10 Lessons The Gaming Industry Must Learn From #GamerGate

4. The Streisand Effect Is A Thing

In a nutshell, the Streisand Effect is the phenomenon where the attempt to suppress and censor something inadvertently leads to it being publicised. The attempted denouncing of gamers aroused some very understandable criticism, especially since these articles came out from different sources over such a small space of time. This caused the GamerGate hashtag to spring from 0 tweets to nearly 41,000 in the space of five days (according to topsy.com). Suspicions only got worse as mass deletions of posts occurred over Reddit and other websites in relation to the then-called €˜Quinnspiracy€™. Doing this to prevent doxing is absolutely fine, but when users were banned and shadow-banned for simply discussing it, people began to feel uneasy.