Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

I have things to do!”

the colloquial ‘Barbra Streisand effect’—the more effort you put into minimizing the visibility of something on the internet, the more visible it becomes.”

Changing laws takes years, which is basically forever in internet time—but improving tech company policies can be done quickly if you persuade the policymakers. Refining Terms of Service and their enforcement seemed like our best chance at preventing situations like mine from happening to other people.

My life became a monotonous hum of right-click-save-as, right-click-save-as.

Prank calls have been around forever

Many industry giants with all the legal resources and funding in the world were more afraid of GamerGate than two terrified people who couldn’t go home anymore.

As far as I know, no one has never apologized to Leigh.

“We take feedback from customers very seriously, especially as it relates to relevant content and ad placements,” an Intel spokesman told a reporter as the company pulled funding from a major site that catered to its actual customers. It turned out to be a costly error—the company later had to issue an apology for being used in such a way and pledge $300 million toward addressing diversity issues in tech.

Ashley Payne, a teacher from Georgia, was forced to resign over a picture of her on vacation, holding a beer, that she had uploaded on her private Facebook account. Timothy DeLaGhetto was fired from his California Pizza Kitchen job for complaining on Twitter that the uniform was unflattering. These kinds of social media firings have become so common that the National Labor Relations Board started weighing in on their legality in 2010.

and it can be easy for someone to simply parse the situation as “This employee is causing us trouble.”