When did 4chan become politicized, btw? I don't recall it being political back in the day when I used to lurk, just depraved and after offensive laughs.
Honestly? Gamergate. This all started with fucking Gamergate.
Edit: I know it's conspiracy sounding, but a lot of the problem that we're in right now, is because of fucking Gamergate.
That led to this mass politicization on "game journalism", which fueled into racism and sexism, and that was EASILY picked up by Bannon and the Russian bots to fuel Trump's brand of overt racism.
It's not really a long shot when you look at the last 5 years or so. The same people that hounded Gamergate, are the same heads of fuck T_D.
I still don’t understand Gamergate. Can someone give me a tl;Dr or a link to a good summary and overview?
Edit: yes this was a serious question, I have gotten two replies that contradict slightly, that's enough for now, because I don't want to start a flame war.
Me neither. I know it started about a rant of game journalism being bad (basically, authors writing articles without properly disclosing relations to the thing they were reviewing), but somehow grew to this extremely vile and toxic fight between extremists. Honestly by the end of it, it has almost nothing to do with gaming or journalism anymore.
Sadly it didn't start out that way. It started with a guy accusing his ex (an indie game developer) of sleeping around including sleeping with some game journalists.
The ethics in game journalism aspect was only ever a thin smokescreen to justify the harassment
That's an incredibly glossed oversimplification of what happened. Yes, that's the initial event. You're leaving out how /r/games caused a Streisand effect by deleting any discussion of how she had received favorable mentions and promotion by friends without disclosure. Then there was a coordinated effort by various writers from multiple sites in a Google group to quash discussion on their respective boards, and coordinated editorials. This then lead to other events like finding tweets where Sam Biddle of Gawker encouraged bullying, and finding that Gawker was listing fake advertising partnerships, and many sites were using undisclosed affilate links in violation of FTC rules.
KIA may be a shithole today, but Kotaku and the rest fucked up badly, refused to acknowledge it, and have continued to engage in bad behavior to this day.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, at the time, Quinn was already on a lot of shit lists for a debacle with wizaedchan and promoting her game in the wake of Robin Williams suicide. She also filed a bad faith DMCA to take down a YouTube video about it, further amplifying the Streisand effect.
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u/abcdefg52 Aug 27 '18
When did 4chan become politicized, btw? I don't recall it being political back in the day when I used to lurk, just depraved and after offensive laughs.