‘Terrorgram’ Charges Show US Has Had Tools to Crack Down on Far-Right Terrorism All Along
September 13, 2024
—
- 2024,
- GamerGate,
- Manosphere,
- Violence
“They had my address. They had information about my family. They were very specific about the violence they were going to do to me. It was so serious that, actually, the FBI got involved.”
Today, in 2019, the average person knows a lot about what's wrong with social media. There are headlines about Russian Twitter bots, mass shootings announced in advance on message boards, YouTube video wormholes that inspire white supremacists. Now, before all that, there was Gamergate. And this month marks five years since the beginning of a leaderless, mostly anonymous harassment campaign - a campaign targeting women in the industry, developers and journalists; anyone who called for change in the way women and people of color were represented in leadership or in games themselves. It was a warning and a demonstration of how bad actors could abuse the power of social networks to achieve malicious ends.
Brianna Wu is one of the women targeted by the movement. In 2014, she was co-founder of the independent game studio called Giant Spacekat. And today she is a Democratic candidate for Congress in Massachusetts.
Welcome to the program.
BRIANNA WU: Thank you for having me.
CORNISH: So to begin, how do you describe Gamergate in a nutshell?
WU: Well, I think you nailed it. It was an organized harassment campaign against women in the video game industry. And what they found out was, when they made the cost of speaking out high enough, many women in games would quit rather than continue speaking up. So what they did is they sent us rape threats. They sent us death threats, and they harassed us until many women simply left the game industry.
CORNISH: Now, you spoke out about some of the issues that Gamergate at least started to be about on your podcast. And after that, you became targeted. When you say death threats and rape threats, I mean, what form is this coming in? - how frequently?
WU: So it's - it was all the time. It was constant. You know, one of the weird things about being a woman in the tech industry is you gain a kind of dark ability to judge the seriousness of a death threat. So I got one yesterday of a man telling me he was going to stab me to death. That just - you don't take that seriously. The ones I got were very credible. They had my address. They had information about my family. They were very specific about the violence they were going to do to me. It was so serious that, actually, the FBI got involved. Even local Congresswoman Katherine Clark got involved.
