The Plot Twist
I: A Brief Introduction
I have been following the events of #GamerGate for close to a year. I first heard of the “Zoe Post” two or three days after it had been published. The post itself did not interest me much, but dramatic media reaction to the “Zoe Post” was fascinating.
Over the months, the story being presented by most media outlets has changed subtly. At first, #GamerGate (dubbed #Quinnspiracy in the earliest days) was nothing but a harassment campaign against a female game developer. Then, #GamerGate was an attempt to keep gaming an exclusively white-male industry. That narrative was refuted by #NotYourShield, where we learned #GamerGate had more non-white / non-males supporting it than the media outlets criticizing it. Finally, we have the prevailing narrative, in which #GamerGate is populated by terrorists.
I consider all of these narratives false. I will endeavor to show how media distortions occur with this medium post.
I will do so by examining two separate events: the #StopGamerGate2014 ‘movement,’ and the #RedditRevolt. I will also have to examine the former reddit CEO Ellen Pao — her career, some of the highlights prior to her becoming the CEO of reddit, her exit and the media response.
By examining these separate events, and then comparing the vastly different media responses, I believe I will demonstrate how dishonest and biased media coverage can be.
I realize that discussions of media distortions can sound uncomfortably similar to ‘conspiracy theories.’ In Western Civilization, nobody wants to be called a bigot, and nobody wants to be called a ‘conspiracy theorist.’ It is my goal to produce enough clear and easily digestible information to avoid coming off as some tinfoil wearing kook.
If you read to the end of this and feel as though I have failed in my goal, feel free to let me know on twitter. I suspect I will be updating and improving this medium post as time goes on, and I will provide a disclaimer at the top as I do so.
1: #StopGamerGate2014
Who can remember last week, let alone last October?
It has been a considerable amount of time since #StopGamerGate2014 existed in any tangible sense. A brief refresher would go like this: it lasted less than 36 hours but had at least 15 articles written about it, on top of numerous mentions in other articles chronicling #GamerGate, women in tech and a myriad of other topics.
#StopGamerGate2014 appears to have started with Veerender Jubbal. Mr. Jubbal lists this in his twitter bio: “Made#StopGamerGate2014.”
#StopGamerGate2014 was treated with a tremendous amount of respect and deference. Lauren O’Neil wrote a very firmly worded piece for the CBC’s CBC’s (Canadian Broadcasting Company) website. The article claimed, emphatically, “…the internet has had enough of #GamerGate.”
#StopGamerGate2014 was referenced in a front-page article of the New York Times. It was briefly mentioned in an article about Anita Sarkeesian and the threats she had received; these threats were cautiously implied to have come from blame the, “#GamerGate movement,” though no specific names or accounts were offered.
On Wednesday, as word of the latest threat against Ms. Sarkeesian circulated online, the hashtag #StopGamerGate2014 became a trending topic on Twitter.
I will present a simple challenge. In a note to the right, I will provide a link to a google search for news articles on the subject of #StopGamerGate2014. The search is for articles written in a single ‘week,’ from Wednesday the 15th until Wednesday the 22nd. I ask any reader unfamiliar with this subject to take a look, pick a few random articles and skim through them. Absorb what these articles are conveying, try to get a sense for the tone they present.
From my perspective, and with the goal of demonstrating media bias firmly in mind, this is where the fun begins. Considering the articles written about #StopGamerGate2014, the empirical evidence is rather startling.
Consider the message spread, far and wide, across more articles than I could hope to list or refute in a single medium post. “The internet has spoken” in one place, and “The internet is finally tired of #GamerGate” in another (the CBC piece) — but, looking at this chart, it’s perfectly clear that #StopGamerGate2014 had a single day of activity and then died.
I have gotten 3 separate numbers on the ‘height’ of #StopGamerGate2014 — Topsy’s numbers appear to fluctuate regarding the 14th/15th, based on factors I do not fully comprehend. I’ve seen the ‘top’ number as low as 52,000; as high as 71,000. Even on its best day, however, #StopGamerGate2014 had 40,000 tweets less than #GamerGate.
Many articles touched on this fact rather gingerly: while they could note that #GamerGate had more tweets on the 14th/15th, they couldn’t say for certain that everyone tweeting #GamerGate were supporting it. There’s a very good reason I provided a link to the #StopGamerGate2014 hashtag from October 15th — you can clearly see #GamerGate supporters mocking it.
Isn’t that interesting? If you could not verify the percentage of individuals tweeting in support of #GamerGate, how could you verify the percentage of individuals tweeting in support of #StopGamerGate2014? Was there an objective standard used to determine this? An empirical method? Statistical analysis?
If such methods were used, no article I read detailed them. In fact, no claims were made to empirically verify how many people tweeted in favor of #StopGamerGate2014. Some analysis was done, later, and it is of particular interest… but none was done on the ‘big day’ that #StopGamerGate2014 had, in which it trended and caused a cavalcade of articles written about it.
The articles written about #StopGamerGate2014 leave little doubt: the internet had, theoretically, spoken. #GamerGate needed to stop, and the overwhelming majority of people had said/e-mailed/tweeted as much. If only there were some way to show the numerical superiority of #StopGamerGate2014 over #GamerGate…
You’re seeing that correctly. Three days after the “internet had spoken,” one side was multiple times larger than the other, and it wasn’t the side getting positive press.
Taking a look at the topsy graph, #StopGamerGate2014 has been used an overwhelming and impressive 159,796 times. #GamerGate, by contrast, has been used 7,586,056 times, as of July 7th. In terms of percentages, #StopGamerGate2014 can boast that it has 2.1% as much usage as #GamerGate.
I dare say the internet has spoken, the ‘reporters’ and ‘journalists’ who wrote articles about the staggering strength of #StopGamerGate2014 merely failed to listen.
Out of idle curiosity, have there been any updates to these articles, enunciating that the #StopGamerGate2014 hashtag’s moment has passed? Has anyone updated their older stories to mention that #StopGamerGate2014 quit a long time before #GamerGate (still ongoing) did?
The only unverified bit of information I will include in this section is an image from TrendMap. I searched in vain for an archive link of this particular image, but failed to come up with one. The advanced analytics are behind a pay-wall, sadly, so unless someone sees this and produces a link, I can only present the following image without anything to verify the claim being made.
It is weak, as far as evidence goes, but it also raises an interesting question.
That image might lead one to wonder whether #StopGamerGate2014 was an elaborate astroturfing campaign. How silly would media outlets look if they had been, in essence, trolled by the very people they were trying to cover?
Have any of the news outlets in question examined the potential errors in their coverage of #GamerGate and #StopGamerGate2014 from October?
Of course not.
But before going on to the second part, in which the recent events at reddit are examined, I will provide two brief summaries of both reddit and their former CEO Ellen Pao.
Brief explanation on Reddit
For anyone who is unfamiliar, reddit.com is a very popular social-media website that has been nicknamed the “front page of the internet.” There is no single community on reddit — there are subreddits that cover everything from the popular cartoon “My Little Pony,” to subreddits for male fans of MLP (aka ‘Bronies’) and even a subreddit for people who dislike ‘Bronies.’
My Little Pony is only an example: if you can think of a topic, there’s likely a subreddit dedicated to the topic. Muscle Cars? Sure. Nintendo discussion? Yes. The US Women’s National Team in soccer? Absolutely. #GamerGate? Of course. Anti-#GamerGate? Of course. There is also a subreddit that focuses specifically on subreddit drama.
To anyone unfamiliar with the reddit layout or system, I would describe subreddits as self-contained communities. Over time, they grow to create their own culture, in-jokes, memes, attitudes and vernacular. Nearly all subreddits are owned not by the website but by an individual who created the subreddit.
The website is ranked #33 in the world according to Alexa, garners roughly 11.8M users according to Quantcast, while reddit’s own statistics claim 163,966,958 unique users from 212 countries.
The website itself was founded on a few guiding principals, most of which centered around freedom of speech and freedom of expression. There are many reddit communities with a variety of participants but there is one thing the majority seem to agree on: free speech is a paramount principle and not to be trifled with.
P2: Ellen Pao
Ellen Pao was, until very recently, the interim CEO of reddit. She was promoted to that task after former CEO Yishan Wong resigned in November, 2014. She joined reddit in 2013.
Pao performed her undergrad studies in Electrical Engineering at Princeton, and she received both a JD (legal) and MBA (business) from Harvard University. Before joining reddit, she worked as a corporate attorney for a number of companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. From 2005 until 2012, she was a junior partner for the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.
Sadly, Ellen Pao has only had four noteworthy career events: she filed a gender discrimination against her then (now former) employer of KPCB, she was fired from KPCB, she was hired as the interim CEO of reddit… and she appears to have been forced to resign from that position.
Her resignation will figure heavily in the next section of this medium post, so I will focus solely on her gender discrimination lawsuit.
I would describe the events of that lawsuit as a soap opera. Pao filed the lawsuit in May of 2012, while she was still employed by KPCB, after a male had been promoted from junior partner to senior partner. Pao alleged in the suit that she had only been passed over because of her gender.
Mary Meeker, a general partner at KPCB stated on the record that her firm was, “…the nicest, sweetest tamest place,” especially in comparison to Wall Street. Prior to the lawsuit, Meeker was on record urging the company (KPCB) to ‘get tougher.’
According to the testimony of independent investigator Stephen Hirschfeld in court, Meeker told him that Pao was a “so-so” investor who was “not very persuasive, not very articulate,” and “she just couldn’t own the room.”
Pao alleged that her career at Kleiner began to deterorate after she broke off an extra-marital affair she was having with another married partner at the firm. Her longtime mentor at the firm, John Doerr, claimed that subpar performances were the issue.
Pao lost on all counts. She lost the case so thoroughly that the judge ruled Pao would have to pay $276k in KPCB’s legal expenses. After the court-case, she demanded $2.7M from KPCB to drop all appeals, which they declined.
Pao’s case was heard in civil-court, not criminal court, meaning the standard to find for the plantiff was substantially lower than the “beyond a shadow of a doubt” criminal cases require from a jury. All the jury had to find was a “preponderance of evidence” to support Pao’s claims.
Simply put, the jury was instructed to find for Pao if the evidence seemed more in favor of her claims than not. The evidence did not suggest what she was claiming, so the jury did not find for Mrs. Pao.
In other words, by any objective standard, Pao lost her gender discrimination case. I would argue she did not merely ‘lose’ the case, she lost the case in a humiliating fashion.
Despite her nearly unanimous defeat, she was heralded as a hero after the court case. There were articles touting her strength and courage, claiming that she had somehow won and a hashtag campaign of #ThankYouEllenPao.
I found an article by Reuters, published to Huffington Post Tech, to be as balanced and informative as any I’ve read. I have provided a link in a note to the right. It is extremely informative and I would suggest giving it a read.
Despite losing her gender discrimination lawsuit, Elle had an article titled, “5 ways Ellen Pao won her case for women in tech.” The article ends, “#ThankYouEllenPao, for making it happen. We needed a win.”
Matt Weinberger of Business Insider penned an article about women in tech who purchased a full-page newspaper ad thanking Ellen Pao. Quoting directly from the article:
“Ellen’s story resonated, it hit a chord with so many women. We wanted to thank her publicly for being brave enough to tell it, and make it so other people might tell their stories,” Hobson told USA Today.” (Hobson organized the crowd-funding of the newspaper ad.) (Emphasis added by me for effect)
According to a google search that ended on July 1st, 2015, there have been 1,236 articles that featured #ThankYouEllenPao.
Amidst the veritable ocean of articles that exist, so many of them proudly supportive of Pao — who, again, lost her case — it does help to see something that seems grounded in reality. The following CNET article is just about the only headline anyone, anywhere, should have used.
There is one final element to this. Ellen Pao is a married woman. Her husband is a man named Buddy Fletcher.
Here’s a fun fact: Fletcher once sued a former employer, Kidder, Peabody & Company for racial discrimination. According to Boston Magazine, the suit was dismissed, though Fletcher received $1.26M in compensation through arbitration. According to his then employers, they refused to pay him a bonus (the source of the lawsuit) because Fletcher refused to tell them how he had made money through electronic trading.
I’ll provide another fascinating article from Fortune about Pao and Fletcher. It’s a long read, but the information provided is fascinating. Of particular note is how both Fletcher and Pao filed lawsuits, almost at the same time, as their financial situation was growing complicated due to Fletcher’s potential “mismanagement” of money while running his own hedge fund.
Similar accusations are found in a Vanity Fair article about Pao and Fletcher. Behind the legendary paywall of the Wall Street Journal’s online features lurks an article on Fletcher’s assets, but the headline is sufficient. Here is a local article on Fletcher being accused of fraud.
But my favorite of all of these is from Phillip Greenspun. This post puts the whole episode into very clear focus and provides a rough estimate for Fletcher and Pao’s legal expenses: $40M. It’s a short read that I strongly recommend if this interests you. Hell, I’d strongly recommend reading this blog post even if this subject doesn’t interest you.
The summary is rather simple: Pao lost her $160M case and she’s married to a man who appears to be a fraud.
This is the woman people were thanking after she was utterly demolished in court.
Media bias, absurd agenda pushing and ‘narrative crafting,’ are very real things. If someone has gotten this far into the article and is not yet convinced, I can’t help but feel as though I have failed.
… but I’m not quite finished, yet. Remember how #StopGamerGate2014 was pushed forth as ‘the internet speaking,’ and remember all of the unsavory elements you’ve learned about Ellen Pao.
P3: Reddit Revolt
I will defer to the brilliantly written piece by David Felton from adland.tv.
The woman married to a probable fraud managed to alienate a pretty grand swathe of the reddit community due to her actions. People had doubts about Pao dating back to November, when she was given the job as interim CEO.
At the time the move was hailed. Amanda Marcotte wondered, “Will she make reddit less horrible to women?” In hindsight, this is an amusing question; it was Pao’s treatment of a specific woman that led to her dismissal…
On April 6th, Pao banned salary negotiations. Pao told an interviewer from the Wall Street Journal that, “Men often negotiate more aggressively than women, leading to higher salaries.” PBSNewshour claimed that she might have lost her gender discrimination trial, “…but she isn’t backing down on a mission to increase gender equality in the tech world.” “Yahoo! Finance declared it a “bold move to end gender discrimination.” “Thank you Ellen Pao for teaching more people about sexism in the workplace,” wrote Laura Bates for the Guardian.com.
It is worth noting that Pao had already lost her gender discrimination case when she made this decision. She had already been thanked by a greatful tech industry for her brave fight to promote females in the work place, apparently by attempting to sue her former employers over some ridiculous claims of sexism, all for an amount of money that would help cover her (probable) fraud of a husband’s debts… but I digress.
On May 14th, reddit released its first ‘anti-harassment’ policy. Mike Isaac of the New York Times wrote an article on the subject. Jeff Elder of the Wall Street Journal offered a brief blog post on it.
The publishing of new harassment policies were just the precursor to the ‘main event.’ On June 10th, without prior warning, subreddits were banned. Among the 5 first subreddits banned was /r/fatpeoplehate, a subreddit dedicated to mocking fat people. There are unsubstantiated (and, frankly, unverifiable) claims that no warnings preceeded the subreddit banning.
Here’s a brief list of subreddits that survived the first ‘purge’ of reddit sites, courtesy of ED. This whole section should be considered NSFW.
* /r/CuteFemaleCorpses
* /r/sexyabortions
* /r/coontown
* /r/rapingwomen
* /r/BurningKids
Those subreddits are as bad as one might think they are.
Salon.com had an article extolling the virtues of banning /r/fatpeoplehate. Reddit is, of course, filled with nothing but trolls and harassers, so who cares if a vicious subreddit with 150,000+ subscribers gets banned? (FPH had 150k people subsribed to it.)
While I detest Vox as a general principle, I will give credit to Alex Abad-Santos for writing a pretty balanced piece on the banning of /r/fatpeoplehate. Of particular note was a portion of the article that had ominous overtones: on June 10th, redditors were already voicing extreme displeasure with Ellen Pao and the changes to reddit that were taking place. (Live link to actual site and article in the note on the right; the first and only Vox link I’m giving.)
I would like to point out that FatPeopleHate was not a subreddit I visited. Before #GamerGate I never checked reddit at all, and even now I hardly venture anywhere except /r/kotakuinaction. I don’t genuinely care about FPH, and I think the subreddit itself is fairly ridiculous, but, and this is important, you cannot claim to be a bastion of free speech and then ban speech.
Caitlin Dewey of the Washington Post offered her thoughts, including an ironic allusion to the Alamo. In case anyone forgot, the Texan forces lost the Alamo, but eventually won the war. Allum Bokhari of Breitbart UK had a predictably different opinion.
The subreddit r/all features the biggest stories from across the reddit platform. Using the wayback machine, we can get a sense of what the ‘front page of the internet’ was talking about. On the 11th, for example, Pao was being mocked. The mocking subsided, but tensions remained.
The full-blown #RedditRevolt occured on July 2nd, when popular iAmA administrator Victoria Taylor was fired, suddenly. That, coupled with new information that Pao had fired someone who had leukemia, sent the reddit community into a tailspin.
The firing of Taylor caused a ripple effect referred to as a ‘blackout,’ in which popular subreddits shut down in protest. A poster on /r/subredditdrama went through and collected every subreddit that went black, and listed the ones that had 5,000+ subscribers. I warn anyone interested in advance: it is a very big, very long list.
Concurrently, a change.org petition to fire Ellen Pao was circulating. On July 3rd, with Felton’s piece, the number had eclipsed 130,000 people. As of the closing of the petition, it had been signed by 213,445 individuals.
213,445 individuals signed the petition. Please bear that in mind. (It’s been a long article, I know, but we’re in the home stretch.)
Ellen Pao offered an apology on the 6th, but the damage was already done. The people of reddit were angry, and so a new strategy was devised: “No Reddit Day,” a site-wide boycott. Ellen Pao is said to have told friends, between the 3rd when the blackouts started and the 10th, ‘No Reddit Day,’ “You’ll have to pry this position from my cold, dead hands.”
Ellen Pao is still very much alive, but her time as interim CEO has ended. On July 10th, the day of the reddit boycotts, reddit announced that Pao had ‘stepped down,’ as interim CEO. I have included a link to a Wired article that covers the story in a fair and balanced manner.
Let me return to something I wrote just earlier. 213,445 individuals signed a petition for Pao to step down as CEO. She resigned on the 10th, the ‘No Reddit Day’ boycotts. Surely someone, somewhere has done an analysis of reddit traffic on the 10th…? Surely…?
To my knowledge, nobody has verified the traffic fluctuations from reddit from the 10th. Many who may have been boycotting may have returned to comment on Pao’s resignation, regardless.
There is very little in terms of empirical evidence regarding the events from reddit’s traffic numbers from the 10th. Luckily, unabashed spin, from the online journalism sector, is never in short supply.
Believe Mr. Wong if you choose to, but there isn’t a single stitch of evidence to support his claims. It won’t matter in the end, as any additional tampering with reddit by admins or the ‘board’ will likely lead to a mass exodus. Anyone familiar with Myspace or Digg will have an idea of what I mean.
What sort of media response would one expect from this? Pao pretty clearly alienated the users of the site she was paid to run. She bungled from one strange choice to another, and eventually faced a 200,000+ petition asking her to step down. She did so after millions of subreddit subscribers found their favorite subreddits blacked out, on the day of an organized site-wide boycott. It seems pretty clear that ‘the internet had spoken,’ yet again, and that this time, it was listened to; reddit said, ‘enough,’ to Pao, and Pao had stepped down.
The internet has not spoken, apparently.
635 articles featured this news, from the 10th to the 13th, from Friday (resignation) to Monday.
Jeff Ender of the Wall Street Journal referred to the resignation as, “ending an eight-month tenure that was enmeshed in controversy.” Sarah McBride wrote for Reuters, “Ellen Pao resigned as acting chief executive of Reddit Friday in the latest sign of turmoil at the site, recently roiled by the firing of a popular employee and ongoing tensions over the limits of free speech on its social-news platform.” These are good articles that feature balanced coverage.
Sarah Kaplan argued that Pao, who attempted to rid the internet of harassment, instead became a victim of it. Josh Harkinson of Mother Jones wrote that “Reddit’s Faction of Racist Trolls Celebrates CEO Ellen Pao’s Resignation.”
Beth Winegarner had an uplifting piece, in which Pao resigned but still totally won.
I rather like Winegarner’s piece as it features both the abject failure of Pao’s lawsuit and the abject failure of her time as CEO of reddit, yet still manages to claim that Pao has somehow ‘won’ something.
And, of course, what medium post by a #GamerGater would be complete with the beloved and adorable Arthur Chu. Oh, dear sweet Arthur, we’d all be lost without your charm and wit.
Chu wrote, “Reddit’s Terrorists Have Won.”
Yes. Terrorists.
Conclusion
Still reading this? Jesus I can yammer, huh?
71,000 tweets can be considered the “internet speaking,” but 213,000 individuals signing a change.org petition is just racism, sexism or terrorism? In what world does that make sense?
Obviously places like Gawker are… they’re just shit. The Guardian and the Washington Post, however, should be substantially better. Seeing a website called “Business Insider,” publish clear agenda pieces is also strange, as you’d expect them to write about business.
To put this into a clearer focus, from October 15th until today, #StopGamerGate2014 has 159,174 tweets, total. If you include the similar #StopGamerGate hashtag, which only really had any traction once the calander changed to 2015, you have 205,154 total tweets, since October. By comparison, the Change.org petition for Ellen Pao had 213,000 individual signatures in a week.
This is how you can spot ‘narrative.’ Objectively, #GamerGate dwarfed and continues to dwarf all twitter attempts against it. Objectively, Ellen Pao lost her lawsuit. Objectively, the RedditRevolt was large and aggressive; subjectively we might speculate the ‘boycott’ was sizeable, as well.
In short, the narrative around these stories are untrue. Objective evidence clearly shows one picture, while ‘journalists’ are busy obscuring that evidence to present a picture that is inconsitent with reality.
You might think that would fail to work, since people might be inclined to do some research and refute shoddy journalism in the comments sections. Well…
If you’ve reached this point, do I need to explain the image above?
