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      It’s 10 years since Gamergate – the industry must now stand up to far-right trolls

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 8 March - 13:28 · 1 minute

    Conspiracy theorists are still routinely targeting and abusing women and ‘woke’ game consultants. With a small studio currently under fire, the games industry’s silence is deafening

    Ten years ago, a game developer’s aggrieved ex-boyfriend published a vindictive screed accusing her of trading sex for favourable reviews of her indie game. This was leapt upon by the least savoury corner of the 2014 internet, 4chan, and kicked off a harassment campaign that broadened to include all women working in video game development or the gaming press, as well as the industry’s LGBTQ+ community. Sensing blood in the water, “alt-right” agitators on YouTube and Steve Bannon’s Breitbart jumped on the bandwagon, and soon began to steer it – and Gamergate, as this manufactured outrage became known, mutated into one of the first fronts of the modern culture wars, driven by social media, misogyny and the weaponised disaffection of young men. Many of its tactics became part of the Trump election playbook .

    This week, a 16-person narrative design studio has found itself at the centre of a conspiracy theory that holds it responsible for the insidious prevalence of “wokery” in modern video games. A group with more than 200,000 followers on PC games storefront Steam, as well as thousands in a Discord chat channel, believes that Sweet Baby Inc is secretly forcing game developers to change the bodies, ethnicities and sexualities of video game characters to conform to “woke” ideology. They think that Sweet Baby has secretly written and controlled almost every popular video game of the past five years, shutting straight white men out. As Trump once again heads out on the campaign trail, this is part of a broader far right panic about diversity and inclusion that has already resulted in proposed regressive anti-women and anti-woke legislation in the US and elsewhere.

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      At trial, accused Pelosi attacker says Gamergate led him to far-right conspiracies

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 15 November - 21:39 · 1 minute

    At trial, accused Pelosi attacker says Gamergate led him to far-right conspiracies

    Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

    David DePape—the man accused of violently attacking former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband in the couple's California home last year—said at his trial this week that online searches for video game strategies ended up serving as his inadvertent introduction to a rabbit hole of far-right personalities and conspiratorial thought.

    KQED reports that DePape said he'd look up strategies for defeating a video game boss, for instance, when he would stumble on a video that would "be a total different person, and these people would talk about how toxic Anita Sarkeesian is, over and over and over.” DePape said these videos inspired him to research more about Sarkeesian, the Feminist Frequency founder who was a long-time target for the amorphous, 4chan-inspired , anti-feminist online movement known as Gamergate . "I wanted to find out what was going on here. I wanted to get both sides of the story.”

    This isn't the first time DePape has been linked to Gamergate; The New York Times reported last December that DePape's online writings explicitly referenced the group as inspiration for his politics. "How did I get into all this," Mr. DePape wrote in a blog post. “Gamer Gate it was gamer gate."

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      Constanze Kurz: "Professionell haben die nicht agiert"

      debacle · Friday, 4 January, 2019 - 23:29

    Constanze Kurz: "Professionell haben die nicht agiert"

    Frau Kurz, was bedeutet dieser Angriff, dieser Cyberangriff für die Gesellschaft?Constanze Kurz: Ich glaube, man muss nicht unbedingt von einem Hack reden. Ich würde nicht davon ausgehen, dass wir es hier mit professionellen Hacker-Truppen zu tun haben. Hier hat jemand über eine längere Zeit Daten zusammengeklaubt und versucht, Passwörter zu erbeuten.

    Bitte auch den Rest lesen. Lohnt sich.

    #ccc #rbb #constanzekurz #chaoscomputerclub #politik #security #deutscherbundestag #cybercrime #gamergate #afd #netzpolitik