So now that we’re about to be in Donald Trump’s America, a few people have explained how GamerGate was the canary in the coal mine for the rise of the “alt-right”. (If you’re not familiar with this stuff, go read those articles. I’ll wait.)
GamerGate did a lot of obvious damage — the chilling effect on free speech that comes from risking a hate movement target you any time you write about video games, the damage to its targets, etc. There’s a less important casualty, though, that I want to talk about here, and that’s actual discussions of ethics in games journalism.
See, GamerGate made “actually, it’s about ethics in games journalism” its tagline, so it was pretty much impossible to actually talk about it. There are some issues seriously worth considering there: games journalism is mostly funded by advertisers of the games they’re supposed to cover, for example. Since this is just journalism covering a hobby industry, though, it’s not usually a huge deal if it’s shady. The fact that a hate group just made harassment, doxxing, and threats the norm as response to people writing things they don’t like about video games was (and is) a way bigger deal.
Legitimate people — people who aren’t associated with GamerGate, the “alt-right”, etc — pretty much stopped bringing up those ethical issues, because it’s pretty much impossible to talk about them without sounding like a huge crank.
Pizzagate, however, is different. Proponents of this conspiracy theory — including Infowars — that claimed that various higher-up Democratic party members were secretly using a pizza parlor for trafficking children into the sex trade.
And unlike shady hobby journalism, child sex trafficking is a thing that actually matters. Wild conspiracy theories about that make actual reports of child sex trafficking look less legitimate. They also waste the time of law enforcement whose job it is to deal with actual child sex trafficking cases dealing with a bunch of conspiracy theorists.
So not only were the Pizzagate conspiracy theorists trying to use false accusations to go after their political opponents, they were willing to throw the real victims of child trafficking under the bus to do it.
The more they shift the focus from actual children that may need help to nonexistent ones that they’re using for their “save the children” rhetoric, the less the real ones get the time, attention and resources they need.
GamerGate sabotaged the actual cause of ethical reform in games journalism; Pizzagate sabotages actual attempts to help victims of child sex trafficking. In both cases, they are comfortable doing actual harm to the cause they claim to be helping.
Let’s not forget the harm that using smokescreens like this does to whatever, or whoever, they’re using as a prop. And let’s not forget the clear damage that does to their credibility.
