Mob mentality rules the internet. Say the wrong thing, give a differing opinion, or sometimes do nothing at all and the mob will find you. Abusive language, death threats, and more quickly follows. In 2014 an event happened that shook up the gaming industry as well as the internet in general. It was called GamerGate. This is the first episode in a series that I will be discussing internet culture, why it has been so bad, where it originated, and how it all explains the current cultural climate, including how Donald Trump became president.

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As always thank you to my buddy Daren for providing the intro and outro music please subscribe to their channel on Soundcloud here: @ghostisland or the specific album it came from here:  darnfelski.bandcamp.com/ Rough Transcript:

What’s up gamers, this is the TheDecidedGamer podcast, and I am Justin White. The Alt-right, hypersensitivity, white supremacy, Pepe the Frog, cuckservatives, GamerGate, Russian influences, Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, a completely dysfunctional political system, Men’s Rights Activists, Mob Mentality all over the internet. Donald Trump as President. How did we get here? Why are these things I just described known by most in the gaming world, and more and more, known by the public at large? Why were there men with Tiki Torches walking through Charlottesville? Why are women threatened by rape and murder on the internet?  Over the next few episodes I’m going to explore how the United States got here and how societal analysts have narrowed their scope on these issues far too much. This isn’t a 5 piece puzzle, it’s a 5,000 piece puzzle. And like with every puzzle, we must start with the corners first and work our way in until we can see the main picture. In this episode we’re going to find one of the corner pieces.

President Donald Trump. It’s been almost 10 months since he was sworn into office. This is a gaming podcast however, so you may be wondering what this has to do with video games. Well. Everything, really. Trump is the culmination of an incredible amount of circumstances. For most, his election was a surprise. Sure, there were some who forewarned, or supporters of his that were confident all the way through, but for the most part it was assumed somebody like Donald Trump could not win the presidency in the United States. I was one of those people. I had countless conversations with my wife, mother and sister-in-law, friends, people on the internet, that usually went something like this: I don’t think the people of the United States would elect somebody like him. Now sure, I had lot’s of reasoning behind it. I’m an economics graduate and international relations student. Hearing Trump speak about either makes my head feel like it’s about to explode. Have you played Shadow of Mordor or Shadow of War? You know how Talion can make their heads pop? It’s like that. But, why was it so widely assumed that a loud, rude, openly abusive towards women, non-public servant, unabashed rich racist could not win the presidency? An incredible under-appreciation for many things, the first of which we’re going to discuss today: Internet culture.

The most significant moment in internet culture and how it relates to today’s mob rule mentality that infests places like twitter, Facebook, reddit and other places happened in 2014. This moment in time dramatically impacted the internet as a whole, and laid important foundation for the 2016 presidential election, and generally explains why today’s social media feels like a cancer that at times seems like it is in remission, but is always ready to flare up at any given moment.  It was known as GamerGate.

I’m sure most people who listen to this podcast have a general idea of what GamerGate was, but a short synopsis is due, though I know my target demographic will whole heartedly disagree. I only ask that you remain patient. I am very open to discussion, and there are plenty of ways for you to interact with the podcast, but we are now 3 years removed from the event, and much has been revealed in that time. I am not going to use names of the people involved as it can either bring up sensitive issues for the victims, or help promote abusers, and I am interested in neither circumstance occurring. Also, for my purposes here, I want to concentrate on the result of what happened.

 In August of 2014 a young man posted a close to 10,000 word manifesto of sorts on some gaming forums. In this lengthy piece, he describes a girlfriend that he alleges has cheated on him with five different guys. His ex-girlfriend is an indie game developer. He also alleges in this piece that one of the guys that she cheated on him was a video game reviewer and that his ex traded sex for a positive review. This is an important part of the story, so it is vital to remember.

I’m going to pause here for a second, as I believe it incredibly important to point this out early. This stunt was done as revenge for a breakup. The world has no right knowing any personal details of this young couples life. Even if the woman in question had done what is alleged, that was between them. There is no righteousness here, it was designed to hurt the other person, and was posted in places that the boy in question knew would hurt the most. Since the posting of the quote unquote manifesto, it has been revealed that no such review of the woman’s game exists. From the very beginning of this story, whatever righteousness that people pretended to have was built on a false foundation. But, in the end none of that mattered. The damage was done, and it was done as intended.

The post is quickly deleted, but it does not matter. As we have learned in the past couple of years, anything that gets posted on the internet is never really gone. It soon finds its way on to other gaming forums, as well as 4chan, and continues to spread like wildfire. Before she knows it, the woman begins receiving threats from around the internet. Warning for those listening, the next few quotes are deeply disturbing, and if you have experienced abuse on the internet, or have kids listening please listen with caution, or skip forward. “I am going to hunt you down and behead your ugly face, you disgusting cheating feminist whore. See you soon, slut.”

“If I ever see you are doing a panel at an event I’m going to, I will literally kill you. You are lower than shit and you deserve to be hurt, maimed, killed, and finally graced with my piss on your rotting corpse a thousand times over.”

“Next time she show’s up at a con/press conference, we move. We’ll outnumber everyone, nobody will suspect us because we’ll be everywhere. We don’t move to kill, but give her a crippling injury that’s never going to fully heal and remind her of her fuckup for life. A good solid injury to the knees is usually good to this. I’d say brain damage but we don’t want to make it so she ends up too retarded to fear and respect us.”

She gets literally thousands of messages like these, as does anyone associated with her. She gets hacked, accounts of all kind are taken over, nude photographs stolen and posted all over the internet, anyone who speaks out on her behalf receives the same treatment. Her life is threatened on multiple occasions, including people posting her home address and saying that they are going to show up there and rape and kill her. Dead animals are left in her mailbox. The life and career she had built is destroyed in the matter of a few days.

This was a coordinated attack. What people did not know at the time was that guys from 4 chan, 8chan, reddit, and other places planned and coordinated these attacks. Chat logs from IRC channels show that they discussed how to hack her, who her friends and family were, and where to release information to cause the most damage. They also understood that they needed to give the internet something else to focus on. This is where the hashtag GamerGate comes from. The allegations from the exboyfriend that she traded sex for a positive game review, which again never existed, prompted the attackers to focus on what was called ethics in gaming. People in the gaming industry doing reviews for friends, paying for positive coverage, etc. It’s not that these things do not exist at some capacity, but the people who started this entire endeavor were attacking and abusing people, understanding that publicly they needed to make it about something else. They even discussed donating to a charity to give their so called movement good PR. All of this based on a lie and trusting a story from a random guy trying to get revenge on his ex girlfriend.

The attacks on the original woman, as well as many others, still continue today. Gaming websites like Polygon and Kotaku were under constant attack in their comment sections from the same mob. GamerGate received coverage from the mainstream media like CNN and MSNBC. The Guardian, Washington Post, and the New York Times all ran stories about it.

At the time this seemed like a concentrated issue. But there had been something simmering waiting to explode for years. Internet culture had been metastasizing for some time with anti-feminine ideology, Men’s Rights Activism, and much more. GamerGate was just the perfect moment in time where it all came together. In 2017 we see this type of abuse everyday. Mob mentality rules places like Twitter. A couple retweets from the right people, or wrong people, and somebody is getting ambushed from all corners of the internet. This happens no matter what type of ideology you subscribe to. What led us to GamerGate and how the internet currently functions? What was happening in the years leading up to 2014 and GamerGate? And how did the circumstances come together so perfectly and become so potent?

Next week on TheDecidedGamer podcast.