How Gamergate foreshadowed the toxic hellscape that the internet has now become

(CNN) — It’s not uncommon these days to hear the internet described as a hellscape.

Hate speech proliferates in online spaces. Algorithms designed to maximize user engagement amplify divisive content that inevitably leaves us outraged. Disinformation and misinformation spread on social media at rates seemingly impossible to contain.

If that weren’t enough, bad-faith actors exploit these dynamics, distorting reality for part of the population and deepening political divides.

People who were paying close attention to certain corners of the internet saw this reality coming more than a decade ago in Gamergate, in which an angry online mob waged a virulent harassment campaign against women and diversity in the video game industry.

Gamergate was one of the earliest indications that what happened online could have major implications offline — and that a few people who understood the mechanics of the internet could manipulate it to advance a nefarious agenda.

Those who experienced the harassment firsthand warned that if not taken seriously, the behaviors underlying Gamergate would fester.

In the years since, as some experts and observers see it, social media platforms on which Gamergate transpired failed to adequately combat toxic content and online abuse, while lawmakers, traditional media outlets and much of the public failed to see its relevance beyond the world of video games.

From flooding the zone to the use of memes, the tactics once employed by a niche community of gamers are all too familiar today — they’ve since developed into a political strategy that’s routinely used in the halls of power.

To use a popular internet shorthand, “everything is Gamergate.”

What exactly was Gamergate?

On August 16, 2014, a 24-year-old male programmer posted a more than 9,000-word tirade about the dissolution of his relationship with video game developer Zoë Quinn. The rambling account contained screenshots of their private correspondences and accused Quinn, among several allegations, of sleeping with a journalist for the gaming site Kotaku in exchange for a positive review.

“There was no proof of this supposed illegitimately obtained review, just repetition of the Manifesto’s accusations mixed with such conspiratorial conjecture that it would make someone wearing a tinfoil hat instantly sprout another, tinier tinfoil hat on top of it,” Quinn wrote in “Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life.”

In reality, the reporter never even reviewed the game, and Kotaku said at the time that its leadership team found “no compelling evidence” that the writer had traded favorable coverage for sex.

But the ex-boyfriend’s rant quickly attracted the attention of online forum 4chan users, who seized on the alleged relationship between Quinn and the Kotaku writer. The events mutated into a leaderless harassment campaign known as Gamergate, eventually moving from 4chan to more mainstream social media platforms.

Anonymous gamers made rape and death threats against Quinn, feminist gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian, game developer Brianna Wu and others who advocated for a more inclusive gaming industry, and released private information about them. The campaign’s participants also pressured companies to stop advertising on gaming sites that they viewed as critical of gamer culture.

Gamergate activists claimed they were concerned about ethics in games journalism. But really they seemed to be responding to a perceived loss of status, said Adrienne Massanari, a scholar who researches digital culture and author of “Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right.”

For a long time, video games were seen as the domain of young White men. When that was challenged, whether by a game developer subverting industry norms or a woman calling out stereotypical female characters, a core contingent of gamers saw it as political correctness run amok, Massanari wrote in her book. And that sentiment soon expanded beyond video games.

“There was a story on offer pretty quickly after Gamergate started gaining traction that it wasn’t just about games,” she told CNN. “It wasn’t just that you were no longer the center of a pop culture universe. You’re no longer the center of political life.”

Gamergaters ‘gamed’ social media

Gamergate wasn’t the first instance of harassment in gaming communities, but it was the first time it reached that scale, Massanari wrote in her book.

What was notable about Gamergate, she told CNN, was the internet savvy of its participants, who manipulated social media to perpetuate abuse and promote their cause.

Put simply, they gamed the system.

On Twitter, for instance, Gamergaters flooded the mentions of particular users as a form of harassment.

They also used Twitter’s hashtag and retweet functions to control public narrative. By generating a volume of activity on the platform, they could make it seem like a particular message was trending, even if only a small group of users was behind the posts.

One notable example was #NotYourShield, which purportedly represented women and minority supporters of Gamergate who were tired of feminist activists claiming to speak on their behalf. Chat logs later revealed that #NotYourShield was not an organic social media trend or movement but rather a campaign orchestrated by a small number of 4chan users using false online identities, seemingly in an attempt to defend Gamergate against criticisms of racism and misogyny.

While much of the harassment and public campaign happened on mainstream social media such as Twitter and Reddit, Massanari said Gamergate was coordinated on more niche platforms — an organizing strategy that, up until then, had been applied primarily by pro-democracy, social justice activists.

“Gamergate was that moment when people started realizing that you weren’t going to necessarily see activism always be this net positive thing,” Massanari added.

Social media platforms struggled to deal with abuse

The extent of harassment and abuse that Gamergate’s victims experienced — forcing some to leave their homes and go into hiding — showed just how badly tech companies had failed to protect their users, Massanari and others said.

As some in the tech industry see it, Gamergate activists were able to weaponize social media precisely because of how those platforms were designed. The problems, in other words, weren’t a bug but a feature.

Silicon Valley leaders, committed to upholding free speech, were overly permissive in their approach to online content, said Jason Goldman, who served as Twitter’s first vice president of product and later as chief digital officer in the Obama White House. And because they were mostly White men who didn’t experience the online harassment that women and minorities did, Goldman said they were naive about the possibility that their platforms could cause harm.

“There weren’t enough people around who personally had skin in the game,” he said.

Leslie Miley, an engineer who worked at Twitter from 2013 to 2015, said he and others in the company started to recognize how the platform was being misused, but Twitter lacked the robust infrastructure needed to effectively combat the toxic behavior.

“We’re playing a global game of Whac-a-Mole, and we need an army of octopus to do it,” he said. “And guess what? We don’t have an army of octopus.”

In response to those challenges, Twitter built out teams on user services and trust and safety, as well as an extensive policy framework around content moderation. But executives were also reluctant to take bold actions — such as banning certain accounts or shutting down some discussions — that might reduce Twitter’s user base and therefore negatively affect the business, according to Miley.

“They were allowed to organize, they were allowed to spread, and they were allowed to create content much longer than they should have,” he said, referring to Gamergate activists.

Faced with mounting pressure, Twitter later instituted more aggressive policies that permanently banned accounts for repeated violations of its rules. (Such accounts were restored en masse during Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform, which is now known as X. After advertisers and critics expressed concerns, however, X reported last fall that it was continuing to police harmful content, including suspended accounts and removing and labeling posts that violated its rules. CNN has reached out to X for comment.)

In 2020, Reddit announced it banned more than 2,000 subreddits that it said promoted hate based on identity or vulnerability, among other changes to its content policy. Recently, the platform also announced it would begin warning users who upvote violating content. A Reddit spokesperson told CNN that current company policy prohibits hateful and violent content on the platform.

Meanwhile, the dominant culture of Reddit, Massanari wrote in her book, has become less willing to tolerate far-right speech over the years.

But social media companies still struggle to balance the need to police abuse on their platforms, their foundational values of giving everyone a voice and the risk of alienating some users, Massanari said. In some instances, content policy changes have been met with outrage and backlash from users who had grown accustomed to digital spaces with few restrictions.

“If you imagine this big aircraft carrier that’s turning, it’s very hard once all those norms have been set up to start incrementally trying to reshape that space,” she said.

Gamergate became a tried-and-true playbook

Gamergate’s impact went beyond the gaming universe.

It mobilized a new generation of disaffected, young men into becoming politically active, Massanari wrote in her book.

The movement found sympathetic allies in far-right media figures and internet personalities, many of whom built their names by championing the Gamergate cause, per Massanari.

Pro-Gamergate influencers, in turn, exposed their followers to other political ideas, including a broad suspicion about contemporary institutions that they viewed as too beholden to identity politics and political correctness, she wrote.

Political strategist Steve Bannon understood the power of this dynamic acutely.

“You can activate that army,” Bannon told Bloomberg reporter Joshua Green in 2017. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”

But as Charlie Warzel put it in a 2019 piece for The New York Times Opinion, Gamergate’s “most powerful legacy is as proof of concept of how to wage a post-truth information war.”

Gamergate gave rise to a pattern of sowing confusion and chaos in the information landscape, Massasnari said. Participants elevated new conspiracies and used memes and ironic rhetoric to send coded signals, allowing them to claim plausible deniability about troubling aspects of the movement.

Traditional newsrooms struggled to cover these communities and forces responsibly, giving equal weight to “both sides” even if one side wasn’t arguing or acting in good faith, according to a report from Whitney Phillips, a scholar and author of “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture.” In some cases, they inadvertently amplified extremist ideology.

In an eerily prescient article for Deadspin in 2014, Kyle Wagner predicted that this pattern would become the future of political and cultural battles.

“What we have in Gamergate is a glimpse of how these skirmishes will unfold in the future—all the rhetorical weaponry and siegecraft of an internet comment section brought to bear on our culture, not just at the fringes but at the center,” he wrote at the time. “What we’re seeing now is a rehearsal, where the mechanisms of a toxic and inhumane politics are being tested and improved.”

Over the years, the Gamergate playbook would be replicated in conspiracies such as Pizzagate and QAnon, as well as the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The many legacies of Gamergate

The legacies of Gamergate are complicated and far-reaching.

In one sense, per some scholars, Gamergate was a battle between an increasingly diverse society and a group of White men who felt threatened over those societal shifts. At least within the realm of video games, Gamergate supporters seem to be losing: The gaming industry workforce is significantly more diverse than the US workforce more broadly, and studios and developers are adopting more inclusive storylines and characters.

Still, the backlash against diversity persists — in video games and on a much grander scale, in President Donald Trump’s elimination of federal DEI programs.

Meanwhile, Gamergate did force more people in the tech industry to reckon with abuse and harassment. And while major companies have rolled back some efforts to curb harmful content on their platforms, others in the tech sector are building new social technologies with the lessons of Gamergate in mind, said Evan “Rabble” Henshaw-Plath, a member of Twitter’s founding team.

For Henshaw-Plath, the enduring lesson of Gamergate was that social media platforms as they were originally envisioned were only as good as the people using them.

“What happened with Gamergate is inherent to what happens when you take human nature and you give them a tool that potentially puts the entirety of humanity in the same conversation,” they said. “All of humanity’s problems, dynamics and difficulties can get amplified if we design a system that doesn’t account for them.”

But that doesn’t mean a toxic internet is inevitable, said Henshaw-Plath and others.

Regulators can implement rules to improve content moderation and mandate transparency by social media platforms. Tech companies can diversify their top ranks to help ensure their platforms are designed to be safe for everyone. And people in the industry can create new systems that put more power in the hands of users — like what X competitors Bluesky and Mastodon are doing.

For many users, social media platforms were once an exciting, and even transformative, space for community. With some radical reimagining, Henshaw-Plath said, they might experience that feeling again.

The-CNN-Wire
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