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Gaming the Rules

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Abstract

Alternate reality games (ARGs) and online harassment also overlap in the way their communities learn both social and technological ‘rules,’ in order to manipulate them as part of ‘playing the game.’ These dynamics highlight the extent to which purely technological solutions are doomed to failure because they will simply represent new systems to ‘game’ or miss social dimensions to the problem. An example is the ‘Google bomb,’ where a harassment campaign creates volumes of material that repeatedly links key phrases together, such as the name of someone they want to target and a crime to frame them for. If enough articles are published claiming that someone is a terrorist, then seemingly neutral web-searches for that person’s name will increasingly return articles claiming that they are a terrorist.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I have not been able to find external verification of the details in this specific case. For a related case, see (O’Brien2009).

  2. 2.

    In an example of the deep hypocrisy that harassment communities often embrace, Dan Olson was accused of paedophilia based on the fact he published an article proving that 8chan—a forum that hosted Gamergate after it was banned from 4chan—was hosting child pornography. Olson’s article included evidence in the form of ethically sanitised screenshots from 8chan illustrating its child pornography, and on that basis, Gamergate argued he was distributing child porn.

  3. 3.

    Just as with the firing of Jessica Price and Peter Fries, harassment communities depend on the cowardice and lack of support provided by companies across the creative and technology industries in order to achieve this kind of impact. Lana Polansky argues that the situation goes beyond cowardice into active collaboration: that videogame and technology industries find the existence of harassment communities to be convenient, since it helps keep their workforce ‘afraid, quiet, and deprived of leverage’ (Polansky2018).

  4. 4.

    It is also incredibly demotivational to know that if you upload a more critical video, the harassment community will use it as fodder for their own response videos—and probably make significantly more money from the harassment community through doing so than you will.

  5. 5.

    It is worth highlighting that as the Nerd City group have argued, the underlying business model of YouTube’s algorithms contributes to the marginalisation of vulnerable groups even outside of situations where it is gamed for abuse (‘Nerd City’2019). They have shown that including particular keywords will result in a video losing any ability to monetise itself via YouTube, despite YouTube’s claims to the contrary, and the ‘learning algorithm’ underlying the system now automatically demonetises LGBTQA+ content. This is another example where harassment campaigns have definitely gamed systems, but large corporations and their algorithmic systems have effectively taken on the job of inflicting that abuse themselves.

  6. 6.

    Twitter even concluded that threats made by the person ultimately responsible for the mailbombing campaign targeting prominent Democrats and their associates in October of 2018 were not against Twitter’s rules—until bad publicity around his arrest for domestic terrorism made them re-evaluate the decision (Beschizza2018; ‘@ryanjreilly’2018).

  7. 7.

    hese are both American laws: a House bill known as FOSTA, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, and the Senate bill, SESTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act.

  8. 8.

    Aka Zak Sabbath, Zak S. and others.

  9. 9.

    Smith has been accused of harassment on many occasions—by different people, across different contexts and across many years—some of whom documented their experiences with him in great detail (‘ArthurTheRef’2019; Hatfield and Ellison2014; Hurley2014a,2014b,2014c; Kreider2014,2015; Matijevic2015; Tabletop’s Missing Stairs2019). Evidence is available online of Smith informing his followers about particular targets next to statements such as ‘Destroy’ or ‘Get at him,’ risking stochastic terrorism (‘@FreyjaErlings’2015; Smith2015a,2015b). Other accounts allege that Smith avoids direct harassment of targets when it can be delegated to his followers, creating plausible deniability through tiering effects (Hill2017). There is evidence he has created ‘sockpuppet’ accounts to impersonate people online, visible when he posted a statement in the wrong account before deleting it and reposting in the correct one (Author Unknown2017). The allegations of rape and abuse also accuse him of impersonating people such as Morbid online, using her accounts to defend himself in her name (Nagy2019).

  10. 10.

    This is an example of asymmetrical information gathering, where it is easier for the community to gather information about their target than it is for the target to discover who is attacking them.

  11. 11.

    Promotional bot accounts on Twitter which mindlessly reshare any mention of a brand or product name as publicity often cause similar problems: anyone critical of the product or brand will have their comment shared with its most rabid fans.

  12. 12.

    Searching for #digraa now reveals a core-sample of posts from the 2015 conference, both during and before Gamergate began flooding it and attacking the people using it. Another example was the harassment campaign targeting Alison Rapp that used #torrentialdownpour to organise itself. However, #torrentialdownpour has since been diluted by Twitter users applying it in an everyday context. Tweets linking the hashtag to targeting Rapp and/or Nintendo are still being made in 2020 alongside broader complaints about ‘censorship,’ including some from 2019 wishing the harassment campaign would come back.

  13. 13.

    They are also sites of conflict and strategic discourse: in 2020, 4chan responded to the sweeping Black Lives Matter protests by introducing competing hashtags like #WhiteLivesMatter and #WhiteOutWednesday. These were full of white-supremacist material and disinformation until they were hijacked by fans of K-pop and flooded with K-pop videos (Andrews2020; Molloy2020). Those same fans then turned their attention to hashtags associated with the QAnon conspiracy, to the horror and outrage of QAnon members.

  14. 14.

    Roderick Graham has also written about how neo-Nazi and white-supremacist communities use hashtags as part of their online recruitment strategies—something that seems particularly relevant given the significant overlap between Gamergate and alt-right/neo-Nazi communities (Graham2016).

  15. 15.

    Nominally, ‘polite’ enquiries become a form of harassment when combined with the inability for people online to ‘get away’ from their interrogators, particularly when they come in swarms—which the harassment community tries to ensure. This dynamic was highlighted by David Malki in the webcomicWondermark, which lead to the process becoming known as ‘sea-lioning’ (Malki2014; Massanari2018, 2).

  16. 16.

    This strategy was more about leaving doubt in the minds of external observers and potential recruits as to who was at fault than preventing targets from knowing who was terrorising them. It was also never implemented with 100% effectiveness, since some of the community were very comfortable harassing under the #gamergate banner. The community’s strategy for those cases was to claim that anyone doing so was a ‘false flag’ operation from external forces trying to frame them, again in an attempt to sow doubt and disorder.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Humanities, Media and Creative Communication, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

    Kevin Veale

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  1. Kevin Veale

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Correspondence toKevin Veale.

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Veale, K. (2020). Gaming the Rules. In: Gaming the Dynamics of Online Harassment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60410-3_4

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