- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
The Economist, fresh from it’s embarrassing retraction of their claim that Ben Shapiro is alt-right, retells Wu’s GamerGate fantasy harassment.
Brianna Wu has been tormented by online trolls for three years. It started in 2014, when Wu spoke up to defend women in the gaming industry, only to find herself plunged into a roiling controversy called Gamergate that turned her life upside down. The threats of rape and murder hurled at her online became so scary that she and her husband fled their home. To this day, they live in a new location under an alias. But sometimes the trolls still manage to track her down, and online harassment becomes an off-line ambush.
“They found our address and smashed a window of my house. Threw a brick right through it,” Wu told me in April 2017, when I reached her by phone at a number she instructed me never to share. At the time we spoke, the window was still shattered.
The online attacks, like the one perpetrated on Wu, began and gathered force on sites like 4chan, Twitter, and Reddit, the largely unmonitored town halls of the web. All of these sites allow or encourage anonymity and pseudonymity, as well as a laissez-faire approach to free speech, in keeping with the long-standing libertarian ethos of the internet. All of them have tolerated years of online harassment of women.
![]()
Disgusting. None of that shit ever happened.
Nice man purse, John.