Read on Twitter
gamergate made the blueprint for radicalizing some kinds of nerds and created a few reactionary celebrities and also they did a really good job of testing what would be permissable on social media. they didn't create white supremacy or militias
they have some responsibility for qanon certainly but you can't blame all this shit on them
it's easy to draw a line between them if you were involved in anti-gamergate shit because it feels similar to know something really bad is going on and that everyone's ignoring it but it's not really a straight link so much as that both took advantage of the same resentments
a lot of people are reading this as "yes, this WAS gamergate" not "it is a lot more complicated than that"
gamergate did show how hard platforms will work to avoid banning bigots and how much they'll avoid doing anything about the chilling effect that has on speech, which is useful for recruiting these kind of people
but the reason it looks the *same* is because of a combination of trauma from being gaslighted/ignored being familiar and a failure to understand the deep roots of white supremacy in this country. it's always been there it's just more mask off now
i think the tea party is a lot more responsible for this than gamergate, this is very tea party 2.0
also if it hadn't been gamergate it would have been something else. the weird reactionary mob that metastasized into gg had been around for a long time, it basically happened in movement atheism right before it happened in gamergate
what did happen with gamergate is we wound up with a bunch of movement celebrity figures who failed to keep up a useful fight against online hate so there was not a useful popular movement to act as a bulwark against the online aspects of the trump movement
