To be fair, I do think the threat was always meant as a joke, possibly even a joke that was supposed to be obviously a joke. Nevertheless, it's one of those jokes that, even after you explain it, doesn't seem very funny, and still looks to me like just another form of harassment.
Not all harassment is equal. You already know this since you yourself were telling me just a page ago that you believe the harassment women get is worse than what men get, even if men get more of it.
If a black man receives death threats from a known violent racist group, that is very different to a black man receiving non-serious threats from people that turn out to be pranking them. Obama gets a lot of harassment and "threats" but those become very different and a lot more concerning if his security services believe they are being made by people that actually intend to cause Obama harm. Tom Cruise and other Scientologists received a lot of harassment and mockery in the recent past, but that harassment is not equal to Anonymous sending violent threats they actually intended to carry out. It might all be defined as harassment, but not all harassment is the same. Kent Hovind and other Creationists get trolls and harassed and mocked frequently and has been for years now. If actual psycho's genuinely wanted to murder them sent them death threats that is completely different from people trolling them and sending fake threats on the Internet.
Total Biscuit on YouTube and pro-gamergate supporter has talked a lot about harassment he and others receives in a general sense.
"
... I believe [Anita Sarkessian] received death-threats. I have no doubt of this. This is the internet, lots of people receive death-threats. Over the last year or so we've received 48 in email form and countless more through burner twitter accounts and those are only the ones that specific threatened to kill us (Jezebel seems to think that telling someone to kill themselves via Twitter is a death-threat, the law disagrees)..." - John Bain aka "Total Biscuit"
People that have a public face all know getting harassed and getting mean comments and even threats on the internet when you have a public face is normal. The more popular you are the more hate and harassment you'll see. The most well liked and popular people on youtube will have way more hate than most people that get hardly any views. The ratio of likes to dislikes may even be 99/1, but that 1% can still consist of a huge number of people because of the sheer number of people we're talking about. It is unavoidable, the more popular you get, the more people will hate you, even if 99% of people like you. I feel like I'm stating the obvious, but apparently when it comes to this subject obvious things have to be repeated over and over again.
The original claim was the "Jace Connors" character was major evidence of how violent and dangerous gamergate supporters were to people like Wu. So it turns out he was not serious, that it was all an act, and to him and his group "
Million Dollar Extreme" see it like some kind of "sketch comedy" presumably a bit like Borat or Ali G. He was a 3rd party that wasn't part of gamergate, he just wanted to stir the pot and get a reaction and the gamergate drama was a convenient and easy target.
That does not mean we have to agree with his behaviour. We can still see it as unacceptable and a troll that went too far and that caused real fear, and we can also even see it as something that should be prosecuted. I have seen various pranks on the internet and I think some go too far and have the potential and/or do cause real harm.
I recall a Japanese show that had a format that could easily give people a heart attack, or this one
where the "victim" is in a fake meeting where everyone is killed except for him.
Whether or not these pranks break the law is not relevant, and it shouldn't be for you either. If what Sam Hyde did pranking Brianna Wu is
not against the law, you would fully agree that this wouldn't make his actions any more acceptable or make the terror it may have caused any less real.
What is
objectively true is that the claim that what Sam Hyde did proves gamergate is full of genuinely dangerous harassers
is utterly false. Not only was it not actually a gamergate supporter that was responsible, it was all an act and there was absolutely no threat whatsoever to Brianna Wu from this person. Even if we all agree this person was irresponsible and it was totally unacceptable that they went this far and should be prosecuted for it, that still doesn't mean they were a genuinely dangerous person. The fear caused may well be real, but that doesn't mean the threat was real.
We have been saying for rather a long time that there are 3rd party trolls that intend to play both sides off each other, it is met with a handwave as if this is just an excuse. When gamergate supporters get doxxed and harassed like I have shown you in the past many of them are fully aware that this may not have anything to do with anti-gamergaters. They know they could have been doxxed and threatened by 3rd party trolls that very much want them to blame it on anti-gamergate and so continue the drama.
Such a big difference in mentality between pro-gamergate and anti-gamergate is that almost universally anti-gamergate refuses to acknowledge the existence of 3rd party trolls that are behaving this way. All hateful comments, all "rape" and "death threats", all the doxxing, all this becomes evidence of what pro-gamergate supporters are doing. It doesn't matter if they aren't part of gamergate, they are against them and so they are all the same and so they feel justified in grouping them all together. It is absolutely the "us vs them" mentality. This is why someone telling Brianna Wu that there are many people who would be happy to discuss things civilly and reasonably with her but that she blocks everyone at the slightest hint that they disagree with her, is represented as someone talking about all the hateful messages and harrassment she has ever received and so is therefore "scary". Why does she do that? Because if you are not with her you must be against her, which means you're part of the same homogeneous group.
So to bring it back to Sam Hyde... In spite of him having nothing to do with gamergate, in spite of him not actually being a violent mentally unstable psycho, and in spite of him not actually being any threat to Wu... somehow ...some people can still manage to claim this still proves gamergate is this way, or that it changes nothing. She was still harassed (!), you will say. Yes, it is true, it can indeed still legitimately be defined as harassment. But pranks and mockery, even pranks that go too far, does not equal genuinely dangerous violent misogynists.
EDIT:
but the short version is that when people try to imitate gamergaters, they act like psychopaths. That's not a real positive image.
He is not imitating gamergate, he is mocking the hysterical image anti-gamergaters have of gamergate.
But he didn't say that did he, right? Yes, but he also said 8chan were pissed off at him and that their members found him and ..... "threw pebbles" at him and then somehow got in his locked apartment and knocked on his door and then vanished...
You also have to ignore the fact that he said very disparaging things about Brianna Wu on twitter for spending so much time and money trying to get a restraining order against a "figment of [his] imagination" contradicting his attitude in the interview, and where he asked on his Facebook what the most hilarious way he could respond to Buzzfeed was and was told to play it totally serous. So he plays it totally seriously and says he was actually making fun of gamergate and that now they are going after him, and you seem to believe it apparently without reservation. It doesn't matter that his act started long before gamergate, we should forget about that because otherwise he precognitively knew gamergate was going to happen.
Perhaps a more likely explanation is that he already had this character established in this 'long-troll' and then when gamergate came around he decided the anti-gamergate crowd are so willing to believe a crazy violent nutter would want to cause harm to people like Wu, Sarkessian or Quinn that the hysteria from these people was so ripe for mockery he thought he could say the most over the top utterly absurdly laughable nonsense and people would still take him seriously. What is amazing to me is that Wu even managed to misrepresent him anyway, as if what he said wasn't extreme enough! The truth was more amusing than Wu's representation, since he said he was going to "street race" her. Apparently Wu didn't think this was extreme or scary enough and instead represented him as intending to drive across the country with real guns (the only guns were clearly airsoft guns) implying his stated intent was to do her physical harm. His actual video with the crashed car could not possibly have been more full of clues that it was an act. But it was lapped up uncritically and the possibility that it was an act was hand waved. Why? Because it confirmed what they thought they already "knew" all along, that gamergate supporters really were a bunch of dangerous violent misogynists, and this just proved it.
He capitalised on the hysteria and image of gamergate as being being full of actual psycho's, yet here you are missing the entire point and thinking the fact that he went full-on complete satirical mockery of the most hysterical beliefs anti-gamergate has about gamegate supporters, in your topsy turvy world somehow supports your hysterical beliefs that gamergate really is like that.
This is like someone parodying the most extreme exaggerated hysterical image of a man-hating feminist you can think of, then after a while admitting they were just trolling the whole time and then anti-feminists saying that the fact this person chose to portray such a hyper exaggerated stereotype of a feminist this way is just more proof that feminists really are like that. If I used this logic you'd laugh me out the room, but you're so blinkered you think it all makes sense if you use the same exact logic here.
Even if he had asked what's the funniest way to respond to Buzzfeed and was told he should play it serious. It's incredible they are so willing to believe GGare bad that they believed the guy's obvious act to start with and then after getting so burned by that go straight back to believing everything he is saying is 100% true because he is saying what they want to hear. See gamergate are so bad they are now waging a harrassment campaign of playing known down ginger and doing a vanishing act, and sending kids to throw pebbles at people! You see! This proves how scary and hateful gamergate is! /s
Certainly not in your Zoe's blogpost link.
My interests dictate GG? Wow.
