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The return of Gamergate is smaller and sadder
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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The media focusing on these fringe groups lends legitimacy to them and puts a spotlight on them, which in turn draws people on their side but unaware of them, to them.
By attacking it when your attacks can't actually harm the group per se, all you're really doing is giving it visibility. No one's saying it's creating racists/ bigots, but it is giving them a more powerful platform, since they're no longer just a bunch of bigoted individuals, but are now Gamergate(tm), whose dumb ideas the media will publish articles about.
No one writes articles about stupid crap that people say on /b/ as individuals, but Gamergate, Q-Anon, Pizzagate, MAPs, etc all have had many tens if not hundreds of articles written about them, and they're all just 4-chan campaigns.
I mean the flip side of this is that by doing nothing you're letting them write the narrative. I feel like whatever this mess is, it's starting to grow, so a more legitimate source calling it what it is can be helpful
I'm not sure that's the danger you think it is, or that arguing against them is a panacea.
Arguing with them or loudly pointing at them makes a spectacle, bringing people to the issue on both sides. Just an argument isn't super likely to bring people around if they've already made up their minds, but it will certainly organize the opposition.
In the mean time, unless you're actually able to sway the thing you're arguing over, there's now just a big visible and time consuming turf war going on over things that nobody in the discussion has any ability to change, because they all pertain to the opinions of others.
Compare this with disengaging. Suddenly the loud opinion has nothing to reverberate off of. It's alone, yelling into a void that doesn't care. It's not even a blip.
The right knows this, which is why they DARVO. We need to learn this, but to use it honestly instead of using it to become better manipulators. Disengaging doesn't just prevent the triggering of massive opposition organization, it saves energy for where it can actually be useful. Then you can just go do the thing without making a spectacle of people with shitty opinions who otherwise wouldn't even matter to the progress being made.
Stop giving them something to fight about day in and day out and they'll get bored and go back to looking at big trucks instead of paying attention to politics.
These Right wing campaigns don't have a platform on which to advance a narrative. 4-chan and Truth Social and 8-chan and Parlor/Gab/whatever aren't frequented by most 'normal' folks, and the only reason these campaigns reached mass audience is because news media puffs them up for clicks.
There are many more hundreds of right-wing troll/ hate campaigns that go nowhere, because they never manage to catch the attention of the media.