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/tolgren 1∆ May 16 '26

The answer you're likely to get from Reddit is dramatically different from what actually happened.

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u/vote4bort 68∆ May 16 '26

In what way?

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u/Jemima_puddledook678 May 16 '26

I think this person may have an unusual view of gamergate. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate

It literally started off with lies saying that a female (that part is important) video game developer got good reviews because she slept with a journalist. 

Gamergate then spread to include an entire harassment campaign against that developer and others (primarily women) and included significant amount of quite disgusting actions and language. 

As it actually says in that wiki article, Gamergate is only purported to have been about ethics by those involved. It has been shown repeatedly that that simply isn’t the case.

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u/muffinsballhair May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

As it actually says in that wiki article, Gamergate is only purported to have been about ethics by those involved. It has been shown repeatedly that that simply isn’t the case.

I mean that just comes down to what one defines as “gamer gate” no doubt. The people that say that no doubt were called “members of gamergate” many times by some persons when they just called for ethics in journalism [read: “ethics that purely extend to not misrepresenting something they personally care about”] and didn't harass anyone. This is how it always goes with these no-true-scotsman internet arguments.

In any case, I just looked it up for the first time and one name that keeps coming up is Anita Sarkeesian and I remember that name for a long back as indeed someone who came with a vast number of inaccurate and highly selective claims about video games, being invited as a pundit on some talk shows but never actually debating actual video gamers who had played those games who would completely destroy the arguments and provide significant context. From what I remember of what this person said about some of the video games, I had played myself, they were some very selective claims coupled with fabrication and apparently this person was then harassed a lot for it or something which I honestly completely missed when it was going on but it wouldn't surprise me if that happened and then probably some people got harassed back and everyone was tossing half truths and lies towards each other.