Aug. 21, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
14:42
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| So you're probably aware, and I'm rather late doing this video, but the SPJ AirPlay debate happened, where the Society of Professional Journalists invited Gamergates to nominate representatives to send to them to debate journalistic ethics within the gaming industry. | |
| As you can imagine, a debate this politicised was always going to be rather eventful, and I have left a link to the full seven hours of coverage that I did on the day. | |
| Although, trigger warning, it does also contain V Monroe. | |
| Thankfully, Leo Pirate did an abridged version of the debate where he cut it down to around 20 minutes for the most pertinent and important points. | |
| So it's a lot easier for me to comment on a few things that I'm interested in talking about here. | |
| Again, the link's in the description, and I fully recommend checking it out if you're interested in a more manageable summary of what's happened at the debate. | |
| I'm going to go through a few points from the debate that I want to personally talk about, but before I do, I just want to say that I thought that everyone in the debate did a really fine job. | |
| Absolutely fine. | |
| I thought that the pro-Gamergate people did an excellent job representing Gamergate, and I think the people who were representing not necessarily anti-Gamergate, but more neutral, professional, journalistic side of the debate were very, very on point with what they were saying as well. | |
| So SPJ AirPlay was split into two debates. | |
| There was a morning panel and an afternoon panel. | |
| And this is from the morning panel. | |
| Gamergate is a hashtag that was used by gamers when they found out about a conflict of interest between game journalist and game developer. | |
| The bulk of gamers were really concerned about the conflict of interest. | |
| And so while they were trying to discuss this, the media was running with the harassment narrative. | |
| So they created the hashtag so that they could try and discuss the conflict of interest and the ethics. | |
| At the same time, there was censorship of discussion happening on a range of online gaming communities. | |
| That's what really sort of blew up Gamergate. | |
| It was a combination of the harassment narrative and censorship of discussion. | |
| So let me ask the journalists, what did you learn from that exchange? | |
| You also have a concern over media coverage of gamers. | |
| It then became also a story about collusion when a mailing list containing the editors and journalists at some of the biggest gaming publications was leaked and the conversations were made public. | |
| That's when people decided to question, well, are games journalists coordinating too much? | |
| I think this was a fantastic summary and really highlights the concerns of most people who support Gamergate. | |
| And then this happened. | |
| What's your opinion of the journalistic value of Gawker? | |
| I mean, I would never quote them or cite them or, I mean. | |
| The speaker there was an Emmy award-winning journalist called Lynn Walsh, who works for NBC San Diego as an investigative journalist. | |
| Although ostensibly on the side opposing Gamergate during this debate, it was clear that her concerns as a journalist were very much in line with Gamergate's own concerns about games journalism. | |
| But in the case of Peter Hernandez, she had written up six pieces that promoted the person and was also her roommate. | |
| Did she disclose her relationship? | |
| No, not until Gamergate got involved. | |
| Being an actual professional journalist, Lynn Walsh understands the problem with conflicts of interest and disclosure of personal relationships. | |
| And honestly, she completely validates everything that Gamergate has been striving for here. | |
| If I have a reporter and they want to cover a restaurant, if they have any ownership or their friend has any ownership of that restaurant or any connection, they absolutely would not work on that. | |
| Avoid conflict of interest, and this is from the SPJ's code of ethics, real or perceived. | |
| And I think that is so important. | |
| And there we have it. | |
| Everything that Gamergate was striving to see recognized by the press, acknowledged there by a professional investigative journalist. | |
| Using the Society of Professional Journalists' own code of ethics, no less. | |
| And that brings us to the man sat directly to Lynn Walsh's right. | |
| Derek Smart, a veteran indie developer. | |
| This is his opinion on Gamergate. | |
| This is never going to end until the journalists stop branding gamers, especially Gamergate, as a hate group. | |
| I've said this from day one. | |
| It's a non-starter. | |
| As a gamer and a game developer, I didn't believe it then. | |
| I don't believe it now. | |
| I never will believe it that Gamergate was ever about harassment. | |
| After Koretsky and Milo had a minor tussle over something Koretsky alleges that Milo had said, which Milo claims he didn't, Derek Smart absolutely nailed it. | |
| What you're doing is exactly the reason why Gamergate is portrayed improperly in the media. | |
| Because you're not allowing the narrative to be focused on what the problem is. | |
| This isn't just Gamergate. | |
| this goes with everything like if you want the media's attention there's a certain you you approach them a certain way By attacking them, it's probably not going to be the best way to do it. | |
| This is the problem because the stated purpose of Gamergate is to protest bad ethics and journalism. | |
| So there's already that sort of opposition. | |
| So I understand what you're saying. | |
| It's difficult because Gamergate's default position is journalists are crap. | |
| Can you write about how journalists are crap? | |
| I can understand the reluctance of an editor to give the go-ahead for a story that's so amorphous, but it did not stop editors from writing with great authority about something they knew nothing about. | |
| There were many stories, hundreds of stories about Gamergate. | |
| They all followed the same storyline of women who were imperiled and bad gamers. | |
| And this was written over and over and over again. | |
| No one had the least inhibition. | |
| It just simply didn't occur to them to go to the other side. | |
| And the problem is not even so much that the media didn't cover Gamergate, it's that they covered it from a very one-sided standpoint. | |
| Let's mention there were some wonderful examples. | |
| There were reporters like Eric Kane, Blade, who did a wonderful job. | |
| He tried to get the story and sought people out. | |
| They're models of how to cover. | |
| What the hell, everyone nailed it. | |
| This was the afternoon panel where Koretsky would have preferred the subject to have been more about teaching traditional journalists how to deal with and cover online movements. | |
| Also, Christina Hoff Summers got to learn what furries were. | |
| And that is a culture that does not want mainstream journalistic attention. | |
| But me and those journalists, including the former women. | |
| Who are they? | |
| Furries. | |
| They're the people who address them. | |
| I'm so sorry that you had to learn about that, Professor Summers. | |
| Anyway, then this happened. | |
| There's been 10 bomb threats, so we're going outside. | |
| Everybody profits! | |
| Yes, someone called bomb threats in to disrupt the conference. | |
| Luckily, Derek Smart had some kind of webcam linked to an application called Periscope, which I have no idea about because I'm some sort of fucking Luddite. | |
| but he managed to continue streaming from outside so we could see what was going on. | |
| ...street now, nobody's allowed back in. | |
| John, I am streaming. | |
| Derek, you're streaming? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Alright, welcome to SBJ Airplay. | |
| The building was just evacuated because the policewoman said that at 2.45 a bomb was going to go off. | |
| We have no idea who called in the bomb threat, and... | |
| And despite Arthur Chu's reaction to the Gamergate in DC meetup, I'm sure that it wasn't him. | |
| So I was streaming watching it with Vee Monroe and short fat Otaku. | |
| And in the SPJ chat, someone began doxing. | |
| This was during the morning panel, and in the afternoon panel, the SPJ shut off their chat. | |
| And so the doxes came to my stream, two dogs. | |
| I, of course, set up a bunch of moderators to remove the tweets from the stream. | |
| This didn't stop known paedophile from anti-Gamergate Sarah Nyberg from claiming that Gamergate was doxing in their own stream for their own debate at AirPlay. | |
| For some reason, of course she had no proof of any of this. | |
| However, Gamergate supporters found the people who admitted that they did it because they were admitting it publicly with glee. | |
| Because, surprise, surprise, they were third-party trolls. | |
| And honestly, I suspect these were the people who called in the bomb threats. | |
| Of course, a bomb threat to the Society of Professional Journalists is going to generate some coverage on its own. | |
| Local newspaper Rise Miami News were obviously quite concerned about what was going on in their local area and wrote an article very swiftly called Breaking Gamergate Controversy Prompts Evacuation of Kubek Center in Miami, which began with the nonsensical line, Bomb threats closed down a debate on the controversial topic of women's representation in video games at a Society of Professional Journalists event in Miami. | |
| Why would the Society of Professional Journalists be talking about women's representation in video games? | |
| Like almost all Gamergate coverage, the insidious narrative woven by the anti-Gamergate people had clearly influenced this journalist's perspective before anything had happened. | |
| However, Rise Miami News quickly amended their article when they found out what the actual situation was. | |
| It's not perfect, but it at least doesn't frame Gamergate from the perspective of those people opposing it. | |
| But what's better is that Rise Miami News decided that this was something worth reporting on, and now have a Gamergate section on their website. | |
| A section for which they're happily receiving reader-written op-eds, so people from Gamergate can actually make their voices heard. | |
| And as you can see here, they're being fair and even-handed and receiving op-eds from anti-Gamergate people as well. | |
| So covering both sides of the aisle. | |
| These are being termed the Gamers Are Alive articles. | |
| And if you've got something that you want to say and you want it in a professional, non-partisan news outlet, by all means, please contact them. | |
| I fully recommend it. | |
| SPJ Airplay has had many positive results for GameGate. | |
| Not only has it had professional journalists legitimizing what Gamergate has been striving for, but it's also encouraged major game developers to come out vocally in public in support of Gamergate. | |
| These include Michael Lawson, who worked on The Sims, Jay Truman, the designer for Operation Flashpoint, and a fellow called Alexa Roth who worked on the Xbox One at Electronic Arts and is now at Rockstar. | |
| And that's not including the composer for Mountain Blade and actor Dean Kane, who came out publicly as supporting Gamergate before SPJ. | |
| And finally to discuss Koretsky's concern about how journalists can cover online movements. | |
| Writing for GamePolitics.com, Brad Glasgow has written an article about how he has interviewed Gamergate, and honestly, I think it's quite a good model for this going into the future. | |
| To sum up briefly, what he would do is post a question on Kotaku in Action every 12 hours. | |
| This would give people in multiple time zones enough time to reply to it if they were interested in replying to it. | |
| He ended up with thousands of answers to his questions and follow-ups. | |
| And naturally, he would look at the most upvoted comments to get an impression of what the most popular opinions within the movement were. | |
| In addition to collating the number of responses that shared the same theme. | |
| And so a brief summary of his lessons for journalists are as follows. | |
| He recognises, of course, that you need to use the most popular sites as hubs to get the largest audience participation possible. | |
| But remember that this isn't the entirety of the movement. | |
| And this goes not just for Gamergate, but for any online hashtag movement. | |
| His second point is that timing matters. | |
| If major events are underway, don't bother trying to interview the people operating with the hashtag. | |
| They are too busy being interested in the events that are occurring than answering your questions. | |
| Recognize that hashtag movements are often leaderless, although I'm sure they don't always have to be. | |
| But there will be prominent voices within these movements who, for whatever reason, end up with a large following on social media, and these are people who you can use to access large numbers of the supporters of the movement very quickly. | |
| The next point is that people within hashtag movements have often been burned by the press already. | |
| And I'm sure that goes as much for Gamergate as it did for Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. | |
| So expect them to be naturally distrustful of you. | |
| Because the people have been burned by the media, they often tend to understand, or at least assume, that any questions that are asked that are perhaps inappropriate or they don't particularly perceive as being useful to their cause are due to a lack of research or a perceived lack of knowledge on the part of the journalist. | |
| It apparently can be a barrier to communication, but frankly, I don't really see a way of getting around it. | |
| I think, honestly, you've just got to operate in good faith and have a bit of patience, because you're going to come up against people, in the case of Gamergate, who have been under the slings and arrows of some outrageous statements about their character and their actions. | |
| Apparently, moderator support was crucial, especially on the Kotaku in Action forums, to ensure that questions were stickied to the top of the forum and whatnot. | |
| And lastly, there is an anti-Gamergate side, and they can be just as hostile to journalists. | |
| Now, I think this is probably true about any kind of hashtag movement. | |
| And it's not just people who don't care about what they're trying to achieve within this movement. | |
| It's people who are actively working against them. | |
| Speaking from personal experience, I would say the reaction with which the journalist is met for dealing with the other side is probably one of the best metrics by which to determine which side is more credible. | |
| If one side is open and honest and allows you to post on their forums and ask them questions as a movement, and the other side bans you for having spent time interacting and interrogating their opposition, then I think that's a good way to judge who's actually being honest with their motivations. | |
| I personally think that the SPJ Airplay event was a magnificent success for Gamergate. | |
| Love him or hate him. | |
| If it wasn't for Korecki's persistence and his putting up with our shitposting and cynicism, none of this would have happened. | |
| It wouldn't have given GameGate an opportunity to prove itself to be about journalistic ethics. | |
| Other developers might not have come out in support of Gamergate. |
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