Sorry, I find it hard to buy into the whole business about "journalistic ethics" and all that when the pro-GG side is championing, out of all sources, Breitbart, a site notorious for its misusing of video footage to get prominent people fired - just Google ACORN videos and Shirley Sherrod, both of which are found to be innocent.

And there's the double standards when it comes to Milo Yiannopoulos and Ian Miles Cheong. The former has made nonsense Tweets and articles such as these:

http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/2009/11/30/twitter-mishaps-and-netiquette-for-journalists/
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/09/09/Ginger-Jihadis-Why-Redheads-are-Attracted-to-Radical-Islam
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/08/14/Players-as-young-as-12-and-13-are-being-raped-by-dorky-weirdos-on-Grand-Theft-Auto
http://www.webcitation.org/6EUKtyJMe
https://twitter.com/Nero/status/421037661919670273
https://twitter.com/Nero/status/304398843435446272
https://twitter.com/Nero/status/470540684043501568

And even as recently as of August 2014, he made Tweets mocking gamers before he realized that he could take advantage of the movement instead. Even Erik Kain questioned his motives:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/09/04/gamergate-a-closer-look-at-the-controversy-sweeping-video-games/

Cheong, on the other hand, made some rather harebrained comments about Nazis many years ago, and somehow he's a neo-Nazi, despite the fact that he's Asian and would never be accepted by actual neo-Nazis, not to mention never actually professed belief in Nazism since? It appears more of a case where he said some stupid things in the past coming back to bite him.

As such, I find it rather absurd to see GG being so quickly forgive and even promote people like Yiannopoulos, who had an actual history of making abusive Tweets and articles, and wide influences being on one of the most notorious sites on the internet, while Cheong kept getting attacked for that one stupid comment he made years ago, and whose influence is limited to Reddit and his gaming website. Something tells me it has something more to do with digging dirt on the latter's activism.

Exactly. Furthermore, using that hashtag, even if one is genuinely trying to talk about ethics in journalism, is also going to draw the nutters like iron to a lodestone. Going ahead and doing so anyway at that point is the equivalent of flashing around the One Ring; sure, it's an object of great power that can be used for good things, but it's going to draw the attention of some unpleasantness from the Nazgul and the armies of Sauron.

http://blueplz.blogspot.dk/2014/10/whose-side-am-i-on.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cdWB7NngzA

What's sad is that I felt that there are genuine voices on the pro-GG side, including TotalBiscuit and Boogie2998, who can argue their points without resorting to emotive accusations and genuinely concerned about corruption in VG journalism, and sadly got drowned out by extremists.

LOL exactly!
Actually I recently remembered that this whole anti-female gamer backlash seems to date back to those 'Fake Gamer Chick / Fake Geek Girl' accusations that were flying around a while back - this made me chuckle at the time:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/01/16/simulacra

I little disclaimer: I don't really know about gamergate and what happed and when. I was quite astounded to see the thing creep up almost everywhere.
The only things I knew were that this AS person did (for quite an amount of Kickstarter money) a pretty bad series of youtube videos about sexism in games. She got some hate from this and then posted a horribly fake looking twiiter screenshot of supposed rape and death thread against herself. And then there was that ZQ person who made a not-very-good game about depression and slept around to promote it.
When I read those stories and shrugged it off as "scandal of the day, will be forgotten in a week". I truly don't know how this got so big. I've heard the term "doxxing" for the first time last week.

To be honest, this situation exactly describes the "feminist" movement of at least the last 10-15 years.

You can't expect a lot from a movement based on a twitter hashtag (seriously?), that's why it's doomed to fail in its current form.....

In real life, it has become common practice to dig the garbage cans of the net to find infos and quotes. Currently, people from Belgian government are attacked based on racist e-mails/tweets/facebook posts from years ago to make them quit. Welcome to the web 2.0 :(

Two things, TotalBiscuit has always been neutral. He has never been pro-Gamergate. The only people claiming he is, are the anti-GG people because he dared to criticize game journalists. Saying anything negative at all about anyone involved in the anti-GG group seems to make one pro-GG. Don't buy the hype.

Next, this version of feminism is about 40-50 years old. I saw the same thing almost 30 years ago in college. College seems to breed the Andrea Dworkin/Catherine Mackinnon style feminists. They give real feminists a bad name. Even normal feminists are divided on them. Some claim they are good for the cause by providing attention to the cause (crazy talk gets press), others feels it sets back the movement.

And as for all you anti-GG people wanting people to run away from the hashtag, answer these questions and when you can't, how does this change your position...

1) How many of these threats to women were signed with the hashtag?
2) The complaints about Zoe's game started when?
3) Anita's Kickstarter started when?

It should be noted that both claimed harassment long before there was a Gamergate, so what does the hashtag have to do with anything?

The way I see it, there are extremist jerks on both sides. Both sides need to quit pointing at the other side's nut jobs and judging the rest of the groups by them.

Wait, who are you calling a feminist extremist? Sarkesian is the only one who's even identifiable a feminist and while I'm probably debate some of her finer points, I think she broadly has valid arguments most of the time
Day, Wu and Quinn haven't said anything blatantly 'feminist' at all as far as I know...

Oh, I didn't want to say that there were no extremist feminists among the jerks of the university group I was talking about.
Any group that accepts extremist jerks among them looses a good chunk of my respect and in nearly all cases my support.

Well it's not that easy when it comes to loosely (if at all) organized internet movements. And almost impossible with something like twitter where every single troll can post anything with a certain hashtag. It's hard to exclude people if you have no control.

1) That of course depends on what qualifies as threat to you. If the internet standard of "I'll rape you with a hot iron rod" is enough already to qualify I'd guess it were somewhere above 2.000. But I'll see if I can find reliable sources as of course my own observations aren't nowhere accurate enough.
Do you have any good sources for the amounts of threats?
2) August 2014
3) May 2012

I don't think anybody has ever claimed that all the threats and harassment that Anita has received over the years is originating from GG. As a one of her subscribers on twitter I can say though that a MASSIVE amount amount appeared on there this summer. Twitter deletes a lot of it though.

I remember Zoe being attacked about her game before this summer but I'd say that was nothing compared to what happened after her ex's post on the internet.
She wrote about it here: http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-i-learned-as-internets-most-hated-person/

Problem is that many of the threatening tweets using the #GamerGate hastag get deleted, so if there are no screenshots they are just gone.
And for those that screenshots exist people claim that those threats were not made by "real" pro-GamerGate people. So I'm not sure what you want me to say or do?
Google for the screenshots?

I could never join any side of this GG thing because of that. Neither can I be pro-GG nor anti-GG. Both sides with their extremists are stupid from my point of view. That's why I don't need to defend any of them.
And many of the sheep following either side bleating loudly just make my cringe.

I don't want to be affiliated with any side of this "conflict". That doesn't mean I'm neutral though. I'm just not a part of any group.


Anyway, my little son needs me now, so that's it for now.
But you can distance yourself from the group then. I couldn't kick out the assholes of that university group either but I could decide to not be part of it. And not defend them, not support them, not stand up for them.

Back.

I think I can say it all shorter:
If you see somebody talking shit, call him out - no matter if he/she is part of your group or another.
If you don't want to be affiliated with extremists, don't be part of a group that contains them. (Or kick them out if you can.)
Don't defend people just because they use the same label as you.
Don't take shitty sides if you can just be your own person.

Edit: Added "shitty".

I guess. But with a massive uproar like that you will be busy distancing yourself from the trolls and not doing much else.
That's the most wise position in my eyes. It's the reason when asked if I was a feminist I will answer, "I'm a humanist". I want to be this little earth the best place of as many people as possible, not just for a distinct group drawing borders around them, however just their cause may seem.

You really think there were 2000+ "I'll rape you with a hot iron rod" or worse? I just find that a little hard to believe especially since Zoe has only received a bit over 10,000 Tweets in total per Newsweek and Anita 35,000. And the breakdown of the tweets, I'm not even sure there were 2000 negatives among all the participants.
http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/embedded_full/public/2014/10/24/sentimentvolume.jpg?itok=eySg1iIE

It's sounding to me more like a few dozen and those few dozen are almost always screenshot and posted by certain individuals trying to make a point. I think all the media attention is making it seem more common than it really is.

As to the initial uproar, try early 2013 where she was accused of endorsing medication for depression sufferers among other things. Put is, there were haters long before Gamergate existed, how many of these old gripes came back to haunt them?

Then let me put it this way, some say people should abandon the hashtag because there are bad actors, should someone quit using the SJW tag because there are bad actors on that side too? Should people disvow Christianity because of the Westboro nut jobs? Should I disvow America because my country bombs weddings by mistake but still counts any male of an appropriate age as a successful terrorist kill for statistical purposes?

While it's your choice to sit on the sidelines, for some to claim you are as guilty as the worst is you even dare associate with a group is just plain stupid.