Reality check: What do the statistics tell you what GamerGate is about?

Hi, it’s aquapendulum the KnowYourMeme archivist again.

I’m writing this as part of a series that examines the claims flying around that might or might not be related to GamerGate depending on your stances, and might be comfortable or uncomfortable depending on (once again) your stances. This is recommended reading for proponents, detractors and fencesitters alike.

A quick disclaimer: I am not a GamerGater, although i was swayed to their side from being an ex-fencesitter. I, therefore, grant myself the freedom to talk about certain things GamerGaters would rather not bring up. What I do should not be attributed to GamerGaters and vice versa.

So today’s claim: Zoe Quinn is at the center of GamerGate.

Reality check: Many GamerGate detractors have made this claim, that Zoe Quinn is at the center of this controversy, and that the proponents of GG are mainly harassing this woman. Let’s assume for a moment that Zoe Quinn is even remotely relevant to GamerGate (let alone being harassed by the majority of its proponents, as claimed by the detractors) what would the trend of #GamerGate tweets look like? The majority of them would contain either the Twitter handle @TheQuinnspiracy or mention the name “zoe quinn” in its content, right? In order to prove majority, we need statistics.

And here is what the statistics say about #GamerGate trend.

Just for future reference, this is the result I got on October 2nd 2014.

So what did I compare just now? I compared 3 trends:

• Total number of #GamerGate tweets
• Number of #GamerGate tweets that contain @TheQuinnspiracy
• Number of #GamerGate tweets that contain “zoe quinn”

From Zoe’s perspective, for every tweets in the blue trend, she receives a notification in her Twitter account. I can kind of understand why this woman still thinks she is relevant to #GamerGate: it’s because she has a narrow perspective, she doesn’t see the #GamerGate tweets out there that are not relevant to her in any way, she only sees the ones that are relevant to her. The numbers say otherwise, with the blue and green trends combined, I got a total of 16885 tweets in which Zoe Quinn is somehow relevant to #GamerGate. There are a total of 1125971 #GamerGate tweets, so Zoe Quinn is relevant to #GamerGate in 1.49% of the tweets, and irrelevant in 98.51% of them. That means for every 1 #GG notification Ms Quinn gets in her account, there are 99 more #GG tweets that are talking about… something else. I’m pretty sure we can all agree that the number 98.51% is the majority.

It’s also interesting to consider that there could be tweets like this that contributed to the blue trend:

@cluelesstwitteruser Leave @TheQuinnspiracy out of #GamerGate please.

Context matters a lot.

And if you do see tweets like:

Drop dead @TheQuinnspiracy #GamerGate

Be very skeptical of where these tweets came from.

Final verdict: Highly implausible, statistics don’t support this claim.