Jimmy Wales on #GamerGate Wikipedia Article Message 5

Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 04:49:22 -0400
From: The Leader of GamerGate <GamerGateLeader@gmail.com>
To: Jimmy Wales <REDACTED>
Subject: Re: #GamerGate Article Issues (I'm bubblesort1 on twitter)

Sorry it took a while to get back to you.  It's been a busy few days for me.

On 9/28/2014 11:15 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> On 9/28/14, 5:23 PM, The Leader of GamerGate wrote:
>> Thank you for your thoughtful message.
> You are welcome.  I actually have no idea why you are now viciously
> attacking me on twitter.  Please don't do that.
I never viciously attacked you.  We had a gentleman's agreement to keep
these messages between us, which I have kept, so far.  I came to the
conclusion that Wikipedia is not safe to edit and I told you that I
would try to find a way to argue this point to my fellow #gamergaters
without disclosing this message, which makes it harder to make that
argument.  That makes my life more difficult, but it's a small price to
pay for a rare respectful conversation.  Anyway,

Here is the twitter thread in question, which I will transcribe with
some notes below.
https://twitter.com/boom_ix/status/516235668721115136

Boom Ix posted the following after both of us encouraged him to be more
optimistic about helping fix some problems on Wikipedia:

"Patience is fine but people are even now referencing the page as gospel
painting a huge swath of people as worse than well..."

I posted the following on Twitter, in response to his message:

"After looking into it, you were right.  Leave the article visibly
defaced.  We are not going to be allowed to fix it."

Followed by,

"Let SJWs make it extreme as possible so its an obvious hit piece. Hoist
them on their own petard."

That said absolutely nothing about our email exchange.  You came in and
posted:

"What?  That's exactly the opposite of the advice I gave you."

Followed by,

"That's the worse possible approach.  So if you want to take it, don't
say that I was right. Say you've rejected advice."

Then you went and DIRECTLY QUOTED the last message I sent to you, as if
our gentleman's agreement does not exist at all!

"I'm quite confused.  Your last email to me started "Thank you for your
thoughtful message" Now accusing me of hate and bile?"

You are lucky I gave you the benefit of the doubt rather than just
pastebinning or screen capping all of this immediately.  I said I would
not speak about Wikipedia again until I read your message to give you a
chance to make your case, and I kept my word on that.

As I mentioned in my last email to you, I'm not taking your advice. That
should not surprise you at all.  The message I wrote, however, did not
reference your advice in any way.  All I did was tell somebody my honest
conclusions after looking into the problems with a Wikipedia article.
By bringing these messages we are currently exchanging up in public and
accusing me of lying about them you are deliberately trying to use our
gentleman's agreement to paint me as a liar.

Maybe being called a liar isn't a big deal to you.  To me it is a big
deal, and I will not allow you to paint me as a liar in order to keep a
gentleman's agreement made in bad faith on your end.

I want to be clear:  I am not a fool.  If you ever bring these messages
up in public again I will publish them.

As it stands now, I may or I may not show these messages to others. I
see no reason why I should keep an agreement made in bad faith.  I will
show them around as it suits me.  Whether I keep our gentleman's
agreement from here on in depends on my mood, because as demonstrated
above, you broke the agreement first.
>> When somebody says they have been harassed online or talks about an
>> incident of harassment the first reaction must never be skepticism or
>> changing the subject.  Ever.
> I agree with you 100%.  And so I don't know what you are angry about or
> what the next several paragraphs are even referring to.
I don't think you do agree with me.  You tried to impose gender on a
transgendered person and claimed that it was ok to link their accounts
across different web sites in order to smear them.  You then said I was
bringing the article up as a 'gotya' (which is crazy because I really
did like Wikipedia), and you said it wasn't a 'full blown doxxing',
whatever that means.  You dismissed Zoe Quinn's reckless endangerment of
this transgendered minor.  You did all this without citation, so you
have no evidence.  You are just dismissing harassment as a matter of
course, because these people are gamers and not SJWs.  You are deeply
biased and you do not take threats of violence against gamers seriously
because you happen to think you are a feminist.

This is the standard I hold all my friends to:  If you don't have
specific evidence, you accept that the abuse happened and show a little
humanity.  When they don't hold to that I get mad.  All of my friends
know how to handle harassment claims.

Now, I'm not asking you to take responsibility for the incident, but you
need to at least treat it with the respect it deserves and not attack
the victim.  Not without direct, specific citation.

I'm not even going to dignify your attitude towards the issues regarding
Zoe Quinn with a response.  Appearance of impropriety exists.  That
isn't controversial.  Facts are facts.  I don't care about your boats
(although I always wanted to sail, I even founded a sailing club at my
college but couldn't get boats until after I graduated so I never sailed).

I also don't care if you take offense to the term SJW.  That's what they
were called during Occupy Wall St, which I was deeply involved in, and
back then it wasn't an insult.  It isn't an insult now, I don't care
what you think.

Asking what reliable sources call gamergate a hashtag is absurd.  It is
objectively a hashtag.  The thing at the end of this sentence is a
period.  The sky is blue and the grass is green.  These are not
controversial statements.  The argument against #gamergate being a
hashtag is patently ridiculous.

Then... and this really made my blood boil:

"As a side matter, I think you are mistaken actually. I've seen vibrant
discussions at reddit in which people DO disagree with Sarkeesian. And
no one is getting banned for that."

Fuck you.  I was a redditor until they banned all discussion of this
situation on the major subreddits.  I wasn't banned there because I will
not post to a forum that engages in this kind of censorship since I was
banned from the SA forums years ago for questioning Sarkeesian's claim
that games define our reality.  I wasn't disrespectful, I wasn't
trolling.  I was banned for disagreeing. This happens in almost all
gaming forums.  Where we decide to migrate to when we leave has more to
do with where people are and less to do with what can be discussed.
That is how we ended up on Twitter (I hate twitter... did I already say
that?  I really, really hate twitter, LOL).

So fuck you, my experiences happened and I don't need to justify them to
you.

You want to know about another incident that happened yesterday
morning?  I was posting on a conversation thread for a game dev friend.
Everybody in the thread but me is a professional game dev. They spent
all morning hammering me with accusations of harassment and rape.  They
did not claim I was harassing or raping them or I would have left.  They
accused me of it in general, because I told them that I am a gamer.
When I finally did stop begging them to engage in meaningful
conversation and stop with the accusations, they went insane.  The head
of the IGDA came in and ordered everybody to stop engaging with me.  Not
a single person came forward and apologized for lying about me.  Not a
single one of them stuck up for me.  They all just want to be aggressive
towards me, accuse me of being a sexual predator and make me take it,
all because I'm a gamer.

That is what I'm dealing with.  This is naked aggression against
customers from the games industry.  If you think our problems are all in
our heads you're an idiot.  They hate you too.

I'm not even going to address the rest of the double speak in your
message because my time could be spent more valuable sending emails to
advertisers and talking to fellow gamergaters about how to fix this
problem.  I am going to tell everybody to let the gamergate and Zoe
Quinn and related articles go to hell.  I am going to push for them to
let you and your friends make the articles as extreme as possible,
because Wikipedia is a dangerous place.  The more extreme the article is
the less people will trust it.  You won't follow your own rules or use
any kind of objectivity regarding our issues.  If I feel like it I will
show these messages around publicly to make that argument, because you
acted in bad faith.

~The Leader of GamerGate