Jubbal supports diversity in gaming and questions the way most games depict people of color, the men often serving as a
nondescript,
non-white cannon fodder, and the women as
non-playable sex objects. Black player characters are few and far between - only one game in the infamous Grand Theft Auto franchise features a black player character. (
Carl Johnson from San Andreas) That game was published
eleven years ago!
Jubbal had the gall to ask whether these depictions of people of color in AAA games were healthy, given the context of real-life race relations in the United States. By asking this question as a person of color, Jubbal received endless racially charged harassment. And I can't think of any person who 'deserved' it less than him.
His Twitter persona reminds me of a modern-day Ghandi; his trademark response to racist insults directed at him personally was just "Gosh." When things got really heated, Jubbal released his frustration by tweeting Sailor Moon GIFs. Jubbal's calm, polite responses in the face of furious racism became so well-known amongst #gamergate opposition on Twitter that somebody designed a T-shirt to commemorate Jubbal.
When someone this patient, this polite, and this tenacious is driven from a public forum like Twitter, it undermines the idea that the Internet is a free marketplace of ideas, where anyone may speak freely. It belies the fact that "free speech" on the Internet is a privilege, not a right. When someone like Veerender Jubbal has to flee Twitter to escape an endless stream of 9/11 photoshops directed at him by angry white gamebros, it serves as a warning to other people of color not to speak at all.
So, Dick Costolo. Where's that promise to do better?
Correction: One of the three playable characters in GTA V is black.
