Home > Author > Zoe Quinn,
1 " Generally speaking, the bigger the following someone has, the less interested a service is in banning them. Platforms like YouTube thrive on traffic, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe get a percentage of the funds raised. The incentives for these companies to remove abusive uses or not as compelling as they should be. I want to believe that it's not intentional, but it's hard to understand why episodes of Game of Thrones are wiped from places like YouTube within nanoseconds well chronic abusive users are allowed to flourish. "
― Zoe Quinn, , Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate
2 " The mob was engaging in a performative group activity. "
3 " Much of the existing dialogue around the issue of online abuse frames it as violence against women, and that's a major problem. Most of the space being taken up focuses on gender and ignores race, sexuality, and every other type of identity and the intersections thereof. Yet most of the people whom I consider to be the top experts on online abuse and how to defeat it are not white. "
4 " Seeing people who personally profited off the abuse against me being selected for Trump's cabinet scares the hell out of me. I don't know how to express to anyone the extremely weird issue of having your personal trauma wrapped up in international trauma. "
5 " They shared elaborate fantasies about raping and murdering me, discussing the pros and cons of each. They talked about how to break into all of my accounts to try to find more ways to invade my privacy. They bragged about victories like flooding my game's page with hatred and nude photos of me and went so far as to create guides to share tactics on how best to ruin my life. They even orchestrated plans to donate to various charities specifically to make themselves look like concerned citizens and not a mob of people trying to get me killed. They build friendships and bonded with each other by reinforcing their dedication to the righteous cause of taking me down, reminding themselves at every turn but they were the good guys. "
6 " Most of the activists and survivors I know... knew the loudest, most hyperbolic garbage will rise to the top if left unchecked. We knew enough people in charge either don't understand, don't care, or are part of the problem. "
7 " After a few months of giving each other space so we could each do our own soul searching, I got a text from him asking if I'd like to smoke weed and go to a Hello Kitty art exhibit. How can you NOT reconcile with someone in that environment? "
8 " We should be judging the effectiveness and value of any of our solutions by how well they'd work for people with the least institutional power. Aside from idealism, it's pragmatic—if marginalized users are the people being targeted the most and being targeted the worst, then designing solutions that focus on the majority and treat the marginalized users as edge cases is not logically sound, because they aren't. Conversely, there's no reason to assume that the solutions that work for the people who need it most wouldn't also work for people who aren't as much at risk. "
9 " Internet Inquisitors harness this fandom to make money. Multiple websites have been set up since the beginning of GamerGate to pander to this audience, gaining ad revenue and a following. YouTube, Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Indiegogo, Patreon, and other money-making platforms are leveraged by the more opportunistic among them. "
10 " Even if you stick mainly to mainstream sites, you've probably seen glimpses of the internet's underbelly in the comment section at the bottom of news articles. The article could be about local man saving a box of kittens from a burning building, but no matter: the comments will accuse him of hating dogs, setting the building on fire in the first place, and secretly being Barack Obama's Kenyan uncle. "
11 " For every community of angsty kids who pretend they are secretly vampires, there are seven different forums of white nationalists who sincerely believe that Jewish people are secretly vampires. For every Kiki and silly toy collectors community, there are forums full of dudes collecting upskirt photos of random women and girls who had no idea that they were about to become porn. "
12 " We should be judging the effectiveness and value of any of our solutions by how well they'd work for people with the least institutional power. "
13 " ...when someone comes to me who possesses any traits that stray from what might appear in an American i950s-era sitcom, their identities are part of their abuse. They are targeted by certain people who want them to suffer for existing. "
14 " While online abuse can happen to anyone, it is by no means an equal-opportunity occurrence. We're dragged the same sort of cultural baggage that we live with offline into online spaces like a gross piece of toilet paper stuck to our shoes. "
15 " My romantic rejections of industry veterans have severely hurt my career—saying no to the wrong man has led to exclusion from professional events, lost contract gigs, my name's removal from my own work, and worse. "
16 " They start coordinating strategies to accomplish their goal, Sharing the information they've been able to glean and formulating plans. Attacking you becomes a participatory Game in which people try to one up each other in terms I have who can get to you the most. That first night, I was struck by how many of the threats or disgusting remarks sent my way we are made so publicly, lowercase while tagging other people. The ones that were especially vicious were rewarded (in social media terms) with likes, shares, and people joining in on the abuse. "
17 " I don't care if he posts about what he had for lunch sometimes; I want to know why that somehow gives him a free pass to post death threats on your service. "
18 " How do you tell someone that the people who could have stopped it saw what was happening to them and, even though you fought tooth and nail, were determined not to care? "
