GamerGate: A Case Study in Online Harassment

Aghazadeh, Sarah A.; Burns, Alison; Chu, Jun; Feigenblatt, Hazel; Laribee, Elizabeth; Maynard, Lucy; Meyers, Amy L. M.; O’Brien, Jessica L.; Rufus, Leah

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-78583-7_8

Cited by 23 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…This included targeting several female games scholars who used feminist analysis in their work through #OperationDiggingDiGRA (Chess and Shaw 2015; Massanari 2018). #GamerGate also began to target female media personalities like actress and Internet personality Felicia Day who spoke apprehensively about being under a social media spotlight (Aghazadeh et al 2018). In most instances, the women’s worst fears about being visible were confirmed; for example, commenters maliciously shared Day’s home address on the first Tumblr post she wrote about #GamerGate.…”

Section: History Of #Gamergatementioning

confidence: 99%

Media in the Post #GamerGate Era: Coverage of Reactionary Fan Anger and the Terrorism of the Privileged

Blodgett

2019

Television & New Media

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History has recorded the aggressive fandom campaigns of the 2010s, which drove vulnerable minority actors from their careers and homes. #GamerGate was the most iconic of these movements with its claim to focus on the ethics in games journalism. This article examines select news coverage of the #GamerGate movement from its initial outset in 2014 to today to identify how the movement changed news reporting’s approach to fandom harassment stories. #GamerGate’s development and deployment media of frames were examined to see how the repertoires of contention shaped during this period played into social and political events that followed.

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Section: History Of #Gamergatementioning

confidence: 99%

Media in the Post #GamerGate Era: Coverage of Reactionary Fan Anger and the Terrorism of the Privileged

Blodgett

2019

Television & New Media

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“…Further, not all parties suffered the same level of harassment; the male journalist whose article is attributed with starting GamerGate faced little harassment from the same bad actors targeting women. Collapsing the reality of multiple, intersecting Types of Harm into a simplified "harassment campaign" would neglect the fact that the women suffered much more severe harassment than the men did [2,14,49]. Our Framework of Severity reveals that harm is not as simple as harassing behaviors; the Types of Harm harassment encompasses, and the contextual Dimensions which shape that harm, are crucial to understanding how bad some harm can be.…”

Section: Example One: Assessing Differential Severity Within "Harassment"mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In 2014, a blog post that attacked and made false claims about game developer Zoë Quinn started a series of controversies and events later famously known as Gamergate [2,14,49]. Prior research, as well as journalistic writings, broadly characterized Gamergate as a harassment campaign that induced vast emotional harm.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Framework of Severity for Harmful Content Online

Scheuerman

Jiang

Fiesler

et al. 2021

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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The proliferation of harmful content on online social media platforms has necessitated empirical understandings of experiences of harm online and the development of practices for harm mitigation. Both understandings of harm and approaches to mitigating that harm, often through content moderation, have implicitly embedded frameworks of prioritization-what forms of harm should be researched, how policy on harmful content should be implemented, and how harmful content should be moderated. To aid efforts of better understanding the variety of online harms, how they relate to one another, and how to prioritize harms relevant to research, policy, and practice, we present a theoretical framework of severity for harmful online content. By employing a grounded theory approach, we developed a framework of severity based on interviews and card-sorting activities conducted with 52 participants over the course of ten months. Through our analysis, we identified four Types of Harm (physical, emotional, relational, and financial) and eight Dimensions along which the severity of harm can be understood (perspectives, intent, agency, experience, scale, urgency, vulnerability, sphere). We describe how our framework can be applied to both research and policy settings towards deeper understandings of specific forms of harm (e.g., harassment) and prioritization frameworks when implementing policies encompassing many forms of harm.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI; HCI theory, concepts and models.

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“…Another platform-aware viewpoint, the use of Twitter bots and their rhetorical affordances to understand and protest against #GG activists, has been developed in an article by Holmes and Lussos (2018). In other research projects, #GG has been used as a case study for specific topics or problems, mainly concerning harassment, misogyny, and racism (Aghazadeh et al 2018).…”

Section: #Gamergate Past and Presentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative Emotions Set in Motion: The Continued Relevance of #GamerGate

Mortensen¹,

Sihvonen²

2019

The Palgrave Handbook of International Cybercrime and Cyberdeviance

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This chapter aims at making sense of the #GamerGate (#GG) online harassment campaign that was particularly active in 2014-2015 but to this day continues to produce hateful speech against certain ideologies and minorities in gaming culture. The campaign was especially successful at building online visibility through harassment, and the affective resonances of the issues it raised have since translated into general online campaigning how-to's, financial earnings, and even political action outside of the gaming sphere. Although the primary breeding

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GamerGate: A Case Study in Online Harassment

Cited by 23 publications

References 13 publications

Media in the Post #GamerGate Era: Coverage of Reactionary Fan Anger and the Terrorism of the Privileged

Media in the Post #GamerGate Era: Coverage of Reactionary Fan Anger and the Terrorism of the Privileged

A Framework of Severity for Harmful Content Online

Negative Emotions Set in Motion: The Continued Relevance of #GamerGate

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