Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

SAME.

https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1318998656645697537

It's been a while and I've had enough new followers pop up since that I think we're way overdue for some Story Time but I'm also sitting here looking at Twitter as the sun goes down and I promised myself I'd make some stew in the slow cooker, so read Gwen's thread then come back.

Right then, flashback time! The year was 2014, I'd just started a new set of social media accounts to explore transition options safely, and a bunch of nazis looking to test how much violence they could get away with started terrorizing the hell out of a seemingly random group of

innocent people. Thanks to the odd combination of having this anonymized new handle, generally caring quite a lot about this sort of thing, and having ties to some of those early targets, I put on my do-gooder hat, started offering targets some moral support, and digging around

to get to the bottom of what was actually going on. Contrary to a whole lot of revisionist narratives that keep getting repeated by people who take nazis at their word on their motives, what was going on really had nothing to do AT ALL with anything going on with video games, but

actually started as a weird group revenge thing with enthusiastic misogynists helping a particularly gross scumbag you can read about in more detail here bostonmagazine.com/news/2015/04/2… who was particularly upset over being dumped by another participant of this very sort of group 4chan

activity, so it was a nice axe to grind for a lot of them, feeling that shared sense of rejection and again, the general raging misogyny. And of course "started" is a nebulous concept here because they were already deep into a series of events, singling out random women or trans

people to try to destroy for years. You could make the case it "started" in like 1999 or so when sites for coordinating this sort of harassment first sprung up. But the name "Gamergate" just came from some burnout boomer who briefly had a TV show picking up on some of this via an

incoherent rambling video some loser made about a particular chapter in Gjoni's manifesto rambling about his suspicions his ex slept with a number of men at some indie game event and pretending that'd be some sort of scandal. The burnout boomer posted a link on twitter, added the

now infamous hashtag, and tada, this current hell of far right garbage we all live in was born out of the perfect storm of 4chan creeps mingling with older more traditional conservatives gleefully repeating incoherent crap they don't really read on the internet. And in particular

Steve Bannon bylinetimes.com/2019/10/02/mon… but I'm honestly still focusing mainly on the 4chan crowd here. Really everyone mixed together plenty, so it's all the same sad bigot soup anyway.

4chan, for several years thenand continuing to this day, is something of the internet's septic

tank. People go there to make anonymous message board posts saying stuff they know would cause them serious problems if they brought it up anywhere else. And while I've gone into plenty of detail on that in an old article as well, whitehatmag.com/editions/2017-… the important thing here

is that a subset of "stuff you can only talk about if you're posting anonymously on some sketchy message board site with self-deleting threads" is "talking openly about pedophila." Of course, that also overlaps with "stuff you will probably go to jail for posting on the internet"

so while that sort of thing did commonly appear on 4chan, and still does as far as I'm aware, there was (and I would hope there still is) Some Effort made to strike that sort of thing down and ban whoever posted it.

That served as a bit of a precedent when the whole Gamergate

thing started bringing a whole lot of new eyes to the site. Not having any real organizational structure up and running yet, the best system available to organize all the harassment and such was initially to just keep everything in one giant post on 4chan and make sure someone

posted a new message on the bottom every minute or so to keep it visible when telling weird creeps from the greater internet where to look for updates.

This also means someone like me, looking to expose all this as a hate mob targeting innocent people, had a very easy time of

finding and keeping good tabs on the coordination of all this.

It also meant there was this slap fight between the people spamming that thread to keep it floating, and keeping backups going, in multiple sections of the site, and what little 4chan had in the way of moderators not

particularly wanting a bunch of reporters asking why the site is covered in detailed instructions on how to stalk and threaten people, mass register fake social media accounts, dumps of compromised nudes of underaged targets, and so on.

So they started moving it all offsite.

The first new home they found for all this, of all places, was freaking github. Yeah the site where people archive revisions to software as they go. They just set up a repository on there with a bunch of files that were just lists of targets names, instructions on how to register

twitter accounts with big colorful errors to help non-English speakers, scripts to just copy paste into said accounts and comments sections all over the internet, and for some reason, animated gifs of the kids from Gravity Falls of a sexual nature.

This stayed up on github for a

hell of a lot longer than was reasonable, incidentally. I don't have the specifics in my notes, but I think it was like 2 years between when I first flagged it and when anyone could be bothered to act.

This wasn't really convenient for this sort of mass-wrangling of would-be far

right terrorists though, so just a couple months after 4chan started shooing them away, they moved their organizational threads, with much easily tracked plugging on 4chan still of course, to its "sister site" 8chan. Which is of course me being euphemistic about a profound creep,

towards the end of 2013, having taken the same forum software 4chan ran on and setting up a new site that was just like 4chan, but "without the restrictions" and, of course, with basically no user base.

So again, being someone trying to point to this crap when educating people

about how these are literally terrorists, actively working towards getting a whole lot of people killed or at least utterly destroying their lives and sense of safety, I started making daily rounds going through the much slower moving 8chan boards documenting all kinds of awful

things.

Mostly these were in the posts themselves, but as 4chan's software was originally designed for posting art with commentary, posts generally had some random image off a user's computer on the side, and animated 7 year olds without pants on were a pretty common theme.

And one particular day, in response to such a post that was more than a bit over the line, someone posted the helpful scolding that people from outside the site often looked at the gamergate subsection, and they should, if I recall the exact phrasing, "keep that shit on /loli/"

This is, mildly put, a Rather Concerning Name for an entire subsection of a website. And after having cause to investigate, it quickly came to light that this was one of SEVERAL unsettling subsections of the site.

See if you've been paying attention to this little history lesson

you would perhaps have noticed a gap of a year or so between when 8chan first came to be, as a place for hosting things 4chan does not allow, and Gamergate moving over there. And you might have also caught my aside that the prior precedent for 4chan stamping those threads out was

an issue they were having with their pedophile population. So yes, the site they moved over to was one they all seemed to have some familiarity with, and which had previously served only as a one stop shop for things I do not care to speak of.

If I must: web.archive.org/web/2014122309…

Like I said, I wasn't looking to find a site of that nature. I wasn't expecting to find a site of that nature. I was honestly naive enough at the time to believe a site of that nature could only exist in complete obscurity and even then for brief periods because people would shut

that down on sight. So on discovering this, I did a whole hell of a lot of whistle blowing. And kind of an amazing thing happened when I started doing that.

A whole pile of crying nazis, totally dropping their tough edgy act, started popping up in my mentions here begging me not

allow a site that was so very important to them to be collateral damage in my efforts to make the whole terrorism thing go away.

A lot of other changes in the tenor of things started happening shortly thereafter too, as I proceeded to take some fucking steps towards wiping that

particular blight off the face of the world.

I started personally dealing with a whole hell of a lot more threats, personal stalking efforts, and poorly organized efforts to have me assassinated.

The whole weird collective of British media people who make a career out of their

hatred of trans people started to take a very personal interest in me.

It very much came into vogue in the far right internet front to start hurling accusations of pedophilia against anyone and everyone.

That, as it happens, was particularly spearheaded by the closest thing GG

in general and the then-owner of 8chan in particular had to formal legal representation, as I've had a big flashing arrow pointing at for 2 years now:

https://twitter.com/SecretGamerGrrl/status/1020447283215822848

And you know, it's one of those things too where once you're aware there's an issue, and who the major

players are, it really starts jumping out how well connected certain dots tend to be: archive.is/RhN6k

If I could still edit that, I'd have something like a hundred more examples I could list. Well, if I could go through bookmarks spread over 3 or 4 machines anyway.