Aram Zucker-Scharff

One Week of Harassment on Twitter:

femfreq:

Ever since I began my Tropes vs Women in Video Games project, two and a half years ago, I’ve been harassed on a daily basis by irate gamers angry at my critiques of sexism in video games. It can sometimes be difficult to effectively communicate just how bad this sustained intimidation campaign…

“The campaign grew and morphed and got a name, “gamergate.” Very few people came out looking good in the ensuing hashtag war—an example of social media at its worst, with childish insults, sarcasm, disingenuousness, and threats of rape and other violence. Quinn fled her home in Boston and hasn’t been back in months. She periodically gets reports that strangers are lurking outside. She’s working with criminal prosecutors and the FBI on some of the more serious threats, but she says that her life has been practically destroyed. “I talk to my therapist,” Quinn says, via Skype from London. “She says, ‘I don’t even know what to tell you, this is so f-‍-‍-ing far outside anything I’m aware of.’ ””

– The Gaming Industry’s Greatest Adversary Is Just Getting Started.

“

I’ve been using Twitter for eight years, but I’ve never seen behavior quite like this. This swarming behavior is so prevalent, it got a new nickname — “sea lioning,” inspired by David Malki’s Wondermark comic.

I wanted to understand #Gamergate, how its proponents and critics behaved and the composition of both audiences.

So I wrote a little Python script with the Twython wrapper for the Twitter streaming API, and started capturing every single tweet that mentioned the #Gamergate and #NotYourShield hashtags.

”

– 72 Hours of Gamergate.

“There are people … who want to keep it marginalized…” 

Meet the woman whose game sparked a thousand death threats, her first TV interview on MSNBC.