You may have already heard the story of Canadian journalist and GamerGate opponent Veerender Jubbal, misidentified in the media as one of the Paris terrorists after trolls took a bathroom selfie of his, photoshopped to make it look as though he was wearing a suicide bomber vest and holding a Koran, and spread it around labeled as a photo posted by one of the Paris suicide bombers shortly before Friday’s deadly attacks.
The photoshopped pic of Jubbal, a Sikh, was reported as authentic by major media outlets in Italy and Spain; one newspaper put Jubbal’s face on its cover as one of the Paris terrorists.
While the photo has been debunked now by more media outlets than originally reported it as real, this is the kind of smear that never really goes away; Jubbal will forever be tarnished by his imaginary connection to a terrible act of mass murder.
GamerGaters at first denied they had anything to do with the smear job — the standard GG response whenever one of their own does something utterly appalling — but Vice has now conclusively proven that the people responsible for creating and spreading around the photoshopped selfie were longtime GamerGaters.
Initially, even as GamerGaters were denying any connection to the photoshopped pic, more than a few of them were saying that Jubbal deserved the smear because of his criticisms of the alleged “ethics” movement; others, as Vice notes, concocted and spread fake Tweets allegedly from Jubbal to cement the false notion that he was a terrorist.
The GamerGate panderers over at Breitbart added fuel to the fire with a sneering “report” on the smear that was clearly designed to embarrass Jubbal further. “[A] large majority of the internet has found the situation hilarious,” regular BreitbartTech contributor Charlie Nash wrote,
especially due to the irony of Jubbal’s previous comments that have painted entire innocent communities as terrorists and hate-mongers.
In other words, he was asking for it. And it gets worse:
Luckily for Jubbal, there are many women that love serial killers and the foulest dregs of society serving life sentences, so an online reputation as a suicide bomber should be more than enough to earn him the female company that so far has eluded him.
The whole shameful affair tells us a lot about what GamerGate has become more than a year into its sordid existence.
Let’s start off by looking at what Vice uncovered.
First, the doctored photo of Jubbal-as-terrorist was whipped up by someone called @turd_wartsniff back in August. This lovely fellow, Vice writer Rich Stanton reveals,
is also responsible for a series of images, Photoshopped and otherwise, attacking Gamergate opponents. Among this individual’s favourite targets are Arthur Chu, Anita Sarkeesian and Zoë Quinn – all of whom have spoken out against Gamergate harassment. The account also posted images containing the Gamergate logo, a purple and green “GG” badge, and the Gamergate cartoon character Vivian James.
After the Paris attacks, a colleague of the photoshopper who goes by the name of blacktric reposted it, claiming that Jubbal was one of the terrorists. As Stanton notes,
Gamergate members have insisted that blacktric has no association with the group, but that is contradicted by his posting on the GG subreddit KIA*, jolly back-and-forths with Gamergate’s “based lawyer” Mike Cernovich, and his history of commenting on stories about the group. Astonishingly, amongst the evidence offered by Gamergate that blacktric has no association with them is a tweet where he refers to GG as “us”.
Short of a stamp from a Notary Public confirming the smear job as an official GamerGate production, this is about as conclusive as it gets.
After Vice posted its story, one of the mods on Reddit’s KotokuInAction subreddit, one of GamerGate’s main online hubs, deleted blacktric’s KIA comment in what seems to have been a crude attempt at a cover-up.
The mod later explained that he deleted the comment “to fuck with the [Vice] author ‘smoking gun’, meh.”
Apparently destroying evidence in an attempt to exonerate the guilty is … ethics?
Vice’s Stanton suggests that maybe, just maybe, GamerGate’s
linking an innocent man with one of the most despicable terror attacks on European soil, within hours of it happening, will be what brings Gamergate to an end.
I’m not quite so hopeful. While the smearing of Jubbal is, admittedly, a new low for GamerGate, the phony “ethics” movement has been morally and ethically bankrupt from the start.
But it will likely drag on as a sort of roving harassment squad for some time, bolstered by its enablers at Breitbart, on YouTube, and within the American Enterprise Institute, even as more and more GamerGaters give up even the pretense of giving a shit about media ethics or even basic human decency.
In other words, expect more of this crap. And more denials.
EDIT: Added a quote from the KIA mod, which I found linked to on GamerGhazi.
“For those of you unaware of this act of truly unethical behavior in 2007 Jeff Gerstmann ,a reviewer at gamespot gave the game “Kain & Lynch: Dead Men” a ‘fair’ rating . This apparently wasn’t good enough for the games publisher Eidos interactive who pulled all their advertising from the site. Shortly after Jeff was fired for being untrustworthy and his review replaced with one with a better score at which point Eidos resumed adverting.”
Worse, GamerGate actively pressures advertisers to influence content. Look up “Operation Bayonetta 2” for a salient example: GG was complaining about the lowest-scored review of the game (courtesy of Polygon) because it had all that social-justice-warriory stuff as arguments, and urging Gaters to report the review to Nintendo.
About the Jubbal affair: Gater troll rhetoric now involves saying “see, we’re showing you the media are unethical by not doing their homework”. Well, I’m not excusing the media who reproduced the doctored photo at face value; but you can’t claim to occupy the moral high ground when you’re the ones to blame for creating the hoax to begin with. (Or, as I pointed out elsewhere, it’s like a serial killer blaming the cops for the lack of public safety.) So yeah, it’s not going to bring GG down, since they’re also denying he was a member of their group. Everybody’s invited, but nobody’s accountable.
So yeah. I guess your best bet is that now that GG has fucked around with the investigation of a terrorist plot, law enforcement and especially the intelligence community will start paying attention to GamerGate and the people in it.
It still kills me that that alleged review never even existed.
Hey, the Kane & Lynch thing was different. Eidos are part of the Games Industry and so loyal gamers need to defend them. Besides, the game was edgy and violent, which means Gerstmann must have been some SJW objecting to its manliness and frozen peaches. His review was bias and unobjective. Firing him was the right thing to do.
/s
You know I bet if we asked them Gators would say they did start fighting for ethics after gamespot but they were ignored by the media and it wasn’t until the lies about them harassing people started getting made up by evil SJW
(continued from last post since we can’t edit)
That people started to heard about them and their great cause.
That’s basically what they are at this point. The ones who just don’t spend all their time posting hyperbole at their hangouts, anyway.
@Xanthë
Re: checking suspicious commenter:
Over blown and pandering to fantasises of being an amorphous untouchable hive,
They are not untouchable. The people who are supposed to investigate this shit simply didn’t do their jobs and gave the ringlingers time to hide their tracks.
Besides Mr. Baldwin, Milo should be at the top of the investigation list with his “I was mailed threats…oops I threw it away before it could be forensically examined” schtick. I guarantee logs of their chat, emails, and social media would would have been instrumental in nailing all the GG ringleaders. If the FBI had taken it seriously at the time.
Same for the shooting threat were Anita was speaking at. It’s is ridiculous how this has spiraled out of control.
Basically GG is exploiting flaws and blindspots in social media and law enforcement. Competent law enforcement professionals would recognize this and work to close those gaps, not wringing their hands whining(nothing more pathetic than fed whining), “What can we do?”
It isn’t just GG. After the Sandy Hook shootings, Sandy Hook “Truthers” started stalking and harassing survivors and some idiot Fed said something similar in an interview, “I’m not sure what we can do.”
I don’t know… YOUR JOB?
I seriously pondering to hold some kind of speech about Gamergate and their deluxe edition bullshit. I’ve done it once, should probably do it again.
Rant continued:
Put it another way: If a close family member of a federal agent, or the agent themselves was targeted the way Antita had, GG would have been dead in weeks and people would be behind bars.
/RANT
bvh — hell, at the least witness protection would be offered, though I guess that’s harder to do when your face has been plastered across the web. Not really feasible for larger groups (like the Sandy Hook parents who were targeted), and does mean a complete change in identity, but that they just went “nope, nothing we can do” is a bit… you guys do know what your jobs are right?
Like, stalking, harassment, and making threats are all already illegal. These are not some grey area where laws don’t exist yet, these are laws that are enforced every damned day. As for Sandy Hook, I grew up in CT and moved back here a few years ago, and to anyone thinking “not like restraining orders are enforced” violating one is its own defined crime here. There is absolutely no fucking reason these people can’t be treated the way they would be if they weren’t politically motivated — arresting someone for death threats is not a fucking violation of free speech just because the cause of the threat is a belief and not a personal grudge.
Huh? I don’t see why there would be ringleaders, I thought the doxxed information was repeatedly posted in 8chan and the assholes there had at it. Outside of the WTF syringe mailing stuff, Milo is involved by being a huge asshole on Twitter, a grotesque panderer and an ethically-stunted impossibly bad journalist.
I don’t doubt that law enforcement needs to learn how to investigate online threats and Twitter executives should take a good hard look at how they created the shithole where this happens. That said I don’t think you can approach GG as an organization because there’s no structured group or leadership that works together, raises money or has assets. I have to think it’s a lot easier to go after open carry extremist groups that harass gun control activists and I don’t even know if that happens, though it for sure fucking should.
Baloney.
A more polite was of saying this is, while there is no formal legal entity, there ARE a small group of people who co-ordinated to start it and are invested in keeping it going and use their resources to that goal. All this is traceable. A prompt investigation would have caught all that in a few weeks or less, at the time. Now of course is a clusterfuck of noise.
—
I just deleted a paragraph where I explain how one aspect of such an investigation can work. Because who knows, maybe GG is so arrogant they haven’t covered their tracks completely and I’m not giving them tips.
Every organized group endeavour starts out with ringleader(s). And it’s very beneficial to those people to push the idea they don’t exist.
^^
*organized group endeavour like GG
brooked — I’m related to people who would probably do that if they were a tad bit stupider (and thus thought this was a good idea) or less lazy, but would certainly moan loudly if the open carry fans were being arrested by the horrible liberal government. So I don’t think it happens, but I’ve not actually researched it or anything.
This is almost certain. It would have been a side point in my reply to the ridiculous comment by ijy2008, but:
The #Gamergater harassers are united by a wonderful technological device allowing people all over the world with horrible shared views and petty hatreds, to get in touch with one another, socialise in marked-out spaces, and organise themselves to encourage and egg one another along in their hatreds. We have a fairly good idea where they congregate to do this; it’s hardly secret. These groups, once they get rolling, can be more-or-less self-perpetuating by continually finding new people or new situations to vent their hatreds on – one such group of my acquaintance formed in response to an Internet clusterfuck four and a bit years ago and it is still fulminating away and generating toxicity, with no end in sight. They’re pathetic, disgusting abusers, and I don’t think about them often since the social media circles I’m in do a pretty effective job of blocking them out and denying them a platform, but I guarantee many of those same assholes will still be being assholes five years from now. That is the future for #Gamergate – and it’s patently obvious that both the legal system and law enforcement are still waaaaaaay behind in taking any of it seriously. They should be.
/RANT
Reckon Occam’s Razor favors this argument if nothing else.
Cassie Jaye needs to read this post so she can understand what MRAs are all about. THEY ARE NOT GOOD PEOPLE as she has fooled herself into believing.
I wish Mr. Jubbal could push back legally and sue those who smeared him. This malicious photo shopping campaign could have resulted in violence against him along with the possible permanent damage to his reputation.
This could be about more than a lawsuit. Someone is creating false evidence and introducing it into the investigation of a terrorist event. No matter how fake this looks, the authorities are going to have spend precious time and resources checking it out. There’s got to be some way that this is worth a little jail time. No more than a year or two but still.
I’d have to know more than I do right now to condemn the media for posting a photo of an alleged terrorist while the bodies are still warm, and some of the perps are still at large. This is something that really could have been in the public’s interest to know. I’m sure that some outlets handled it better than others, but there really is no right way to handle this.
“Luckily for Jubbal, there are many women that love serial killers and the foulest dregs of society serving life sentences…”
I didn’t know Vox Day was a woman.
It would’ve taken about 5 minutes to notice that the photoshopping is obvious and the turban is Sikh. Not to mention that they could’ve spent about a minute fact checking. Even just Googling his name. What more do you have to know to understand that it’s shitty journalism and highly condemnable?
Yes there is. The news outlets could have done the most basic fact checking before publishing. These kind of statements are why you’re regarded as a troll.
@Felix
Putting aside my earlier snark for a moment… The fact that the media is far too racist to tell the difference between a Sikh and a Muslim or an Indian guy and a Middle Eastern guy, far too lazy to care about journalistic ethics – actual journalistic ethics, not Ethics In Journalism™ – and far too stupid to notice the giant dildo taking up a quarter of the picture is not a mitigating factor. It’s a damning factor. It makes it worse, not better.
For the love of Christ, right after a major disaster is when it’s most important to fact-check.
So the Goober response is the usual “it’s a leaderless movement, it was someone trying to frame us.”
This is literally the response to *everything* that GG does. I’ve been under pretty constant shelling on le twitter since the MRAssholes took this sad boy hate mob over in October of last year, as have a lot of other women, queers, and PoCs in gaming. The defense is always the same thing, because that’s their only defense, literally “it wasn’t GamerGate because someone was trying to frame us/it’s leaderless/the illuminati.”
That’s all. And yet they accuse anyone who won’t knuckle under to their MRAssholery of being the nefarious, fictious “anti-GamerGate”, or an “aGG”, their term for decent human beings who aren’t, yanno, the Goobers shitting all over gaming, gamers, women, minorities, etc. for sport.
So they’re leaderless and always innocent. I am responsible for something some d-bag said 10 years ago that he disavows. Oh, and tonight I found out that I, personally, am “censoring” video games.
You know, from an egg and then suspiciously an identical tweet from a sockpuppet. Who, incidentally, started blaming my menstrual cycle (joke’s on you, my dear) when I so horribly dared her to show proof I favored censoring games.
Which, for the record, I’m against. I got swept up in this MRAKKK turdnado last year for the sin of being a woman on the internet (until the Esmay types find out I’m trans, when they then call me a “self-loathing man”, as Dean once so elegantly put it) who talks occasionally about gaming. You know, lol here’s a picture of my warcrack mog. Not, yanno, gaming 25/8. I never have thought the government should have power to modify the content of games and *almost no person who stands against GynoGripe’s hate has even suggested that*.
But there they are, flinging whatever poo they can, because why bother with facts, truth, and logic, when you can appeal to poorly defined vague fear? That’s all GooberGrape is: merchants of fear.
Merchants of fear who take orders in their “leaderless movement” from the same MRAssholes like Barnes, Esmay, and Price who were, you know, mocking gamers 2-3 years ago. I guess given that these three horsemen of the douchepocalypse have gotten to critical mass on mocking women, they’re deploying part two and going after people of color. Good old KKKMRAs, you’re so predictable.
It’s just unfortunate that like cowards they deny responsibility, cover the evidence, and don’t own up to what their hate mob is really about. Trying to play their misogyny, transmisogyny, ableism, racism, etc. coy only makes GGMRAs look worse.
According to this more recent article – Vice selectively commented on the tweet. My interpretation of the tweet suggests a non-gamergate association but take it as you will.
The Tweet in question: “@oliverbcampbell I don’t want gamergate heard because I think it’s mostly comprised of retarded zealots like you who give us a bad name.”
http://web.archive.org/web/20151027220307/https:/twitter.com/bl4ptrep/status/659035647479406592
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/11/25/when_trolls_attack__gamergate_is_scapegoated_128844.html