It is not a complicated situation, from the start its been clear that gamergate is solely a vehicle for organised harassment (primarily of women). There isnt any moral quandry or naunced position about it, its just harassment.
So there is an interesting question. In a polarized situation where there are two sides presenting themselves as victims of the other... how could show one side is ACTUALLY right and one is wrong (assuming reasonable evidence) without sounding partisan?
Wouldn't anything that bolstered one side and defamed the other look very partisan? Wouldn't stronger evidence look MORE partisan?
Would you have to slowly dish out the evidence over time to turn the tide without setting off people's 'partisan hack' sensors in any single discussion?
Could you evidence end up making things MORE partisan and doing the opposite of what you intend?
No one's stopping you from posting evidence and discussing it, of course. In a debate with sides this polarized, you will sound partisan whenever you use any kind of evidence.
I try fairly hard to combat that fact when I present evidence, although I honestly don't know all the facts and thus can't represent them all fairly. But then again, that's why I participate in discussions online. To learn.
I meant my comment in the abstract, outside of this issue. I seem to remember On The Media (or something else) discussing something like this. I think there was a study that at a certain point any evidence tends to reinforce people in their position even if it's backwards (i.e. your proof I'm wrong convinces me I'm right).
It's not like we haven't seen a number of topics get wedged in this permanent 'stuck' state even when we have objective proof. They become politicized and truth no longer works on the discussion.
Umm... That report does not say what you think it says.
Whoever did that excerpt was either utterly useless at statistics (and reading comprehension), or was trying to twist the results to try to prove a point.
The report was about harassment on Twitter in general, not GG. They were trying to get a very broad sample from all over Twitter, covering any abuse or harassment that was reported to them.
Since the whole GG mess was ongoing at the time of the research, the researchers decided to use the ggautoblocker list to see how much overlap their was between their sample, and people connected to GG, to find out how much it affected their results.
The result is that there was a fair bit of overlap - about 12% of the people in their sample were also on the ggautoblocker list. Most of the harassment they found was not related to GG.
Their finding: "Reports to WAM! constitute a much wider range of harassment than the GamerGate controversy alone".
That's not what the excerpt you posted claims at all. It interprets that as "only 65 out of 9,844 accounts on the ggautoblocker list engaged in harassment". Which is bunk - the study found nothing at all about the remaining 9,779 accounts on that list. Only that those 65 accounts were in both sample sets.
Here's another way to look at it. The 65 harassers who were also on the ggautoblocker list were responsible for 12% of the harassment on Twitter that these researchers found. So they obviously only noticed 0.6% of GamerGate. Therefore, if they'd found all of the GG-associated harassment and abuse, they'd end up with about with 18 times more harassment reports, of which 95% would have been associated with GamerGate.
That analysis is also complete garbage, but it's just as sound as the analysis in that excerpt you posted, and based on exactly the same faulty reasoning.
Many of the accounts on the ggautoblocker list are either bots, or duplicate accounts created specifically for the purpose of harassing people and discarded when they are no longer useful.
No problem. Those excerpts were basically designed to be misleading, for the purpose of pushing an agenda (the "GG totally doesn't harass women, you [insert gendered insult towards women here]" angle).
The basic tactic is to try to sound reasonable, to mask the seething rage and hostility that lies beneath.
