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.
Blockquote redo.
FFS, please stop. You don’t need to be mentally ill to be a wrong-headed conspiracy theorist, you just have to be a poor thinker.
This particular nightmare is a result of asshole LULZ trolling taken to the extreme, going well beyond terrible heartless harassment into a grotesquely reckless act that has without a doubt put someone’s life at risk and has to really illegal in all sorts of ways.
I can actually see the #GGers shrinking into a hard core of internet harassers as ljy2008 said, who are with us for years to come (indeed, to an extent that may already have happened.) I don’t think they’ll ever move on to real life violence, certainly not when it requires them to drop the sock puppets and risk some consequences. It’s more likely that Sarkeesian was right and that this, to them, is a video game.
However, I can also see some good coming of this. Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been saying for years that anonymous harassment of women online is one of the biggest problems that the internet faces, and for years people have been ignoring him in the rush to roll out ever more grandiose technology. That’s no longer the case.
If the #GGers shrink down to the level where they continue to remind companies that they need to protect their users, whilst not being a severe enough threat to do more than this type of chickenshit harassment, then it might result in a better world in the long run. I hope.
If nothing else, it means that some good may have come of this awful experience that Jubbal went through.
This would be the time for David to check ljy2008 for being a false-flagger, on account of such half-baked conspiracy theorising. There’s a perfectly adequate explanation for Gamergate’s actions: they’re assholes. They are not mentally ill. They don’t have to be to have little or no regard for their targets of hatred or contempt, or to think those people deserve what abuse and harassment they get; again it’s a quite disturbingly normal social habit of mind found all around the world that lumps people into groups of those we like (‘us’) and those we don’t (‘them’). GG doesn’t scare me in the slightest (mainly because it’s so pathetically transparent and incompetent); what concerns me are their illegal real world attempts to leverage police forces (by SWATting people, for example) or making alliances with real terrorist hate groups (Stormfront) for the LULZ. That stands a much higher risk of causing someone real harm or death. Did you say ‘death squad members’? Are you for real?
@Xanthe
Yup. Gators love outrageous hyperbole from their critics, it’s important to stick to the basic facts, such as 1) they don’t know how journalism or ethics work 2) they are nitwits who only gained attention because they’re ranks are thick with huge assholes on twitter and Channers troll mobs who have been aggressively harassing their hated targets for years.
We can point out the damage they’ve done via harassment and mock them at the same time. Sorry, Hot Potato, everyone, outside of your exploiters at Breitbart, considers your fake movement of nitwit man babies a complete joke and that will never change. You’ll never sucessfully distance yourself from the likes Bathomet, it’s super cute that you keep trying though.
typical GG behavior includes twlling someone they arent being harassed in the middle of actively harassing them. Their behavior is so bizarre that even the people who are legitimately afraid of them having been hurt by them are laughing at them.
I don’t remember the “authorities” handing out blocking software or anyone suggesting they do.
Well, people like Randi Harper created programs that automatically block GGers, and according to them SJWs like her run the government, so it’s practically like the authorities are handing out the blocking software?
That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if websites start officially recommending blocking programs to users who make complaints about being mobbed by GGers. Sort of like anti-spam measures, but the problem isn’t actually bots for once.
@Hyatt:
I’m hoping that we can get websites to acknowledge that sock puppetry is an issue and work to allow us to ban unique users even when they generate new accounts. That would make me very happy indeed.
Hey, actual schizophrenic person here. Clearly you got your psychiatric knowledge from Law & Order, because in real life, that’s not even close to how it works. We don’t hunt for conspiracies, we hide from them; we don’t hurt others, we only hurt ourselves. Go read a book on the subject then stick it up your proverbial arse.
(I know, dogpiling, but this one’s personal.)
I dont think theres any good reason why accounts that abuse people cant simply be banned from platforms like twitter. Id be interested to kmow what is holding that back now – is it as simple as manpower or what?
@ kale
“Manpower”!!!
He, go write out “staffing” 200 times 🙂
(actually it’s not that long ago that the main UK official employment agency changed it’s name from ‘ the manpower services beureu’)
Man, HotPotato’s post was amazing. It’s like they weren’t even trying. I found the fact that they said “But, let’s be honest here” immediately after the link to an impostor account.
@kale
Be warned that you might need a shower to wash off the pure evil of the answer: Ad revenue.
Tessa, yeah, that line coming right after the link to the fake Twitter account, reads incredibly badly.
Shorter HotPotato: “But let’s be honest here, since nothing I’ve said up until now has been honest…” (continues being dishonest)
@M:
Ugh, that’s awful. Thanks for linking that, I think I do need a shower.
Scented Fucking Hard Chairs: Wow. That blows my mind. WOW. And that’s dated from just before #gamergate started, too. It’s almost prophetic.
It’s been pretty conclusively established that journalists don’t know what dildos are. Remember when CNN thought a dildo was the ISIS flag?
The thing about the picture is that it is self-debunking almost without context and without knowing who Veerender is.
1. The dildo. It should cause some suspicion alone.ch
2. The power socket in the picture – it does not match the ones found in Paris.
3. Absolutely massive pixel smears on almost all photoshopped elements.
4. He is clearly taking the picture with the new iQuran Pro with an integrated camera on the back.
It is quite mind-boggling how those newspapers and channels ignored all this.
Gamergate knew this and they kept spreading misinformation – playing this as a real thing. THE ETHICS.
thirding the request to VooT to s ale back the religious postings. There are places on the internet for nuanced discussion of culture and religion. A blog dedicated to mocking misogyny is not one of them.
@ ultimatezer0, it’s the rush to be first. News cycles are so stupid short that everyone is afraid of being scooped. They publish first, think later. This is not to excuse them. If anything, I think it damns them further.
GamerGate is just so unbelievably baffling to me. I mean, if I were to even believe that this IS about ethics in videogame journalism, like how is this issue in their minds so life and death important? (Obviously I know it isn’t actually about that anyway, but the fact that they have maybe convinced themselves it really is about this issue is fucked). I don’t understand, as someone who plays videogames I have never in my life read reviews from journalists and don’t see how it could possibly matter to anyone.
There’s something just . . . comical about the way they try to hide their true purpose (harassing women and “SJWs”) with the stupidest “cause” imaginable.
Even if it were true that “not all Gamergaters” are like this, it just seems totally fucking insignificant to point that out because their entire cause is just so fucking pointless. And they don’t even do anything to actually redress the wrongs they have chosen to rally behind. All they seem to ever do is shit like this and then cheer gleefully while taking absolutely no responsibility.
@Alan damn PC FemiNazis! 😉
Lol jk I will def try to use something more like “staffing” next time.
@SFHC – thanks! Very illuminating.
Made me think of how when you’re being harassed harassers will say you should just get offline, but you actually can’t disengage because if you do you may miss a serious threat, doxx, Etc. Victims are actually held hostage so to speak. And that’s just the people who aren’t determined to continue to speak and not be silenced. Not to mention they make deletion difficult. So Twitter isn’t exactly losing business from harassment victims.
Regarding Hot Potato: GGers tend to be super arrogant and think everyone else will be easily fooled by them, and when called out they stubbornly continue to deny and try to turn it around on the person calling them out, ie using the “SJW” opposition to victim-blaming and calling victims liars to try to say no one can call them liars as if calling out actual liars is somehow equivalent and this becomes confusing and exhausting like a child’s temper tantrum. Of course simply blocking and ignoring is also persecution somehow.
If gamegate was truly about ethics in gaming journalism where were they in 2007 after the gamespot ‘Kain and Lynch’ scandal.
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.
The result of this? People where upset for a bit, gamespot because the butt end of jokes like being called Game$pot but no movements for ethics in gaming journalism that I know of were were formed.
@Fabe: But Eidos wasn’t run by a woman who may or may not have had sex with the Gamespot reviewer!
*gag*
And the accusation sexual favors for good reviews wasn’t made by a credible source like a spiteful ex-boyfriend