No one linked the craptastic Newsweek article...
http://www.newsweek.com/gamergate-about-media-ethics-or-harassing-women-harassment-data-show-279736 What's more interesting is in the comments. A feminist who apparently takes the article to task, is not a GGer, gets attacked by anti-GG, and rips them a new one. "Kelly Rued · Founder and Creative Director at Black Love Interactive LLC
Having worked with social media and web analytics for several years, I'm a little underwhelmed with your data analysis. Hopefully the report you got from Brandwatch was much more detailed than the summary in this article.
Why is there no timeline to contextualize the relationship of gamergate tweets to media coverage of these people/brands? For example, I would expect discussions of Brianna Wu to spike following her press junket where she alleged her harassers were representative members of gamergate. Since those allegations portrayed the entire movement as hateful harassers, they led to intense discussion of Wu among the thousands of innocent gamers she implicated as a hate group. If analyzing social media mentions for a business client, I'm sure Brandwatch would correlate the data to media campaigns and press mentions in other channels to give some idea of what events triggered these conversations. Without context, it's much harder to understand or speculate why some people were discussed more than others.
People like Grayson and Totilo did not do mainstream press interviews accusing gamergate of being a terrorist/hate group attacking women in games. Maybe that's why they did not generate nearly as much discussion as some of the developers you had Brandwatch look for (we can't really speculate though because you have not presented enough data to make a reasonable claim either way).
Had you really been interested in measuring gamergate's mentions of games press, you might have filtered for Arthur Chu, Ben Kuchera, Sam Biddle, Polygon, Gawker, etc. than a relative unknown like Grayson.
Also you could have filtered for relevant male game developers, like Phil Fish, or filtered for mentions of more famous and influential women developers (Robin Hunicke, Kim Swift, Brenda Romero, Sheri Graner Ray, etc.) who have not publicly accused gamergate of misogyny, harassment, and death threats (which is not to suggest these other women in games don't also feel that gamergate is a hate group, but just that they have not engaged gamergate on Twitter the way Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu, Anita Sarkeesian, and Leigh Alexander have). Instead you only filtered for women in the games industry who have been very vocal in their condemnations of gamergate. If gamergate was specifically mentioning women developers mainly because they are women, then we would surely see more famous and influential women developers receiving as much or more gamergate mentions than a relative unknown like Zoe Quinn.
According to Kathy Sierra's Koolaid Point theory, the more famous and influential a woman is, the more she will attract misogynistic harassment and hate so surely we could draw some conclusions about gamergate from analyzing how they often gamergate mentions a few industry-leading, award-winning women developers, some with decades in the business and dozens of published titles. It would at least help us speculate how much of gamergate mentioning women developers is based on a woman simply existing in the game industry, and how much might be related to women condemning and antagonizing gamergaters.
I also wonder if your data is accurate because the brevity of tweets encourages shortened names and gamergaters often use nicknames including cryptic acronyms like ZQ and LW (there are so many snarky terms referring to Zoe Quinn that her mentions may have been much higher than reported here). But from the data presented, who knows.
So yeah, you've got a couple of bar graphs, some aggregate mentions, uncontextualized sentiment analysis, and they're tied neatly together with foregone conclusions. Maybe consider contacting a social scientist instead of relying on a brand monitoring company to correctly analyze a consumer revolt."
And after being attacked... "Kelly Rued · Founder and Creative Director at Black Love Interactive LLC
Matthew Dean,
Let me talk slower, as if you are a man actively trying to misunderstand and misrepresent me.
I'm a feminist woman who has been openly critical of problematic social justice issues in games since 2004 (and never received any threats or harassment at all, which is why I noted the Kool Aid Point because misogyny is not commonly directed at women who have no influence, fame, or audience). So no, misogyny is not simply "common" so much as it is known to be a problem once women become prominent or achieve anything remarkable in games and tech.
My point was that to critically evaluate the claim that gamergate's mentions of female game developers if fueled by misogyny, we need to understand why there are more mentions of some women in games than others. Surely Swift is a bigger target for misogynists than Quinn because Swift is highly influential and has landed plum industry jobs leading teams for Valve and Airtight Games (w/Square Enix) that a misogynist in games would notice and resent. Yet I have not seen her criticized by gamergate, in fact I see gamers try to signal boost for her when they try to defend themselves against people arguing (facetiously) that everyone in gamergate simply hates women in games.
It's probably pointless to clarify anything or give real consideration to your reply. You didn't address any of my actual criticisms about this sorry excuse for data science in this article. But you don't really care what I have to say. I get it, you think I'm pro-gg and you're anti-gg and jumping on bandwagons full of dogmatic bullshit is fun for some people.
But understand this: you didn't just ignore and misrepresent an anti-gg post, you ignored and misrepresented a woman's ideas as "mental gymnastics" without offering a single valid counterpoint.
I'm not pro-gamergate, never used the hashtag. I don't get my panties in a bunch over media collusion because the mainstream media are shills and that's exactly how their business model works. It's like expecting a dog to stop licking its own asshole, not only will you be disappointed but the dog is better off. Mainstream press panders, it spins, it sells eyeballs to advertisers. If you don't like it, reject them, deny them the eyeballs. There are more than enough other sources of news and information about games online. Personally I prefer gamer forums where I can ask paying customers what they thought of a game.
I've got no skin in gamergate. I'm just a freethinker who can't fucking stand when people lie, abuse power, and misappropriate the social justice and feminism that I care about for selfish, disingenuous ends.
My post exclusively discussed the methodology of the data analysis in the article, but you felt the need to come and put words in my mouth about points I never tried to make, while totally ignoring every point I did try to make. If you see yourself as a man who supports women, please think about how dismissive you were to the substance of my ideas. I won't tell you how to feminist, because I don't believe you were genuinely engaging with my comment, but I am venturing a guess that you dismissed me solely because you thought I was pro-gamergate and to you, that meant I was not worthy of sincere consideration.
That is the problem with all of this anti-gg rhetoric. I sympathize with points on both sides but the only people I see willfully misunderstanding and preemptively dismissing the other side's thoughts and experiences are the anti-gg crowd. The indefensible tabloid style take-down pieces like this one on Newsweek are insulting and deserve to be challenged.
Do you not understand why it is deeply offensive that when a group of everyday people complain about mainstream media ethics, they are smeared as crazy woman-haters with over 6 weeks of dogpiling eerily similar articles from all major media channels? This does not raise a red flag for you at all? That is the real head-scratcher here."
