Draft:Impact of Gamergate

The impact of Gamergate was initially confined to people, primarily women, victimized by the Gamergate harassment campaign, which began in 2014 and grew out of a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture. Women gamers, journalists, and developers faced a surge of online harassment, including threats, doxxing, and targeted attacks. Gamergate not only revealed the prevalence of misogyny within gaming communities but also contributed to the creation of a toxic atmosphere characterized by polarization and hostility towards women.

However, the impact of the controversy soon extended beyond gaming, and was a contributing factor in the rise of the alt-right movement. Gamergate provided a platform for individuals and ideologies associated with the alt-right, fostering connections with other online subcultures like the incel community, the manosphere, and right-wing media outlets such as Breitbart. The cross-pollination of ideas, fueled by anger, victimhood culture, racism, and misogyny on online platforms such as 4chan laid the groundwork for a broader mobilization of these tactics by right-wing populist figures with social or political agendas, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election in support of Donald Trump.

Disparate controversies such as QAnon, the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and the CNN blackmail controversy have been compared to Gamergate, and have been described as exhibiting the "same tactics and major players" that arose during Gamergate.

Analysts have described wide-ranging impacts, including that Gamergate "gave many on the extreme right a template for how to attack their perceived enemies", and showed "how to wage a post-truth information war". Gamergate figures worked to prepare the ground for the 2021 United States Capitol attack, remains one of the largest influences in the spread of misinformation, online conspiracies, and reactionary right-wing movements, and has echoes in the online backlash against "woke" corporations. The man who attacked Paul Pelosi spoke of his radicalization during his involvement with Gamergate.

Overview
The people targeted by Gamergate have continued to be attacked in right-wing media and on men's rights websites, have been forced to limit their public appearances and social media activity, and continue to express frustration with the lack of action taken against their harassers. Despite the continued problems, some observers have argued that the video game industry has become more diverse and open to women since Gamergate began. Some figures and tactics associated with Gamergate went on to become components of the alt-right, which featured in the 2016 United States presidential election  and in other more targeted harassment campaigns, such as Learn to Code in early 2019.

Some commentators have argued that Gamergate helped elect Donald Trump as US president in 2016 and assisted other right-wing to far-right movements;  Alyssa Rosenberg called Trump "the Gamergate of Republican politics" in an opinion article for The Washington Post in 2015. Trump's strategist Steve Bannon remarked that through Milo Yiannopoulos, who rose to fame during Gamergate as the technology journalist for Breitbart News (a news website Bannon co-founded), he had created a generation and an "army" that came in "through Gamergate... and then get turned onto politics and Trump". According to Axios, in the 2022 book Meme Wars, Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, argued that Gamergate served as "The key template that the far right and former President Trump's MAGA movement have used to organize online", noting that during Gamergate, "online mobs deployed techniques and tactics that were later taken up by the Trumpist right, including the use of memes, false allegations and coordinated harassment." Donovan also argued that "similar techniques are being used to intimidate and harass entire groups of people, most prominently transgender youth and adults."

The alt-right's emergence was marked by Gamergate. According to the journalist David Neiwert, Gamergate "heralded the rise of the alt-right and provided an early sketch of its primary features: an Internet presence beset by digital trolls, unbridled conspiracism, angry-white-male-identity victimization culture, and, ultimately, open racism, anti-Semitism, ethnic hatred, misogyny, and sexual and gender paranoia". Gamergate politicized many young people, especially males, in opposition to the perceived culture war being waged by leftists. Through their shared opposition to political correctness, feminism, and multiculturalism, chan culture built a link to the alt-right. By 2015, the alt-right had gained significant momentum as an online movement. > According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, Gamergate is "a manifestation of the so-called 'men's rights movement' that had its origins on the Web site 4chan." The Southern Poverty Law Center described Gamergate as an example of male supremacy.

Gamergate has been compared to the far-right political conspiracy theory QAnon. Claire Goforth of The Daily Dot argued that Gamergate helped give birth to QAnon: "Each movement, in its inception, tapped into the collective force of the army of trolls who frequent anonymous message boards. Their tactics are an outgrowth of an online subculture where no prejudice is too shocking, no attack too vicious, no accusation too egregious." and "Like Gamergate, QAnon is toxic and alluring because it clothes trolls and conspiracy theorists in the armor of righteousness. Their chosen enemies' faults are an absolute evil that needs to be excised. Nothing else matters when that's the ultimate goal." Goforth also noted that "While Gamergate was confined to the web, QAnon has crawled out of the screen." Kate Knibbs of Wired called Gamergate "proto-QAnon", saying that both are "ideologically incoherent and loosely organized, seeping across chan boards, forums, and social platforms" and that "it was impossible to tell exactly how many people actually believed what they were saying and how many were trolling."

2015–2018
In 2015, Yasmin Kafai, the Chair of the Teaching, Learning, and Leadership division at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE), said that "What Gamergate has changed is not the situation for women and minorities in gaming, but it has changed the public perception". In 2016, Sarah Jeong of The Washington Post compared the Pizzagate conspiracy theory to Gamergate, calling both a "time the darker parts of the Internet have delivered up sustained, orchestrated harassment on the back of a convoluted nest of lies." and claimed that "If we took 'Gamergate' harassment seriously, 'Pizzagate' might never have happened". In May 2017, Sean Murray of TheGamer argued that "The most important thing that Gamergate did was bring the online harassment of women into the public consciousness. That alone is something to be thankful for, but many people went above and beyond." In July 2017, Katherine Cross of The Daily Beast compared the CNN Blackmail controversy with Gamergate, claiming that "Many of the same tactics and major players that made names for themselves in GamerGate—from Mike Cernovich to Weev—are being used to push a wide-scale harassment campaign against CNN."

In July 2018, Kishonna Gray, a communication and gender studies researcher, argued that "Gaming culture and games companies have been complicit in the abuse. There's no way that GamerGate could have had the power that it did have without that historical practice of diminishing women. The game industry weaponized GamerGate." Also in July 2018, Vox said that Gamergate's "success" "gave many on the extreme right a template for how to attack their perceived enemies." and that "The methods deployed in this ground-zero Gamergate event have since become standard practice for internet mobs wishing to attack seemingly anyone they believe to be a foe." As of 2018, "Not only are Gamergate supporters still active, but its most visible advocates seem to be thriving in the age of President Trump."

2019
In January 2019, Talia Lavin of The New Republic said that Gamergate was "a public test of weapons online trolls would use to inflict hell on anyone who they perceived as enemies" and that "Its tactics have only grown in sophistication in the intervening years."

In a retrospective for Slate in August 2019, Evan Urquhart wrote that Gamergate was still active on Reddit and that its members continue to harass journalists. However, Urquhart also commented that Gamergate had not stopped socially-conscious games journalism, efforts to increase diversity in games, or individuals like Quinn and Sarkeesian. In a retrospective for The New York Times, Charlie Warzel said that "Gamergate is occasionally framed as a battle for the soul of the internet between a diverse, progressive set and an angry collection of white males who feel displaced. And it is that, too. But its most powerful legacy is as proof of concept of how to wage a post-truth information war." In a retrospective for TechCrunch, Jon Evans stated that the mainstream media had not learned how to combat Gamergate-like strategies and criticized coverage from The New York Times in particular. In a retrospective for NPR, Audie Cornish said that Gamergate "was a warning and a demonstration of how bad actors could abuse the power of social networks to achieve malicious ends."

In a retrospective for Polygon in December 2019, Sarkeesian said that "GamerGate's real goals were expressed in the explicit racism, sexism, and transphobia of the memes the movement generated, and the posts its supporters wrote on the message boards where they organized and strategized. Later, the flimsiness of the 'ethics in games journalism' pretense would become a mocking meme signifying a bad faith argument. It would almost be funny, if GamerGate hadn't done so much harm, and caused so much lasting trauma." Sarkeesian also criticized the video game industry's response to Gamergate, saying that "The game industry's silence was shameful".

2020–2021
In a retrospective for Vox in January 2020, Aja Romano stated that police, businesses, and social media platforms are still susceptible to Gamergate-like tactics and that they would have to change in order to keep victims safe. Romano also stated that "[Gamergate's] insistence that it was about one thing (ethics in journalism) when it was about something else (harassing women) provided a case study for how extremists would proceed to drive ideological fissures through the foundations of democracy: by building a toxic campaign of hate beneath a veneer of denial." In September 2020, Kate Knibbs of Wired compared the backlash to the 2020 film Cuties with Gamergate, claiming that people were "using tactics favored by Gamergate like review bombing, online harassment, and calls for boycotts."

In the aftermath of the 2021 United States Capitol attack, Brianna Wu said that "everything I tried to get the FBI to act on in the aftermath of GamerGate has now come true... We told people that if social media companies like Facebook and Reddit did not tighten their policies about these communities of organized hate, that we were going to see violent insurrection in the United States... We told people that these communities were organizing online for violence and extremism. That, unfortunately, has proven to be true." Donovan said that key figures in Gamergate worked to raise online fury ahead of the attack.

In August 2021, Jen Golbeck, a computer scientist and professor at the University of Maryland, said that "The important lasting, lingering impact of [Gamergate] was it was one of the first grass-roots campaigns of harassment that had no real consequences for the people who did it". In October 2021, Andrew Paul of Input magazine said that Gamergate "is largely considered one of the biggest influences for today's spread of misinformation, unhinged online conspiracy movements, and right-wing reactionary trends." and that "Some of the most effective methods of weaponizing memes got their start within the Gamergate movement, along with doxxing tactics and harassment strategies."

2022–present
In April 2022, David Emery of Snopes.com said that Gamergate is "considered by many a watershed event in the ascendancy of extremist personalities and tactics to online prominence" and that "Gamergate is regarded as emblematic of the deeply rooted sexist and reactionary attitudes observed not only in the male-dominated gaming industry of that time, but across the internet at large." Also in April, Caroline Sinders, a research fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said that "Gamergate, for a lot of people, for mainstream culture, was the introduction to what doxxing is". In May 2022, Elle Reeve of CNN said that Gamergate resulted in a "massive wave of young people enter[ing] what had been an old man's world of White nationalism." Also in May, Katherine Denkinson of The Independent compared the backlash against Amber Heard and her supporters in her then-ongoing trial against Johnny Depp with Gamergate, claiming that "the anti-Amber train has been expertly commandeered by the alt-right.", while noting that Gamergate "was quickly co-opted by the alt-right to promote anti-feminist rhetoric."

In November 2022, Brendan Sinclair of GamesIndustry.biz argued that Gamergate was a test to see "how much pushback a decentralized hate movement" would receive from the video game industry and condemned the industry's response to Gamergate as "Decry[ing] the tactics instead of the motivation". Sinclair attributed the video game industry's poor response to Gamergate and other forms of harassment "to cowardice and greed, a reluctance to take sides in any kind of argument lest they alienate potential customers.", as well as the industry's inability to properly treat "abuse and misogyny within its own ranks". Sinclair also noted that "in the years since Gamergate, we've seen a new golden age for conspiracy theories, disinformation and harassment campaigns, and unapologetic fascism and racism as mainstream political views."

Also in November 2022, Stacey Henley of TheGamer argued that "Gamergate has been one of the biggest lightning rods in political recruitment of the internet era, perhaps the single-largest. What's crucial is that the people involved never cared about Gamergate in the first place.... All they cared about was being abusive to women." Henley also argued that "The blackpill movement, AKA the incels, also has deep roots in Gamergate. It doesn't matter what you pick. If you dig deep enough, you eventually hit Gamergate." Henley concluded his article by saying that "For a campaign that wanted to take politics out of gaming, Gamergate has injected gaming deep into the veins of our politics."

In June 2023, Alyssa Mercante of Kotaku argued that "Gaming was ripe for [Gamergate]: Women have been historically underrepresented among both players and makers of video games. Even today the industry is composed of more than 60 percent men and only 38 percent women/non-binary folks, according to a recent International Game Developers Association study, and representations of women in games have been notoriously misogynistic. Couple that with the lack of safeguards for women and other vulnerable groups on social platforms and it's not surprising that the industry became a nexus of very bad behavior." Mercante also argued that video game conventions in particular continue to be "hotbeds of sexualized abuse". Also in June 2023, Miles Klee of Rolling Stone compared contemporary backlash against "woke" corporations, such as Activision Blizzard celebrating Pride Month, to the backlash against "social justice warriors" during Gamergate.

David DePape, who had attacked Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's husband, in October 2022, asserted in his trial that part of his turn to the far-right was his involvement with Gamergate.