I read the whole 45 page report from GAO about "gaming extremists": 🧵
Bear with me, because this thread will be long. I will highlight all the parts I found funny or concerning.
It's important to be aware that the government is full of stupid, intrusive clowns.
So what is GAO?
It is the Government Accountability Office, headed by the Comptroller General who is appointed by the President.
It supposedly helps the government work more efficiently and tracks how taxpayer dollars are spent.
Not doing a very good job of it I'd say, lmao.
To start with, GAO links video games with domestic extremism and claims they influenced domestic terror attacks.
They are claiming that livestreamers are the point of origin of extremism, which then moves through YouTube and Twitter, and finally "infects" a large group of people.
They reference the Anti-Defamation League about white supremacy in games.
You'll find out why towards the end of the thread.
They unironically say that humor, memes, and positive aesthetics are a threat.
They link the Buffalo shooter with FPS video games.
Those gosh darned extremists making friends while playing games online!
Their own experts say that there's no evidence to link violent extremism with video games, but they press on regardless.
Reddit jannies mentioned LMAO
If you're too spicy online, companies may give you a personal janny who monitors your activity on other platforms so they can ban you.
Companies give organizations and other special interest groups a reporting backdoor. This was revealed during the Twitter files, but apparently this is still going on unabated.
They're afraid of statue pfps lmao
The FBI and DHS have direct lines to social media and gaming companies.
The Jan 6ers had code words to bring weapons to the Capitol but mysteriously, they didn't bring any. Weird, that.
The DHS collects text and images from social media. This means the DHS has a meme stash lmfao
I&A is the Office of Intelligence and Analysis within the DHS.
They lament that they're not able to collect spicy memes from online video games.
The reason this report references the ADL so much is that they have THREE "experts" from the ADL.
Other organizations are generally represented by a single person.
FINAL NOTES: The report reveals how intrusive the government is, and how they want to expand their incestuous relationship with social media companies into gaming as well.
They make tenuous links between gaming and extremism, but they only support it with assertions.
The worst is yet to come. The report urges the FBI and DHS to improve on their strategies to secretly collect data from games and work with gaming companies and social media to root out "domestic extremism". The DHS has already agreed to this report and is taking action.
If you've gotten all the way down here, thanks for reading. I spent about 3 hours on this, and I'd appreciate it if you retweeted this so others may see it.
Here's an apustaja for your troubles.
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Image 1: Video of black guy brutally beating an elderly Asian woman. Man suggests the death penalty.
Image 2: Prison abolitionist is appalled, but retreats to credentialism and consensus when pressed about his kooky beliefs.
The leftist evades the simple question: “What should be done about this guy?”
This is because leftism teaches him that black people are not agents of themselves, and prisons exist to oppress black men. As such he has a gaping, unaddressed blind spot.
Note how evasive he is about this. He’s drawing a blank, he has no response.
Nowhere in this Twitter-consensus-sourced theory of prison abolition can he find a method to deal with a violent criminal that is a danger to others.
These two videos juxtaposed show the glaring issue with RLM's coverage of modern Star Wars.
The Acolyte re:View was one of the worst videos I've seen from them, and that's because they're really not invested in Star Wars at all.
They spent most of the video talking about how Star Wars has become a cultural battleground, and I do agree with some of the points they made.
But when they were talking about the show ITSELF, there was a terrible lack of clarity and it was clear they were uninterested.
A person who hadn't watched The Acolyte coming into this video would not come away with much information about The Acolyte at all. They'd also just watched 4 episodes so far.
The energy difference between when they were discussing the culture war vs the show itself was shocking.
I read the entire "Product Inclusion Action" report from Microsoft:🧵
Any game developers who use this as a blueprint will never, ever have a well written game again. Microsoft certainly won't.
In this thread I'll go over the sections that will fuck up good writing the most.
Starting off with the bit that's been floating around. Microsoft doesn't like ass and titties, but there's another issue here.
They want quotas for screen time, speaking lines, and playable characters.
Microsoft's new corpospeak is "respectful expression" which is that diverse characters are "respectfully" portrayed and throwing money at "diverse" content creators to shill their products.
(We will get into what they mean by respectful portrayal in a minute)
Let me explain why you shouldn't talk to journalists because some people don't seem to get it: 🧵
1. Journalists are not important. Legacy media is dying and random shitposters on social media get more views than their articles do, by far. You're talking to dinosaurs.
2. We know they're lying, they know they're lying, and the proof already exists in their bylines on their articles. We don't need further evidence of this. If people are not convinced by what we already have, they're never going to be convinced.
3. Despite their dinousaur status, they still have more clout than most people who talk to them, and their record remains for far longer than our twitter accounts will. If they lie about you, their lie sticks around like a skunk's stench, while you or I don't have that longevity.
Movements cannot be successful without a plan of action and a win condition. In this thread, I will focus on positive, action-oriented things that we can do as a movement and as a community, based on my analysis of the articles I've read.
1. The boycott: Beware of scope creep. We know that the present state of gaming is terrible, but expanding out from SBI and the other DEI-based consulting agencies can make us lose focus. I'm happy with the focusing on SBI alone right now. We eat the elephant one bite at a time.
2. Memes and art: The government has called these a threat, so it's important for us to generate witty memes and encourage artists in the movement to make beautiful works that we can rally around. With these we can mock SBI-types and create a positive aesthetic for ourselves.
My recent threads have been either frustrating or alarming, so I thought we should have a bit of fun today.
So I decided to look at the characters from ValiDate and we can all have a go at them: 🧵
They're right out of tumblr fanfiction, sometimes literally.
Starting off with a perplexing one: Emhari Abdi. He's a "bigender lesbian transwoman" hailing from Qatar and South Africa who hasn't medically transitioned and has two children from a divorce.
As you'd expect, dude's an HR rep.
It was a brave choice to make a black guy work at Popeye's, but the devs of ValiDate are not only brave, they're also stunning.
He has two aliases - The Coochie Man, and MalikDeGoots
The devs thought it important for us to know he owns an Xbox.