Morning Must-Read: Jennifer Allaway: \#Gamergate Trolls Aren’t Ethics Crusaders; They’re a Hate Group

…I’ve been working on a new study on the importance of diversity in game content to game players, and whether or not the game industry is able to predict this desire. Game developers can be hard to reach…. By September 25th, I basically had all the data I needed. And then I got this email: ‘Hey diddle-doodle, Ms. Allaway! A heads-up: your project has been targeted for extensive “vote brigading” (possibly ranging into the tens of thousands of entries). Use that knowledge however you will. Cheers’…. I went into 8chan—the movement’s current and primary forum for coordinating their efforts—and found a discussion on a ‘secret developer survey,’ referring to my questions…. In under four hours, the developer survey jumped from around 700 responses, which had been collected over the course of a month, to over 1100 responses. The responses were not… subtle…. It appeared that less than 5 percent of the new responses had actually come from developers…. Responses like this…. I set about locking down accounts, emailing professors, contacting campus safety, and calling family. It was an exhausting process, but I considered it necessary. The attack could get out of hand…. If you’re even asking about equality or diversity in games, being shouted down in a traumatizing manner is now a mandatory step that you have to sit back and endure. But I don’t hate #Gamergate for what they’ve done to me. I’m a researcher; my goal is to analyze and to understand. And after two weeks of backtracking through the way they’ve carried out their operations, this is the conclusion I’ve reached: #Gamergate, as we know it now, is a hate group…