It’s not just conservatives who feel the sting of media bias. On Monday, the yearly Austin music, technology and movie festival known as South By Southwest cancelled two panels that had been associated with the online movement known as GamerGate.
The GamerGate movement is typically described in one of two ways. Among its supporters, it is seen as a reaction to unethical, undisclosed conflicts of interest in video game journalism. Among its detractors, the movement is a mob of online misogynists who harass women.
One of the cancelled panels, called “Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games,” included panelists who had openly disparaged GamerGate activism in the past. The other panel, “#SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community” included panelists who had spoken in support of GamerGate previously. Neither panel was specifically about GamerGate, but both panels would not likely have been able to avoid a discussion about the movement.
When two members of the anti-harassment panel (Caroline Sinders and Randi Harper) tweeted that they had been informed their panel was cancelled “due to threats of violence,” Twitter erupted with blame for GamerGate and claims that only one panel had been cancelled.
A quick glance at the SXSW schedule showed that both panels had been cancelled. SXSW Interactive Director Hugh Forrest then released a statement explaining the situation, and noting that SXSW “has received numerous threats of on-site violence related to this programming.”
“SXSW prides itself on being a big tent and a marketplace of diverse people and diverse ideas,” Forrest wrote. “However, preserving the sanctity of the big tent at SXSW Interactive necessitates that we keep the dialogue civil and respectful. If people can not agree, disagree and embrace new ways of thinking in a safe and secure place that is free of online and offline harassment, then this marketplace of ideas is inevitably compromised.”
The organizer for the SavePoint panel, Perry Jones of the Open Gaming Society, released a separate statement announcing the cancellation. Jones followed up his announcement in a video interview and described what he was told by a SXSW official in a phone conversation.
“The way he put it to me was: ‘It was the worst thing that they have experienced [since] they held a panel on [Edward] Snowden,” Jones said. “Both sides were just so intensely against one another that they just had to wash their hands clean and they had to back out and say ‘Look, we can’t host this. We can’t have this discussion here. It threatens everyone’s safety.'”
Jones acknowledged that he can’t verify any of the threats and did not receive any himself. He believes the threats were lodged against SXSW specifically, as the host. He said that security was one concern but that staff was another. “They were literally devoting a majority of their time to just two panels – to fielding questions, concerns, comments, anger from all sides of every argument for two panels out of the 20 or so panels they have just for the gaming event and the who knows how many panels for the entirety of SXSW,” he said.
SXSW’s decision to cancel both panels came after a week in which people opposed to GamerGate voiced opposition to the festival’s inclusion of a panel associated with the movement and were given a platform in mainstream press. In the wake of the announcement, nearly two dozen articles were written about the cancellation, each claiming either that GamerGate was to blame or that it was a hate group given a platform at a major festival.
Vice’s online magazine dedicated to science and technology, Motherboard, described GamerGate as “an online movement whose members have alternately advocated for ethics in games journalism while attacking—including rape and death threats—so-called ‘social justice warriors,’ including those calling for increased diversity and inclusivity in gaming.” Later in the same article, the author, Kari Paul, claimed that supporters of Gamergate have used ethics in journalism “as moral cover during online harassment campaigns.”
Other media outlets wrote similar claims.
Harassing women was not what the panel tagged as “pro-GamerGate” was about at all, nor is it the core of the movement.
One can’t dismiss that harassment has been a problem for both sides of the GamerGate movement. Gamers had finally had enough of being called misogynist basement dwellers by a media that openly despised them. Meanwhile, those opposed to GamerGate’s calls for accuracy in media reporting were claiming that women were being portrayed poorly by video games.
Think about that: Both sides felt they were inaccurately represented. Both sides lodged insults and complaints against the other. Third-party trolls stepped up and made things worse, threatening violence at events where either side spoke. While the media feverishly report threats made against anti-GamerGate women, it virtually ignores threats made against pro-GamerGate members, including pro-GamerGate women.
Case in point: Only seven or so articles were written about multiple bomb threats against a pro-GamerGate event in Miami in August, mostly written by people who were there (myself included). Compare that to the two dozen pieces already online about the cancellation of these panels, mostly focusing on the anti-harassment one and branding GamerGate members as harassers.
Michael Koretsky, host of the August event, told the Washington Examiner in response to the original backlash to the SavePoint panel that his “butt puckers whenever some people try to stop other people from talking – especially when they aren’t being forced to listen.”
To read part 2 of this report, click here.
