One of the biggest revelations from those IRC and 4chan screenshots is quite how much of the #GamerGate "debate" were entirely fabricated by those gross Social Justice Warrior-hating people at the centre of the movement. By the way, since when is Social Justice Warrior a bad thing? Those are all good words. The opposite would be Antisocial Facism Loser. Which would you prefer to be? Anyway, one of the ways that people have been trying to destabilise any of the counter arguments (namely pointing out the amount of misogyny that appears on the opposing side) with stuff like #NotYourShield which, it turns out, was mainly a sock puppet campaign where a bunch of pro-GG types created a load of fake Twitter accounts. #NotYourShield was supposed to disprove all the accusations of misogyny and racism by showing that there were women and people of colour who supported #GamerGate. How can they possibly be prejudice when there are people agreeing with them? Well, because most of those people weighing in saying I am a woman and I don't think this is sexist! were just the same straight white dudes who were being sexist, racist and homophobic in their hysterical defence of video games, only they were pretending not to be to add some more credence to their arguments. It's the infinitely more insidious equivalent of I can't be racist, I've got loads of black friends!, and infinitely more problematic to boot.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
