| Danman27 said: There were a lot of mysgonisistic and harrasing tweets in gamergate. That wasn't it's oringal purpose, arguably, but it was a movement that got hijacked by mysognists. |
And if the media had actually investigated it professionally, rather than jumping at any kind of sensational scare-mongering headline they could find, we'd all have a much better idea of to what extent those kinds of tweets were from longtime gamergate supporters, or just third party troll accounts.
Some people were saying it's impossible to know either way and that that's just a necessary limitation of a hashtag movement. I think that's just incorrect. It would've been perfectly within the power of a big media organisation to do serious statistical studies on the hashtag.
So for example, you could take a random sample of these "harassment" tweets and rank them based on how well the accounts of their origin were networked with other long-time gamergate supporters. So if you've got these harassing tweets coming from accounts that are well connected across the movement, so if they're being followed by people like Sargon, Milo, Mark Kern, Totalbiscuit etc etc (the big names around the subject), then that's a legitimate criticism that the movement is at least inadvertently supporting harassment. Whereas if most of these harassing tweets come from fairly new twitter accounts that have very little connection to the rest of the movement, that's fairly easy to detect, and points clearly to third party trolls.
I've observed the movement fairly loosely but consistently since its origin. In my opinion, about 95% of the "harassment" falls into the latter category and only about 5% comes from serious gamergate supporters (which would put it as no more extreme than pretty much every other movement out there, all of which contain a small minority who take it too far)
