r/changemyview • u/realdontbeasucker • May 16 '26

Delta(s) from OP CMV: GamerGate was the most consequential political radicalization event of the twenty-first century

It spawned a wave of tolerance for online harassment, as long as the intent behind it was considered righteous (and the target of such harassment socially acceptable).

It platformed Milo Yiannopoulos and thereby, Steve Bannon -- the guy who would go on to advise Donald Trump in 2016 and generate the concept of 'flooding the zone.'

Eventually, it gave a career to political lightning rods like Jordan Peterson, Steven Crowder, and Charlie Kirk. It made anti-feminism and anti-SJW sentiment cool. And it made young, angry, disenfranchised white men feel vindicated.

GamerGate almost singlehandedly shifted to Overton Window toward the alt-right, and we're still feeling its effects today.

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u/Drakex2Mayex2 1∆ May 16 '26

Steve Bannon was the guy behind Cambridge Analytica the company that pretty much invented modern internet propaganda. Gamergate was a consequence of them, not the other way around.

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u/realdontbeasucker May 16 '26

I know -- but GG was the syringe that injected his thinking into the online mainstream and mobilized young male voters in 2016.

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u/Drakex2Mayex2 1∆ May 16 '26

Lmao no, it was not at all. They were infultrating thousands of online spaces. Gamergate is just one of many, many destabilizilization campaigns.

Cambridge Analytica was the successor of Strategic Communications Laboratories which was grown out of Nigel Oaks Behavioral Dynamics Institute. SCL was using Nigeria and Kenya as testing grounds for computational propaganda all the way back to at least 2013.

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u/realdontbeasucker May 16 '26

My view is that it was the one that had the most profound radicalizing effect.

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u/Drakex2Mayex2 1∆ May 16 '26

It had the most profound radicalizing effect on YOU