This Activist Warned Us About GamerGate Before It Happened
Remember GamerGate? If we had just listened to this activist, we might've been able to prevent it, and a whole lot more too.
www.thegamer.com
Remember GamerGate? If we had just listened to this activist, we might've been able to prevent it, and a whole lot more too.
Before #GamerGate, before Russian trolls stole the 2016 US election, there was #EndFathersDay. It was a Twitter campaign that was supposedly instigated by black feminists on Twitter, but as it turned out, it was actually the same trolls that would later go on to do so much worse.
Shafiqah Hudson was the first person to notice. In an interview with Slate, this actual black feminist started digging into the Twitter profiles of posts with the hashtag #EndFathersDay. It didn't take long for her to discover that they were all fake.
Each account had several red flags. First, they weren't associated with any other social media or online accounts--they had no presence. Second, they all used a form of black vernacular that just seemed so obviously sarcastic that it was hard to miss. It was like someone else was trying to sound African American but they couldn't keep themselves from throwing in at least a hint of contempt.
Unfortunately, the #EndFathersDay campaign worked. It managed to fool mainstream media and news organizations long enough to start making headlines, pinning the blame on such a ridiculous campaign on "black feminists" in order to generate a wave of hate towards them.
Another activist, I’Nasah Crockett, noticed the same thing. She dug even further and found the source of the #EndFathersDay campaign: a 4Chan post that outlined the whole thing. Crockett and Hudson then joined forces with other black feminists to begin the #YourSlipIsShowing campaign that outed many of those accounts, but the damage had already been done.
Worse still, #EndFathersDay was a proof of concept. It proved that a public misinformation campaign could be started with relatively few resources (just a few hundred fake accounts) in order to create real-world mayhem.
That was back in June of 2014. A few months later, GamerGate would hit using the exact same tactics: fake accounts created an online whirlwind of outrage centered around games journalism, while the real 4Chan trolls went after female game developers like Zelda Williams and Zoë Quinn.
Fast-forward to 2016, and Russia would use the same tactics in order to sway an entire election. And it’s been going on ever since.
