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Exploring the Overlap Between Hatemobs and ARGs

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Abstract

A central argument of this project is that online harassment campaigns function as autonomous alternate reality games (ARGs) with no external leader or guidance. This chapter defines the structure and context of a ‘normal’ ARG before exploring a series of angles in which ARGs and online hatemobs overlap in their structure and community dynamics. This includes how they set their goals, their relationship with external challenges, how people are introduced to the community, and their approach to problem-solving. Approaching harassment communities as malevolent ARGs helps explain a number of distinctive dynamics visible in online harassment.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Those designers were an element largely missing from the experience of thePortal ARG, since the material was static once it was added to the game.

  2. 2.

    These firings happened mere weeks after it was revealed that Riot Games has a deeply toxic and sexist internal structure, which prompted representatives of Riot to claim that efforts to reform the company were under way. Firing staff standing up for diversity initiatives in that context suggests that the claims were a PR fig-leaf at best (D’Anastasio2018a; O’Connor2018).

  3. 3.

    The character featured prominently and swiftly within community-generated porn and also reflected Gamergate’s gender preferences by being almost entirely silent (Butt and Apperley2016; Cole2018).

  4. 4.

    This is an example of stochastic terrorism and ‘tiering,’ which will be discussed later in this chapter.

  5. 5.

    Examples of online harassment storms are not hard to find, but as a representative example, Anita Sarkeesian collated one week of harassment over Twitter herehttps://feministfrequency.com/2015/01/27/one-week-of-harassment-on-twitter/ (Sarkeesian2015a). As one might expect, content warnings for graphic descriptions of abuse and threats of violence/rape.

  6. 6.

    The ‘puppet master’ label becomes particularly ironic in this context, given the way that harassment campaigns like Gamergate justify attacking their targets based on conspiracy theories that present them as manipulating events from behind the scenes, and which suggest that a vast distributed mob of attackers are somehow the underdogs in the ‘conflict.’

  7. 7.

    The targets and friends of people being targeted experience variations on the same theme, except they need to find out what damage has happened to themselves or the people they care for while they have been away or asleep.

  8. 8.

    This example is useful for illustrating that vastly more projectsattempt work at the primary tier than necessarily achieve successful harm: the ones noted and remembered are successful, and the rest are forgotten. I was able to document this example purely through seeing the secondary tier promoting the initiative on Twitter; otherwise, it would have vanished without trace.

  9. 9.

    This is a significant problem that involves people taking a screen capture of a tweet, editing it using something like Photoshop, and then using the edited image as ‘evidence’ of what someone said in ways that can be reshared by the harassment community. The ability to edit tweets is a commonly requested feature on Twitter and would amplify the problem enormously. The pattern would be to send someone threats or other vile messages, wait for them to respond and then edit the original message to be innocuous so that it looks like the response is unjustified. Images of that interaction would then be taken as evidence and circulated to the harassment community and so on.

  10. 10.

    My understanding is that members of Gamergate targeted Polk for harassment after the revelation that Alison Prime had always been a sockpuppet due to his performance of femininity online, because of the high levels of transphobia and homophobia within the community.

  11. 11.

    ‘False flag’ operations are a frequent tool of harassment campaigns, where they fake membership in groups for strategic purposes. One example is Operation NotYourShield, which invented and impersonated women and people of colour who supported Gamergate, as a literal shield against claims that Gamergate was racist and misogynist: the goal was to make it seem like Gamergate critics were shouting down or talking over members of the groups they claimed to be defending (Futrelle2014b; Johnston2014; Jong2014; Lynch2015). Another pattern is where attackers claim membership in a group they wish to target while attacking another, in an attempt to inspire other groups to retaliate. 4chan often attempts to discredit feminist groups by trying to fake activist movements around topics like ‘free bleeding’ or the desirability of a ‘bikini bridge’ (Alfonso III2014). Another example was where 4chan faked a campaign by gay men who wanted paedophiles to gain the same social acceptance as other rainbow communities (Collins2019; Evon2017). People also fake attacks against people in harassment communities in order to whip up sympathy and justify aggression against the enemies of the community. Joshua Goldberg is one such example, but some people take their initiatives into physical spaces. For example, in 2018, a poster on 4chan was arrested after posting plans to attack the white-supremacist ‘Unite the Right’ rally to gain sympathy for the movement after the murder of Heather Heyer by a neo-Nazi in Charlottesville in 2017:

    I’m going to bring a Remington 700 and start shooting Alt-right guys. We need sympathy after that landwhale got all the liberals teary eyed, so someone is going to have to make it look like the left is becoming more violent and radicalized. It’s a false flag for sure, but I’ll be aiming for the more tanned/dark haired muddied jeans in the crowd so real whites won’t have to worry. (Indianapolis Man Arrested for Threatening Boston Free Speech Rally Attendees in 20172018)

    People in harassment campaigns often embrace a viewpoint that frames them as the oppressed underdog, despite the fact their members are parts of socially powerful dominant groups fighting to preserve the status quo (Lewis2018, 21–22, 24). They are tempted to invent that oppression when they do not find it.

  12. 12.

    This is also some of the explanation behind why harassment campaigns like Gamergate attack women cited or mentioned by men rather than the men in opposition themselves (Golding and Van Deventer2016, 178): out of any given online mob, statistically more people will take the time and energy to harass someone outside the presumed ‘default’ of online culture because of entrenched sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and so on.

  13. 13.

    Or at least, the firstrecorded example of such a guide …

  14. 14.

    Videogame ‘walkthroughs’ have become more complicated as videogames have themselves grown in complexity; at heart, they combine providing hints and revealing hidden information with suggestions forhow to play the game better, as an aid to people having trouble negotiating the text. However, it is possible to gain notoriety, respect and fame for having a particularly singular contribution to videogame walkthroughs, as happened for Kao Megura and his guides forFinal Fantasy 7 (Square 1997; Burn and Schott2004).

  15. 15.

    The infamous ‘Tactics for Effective Conservative Blogging’ apocryphally attributed to Karl Rove is an example of a guide and one that is still being applied by harassment communities to waste the time of the opposition while pretending to be arguing in good faith (LaCapria2018).

  16. 16.

    An example of one of Gamergate’s ‘conspiracy maps’ is available here athttps://web.archive.org/save/https://imgur.com/zPDtMCK. An example of an image arguing that the videogameGone Home (The Fullbright Company2013) only received the high review scores that it did due to corruption is available athttps://web.archive.org/save/https://imgur.com/sDOjHhM (Jace_Neoreactionary2014).

  17. 17.

    DARVO stands for ‘Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender’ (Freyd2016).

  18. 18.

    Discussed in more detail in Chap.5.

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  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). Exploring the Overlap Between Hatemobs and ARGs. In: Gaming the Dynamics of Online Harassment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60410-3_3

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