Zoe Quinn was right

SPEAKER_00: It's the latest development in what has become known as Gamergate, an online culture war.

Tig: Hello and welcome to another episode of Neutral Good. I'm your host, Tig. The whole first season of Neutral Good is about hashtag Gamergate, so if you haven't gone back and listened to the earlier episodes, I highly recommend them. In the previous episode, we caught up with Anita Sarkeesian and learned about her work with Feminist Frequency since the Gamergate era. Now, unfortunately, Feminist Frequency has shut down in recent years, but that doesn't take away from the fine work they've done. There are now so many folks producing videos that further the spirit of what Feminist Frequency accomplished, and hopefully there will continue to be many more. That's a noticeable impact on the game's media landscape. I'll link to some of those creators in the show notes. In this episode, we'll catch up with Zoe Quinn in a similar fashion, going over their accomplishments post-Gamergate. And just a quick note, season one of Neutral Good wraps up after 10 episodes and we are nearing that finish line. If you want your opinion to help shape the future of Neutral Good, please leave me a voicemail at www.neutralgoodpodcast.com slash voicemail. And I may even feature you in an episode. All right. With that out of the way, let's get into it. I'll recap here a bit, but if you'd like to know more about Zoe and the full extent of the harassment and hatred directed at them, please listen to episode three of this podcast. Not only do I feature some clips from interviews with Zoe, but I've included links to the full interviews in the show notes of that episode. So it's a good pivot point for learning more. Zoe Quinn is an indie game developer in their 30s who fell under attack from angry gamers and 4chan users in late 2014 thanks to a jilted ex-boyfriend shopping a salacious blog post about their relationship around various forums until he found an audience then supported him. In that blog post he alluded to Quinn and games journalist Nathan Grayson having an improper relationship that called into question the ethics of the outlet employing Nathan Kotaku. Except, well, it didn't happen that way. Oh, and he later corrected those parts, confirming there was actually no conflict of interest. And yet, the pro-Gamergate videos that exist to this day omit that fact entirely. Why? Well, Gamergaters had already set their sights on Zoe Quinn being the next Anita Sarkeesian, claiming both would ruin video games forever. Facts didn't really matter anymore. For the full story, again, check out episode three of Neutral Good in your favorite podcast app or at www.neutralgoodpodcast.com. In January of 2015, in response to the harassment Zoe had experienced and witnessed, they and their partner Alex Lifshitz formed the Crash Override Network. Crash Override was an attempt to do something about the immediate crisis of being targeted on the internet like Zoe, like Anita Sarkeesian, like Brianna Wu, like Lee Alexander, like Phil Fish, and these are just a few of the folks whose lives had been permanently altered by Gamergate. Crash Override aims to provide victims with a list of actions they can do in the moment to help secure themselves against ongoing and future attacks, offers them psychological first aid, and most importantly, a support network made up of individuals who can understand and appreciate the severity and complexity of online harassment. Let's just hear Zoe explain it.

Zoe Quinn: I started a grassroots organization after seven months of this, during which I'd been unable to go home. There were people outside of my house, like, waiting for me. And you kind of have to play this Schrodinger's Nazi thing. It's like, are they just some edgy Hot Topic asshole, or are they Elliot Rodger because they sound the same online? I was tired of watching… I'm a game designer, I think in systems, and so the systemic failure was so obvious to me and became so predictable that even early on when other people were becoming targeted, we're like, we know what's going to happen. I found their IRC channels that they were coordinating a lot of the attacks in because I was a shitty channel when I was younger too. I know what all of this feels like, where all of this comes from. I was super into hacktivism. I was one of those assholes that was like, yeah, let's get Scientology when I was a teenager. So it's like, I know that the illegal shit happens in IRC. So I sat there and I monitored and I recorded it for weeks. And I got in front of the next targets every time I could and warned them in advance. You should lock down this, this, and this. They're probably gonna do that next. Don't do this because that's a way that they got my dad's phone number. Let's fix you up. And this turned into, formalizing that to help more people other than people who are just targeted for a loose association of being suspected of maybe being in a room with me once became crash override. And it's like, okay, how do we build the solution or a solution? Because there's no one. We would figure out what this person's end goal was and then work backwards for how we can achieve this. and every time we found ourselves having the same conversations over and over with people affected, we would try to, again, do that automation thing, write a guide, write, and I'd use the same tools that I used to make games to make an interactive checklist of like locking down, because it's like so, so many people don't understand that when you're targeted, it's so much work, like even just bagging and tagging if you wanna do that, or filling out reports, it's like work. And making that easier for people to do was like super important and we found better success rates if it was like here are small things that you can do in a row. Here's a number that goes up when you do it because our brains like that. And it's all here and you don't have to talk to another person when you're probably freaked out and don't want to talk to anybody anymore. So someone would come to us and say, this is happening to me here. I'm like, okay, have you filled out a report? Do you want action to be taken? And if they said yes, it's like, okay, I'm gonna go try to hustle out a contact because while the institutions were super broken, there were still people that wanted to do the right thing working within them. And anytime it could get movement because there was someone, a working person in a broken system that could get stuff done, that did so much to actually help people get the sort of results that they needed.

Tig: And here's the description from the Crash Override Network website. Crash Override is a crisis helpline, advocacy group and resource center for people who are experiencing online abuse. We are a network of experts and survivors who work directly with victims, tech companies, lawmakers, media, security experts and law enforcement to educate and provide direct assistance working to eliminate the causes of online abuse. This obviously covers a lot, but the About Us page tries to make things a little easier to understand. It says, we take a multi-pronged approach that involves working with individuals, tech partners, law enforcement agencies, and legislatures. With each one of these groups, our network currently specializes in preventing and combating the following issues. Non-consensual intimate images, sometimes known as revenge porn, hacking and online security, stalking and surveillance, doxing, circulation of private information, swatting, endangering people by using false police reports, impersonation, threats, harassment, mob-based harassment, and online hate groups. Crash Override Network is a purely defensive, opt-in organization. We use proven and humane methods to combat online abuse, putting our clients' needs, privacy, and consent above all else. So to learn more about the Crash Override Network, please visit their website at www.crashoverridenetwork.com. Link in the show notes. In September of 2015, Zoe and Anita Sarkeesian were both invited to speak at the United Nations about online harassment. I was actually thoroughly impressed with both of their speeches. But here's an excerpt from Zoe's that stood out to me in particular.

Zoe Quinn: We need people to actually enforce their own terms of service and shut down bad actors, bad faith websites. There are numerous places that host a non-consensual pornography and make a profit off of this. There are individuals on services like YouTube that have made a living off of abusing people like Anita and I, who monetize this, who see the mobs, who aren't anonymous, who raise their funds this way to continue attacking, stalking, and harassing us because it's a cottage industry at this point. And all of these things need to be taken into account and might be difficult to understand from the outside. So if there's one thing, one takeaway from all that I can push for is please involve people who are in tech doing this work already in every step of the way. It requires all of our like so many different prongs. The three pronged approach is absolutely correct. And it just involving tech literacy at every level is super important to make sure we don't move in a wrong direction and with the best intentions at heart.

Tig: I'm recording this episode in March of 2024. And from where I sit, I count five different YouTube channels who've made videos about Zoe Quinn in the past eight months and have garnered at least 20,000 views, with the majority getting over 100,000 views. I've done a lot of YouTube digging in order to grab clips for this podcast. And every time I find an interview with Zoe, the comments are always 90 percent vitriol and they like rarely address anything in the video. If you've listened to episodes 2 or 3, then you'd know that most of the comments are literally just slurs. On one hand, Zoe lives rent-free in these people's heads. On the other hand, these YouTubers are profiting from lies and misinformation that continues to direct hate towards Zoe to this very day, without consequences. For recent examples of this lopsided enforcement of policy, look to YouTube censorship of documentary videos about specific channels engaging in COVID misinformation. Imagine trying to raise alarms about channels profiting off medical misinformation only to have your content be the one labeled dangerous and inappropriate for the platform. I also discovered in my research that disgraced ex-Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos did a piece on Zoe and Anita's UN visit titled, The UN Wants to Censor the Entire Internet to Save Feminists' Feelings. And as you can imagine from the title, it had a pretty specific angle to it. To hear more about what Milo was up to these days, not writing for Breitbart, let me tell you, check out episode 6 where I covered exactly how Milo grifted Gamergate and how that worked out for him. In 2017, Zoe released a book aptly named Crash Override. In it, Zoe gives us a first-hand glimpse into the life of someone thrust into a spotlight they never asked for, alternating between personal accounts of harrowing experiences and expansive advice on how one might take action to prevent these things happening to others. Here's Zoe talking about Crash Override.

Zoe Quinn: Do I talk about the time that a First Amendment attorney turned Jew salesman who thinks his semen is literally magic spent five figures on a private detective to follow me and my boyfriend at the time? Or do I talk about the time that the Disturbs lead singer David Draymond ruined my breakfast? All of these things sound ridiculous when I say it out loud like that, but then again, how many people have a breakup so bad the UN has to get involved and it helps usher in fascism? Regardless, that's not what this book is though. I decided to write this book Partially after loudly shit posting on Twitter enough that someone noticed it was like no you should actually write that book though but mainly because you know, I'm still an engineer at heart and When I have to do something over and over and over I'm like, can I automate this? I'll be better Can I get a robot to do this for me? So, it seemed easier for me to just put it all in dead tree format, because if nothing else, it became so apparent to me that what happened to me was not at all uncommon. With what happened to me getting so big and loud, all these other people came to me and were like, oh, I feel like you're the only person who understands what happened to me. And I started to notice there were a lot of commonalities. You know, because I'm a game designer, I think in systems, games are essentially systems, right? So it's like, okay, what can we do to sort of fill in those gaps? How can we form a community-led effort that doesn't have to rely on, like, slower-to-change institutions that are, like, bogged down with doing a million different things, that can focus on centering the needs of the person attacked instead of, like, trying to propose one-size-fits-all solution and really, like, give them some kind of control over the solution instead of just this thing that's been taken for granted. Did you find successful approaches that we should know about? The biggest thing is to get savvy and educated about online culture, about things like digital privacy and security. And there's a very steep learning curve if it's your total entry point. But because the internet's become so widely adopted, there's more and more tools to help you kind of ease into it. And just that basic tech literacy can do so much to help people, especially if it's a parent trying to help their child who's under attack. You got to learn. Exactly. Because then you can give them better advice on what might actually work instead of just saying, oh, go offline. When a lot of kids, you know, myself included, my support network is online and being cut off from that would actually hurt more than help. Right.

Tig: If you'd like to pick up a copy of Crash Override, I'll include a link in the show notes and it's available on Amazon, Audible, etc. But if you have a local bookstore, see if they can order a copy for you. It's not like Amazon needs your support to exist. Fast forward to now. It's 2024. And aside from those YouTube videos I mentioned earlier that were specifically targeting Zoe, they haven't really been in the limelight for a few years. They've sure been busy, though. According to Zoe's social media profiles, they're a senior narrative designer at an unnamed game studio and I doubt we'll ever find out which studio, nor do I think that information should ever be made public, considering this is the second episode of the podcast I've had to make about the suffering Zoe's experienced at the hands of their obsessed harassers. And Zoe's also now writing comics. And since those comics are being featured by DC, comics like Goddess Mode, Fearless, The Infected, Deathbringer, and even an issue of the Addams Family, here come the trolls making videos about how Zoe's now, quote, ruining another industry. So while I am curious to see where Zoe landed, I'm glad they're able to have some privacy after everything that's happened. If you'd like to know more about Zoe's creative works and comics like Goddess Mode, visit their website at www.unburntwitch.com. And I'll leave a link in the show notes. Thanks for listening to another episode of Neutral Good. I'm your host, Tig. Transcripts, show notes and more can be found on the website at www.neutralgoodpodcast.com. Season one of Neutral Good is wrapping up after 10 episodes and I'm thinking of changing up the format for season two. Drop me a voicemail at www.neutralgoodpodcast.com slash voicemail and I might even feature you on the show.