vox--2020-01-20--What we still haven’t learned from Gamergate

It ’ s natural to assess what sociocultural lessons we ’ ve learned from the previous decade , now that we ’ ve entered a new one — and whether they ’ re the kinds that might help us make the 2020s a better era .
No honest attempt at such an assessment can be complete without grappling with the messy human dramas and the increasing trend toward polarized , incendiary conversations that emerged in the latter half of the 2010s .
And that means contending with the unlikely , unpleasant , and far-reaching watershed movement that was Gamergate .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the media were quick to dismiss it .
Sparked by a single blog post published in August 2014 , Gamergate was still very much alive and well when an editor asked me , as a reporter who covered it since the very beginning , to write a “ recap ” of it near the end of that year .
The editor wanted a piece that framed the entire event in the past tense , even though the hashtag was still going strong , the women it targeted were still being harassed , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ take place at upcoming geek conventions .
Soon after I recapped it , other publications wrote about Gamergate as if it were more or less over , too .
One predicted that 2015 would be “ the year everyone forgot about Gamergate , ” noting that it “ is still around as a twitter hashtag and a forum topic , but the relevance is waning from its peak in the fall .
That ’ s going to keep happening.
” That did not keep happening .
But the media ’ s insistence that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ why Gamergate endured , and why it ultimately coalesced into the larger alt-right movement that helped fuel the election of President Trump .
If you never really understood what Gamergate was to begin with , here ’ s a brief refresher : In the fall of 2014 , under the premise that they were angry at “ unethical ” games journalists — a lie that persists today — thousands of people in the games community began to systematically harass , heckle , threaten , and dox several outspoken feminist women in their midst @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The harassment occurred under the social media hashtag “ Gamergate , ” which is still a hotbed of debate and anti-feminist resentment today .
Harassment and misogyny had been problems in the community for years before this ; the deep resentment and anger toward women that powered Gamergate percolated for years on internet forums .
Robert Evans , a journalist who specializes in extremist communities and the host of the Behind the Bastards podcast , described Gamergate to me as partly organic and partly born out of decades-long campaigns by white supremacists and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ Part of why Gamergate happened in the first place was because you had these people online preaching to these groups of disaffected young men , ” he said .
But what Gamergate had that those previous movements didn ’ t was an organized strategy , made public , cloaking itself as a political movement with a flimsy philosophical stance , its goals and targets amplified by the power of Twitter and a hashtag .
Again and again , throughout 2014 and afterward — and , really , well before that , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of targeted harassment — many failed to understand and assess what Gamergate was .
The media , tech platforms , the niche internet communities these reactionaries came from ( places with marginally obscure names like 4chan , 8chan , and Voat , for instance ) , the corporations they easily manipulated , and the general public , who seemed to take it in as nebulous online noise ; no one properly identified Gamergate as a major turning point for the internet .
The hate campaign , we would later learn , was the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ communities and write them off as just “ trolls ” began to crumble .
Gamergate ultimately gave way to something deeper , more violent , and more uncontrollable .
It ’ s tempting to wonder if we could have stopped Gamergate before it happened , in the years before it coalesced into a systematized movement .
Perhaps we could have quashed these kernels of hate with better forum moderation , more serious attention to the problem of misogynistic harassment , and less reliance on the longstanding twin internet wisdoms of prioritizing free speech @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In truth , by the time Gamergate had begun , it was probably already unstoppable — but our inability to learn any lessons from it is what allowed it to scale all the way to the White House .
Six years later , here ’ s a look at some of the lessons we still need to learn from Gamergate in order to keep its victims safe — and in order to keep the next decade from producing a movement that ’ s even worse .
1 ) Police have to learn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ safe from internet mobs At the time Gamergate began , the question of how and when law enforcement should step in to deal with online harassment was a burning one , as multiple women reported being threatened and doxxed out of their homes .
( Among them was Zoë Quinn , the game developer who became Gamergate ’ s target zero after an ex-boyfriend wrote a blog post accusing her of entering an unethical romantic relationship with the reporter Nathan Grayson , of the gaming news site Kotaku .
To that blog post @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the alleged infidelity rendered Quinn the poster child of hypocritical feminism and Kotaku the emblem of unethical journalism in the eyes of Gamergaters . )
Cyberstalking and “ revenge porn ” were also major issues that had been around for years but gained new prominence in 2014 , as “ Celebgate ” saw celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence and Kim Kardashian joining the countless women who ’ ve had private photos circulated online without their consent .
Today , however , the justice system continues to be slow to understand the link between @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Violence Against Women Act made cyberstalking illegal in 2006 , and although one in four young women report being stalked or sexually harassed online , women frequently have difficulty getting law enforcement to take online harassment seriously — especially the veiled kind that ’ s intimidating but not overtly violent or hateful .
There are more on-the-books laws about online harassment now and more prosecutions , but police are often untrained and undereducated regarding what type of behavior constitutes harassment , how to legally counter such behavior , and what should be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ harassment are left unsatisfied with the response .
Recently , while I was researching a violent crime with an online component , one police officer told me that most of the time , officers in his department have never heard of Twitter , let alone other social media platforms and more niche websites .
Evans told Vox that while he believes people in positions of power in government and law enforcement take internet threats much more seriously , the change has yet to fully trickle down .
“ When I started receiving death @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was on a documentary about 8chan ’ s [ politics ] board , ” he told Vox in an interview in 2019 , “ I went to the West Los Angeles police department with pictures of this bounty on my head and Photoshopped images of me with a bullet in my head .
I had to try to explain what was going on to them , and they had never heard of the website , didn ’ t seem to really understand that an online threat was a serious thing , [ ... @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time with the police trying to explain Bitcoin to a bunch of 50-year-old Los Angeles police officers.
” I would have expected as much in 2014 , when Gamergate was first in the news , because many social media platforms were still niche enough that you might not expect law enforcement to be familiar with them or their communities .
Hearing it five years later was an eye-opening moment — but it ’ s a stark reminder that we still have a long way to go to protect the general population , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and off .
“ I think they have very slowly , far too slowly , learned certain things that are valuable , ” Evans said .
“ They do now take online threats of school and [ mass ] shootings much more seriously .
So ...
I am seeing things get better .
But not nearly as quickly as it ought.
” In order to increase public safety this decade , it is imperative that police — and everyone else — become more familiar with the kinds of communities that engender toxic , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ online and offline spaces where these communities exist .
Increasingly , that means understanding social media ’ s dark corners , and the types of extremism they can foster .
2 ) Businesses have to learn when online outrage is manufactured One of the strangest side effects of Gamergate was its effectiveness at convincing corporations to stop advertising on media outlets it targeted as part of its “ ethics in journalism ” motto .
Among the corporations that dropped advertising from various publications as a result of Gamergate petitions were Adobe , Mercedes-Benz @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which later said it had no idea what online politics it had waded into .
Mercedes also later realized its mistake and restored advertising .
But despite wide discussion within the gaming community and the media about Gamergate ’ s manipulative tactics when it was drawing peak media attention , it seems that many corporations and other businesses failed to grasp a vital takeaway from these incidents : that it ’ s crucial to understand how , when , and why an online mob is expressing outrage before you decide how to respond @ @ @ @ @ @ @ businesses that online mobs can and do look for excuses to be outraged , as a pretext to harass and abuse their targets .
There ’ s a difference between organic outrage that arises because an employee actually does something outrageous , and invented outrage that ’ s an excuse to harass someone whom a group has already decided to target for unrelated reasons — for instance , because an employee is a feminist .
A responsible business would ideally figure out which type of outrage is occurring before it punished a client @ @ @ @ @ @ @ job .
Instead , companies have continued to fall for the manufactured outrage playbook Gamergate and its online heirs created , often blaming employees who are dealing with harassment rather than blaming the people doing the harassing .
In 2016 , Gamergate brutally harassed a Nintendo employee , targeting her on social media , unearthing her old writing in order to accuse her of pedophilia , and vilifying her to her employer .
Instead of protecting the employee from the onslaught of misogynistic abuse , Nintendo responded by firing her .
In 2018 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its employees after their responses to what they saw as Twitter harassment sparked major backlash from gamers , prompting the company president to blame the employees for reacting to the community with “ hostility.
” In both cases , the employers framed the employees ’ outspoken response to prolonged and intense harassment as a liability .
Also in 2018 , Marvel fired popular writer Chuck Wendig over reactionary outrage that was literally manufactured — most of it was generated by bots rather than people .
And in reaction to what was perhaps the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Disney fired James Gunn from Guardians of the Galaxy 3 after a harassment campaign straight out of the Gamergate playbook , stripping past tweets of their context to generate contrived backlash .
While Disney — nearly a year later — ultimately acknowledged it had made a mistake and rehired Gunn , it ’ s a familiar note in an exhausting , repetitive , and , crucially , easily avoidable cycle that companies have yet to learn how to sidestep .
This cycle is frustrating .
And it ’ s the fault of corporations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mob ’ s outrage is hyperbolic , and the larger cultural failure to understand and deal with the way those mobs also spread violence , online and off .
3 ) Social media platforms didn ’ t learn how to shut down disingenuous conversations over ethics and free speech before they started to tear their cultures apart The current debate around whether to privilege freedom of speech over the damage done by extremist rhetoric and other types of harmful speech arguably began with Gamergate .
“ There ’ s the perception of not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Evans told me .
“ This idea that you ’ re a veteran journalist if you don ’ t take a side , even if it ’ s an issue that really somebody ought to be taking a side on , like Nazis.
” Dedication to free speech over the appearance of bias is especially important within tech culture , where a commitment to protecting free speech is both a banner and an excuse for large corporations to justify their approach to content moderation — or lack thereof .
During Gamergate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s members found out that with “ a little bit of plausible deniability , ” they could trick the media and social media platforms into taking their harassment campaigns seriously .
When Gamergate found its “ It ’ s about ethics in journalism ” mantra , it had a cloak under which to argue that all of its violent speech wasn ’ t about a misogynistic abuse of women at all , but rather about a loftier philosophical purpose .
“ There were mouthpieces of the movement , like [ Milo ] Yiannopoulos @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a justification that suddenly [ they could claim ] it was not just the story of a harassing campaign , ” he said .
Research conducted by Newsweek in 2015 analyzing the Gamergate hashtag showed that its real purpose was abusive harassment , and that targeted women in gaming were more frequently responded to using the hashtag than the journalists whose ethics were ostensibly up for discussion .
But even though the movement ’ s real motives were widely known , the community structures of platforms like Twitter , Reddit , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anonymous forum 4chan , all fostered Gamergate .
Reddit ’ s free-speech-friendly moderation stance resulted in the platform tacitly supporting pro-Gamergate subforums like r/KotakuInAction , which became a major contributor to Reddit ’ s growing alt-right community .
Twitter rolled out a litany of moderation tools in the wake of Gamergate , intended to allow harassment targets to perpetually block , mute , and police their own harassers — without actually effectively making the site unwelcome for the harassers themselves .
And YouTube and Facebook , with their algorithmic amplification of hateful and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recognize the violence and misogyny behind pro-Gamergate content , or police them accordingly .
Gamergaters chalked up the movement ’ s grievances over ethical journalism to confusion or self-deception .
This was an intentional strategy , one that gained traction on social media with those unaware of the harassment component .
And Gamergaters learned they could scale this approach .
“ Gamergate showed them that they could make a difference in the real world , but it [ also ] showed them something else important , ” Evans said .
“ They saw @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with a harassment campaign like this ... they [ saw that they ] could do that shit all day long and nobody was going to do anything about it .
They learned that it worked , and they kept doing it.
” So the Gamergate movement merged into the larger alt-right sphere of online extremist culture that emerged in the middle of the decade , spreading hate speech throughout social media and setting the stage for the alt-right to influence the 2016 election .
Google , YouTube , and Twitter did eventually begin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ extremist content Gamergate ushered in ; Facebook continues to lean into on its free speech policies .
Reddit finally isolated ( though not ban ) its biggest pro-Trump forum — which has heavy overlap with its biggest Gamergate forum — in 2019 , but only after its members repeatedly violated rules and began threatening politicians with real-world violence .
A recent Wired cover article profiled a Google culture in meltdown over ideological debates and Google ’ s indecision over how to handle them .
Mired in its own culture war , YouTube has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ alt-right , and its 2019 ban on white supremacist and conspiracy content may do little to quell the growth of extremism on the platform .
And Twitter and Facebook , each with its own set of problems , are caught in the national conversation related to free speech .
All of these platforms are wrestling with problems that seem to have grown beyond their control ; it ’ s arguable that if they had reacted more swiftly to slow the growth of the internet ’ s most toxic and misogynistic communities back when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ still nascent , they could have prevented headaches in the long run — and set an early standard for how to deal with ever-broadening issues of extremist content online .
As things stand , many of these platforms are still wrestling with the most basic ingredients for keeping toxic elements out of their communities , even though these are the kinds of foundational building blocks inherent to good internet forum moderation .
It ’ s past time for leaders in the tech industry to learn how to be good stewards of the communities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) Violence against women is a predictor of other kinds of violence .
We need to acknowledge it .
2014 should have been the year the cultural conversation began to acknowledge how serious aggression toward women really is .
It wasn ’ t .
One of the most frustrating things about watching Gamergate unfold is that the seeds of it had been in place for years .
Targeted online harassment against women had been occurring for years , across numerous communities , from men who spent years harassing one woman who complained of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to harassment of actors for playing unlikable women .
In 2012 , male backlash against feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian over her attempt to expand her commentary on films into commentary on games was so intense it made international headlines — and her harassment involved doxxing , death threats , rape threats , and bomb threats , some so serious that she was driven out of her home for weeks .
One planned Sarkeesian lecture at a college campus was canceled over a mass shooting threat .
And there were other signs prior @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and minorities could escalate to real-life violence — for instance , the 2014 Santa Barbara mass shooter ’ s misogynistic online manifesto and history of participation in deeply misogynistic online spaces .
All these events garnered widespread media coverage and attention — but still , in 2014 , when this misogyny escalated into a systematic , organized , scalable , and sustained attack on women through the establishment of Gamergate as a movement , the media and many members of the public initially dismissed it as a watershed event .
During Gamergate , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ women like Sarkeesian and Zoë Quinn with horrific threats that escalated offline : They “ threat [ ened ] to murder people , mail [ ed ] them letters written in blood , sent dead animals to their door.
” But none of this harassment seemed to permeate mainstream discussions of Gamergate , which tended to center more on the personalities involved — from profiles describing Gamergate target Quinn as “ troubled ” to those describing its hero Milo Yiannopoulos as a “ descendant of William S. Burroughs.
” And in the same @ @ @ @ @ @ @ escalating online assaults against women prepared us for Gamergate , somehow , the formation of Gamergate itself didn ’ t prepare society for the cultural rise of the alt-right .
The journalists who did anticipate that Gamergate could and would morph into something worse were , by 2015 , drowned out by the general cultural idea that Gamergate had somehow “ failed ” — even though it was a movement inherently meant to scale and grow .
Somehow , the idea that all of that sexism and anti-feminist anger could be recruited , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ white supremacist movement failed to generate any real alarm , even well into 2016 , when all the pieces were firmly in place .
In other words , even though all the signs were there in 2014 that a systematized online harassment campaign could lead to an escalation in real-world violence , most people failed to see what was happening .
Gamergate ultimately made us all much more aware of the potential real-world impact of online extremism .
Yet , years after Gamergate , despite increasing evidence suggesting a connection between online violence @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mass shootings — many corporations and social media platforms still struggle to identify and eradicate extreme forms of violence against women from online spaces .
For instance : In early 2019 , Valve , the parent company of the online game platform Steam , allowed a game called Rape Day , in which the object of the “ game ” was to rape women , to stay up in its store for days before finally removing it .
Despite all of its algorithmic tweaking , Twitter is still abysmal at identifying and taking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its website .
The 2019 murder of 17-year-old Bianca Devins , a well-known Instagram user , carried a disturbing online component that involved her killer posting graphic online photos of her death .
The photos rapidly went viral , including on Instagram and Twitter , which were both largely ineffective at curbing their spread .
This failure to act has serious consequences , because many of the perpetrators of real-world violence are radicalized online first .
In 2018 , the International Center for Research on Women identified online gender-based violence as “ an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” and linked it to a growing number of mass shootings , noting , “ Failing to detect and deter technology-facilitated GBV is a missed opportunity to prevent deadly consequences offline.
” Other research has found that more than half of the US ’ s mass shootings involve the targeting of an intimate partner or ex-partner , and many of the most recent mass attacks involve a perpetrator who displayed or threatened violent behavior toward one woman or multiple women , either online or off .
In the past year alone , multiple @ @ @ @ @ @ @ misogynistic or domestic violence targeted at women .
It remains difficult for many to accept the throughline from online abuse to real-world violence against women , much less the fact that violence against women , online and off , is a predictor of other kinds of real-world violence .
The dots are there — we just have to connect them .
5 ) Politicians and the media must take online “ ironic ” racism and misogyny seriously .
Gamergate masked its misogyny in a coating of shrill yelling that had most journalists in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ satirical ” and immature “ trolling , ” and very few correctly predicting that Gamergate ’ s trolling was the future of politics — the political wave that would essentially morph into the broader alt-right movement .
But the movement was serious .
“ It served as a rallying point for a lot of groups that wouldn ’ t necessarily have gotten along , like more traditional conservatives and outright neo-Nazis , ” Evans said , “ and gave them all a banner to rally under where the Nazis could pretend to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could give themselves plausible deniability and pretend they weren ’ t working with Nazis .
It acted as a blanket for all of this stuff.
” Gamergate was all about disguising a sincere wish for violence and upheaval by dressing it up in hyperbole and irony in order to confuse outsiders and make it all seem less serious .
As Evans noted to me , Gamergate was fueled in part by online extremists , who initially bonded with young men in gaming communities over what started as “ ironic humor and jokes about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and whatnot .
And over time , all those things became less joking.
” This tactic was a deliberate strategy that formed the core of the alt-right playbook , and years after Gamergate , media outlets continued to fall for it .
Take , for example , the highly disturbing instigator Milo Yiannopoulos , who gained notoriety as a Gamergate commentator before he went to work at the alt-right blog site Breitbart in 2014 .
The media continued referring to Yiannopoulos as a “ troll , ” despite ample evidence suggesting his words @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or extremist beliefs , espoused by both him and his followers .
Yiannopoulos was a prime example of a rabble-rouser who manipulated Gamergate toward his own ends .
He benefited from the mayhem and chaos his rabble-rousing caused , whether he was making campus tour stops that inspired increases in hate speech as well as acts of serious violence , or just egging on the racist harassment of a public figure .
Yiannopoulos constantly exacerbated his followers and their anger .
The danger posed to marginalized members of the communities he visited was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2018 he would explicitly encourage violence and then claim he was “ just trolling.
” Just as Evans noted , the merest suggestion that none of his extremist rhetoric was sincere allowed him to continue spreading it .
Understanding this concept is crucial to understanding why Gamergate was able to morph into the alt-right .
Gamergate simultaneously masqueraded as legitimate concern about ethics that demanded audiences take it seriously , and as total trolling that demanded audiences dismiss it entirely .
Both these claims served to obfuscate its real aim — misogyny , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
By the time Yiannopoulos joined Breitbart , and Breitbart ’ s Steve Bannon joined the Trump campaign , the links between Gamergate and the national political machine should have been clear .
“ The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump campaign represents a landmark achievement for the ‘ alt-right , ’ ” Hillary Clinton said in a 2016 campaign speech .
“ A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party.
” But three years after that , and five years after Gamergate , it seems that very few @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when a troll is just trolling or when it ’ s about to commit real-world violence .
“ It ’ s hard to spot the terrorists among the trolls , ” the Wall Street Journal acknowledged in 2019 , in response to the Christchurch mass shooting .
The Christchurch shooter had posted a manifesto online ; full of hyperbolic alt-right internet memes , it was intended to both obfuscate and amplify the genuine white nationalist rhetoric at its center .
The public ’ s failure to understand and accept that the alt-right ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rhetoric is serious goes hand in hand with its failure to understand and accept that such rhetoric is identical to that of President Trump .
Now we see similar ideologies as Gamergaters from someone as powerful as Trump .
He retweets and amplifies alt-right memes on his Twitter ; his son openly affiliates with the alt-right ; Trump defended and continues to present the 2017 “ Unite the Right ” rally in Charlottesville , North Carolina , as though it wasn ’ t intentionally planned and organized as a white supremacist rally .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ by Vox ’ s Ezra Klein , Trump ’ s willingness to engage in incendiary racist rhetoric is similar to the tactics that have led many journalists to dismiss his followers as trolls : “ He chooses his enemies based on who he thinks will rile up his base .
He uses outrageous , offensive insults to get the media to take notice .
And then he feeds off the energy unleashed by the confrontation.
” In other words , he and his followers — many of whom , again , are members @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its momentum from Gamergate — are using the strategy Gamergate codified : deploying offensive behavior behind a guise of mock outrage , irony , trolling , and outright misrepresentation , in order to mask the sincere extremism behind the message .
Just as Yiannopoulos did before him , Trump speaks to his supporter base through wink-wink-nod-nod moments that lead them to respond in alarming ways , including with violence .
But many members of the media , politicians , and members of the public still struggle to accept that Trump ’ s rhetoric @ @ @ @ @ @ @ evidence to the contrary .
That divide between reality and perception is part of the larger cultural epistemic crisis that has loomed over the US for the past five years — and arguably began with Gamergate .
The movement ’ s insistence that it was about one thing ( ethics in journalism ) when it was about something else ( harassing women ) provided a case study for how extremists would proceed to drive ideological fissures through the foundations of democracy : by building a toxic campaign of hate beneath a veneer of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seems , the rest of us are still struggling to learn from the consequences .

In the wake of the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 by Trump supporters, bystanders on social media had plenty to say about the root causes and contributing factors that may have led to this flash point. Among these was Gamergate, the year-long harassment campaign from 2014 to 2015 that eventually became subsumed into the greater rise of the alt-right movement online.
Several viral threads posited that the far-reaching watershed movement was a crucial precursor to everything that took place in Washington, DC, this week.
Seeing some people say this in private to protect themselves so I’ll say it out loud: there is a direct line from the game industry and media’s failure in addressing gamergate to the right wing terrorism we’re seeing today. Period. — Shayna Moon (@qorquiq) January 6, 2021
Gamergate, MRAs, r/Trump, Proud Boys, etc. were all canaries in the coal mine and y’all didn’t pay attention or told us we were exaggerating. — Leona Thotsky  ⚾ (@LeonaThotsky) January 6, 2021
As many have pointed out, Gamergate was by no means the beginning of the rise in extremism; the fault lies with a broad cocktail of factors ranging from centuries of racism, to decades of neoconservative grassroots organizing, to the rise of conservative media and online echo chambers, to internet recruitment by actual white supremacists, and much more.
Hey, if you wanna say GamerGate led to this without acknowledging that GG was a symptom of the larger systemic bigotry that has always existed, an extension of DV, and the failure of online platform holders to act right, I really don’t appreciate being used like that!! — zoë “thot pockets” quinn (@UnburntWitch) January 6, 2021
Still, Gamergate was arguably a watershed moment and learning experience for many future Trump supporters. As a movement, it showed the trend toward systematized online harassment and increased ideological polarization that emerged in the latter half of the 2010s.
As it was happening, many members of the media were quick to dismiss it. Sparked by a single blog post published in August 2014, Gamergate was still in full swing when an editor asked me, as a reporter who covered it since the very beginning, to write a “recap” of it near the end of that year. The editor wanted a piece that framed the entire event in the past tense, even though the hashtag was still going strong, the women it targeted were still being harassed, and supporters were planning offline actions to take place at upcoming geek conventions.
Soon after I recapped it, other publications wrote about Gamergate as if it were more or less over, too. One writer predicted that 2015 would be “the year everyone forgot about Gamergate,” noting that it “is still around as a twitter hashtag and a forum topic, but the relevance is waning from its peak in the fall. That’s going to keep happening.”
That did not keep happening. But the media’s insistence that Gamergate would end helps explain its endurance, and why the movement ultimately coalesced into the larger alt-right movement that partially fueled the election of President Trump.
If you never really understood what Gamergate was to begin with, here’s a brief refresher: In the fall of 2014, under the premise that they were angry at “unethical” games journalists — a lie that persists today — thousands of people in the games community began to systematically harass, heckle, threaten, and dox several outspoken feminist women in their midst, few of whom were journalists. The harassment occurred under the social media hashtag “Gamergate,” which is still a hotbed of debate and anti-feminist resentment today.
Harassment and misogyny had been problems in the community for years before this; the deep resentment and anger toward women that powered Gamergate percolated for years on internet forums. Robert Evans, a journalist who specializes in extremist communities and the host of the Behind the Bastards podcast, described Gamergate to me as partly organic and partly born out of decades-long campaigns by white supremacists and extremists to recruit heavily from online forums.
“Part of why Gamergate happened in the first place was because you had these people online preaching to these groups of disaffected young men,” he said. But what Gamergate had that those previous movements didn’t was an organized strategy, made public, cloaking itself as a political movement with a flimsy philosophical stance, its goals and targets amplified by the power of Twitter and a hashtag.
Again and again, throughout 2014 and afterward — and, really, well before that, as women in online subcultures withstood years of targeted harassment — many failed to understand and assess what Gamergate was. The media, tech platforms, the niche internet communities these reactionaries came from (places with marginally obscure names like 4chan, 8chan, and Voat, for instance), the corporations they easily manipulated, and the general public, who seemed to take it in as nebulous online noise; no one properly identified Gamergate as a major turning point for the internet.
The hate campaign, we would later learn, was the moment when our ability to repress toxic communities and write them off as just “trolls” began to crumble. Gamergate ultimately gave way to something deeper, more violent, and more uncontrollable.
It’s tempting to wonder if we could have stopped Gamergate before it happened, in the years before it coalesced into a systematized movement. Perhaps we could have quashed these kernels of hate with better forum moderation, more serious attention to the problem of misogynistic harassment, and less reliance on the longstanding twin internet wisdoms of “prioritizing free speech” and “starving a troll” until they go away. In truth, by the time Gamergate had begun, it was probably already unstoppable — but our inability to learn any lessons from it is what allowed it to scale all the way to the White House.
Seven years later, here’s a look at some of the lessons we still need to learn from Gamergate in order to keep its victims safe — and to keep the next decade from producing a movement that’s even worse.
1) Police have to learn how to keep the rest of us safe from internet mobs
At the time Gamergate began, the question of how and when law enforcement should step in to deal with online harassment was a burning one, as multiple women reported being threatened and doxxed out of their homes. (Among them was Zoë Quinn, the game developer who became Gamergate’s target zero after an ex-boyfriend wrote a blog post accusing her of entering an unethical romantic relationship with the reporter Nathan Grayson, of the gaming news site Kotaku. To that blog post’s target audience of disgruntled gamers, the alleged infidelity rendered Quinn the poster child of hypocritical feminism and Kotaku the emblem of unethical journalism in the eyes of Gamergaters.)
Cyberstalking and “revenge porn” were also major issues that had been around for years but gained new prominence in 2014, as “Celebgate” saw celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence and Kim Kardashian joining the countless women who’ve had private photos circulated online without their consent.
Today, however, the justice system continues to be slow to understand the link between online harassment and real-life violence. Although the Violence Against Women Act made cyberstalking illegal in 2006, and although one in four young women report being stalked or sexually harassed online, women frequently have difficulty getting law enforcement to take online harassment seriously — especially the veiled kind that’s intimidating but not overtly violent or hateful.
There are more on-the-books laws about online harassment now and more prosecutions, but police are often untrained and undereducated regarding what type of behavior constitutes harassment, how to legally counter such behavior, and what should be investigated. Frequently, people who report harassment are left unsatisfied with the response.
A while back, a police officer told me that officers in his department had never heard of Twitter, let alone other social media platforms and more niche websites. Evans told Vox that while he believes people in positions of power in government and law enforcement take internet threats much more seriously, the change has yet to fully trickle down.
“When I started receiving death threats earlier this year, after I was on a documentary about 8chan’s [politics] board,” he said in an interview in 2019, “I went to the West Los Angeles police department with pictures of this bounty on my head and Photoshopped images of me with a bullet in my head. I had to try to explain what was going on to them, and they had never heard of the website, didn’t seem to really understand that an online threat was a serious thing, ... and I spent most of my time with the police trying to explain Bitcoin to a bunch of 50-year-old Los Angeles police officers.”
I would have expected as much in 2014, when Gamergate was first in the news, because many social media platforms were still niche enough that you might not expect law enforcement to be familiar with them or their communities. Hearing it years later was an eye-opening moment — but it’s a stark reminder that we still have a long way to go to protect the general population, and women in particular, from violence online and off.
“I think they have very slowly, far too slowly, learned certain things that are valuable,” Evans said. “They do now take online threats of school and [mass] shootings much more seriously. So ... I am seeing things get better. But not nearly as quickly as it ought.”
To increase public safety this decade, it is imperative that police — and everyone else — become more familiar with the kinds of communities that engender toxic, militant systems of harassment, and the online and offline spaces where these communities exist. Increasingly, that means understanding social media’s dark corners, and the types of extremism they can foster.
2) Businesses have to learn when online outrage is manufactured
One of the strangest side effects of Gamergate was its effectiveness at convincing corporations to stop advertising on media outlets it targeted as part of its “ethics in journalism” motto. Among the corporations that dropped advertising from various publications as a result of Gamergate petitions were Adobe, Mercedes-Benz, and Intel, the latter of which later said it had no idea what online politics it had waded into. Mercedes also later realized its mistake and restored advertising.
But despite wide discussion within the gaming community and the media about Gamergate’s manipulative tactics when it was drawing peak media attention, it seems that many corporations and other businesses failed to grasp a vital takeaway from these incidents: that it’s crucial to understand how, when, and why an online mob is expressing outrage before you decide how to respond to it. Gamergate should have taught businesses that online mobs can and do look for excuses to be outraged, as a pretext to harass and abuse their targets.
There’s a difference between organic outrage that arises because an employee actually does something outrageous, and invented outrage that’s an excuse to harass someone whom a group has already decided to target for unrelated reasons — for instance, because an employee is a feminist. A responsible business would ideally figure out which type of outrage is occurring before it punished a client or employee who was just doing their job.
Instead, companies have continued to fall for the manufactured outrage playbook Gamergate and its online heirs created, often blaming employees who are dealing with harassment rather than blaming the people doing the harassing.
In 2016, Gamergate brutally harassed a Nintendo employee, targeting her on social media, unearthing her old writing in order to accuse her of pedophilia, and vilifying her to her employer. Instead of protecting the employee from the onslaught of misogynistic abuse, Nintendo responded by firing her. In 2018, game developer ArenaNet fired two of its employees after their responses to what they saw as Twitter harassment sparked major backlash from gamers, prompting the company president to blame the employees for reacting to the community with “hostility.” In both cases, the employers framed the employees’ outspoken response to prolonged and intense harassment as a liability.
Also in 2018, Marvel fired popular writer Chuck Wendig over reactionary outrage that was literally manufactured — most of it was generated by bots rather than people. And in reaction to what was perhaps the most effective manufactured outrage of all, Disney fired James Gunn from Guardians of the Galaxy 3 after a harassment campaign straight out of the Gamergate playbook, stripping past tweets of their context to generate contrived backlash. While Disney — nearly a year later — ultimately acknowledged it had made a mistake and rehired Gunn, it’s a familiar note in an exhausting, repetitive, and, crucially, easily avoidable cycle that companies have yet to learn how to sidestep.
This cycle is frustrating. And it’s the fault of corporations’ failure to understand whether an internet mob’s outrage is hyperbolic, and the larger cultural failure to understand and deal with the way those mobs also spread violence, online and off.
3) Social media platforms didn’t learn how to shut down disingenuous conversations over ethics and free speech before they started to tear their cultures apart
The current debate around whether to privilege freedom of speech over the damage done by extremist rhetoric and other types of harmful speech arguably began with Gamergate.
“There’s the perception of not having bias, particularly in American media,” Evans told me. “This idea that you’re a veteran journalist if you don’t take a side, even if it’s an issue that really somebody ought to be taking a side on, like Nazis.” Dedication to free speech over the appearance of bias is especially important within tech culture, where a commitment to protecting free speech is both a banner and an excuse for large corporations to justify their approach to content moderation — or lack thereof.
During Gamergate, Evans said, the movement’s members found out that with “a little bit of plausible deniability,” they could trick the media and social media platforms into taking their harassment campaigns seriously. When Gamergate found its “It’s about ethics in journalism” mantra, it had a cloak under which to argue that all of its violent speech wasn’t about a misogynistic abuse of women at all, but rather about a loftier philosophical purpose.
“There were mouthpieces of the movement, like [Milo] Yiannopoulos, who were happy to provide enough of a justification that suddenly [they could claim] it was not just the story of a harassing campaign,” he said. Research conducted by Newsweek in 2015 analyzing the Gamergate hashtag showed that its real purpose was abusive harassment, and that targeted women in gaming were more frequently responded to using the hashtag than the journalists whose ethics were ostensibly up for discussion. But even though the movement’s real motives were widely known, the community structures of platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube, to say nothing of the anonymous forum 4chan, all fostered Gamergate.
Reddit’s free-speech-friendly moderation stance resulted in the platform tacitly supporting pro-Gamergate subforums like r/KotakuInAction, which became a major contributor to Reddit’s growing alt-right community. Twitter rolled out a litany of moderation tools in the wake of Gamergate, intended to allow harassment targets to perpetually block, mute, and police their own harassers — without actually effectively making the site unwelcome for the harassers themselves. And YouTube and Facebook, with their algorithmic amplification of hateful and extreme content, made no effort to recognize the violence and misogyny behind pro-Gamergate content, or police them accordingly.
Gamergaters chalked up the movement’s grievances over ethical journalism to confusion or self-deception. This was an intentional strategy, one that gained traction on social media with those unaware of the harassment component. And Gamergaters learned they could scale this approach. “Gamergate showed them that they could make a difference in the real world, but it [also] showed them something else important,” Evans said. “They saw that not only could they get away with a harassment campaign like this ... they [saw that they] could do that shit all day long and nobody was going to do anything about it. They learned that it worked, and they kept doing it.”
So the Gamergate movement merged into the larger alt-right sphere of online extremist culture that emerged in the middle of the decade, spreading hate speech throughout social media and setting the stage for the alt-right to influence the 2016 election.
Google, YouTube, and Twitter did eventually begin taking steps to moderate the rampage of extremist content Gamergate ushered in; Facebook continues to lean into on its free speech policies. Reddit finally isolated (though not ban) its biggest pro-Trump forum — which has heavy overlap with its biggest Gamergate forum — in 2019, but only after its members repeatedly violated rules and began threatening politicians with real-world violence.
A Wired cover article profiled a Google culture in meltdown over ideological debates and Google’s indecision over how to handle them. Mired in its own culture war, YouTube has become a haven for reactionaries and the alt-right, and its 2019 ban on white supremacist and conspiracy content may do little to quell the growth of extremism on the platform. And Twitter and Facebook, each with its own set of problems, are caught in the national conversation related to free speech.
All of these platforms are wrestling with problems that seem to have grown beyond their control; it’s arguable that if they had reacted more swiftly to slow the growth of the internet’s most toxic and misogynistic communities back when those communities, particularly Gamergate, were still nascent, they could have prevented headaches in the long run — and set an early standard for how to deal with ever-broadening issues of extremist content online.
As things stand, many of these platforms are still wrestling with the most basic ingredients for keeping toxic elements out of their communities, even though these are the kinds of foundational building blocks inherent to good internet forum moderation. It’s past time for leaders in the tech industry to learn how to be good stewards of the communities to which they are home.
4) Violence against women is a predictor of other kinds of violence. We need to acknowledge it.
2014 should have been the year the cultural conversation began to acknowledge how serious aggression toward women really is. It wasn’t.
One of the most frustrating things about watching Gamergate unfold is that the seeds of it had been in place for years. Targeted online harassment against women had been occurring for years, across numerous communities, from men who spent years harassing one woman who complained of getting hit on at a professional conference to harassment of actors for playing unlikable women.
In 2012, male backlash against feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian over her attempt to expand her commentary on films into commentary on games was so intense it made international headlines — and her harassment involved doxxing, death threats, rape threats, and bomb threats, some so serious that she was driven out of her home for weeks. One planned Sarkeesian lecture at a college campus was canceled over a mass shooting threat. And there were other signs prior to Gamergate that online harassment of women and minorities could escalate to real-life violence — for instance, the 2014 Santa Barbara mass shooter’s misogynistic online manifesto and history of participation in deeply misogynistic online spaces.
All these events garnered widespread media coverage and attention — but still, in 2014, when this misogyny escalated into a systematic, organized, scalable, and sustained attack on women through the establishment of Gamergate as a movement, the media and many members of the public initially dismissed it as a watershed event. During Gamergate, as Evans put it, gamers attacked women like Sarkeesian and Zoë Quinn with horrific threats that escalated offline: They “threat[ened] to murder people, mail[ed] them letters written in blood, sent dead animals to their door.” But none of this harassment seemed to permeate mainstream discussions of Gamergate, which tended to center more on the personalities involved — from profiles describing Gamergate target Quinn as “troubled” to those describing its hero Milo Yiannopoulos as a “descendant of William S. Burroughs.”
And in the same way that none of those years of escalating online assaults against women prepared us for Gamergate, somehow, the formation of Gamergate itself didn’t prepare society for the cultural rise of the alt-right. The journalists who did anticipate that Gamergate could and would morph into something worse were, by 2015, drowned out by the general cultural idea that Gamergate had somehow “failed”— even though it was a movement inherently meant to scale and grow. Somehow, the idea that all of that sexism and anti-feminist anger could be recruited, harnessed, and channeled into a broader white supremacist movement failed to generate any real alarm, even well into 2016, when all the pieces were firmly in place.
In other words, even though all the signs were there in 2014 that a systematized online harassment campaign could lead to an escalation in real-world violence, most people failed to see what was happening. Gamergate ultimately made us all much more aware of the potential real-world impact of online extremism. Yet, years after Gamergate, despite increasing evidence suggesting a connection between online violence against women and real-world violence — including mass shootings — many corporations and social media platforms still struggle to identify and eradicate extreme forms of violence against women from online spaces.
For instance: In early 2019, Valve, the parent company of the online game platform Steam, allowed a game called Rape Day, in which the object of the “game” was to rape women, to stay up in its store for days before finally removing it. Despite all of its algorithmic tweaking, Twitter is still abysmal at identifying and taking action against rape and death threats on its website. The 2019 murder of 17-year-old Bianca Devins, a well-known Instagram user, carried a disturbing online component that involved her killer posting graphic online photos of her death. The photos rapidly went viral, including on Instagram and Twitter, which were both largely ineffective at curbing their spread.
This failure to act has serious consequences, because many of the perpetrators of real-world violence are radicalized online first. In 2018, the International Center for Research on Women identified online gender-based violence as “an emerging public health and human rights concern” and linked it to a growing number of mass shootings, noting, “Failing to detect and deter technology-facilitated GBV is a missed opportunity to prevent deadly consequences offline.”
Other research has found that more than half of the US’s mass shootings involve the targeting of an intimate partner or ex-partner, and many of the most recent mass attacks involve a perpetrator who displayed or threatened violent behavior toward one woman or multiple women, either online or off. In the past year alone, multiple mass shootings have had an element of misogynistic or domestic violence targeted at women.
It remains difficult for many to accept the throughline from online abuse to real-world violence against women, much less the fact that violence against women, online and off, is a predictor of other kinds of real-world violence. The dots are there — we just have to connect them.
5) Politicians and the media must take online “ironic” racism and misogyny seriously
Gamergate masked its misogyny in a coating of shrill yelling that had most journalists in 2014 writing off the whole incident as “satirical” and immature “trolling,” and very few correctly predicting that Gamergate’s trolling was the future of politics — the political wave that would essentially morph into the broader alt-right movement.
But the movement was serious. “It served as a rallying point for a lot of groups that wouldn’t necessarily have gotten along, like more traditional conservatives and outright neo-Nazis,” Evans said, “and gave them all a banner to rally under where the Nazis could pretend to not be Nazis. And the conservatives could give themselves plausible deniability and pretend they weren’t working with Nazis. It acted as a blanket for all of this stuff.”
Gamergate was all about disguising a sincere wish for violence and upheaval by dressing it up in hyperbole and irony in order to confuse outsiders and make it all seem less serious. As Evans noted to me, Gamergate was fueled in part by online extremists, who initially bonded with young men in gaming communities over what started as “ironic humor and jokes about the Holocaust, jokes about racial differences and whatnot. And over time, all those things became less joking.” This tactic was a deliberate strategy that formed the core of the alt-right playbook, and years after Gamergate, media outlets continued to fall for it.
Take, for example, the highly disturbing instigator Milo Yiannopoulos, who gained notoriety as a Gamergate commentator before he went to work at the alt-right blog site Breitbart in 2014. The media continued referring to Yiannopoulos as a “troll,” despite ample evidence suggesting his words and actions were associated with real bigoted or extremist beliefs, espoused by both him and his followers. Yiannopoulos was a prime example of a rabble-rouser who manipulated Gamergate toward his own ends. He benefited from the mayhem and chaos his rabble-rousing caused, whether he was making campus tour stops that inspired increases in hate speech as well as acts of serious violence, or just egging on the racist harassment of a public figure.
Yiannopoulos constantly exacerbated his followers and their anger. The danger posed to marginalized members of the communities he visited was immediate and real. Yet even into 2018 he would explicitly encourage violence and then claim he was “just trolling.” Just as Evans noted, the merest suggestion that none of his extremist rhetoric was sincere allowed him to continue spreading it.
Understanding this concept is crucial to understanding why Gamergate was able to morph into the alt-right. Gamergate simultaneously masqueraded as legitimate concern about ethics that demanded audiences take it seriously, and as total trolling that demanded audiences dismiss it entirely. Both these claims served to obfuscate its real aim — misogyny, and, increasingly, racist white supremacy. By the time Yiannopoulos joined Breitbart, and Breitbart’s Steve Bannon joined the Trump campaign, the links between Gamergate and the national political machine should have been clear. “The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump campaign represents a landmark achievement for the ‘alt-right,’” Hillary Clinton said in a 2016 campaign speech. “A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party.”
But it seems that very few people have really learned how to tell when a troll is just trolling or when it’s about to commit real-world violence. “It’s hard to spot the terrorists among the trolls,” the Wall Street Journal acknowledged in 2019, in response to the Christchurch mass shooting. The Christchurch shooter had posted a manifesto online; full of hyperbolic alt-right internet memes, it was intended to both obfuscate and amplify the genuine white nationalist rhetoric at its center.
The public’s failure to understand and accept that the alt-right’s misogyny, racism, and violent rhetoric is serious goes hand in hand with its failure to understand and accept that such rhetoric is identical to that of President Trump. Now we see similar ideologies as Gamergaters from someone as powerful as Trump. He retweets and amplifies alt-right memes on his Twitter; his son openly affiliates with the alt-right; Trump defended and continues to present the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as though it wasn’t intentionally planned and organized as a white supremacist rally. (It was.)
As described by Ezra Klein, Trump’s willingness to engage in incendiary racist rhetoric is similar to the tactics that have led many journalists to dismiss his followers as trolls: “He chooses his enemies based on who he thinks will rile up his base. He uses outrageous, offensive insults to get the media to take notice. And then he feeds off the energy unleashed by the confrontation.” In other words, he and his followers — many of whom, again, are members of the extreme online right-wing that got its momentum from Gamergate — are using the strategy Gamergate codified: deploying offensive behavior behind a guise of mock outrage, irony, trolling, and outright misrepresentation, in order to mask the sincere extremism behind the message.
Just as Yiannopoulos did before him, Trump speaks to his supporter base through wink-wink-nod-nod moments that lead them to respond in alarming ways, including with violence. But some members of the media, politicians, and members of the public still struggle to accept that Trump’s rhetoric is having violent consequences, despite all evidence to the contrary.
That divide between reality and perception is part of the larger cultural epistemic crisis that has loomed over the US — and arguably was accelerated by Gamergate. The movement’s insistence that it was about one thing (ethics in journalism) when it was about something else (harassing women) provided a case study for how extremists would proceed to drive ideological fissures through the foundations of democracy: by building a toxic campaign of hate beneath a veneer of denial.
Six years later, it seems, the rest of us are still struggling to learn from the consequences.


vox--2020-01-20--Democrats should talk about child care costs in a broader way

Child and family policy got a brief moment in the sun Tuesday night during a CNN Democratic debate when moderator Brianne Pfannenstiel observed that child care is a “ huge expense for many new families and a problem especially acute in rural Iowa.
” Despite the expense , she said , “ many families don ’ t have the option of quitting a job because that income is needed.
” Some Democrats in the race have plans that could deliver significant and much-needed help to young families .
This should be fertile policy terrain for the party to reach out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the candidates delivered slightly odd answers in the debate that narrowed the problem and sold their own policies short .
Democrats are increasingly the party of college-educated professionals , and those who make it under the klieg lights of the debate stage are unusually ambitious and successful people .
The pitch made on the stage was aimed directly at this group of voters , while missing the chance to reach women with moderately traditionalist worldviews , lower-income people who really need help from an activist government , and unmarried parents .
Government-funded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to people struggling to balance child-rearing responsibilities with their career aspirations .
But as Pfannenstiel noted about rural Iowans in particular , child care is just a useful form of financial assistance to families with different structures and personal goals .
It ’ s a mistake for career-oriented politicians to project their own set of priorities onto everyone else .
Democrats are too hung up on a niche situation The debate question was directed initially at former South Bend , Indiana , Mayor Pete Buttigieg , who began by saying he supported a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ care .
He explained why by observing that “ until we do , this will be the biggest driver of the gender pay gap .
When somebody like the voter has to step out of the workforce because of the reason , she is at a disadvantage when she comes back in .
And [ it ] can affect her pay for the rest of her career.
” Buttigieg is correct in noting that the gender pay gap arises primarily because of parenting norms rather than just overt labor market discrimination .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the high cost of child care leads women to drop out of the labor force , which leads to a lifelong earnings penalty even when they return , does not appear to be the central part of the story .
Instead , economist Claudia Goldin ’ s research shows , the big issue has to do with the structure of work expectations .
In many professions , like law or finance , there are large financial returns to being able to drop everything at a moment ’ s notice and be at a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ This is incompatible with the reality that kids get sick , someone needs to go to parent-teacher conferences , and schools close randomly for a week in March .
Whoever shoulders those responsibilities garners an earnings penalty , and that person is usually the mom .
This is a serious issue ( for much more on it , see the Explained episode about the gender pay gap ) , but it doesn ’ t have that much to do with child care expenses .
More broadly , women dropping out of the workforce @ @ @ @ @ @ @ care may be a less common scenario than it seems .
More common is probably the reverse , like in Pfannenstiel ’ s example — a parent who might prefer to stay home full time or part time but can ’ t afford to do so .
Sen. Elizabeth Warren , following up on Buttigieg ’ s answer with her personal story , sketched out a worry similar to his .
“ We went through one child care after another , and it didn ’ t work , ” she said recounting her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ If I hadn ’ t been saved by my aunt , I was ready to quit my job .
I think about how many women of my generation got knocked off the track and never got back on .
How many of my daughter ’ s generation get knocked off and don ’ t get back on.
” This is obviously a real issue , especially for Warren ’ s generation .
But while child care affordability impacts virtually all parents , the particular concern Warren is raising of child care expenses forcing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of career success is a bit idiosyncratic .
One-third of children in the US have unmarried parents , for starters .
Of the remaining two-thirds , many don ’ t have a parent who earns enough money that having the second parent drop out of the labor force would even be an option .
Many others have a parent who stays at home because that ’ s what he or she prefers .
And while lots of people have fulfilling careers that give them an important sense of meaning and identity , plenty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to get by .
Democrats actually have policy ideas that would help all kinds of families , but they ’ re really just talking about one kind .
Subsidized child care means you have more money If you ’ re the parent of a young child , the great thing about a federal program to subsidize child care costs is that it would give you more money .
If you have big career goals that are being pinched by child care costs , this helps you .
You might not have been forced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ otherwise .
But with the cost of “ ordinary ” child care now defrayed by the government , you have more money to spend on hiring child care for times when inconvenient schedules lead to work/life balance conflicts ( say , you and your spouse both need to work late one night because there ’ s a presidential debate , so you hire a babysitter ) .
But subsidized health care helps if you ’ d like to have a second or third kid but just don ’ t earn enough money to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you ’ re a single parent worried that you won ’ t be able to afford Christmas presents for your kids .
It might even make it possible for you to work fewer hours per week and spend more time with your family .
The point isn ’ t that candidates should be singling out a particular thing as the one true goal of subsidized child care .
But they are selling their policies ’ merits short by portraying them as narrowly about preventing ambitious women from being pushed off the track into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ though nobody mentioned it Tuesday night — or , as far as I can recall , on other debate nights — virtually all Democrats in Congress have united around the idea of creating a universal child allowance that would give parents of young kids cash that they could use to address any of the many expenses of child-rearing in whatever way they see fit .
Democrats should try to win some traditionalist votes One surprising thing , to me , about the way that dialogue played out is that many of my points @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Warren wrote years ago called The Two-Income Trap .
Warren ’ s point in that book was that for most families , putting all parents to work is not a lifestyle choice but a financial necessity driven by stagnating wages .
But she argues that two-income arrangements create hidden financial instability because they also lock families into arrangements that feature high fixed expenses like child care .
The book earned praise from cultural conservatives , and in it , Warren goes out of her way to address cultural conservative concerns — arguing that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ provide benefits to stay-at-home parents rather than operating as a straight transfer to working parents .
She also expresses anxiety about the future of childbearing in America : “ If the word gets out that families with children are nearly three times more likely to collapse into bankruptcy will even more women decide not to have children ?
” This would be one way out of the trap .
But the text denounces those who “ view parenthood as nothing more than another ‘ lifestyle choice , ’ not so different from joining @ @ @ @ @ @ @ windsurfing.
” The argument is that society has an obligation to support parents and families so that people don ’ t opt to avoid childbearing .
In the time since the book was published , however , the fertility rate has dropped to a record low .
That ’ s not because people have stopped wanting to have kids — it ’ s because people have stopped having as many kids as they say they ’ d ideally like .
And when surveyed as to why , the No .
1 answer is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other words , the exact scenario Warren warned about has come to pass .
And Democrats ’ child care and child allowance ideas , especially if tweaked a little to be friendlier to stay-at-home-parents , could be a big part of the solution to a problem that traditionalist-minded people care about and that anti-tax , anti-spending conservatives simply can ’ t fix .

Child and family policy got a brief moment in the sun Tuesday night during a CNN Democratic debate when moderator Brianne Pfannenstiel observed that child care is a “huge expense for many new families and a problem especially acute in rural Iowa.” Despite the expense, she said, “many families don’t have the option of quitting a job because that income is needed.”
Some Democrats in the race have plans that could deliver significant and much-needed help to young families. This should be fertile policy terrain for the party to reach out to voters it needs, but several of the candidates delivered slightly odd answers in the debate that narrowed the problem and sold their own policies short.
Democrats are increasingly the party of college-educated professionals, and those who make it under the klieg lights of the debate stage are unusually ambitious and successful people. The pitch made on the stage was aimed directly at this group of voters, while missing the chance to reach women with moderately traditionalist worldviews, lower-income people who really need help from an activist government, and unmarried parents.
Government-funded child care can be an enormous help to people struggling to balance child-rearing responsibilities with their career aspirations. But as Pfannenstiel noted about rural Iowans in particular, child care is just a useful form of financial assistance to families with different structures and personal goals. It’s a mistake for career-oriented politicians to project their own set of priorities onto everyone else.
Democrats are too hung up on a niche situation
The debate question was directed initially at former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who began by saying he supported a greater federal role in providing subsidized child care. He explained why by observing that “until we do, this will be the biggest driver of the gender pay gap. When somebody like the voter has to step out of the workforce because of the reason, she is at a disadvantage when she comes back in. And [it] can affect her pay for the rest of her career.”
Buttigieg is correct in noting that the gender pay gap arises primarily because of parenting norms rather than just overt labor market discrimination. But the mechanism he is positing, where the high cost of child care leads women to drop out of the labor force, which leads to a lifelong earnings penalty even when they return, does not appear to be the central part of the story.
Instead, economist Claudia Goldin’s research shows, the big issue has to do with the structure of work expectations. In many professions, like law or finance, there are large financial returns to being able to drop everything at a moment’s notice and be at a client’s beck and call. This is incompatible with the reality that kids get sick, someone needs to go to parent-teacher conferences, and schools close randomly for a week in March. Whoever shoulders those responsibilities garners an earnings penalty, and that person is usually the mom.
This is a serious issue (for much more on it, see the Explained episode about the gender pay gap), but it doesn’t have that much to do with child care expenses.
More broadly, women dropping out of the workforce because they can’t afford child care may be a less common scenario than it seems. More common is probably the reverse, like in Pfannenstiel’s example — a parent who might prefer to stay home full time or part time but can’t afford to do so.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, following up on Buttigieg’s answer with her personal story, sketched out a worry similar to his.
“We went through one child care after another, and it didn’t work,” she said recounting her struggles as a young mother. “If I hadn’t been saved by my aunt, I was ready to quit my job. I think about how many women of my generation got knocked off the track and never got back on. How many of my daughter’s generation get knocked off and don’t get back on.”
This is obviously a real issue, especially for Warren’s generation. But while child care affordability impacts virtually all parents, the particular concern Warren is raising of child care expenses forcing a woman “off the track” of career success is a bit idiosyncratic.
One-third of children in the US have unmarried parents, for starters. Of the remaining two-thirds, many don’t have a parent who earns enough money that having the second parent drop out of the labor force would even be an option. Many others have a parent who stays at home because that’s what he or she prefers. And while lots of people have fulfilling careers that give them an important sense of meaning and identity, plenty of others are just doing a job to get by.
Democrats actually have policy ideas that would help all kinds of families, but they’re really just talking about one kind.
Subsidized child care means you have more money
If you’re the parent of a young child, the great thing about a federal program to subsidize child care costs is that it would give you more money.
If you have big career goals that are being pinched by child care costs, this helps you. You might not have been forced to drop out of the labor market otherwise. But with the cost of “ordinary” child care now defrayed by the government, you have more money to spend on hiring child care for times when inconvenient schedules lead to work/life balance conflicts (say, you and your spouse both need to work late one night because there’s a presidential debate, so you hire a babysitter).
But subsidized health care helps if you’d like to have a second or third kid but just don’t earn enough money to support a larger family. Or if you’re a single parent worried that you won’t be able to afford Christmas presents for your kids. It might even make it possible for you to work fewer hours per week and spend more time with your family.
The point isn’t that candidates should be singling out a particular thing as the one true goal of subsidized child care. But they are selling their policies’ merits short by portraying them as narrowly about preventing ambitious women from being pushed off the track into roles as stay-at-home moms.
Indeed, though nobody mentioned it Tuesday night — or, as far as I can recall, on other debate nights — virtually all Democrats in Congress have united around the idea of creating a universal child allowance that would give parents of young kids cash that they could use to address any of the many expenses of child-rearing in whatever way they see fit.
Democrats should try to win some traditionalist votes
One surprising thing, to me, about the way that dialogue played out is that many of my points could have been taken from a book Warren wrote years ago called The Two-Income Trap.
Warren’s point in that book was that for most families, putting all parents to work is not a lifestyle choice but a financial necessity driven by stagnating wages. But she argues that two-income arrangements create hidden financial instability because they also lock families into arrangements that feature high fixed expenses like child care.
The book earned praise from cultural conservatives, and in it, Warren goes out of her way to address cultural conservative concerns — arguing that child care subsidies should be structured to provide benefits to stay-at-home parents rather than operating as a straight transfer to working parents.
She also expresses anxiety about the future of childbearing in America: “If the word gets out that families with children are nearly three times more likely to collapse into bankruptcy will even more women decide not to have children?” This would be one way out of the trap. But the text denounces those who “view parenthood as nothing more than another ‘lifestyle choice,’ not so different from joining a commune or developing a passion for windsurfing.”
The argument is that society has an obligation to support parents and families so that people don’t opt to avoid childbearing.
In the time since the book was published, however, the fertility rate has dropped to a record low. That’s not because people have stopped wanting to have kids — it’s because people have stopped having as many kids as they say they’d ideally like. And when surveyed as to why, the No. 1 answer is the expense of child care.
In other words, the exact scenario Warren warned about has come to pass. And Democrats’ child care and child allowance ideas, especially if tweaked a little to be friendlier to stay-at-home-parents, could be a big part of the solution to a problem that traditionalist-minded people care about and that anti-tax, anti-spending conservatives simply can’t fix.


Is rationality overrated?

Since the 1970s , behavioral economists — from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky to Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler — have been chipping away at the idea that human beings are basically rational creatures .
Their work has suggested that we ’ re actually a lot more irrational than we think .
That ’ s caused no small amount of hand-wringing : Humans were supposed to be “ the rational animal ” !
Are we instead just doomed to keep making lots of terrible decisions ?
New research says there ’ s another way to look at it .
What @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in cases where doing the rational thing would violate something they value more — like socially conscious behavior ?
And if that ’ s the case , should we actually embrace some instances of irrationality rather than discounting it as an embarrassing nuisance ?
That ’ s one of the possibilities raised in an interesting psychology study published last week in Science Advances .
Researchers based at the University of Waterloo in Canada wanted to understand what prompts people to use rationality — or deviate from it — in their decision-making .
To @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reams of text to see what people generally take rationality to mean .
Then they conducted 12 experiments , recruiting people from Amazon Mechanical Turk to play classic economic games like the Dictator Game online and answer questions about their behavior .
The study starts by distinguishing between two terms : there ’ s rationality , where you focus on maximizing the chance of getting what you want , and there ’ s reasonableness , where you strike a balance between what you want and social norms .
Although we might sometimes use @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shows that people generally associate the former with the cold hard logic of self-interest and the latter with socially conscious traits like kindness or cooperativeness .
A computerized analysis of billions of words — drawn from soap operas , Supreme Court opinions , and Google Books — showed that these associations hold true across several countries .
But is it better to act rationally or reasonably ?
The researchers conducted some experiments to understand people ’ s perceptions , expectations , and behaviors .
Here are five key findings : • Participants perceived @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people .
• Participants expected that reasonable people would share more than rational people .
• Their expectation turned out to be correct : People who viewed themselves as reasonable shared significantly more than those who viewed themselves as rational .
• In a Dictator Game , an experiment where you ’ re given money and have to decide whether to give some of it away , participants donated 5 percent more money if they were aiming to be reasonable than if they were aiming to be rational .
• When participants were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ actions from their lives , and then to take part in a Dictator Game , it turned out that recalling a reasonable action led to offers that were slightly higher than did recalling a rational action .
Plus , whereas 14 percent of participants in the rational condition wanted to donate nothing , only 9.5 percent of those in the reasonable condition said the same ( in fact , 71 percent of them donated at least half the money ) .
Together , these findings offer us insights that cut against our inherited @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decision-making .
Ditching rationality in favor of reasonableness might actually make sense in some contexts , they suggest — especially because we ’ ve lately defined rationality in such a narrow way that it ’ s just not always the most useful standard of judgment .
Is it better to be rational or reasonable ?
It depends on your goals .
One of the noteworthy things in this study is that simple linguistic cues — rational versus reasonable — are effective at influencing participants ’ behavior in a pretty consistent way .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ primed to think about reasonableness may have implications for fields like education , politics , advocacy , and marketing .
“ To encourage people to make more cooperative choices , ” the study suggests , “ reduce the demand to be rational and enhance the request to be reasonable.
” Say you want to mitigate climate change and you ’ re trying to convince people to accept a carbon tax .
You could tell them it ’ s the rational thing to do because it ’ ll end up putting money back into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s in their self-interest .
Or you could tell them it ’ s only reasonable to embrace a policy that will ensure a better future for their children , their country , and their planet .
Igor Grossmann , the study ’ s lead author and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo in Canada , told me he ’ s noticed many advocates in that country using the first approach .
He thinks that ’ s a mistake .
“ When you ’ re arguing for a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ good , ” he told me , “ you may be more successful with the reasonableness frame ” — especially when the behavior requires a bit of initial sacrifice on the self-interest front , as a carbon tax does .
In other cases , however , embracing rationality can serve you better .
The researchers asked participants to imagine that they were caught up in a negotiation or legal dispute .
Who would they rather have acting on their behalf : a rational agent or a reasonable agent ?
Participants favored the rational @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they ’ re looking for someone who ’ ll keep them from getting a raw deal or a prison sentence .
The point , the authors say , is that “ preferences for rational or reasonable agents are conditional on situational goal demands.
” This echoes recent research by other psychologists like Molly Crockett at Yale , who has shown that we prefer different types of moral agents in different social roles .
When we ’ re looking for a spouse or a friend , we prefer deontologists , who believe that an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fulfilling a duty — and that we have special duties toward special people like our partners and pals .
But when we ’ re looking for a political leader , we prefer utilitarians or consequentialists , who believe that an action is moral if it produces good consequences — and that everyone equally deserves to benefit from the good .
In the moral domain , applying deontology in some cases and consequentialism in others might come off as inconsistent .
Yet it may actually be the wisest thing to apply different moral philosophies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ same may be true in the realm of decision-making .
“ Irrational behavior , ” says the study , “ may not necessarily be a sign of failure to understand game theoretical principles but rather an attempt to follow a competing folk standard of reasonableness.
” That ’ s academese for : When you see someone acting in a way that seems irrational and you ’ re tempted to write that off as a stupid mistake , think again .
Maybe they ’ re not failing at rational decision-making .
Maybe they ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they ’ ve deemed more appropriate for that situation .
We need to recover a richer notion of rationality Let ’ s get clear on something : Nobody is arguing that rationality is a bad thing .
It ’ s more that our understanding of rationality has , over the past few decades , become impoverished .
“ What philosophers since the Enlightenment meant by rationality is much more complex than what economists talk about now , ” Grossmann told me .
“ If you look at Immanuel Kant or Adam Smith , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nuanced and it does include social norms .
Yet behavioral economists have this very narrow notion of rationality : abstract , formal , self-interested , and not at all about social norms.
” In other words , rationality used to be this capacious concept that included reasonableness .
By ripping reasonableness out of it , we ended up with a standard of judgment that the average person won ’ t see fit to apply in all situations — and then we assumed that indicates there ’ s something wrong with them .
According @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the more useful notion of rationality , but “ the reasonableness standard can help to recover it.
” We shouldn ’ t extrapolate too much from this single study of his .
It ’ s got its limitations .
For example , although the researchers can show association — the more the participants view themselves as rational , the less money they donate ; the more they view themselves as reasonable , the more money they donate — they can not say for sure what motivation is driving people who opt for reasonableness @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more research before we can draw any sweeping conclusions .
But it ’ s worth noting that this study is part of a larger trend : Grossmann and Crockett aren ’ t the only ones currently challenging our inherited picture of rationality .
The past year alone saw the publication of three books by three professors who question what role rationality can and should play in our lives : Can Science Make Sense of Life ?
by Sheila Jasanoff , Irrationality by Justin E.H. Smith , and The Territories of Human Reason by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ suggest rationality is not a single unchanging thing ; it has a history , and it takes different forms in different times , cultures , and situations .
And all three ask : What would it look like if we challenge today ’ s prevailing notion of rationality and put it in its proper place by recognizing that there are actually multiple rationalities , each adapted to the tasks of a particular domain ?
That question , it seems , is gaining traction .
Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter .
Twice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges : improving public health , decreasing human and animal suffering , easing catastrophic risks , and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good .
Future Perfect is funded in part by individual contributions , grants , and sponsorships .
Learn more here .

Since the 1970s, behavioral economists — from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky to Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler — have been chipping away at the idea that human beings are basically rational creatures. Their work has suggested that we’re actually a lot more irrational than we think.
That’s caused no small amount of hand-wringing: Humans were supposed to be “the rational animal”! Are we instead just doomed to keep making lots of terrible decisions?
New research says there’s another way to look at it. What if people often choose to be irrational in cases where doing the rational thing would violate something they value more — like socially conscious behavior? And if that’s the case, should we actually embrace some instances of irrationality rather than discounting it as an embarrassing nuisance?
That’s one of the possibilities raised in an interesting psychology study published last week in Science Advances. Researchers based at the University of Waterloo in Canada wanted to understand what prompts people to use rationality — or deviate from it — in their decision-making. To get at this, they first analyzed reams of text to see what people generally take rationality to mean. Then they conducted 12 experiments, recruiting people from Amazon Mechanical Turk to play classic economic games like the Dictator Game online and answer questions about their behavior.
The study starts by distinguishing between two terms: there’s rationality, where you focus on maximizing the chance of getting what you want, and there’s reasonableness, where you strike a balance between what you want and social norms.
Although we might sometimes use rational and reasonable interchangeably, the study shows that people generally associate the former with the cold hard logic of self-interest and the latter with socially conscious traits like kindness or cooperativeness. A computerized analysis of billions of words — drawn from soap operas, Supreme Court opinions, and Google Books — showed that these associations hold true across several countries.
But is it better to act rationally or reasonably? The researchers conducted some experiments to understand people’s perceptions, expectations, and behaviors. Here are five key findings:
Participants perceived reasonable people as less selfish than rational people.
Participants expected that reasonable people would share more than rational people.
Their expectation turned out to be correct: People who viewed themselves as reasonable shared significantly more than those who viewed themselves as rational.
In a Dictator Game, an experiment where you’re given money and have to decide whether to give some of it away, participants donated 5 percent more money if they were aiming to be reasonable than if they were aiming to be rational.
When participants were asked to recall either reasonable or rational actions from their lives, and then to take part in a Dictator Game, it turned out that recalling a reasonable action led to offers that were slightly higher than did recalling a rational action. Plus, whereas 14 percent of participants in the rational condition wanted to donate nothing, only 9.5 percent of those in the reasonable condition said the same (in fact, 71 percent of them donated at least half the money).
Together, these findings offer us insights that cut against our inherited ways of thinking about what constitutes sound decision-making. Ditching rationality in favor of reasonableness might actually make sense in some contexts, they suggest — especially because we’ve lately defined rationality in such a narrow way that it’s just not always the most useful standard of judgment.
Is it better to be rational or reasonable? It depends on your goals.
One of the noteworthy things in this study is that simple linguistic cues — rational versus reasonable — are effective at influencing participants’ behavior in a pretty consistent way.
The fact that participants donated more generously when primed to think about reasonableness may have implications for fields like education, politics, advocacy, and marketing. “To encourage people to make more cooperative choices,” the study suggests, “reduce the demand to be rational and enhance the request to be reasonable.”
Say you want to mitigate climate change and you’re trying to convince people to accept a carbon tax. You could tell them it’s the rational thing to do because it’ll end up putting money back into their pockets — in other words, it’s in their self-interest. Or you could tell them it’s only reasonable to embrace a policy that will ensure a better future for their children, their country, and their planet.
Igor Grossmann, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo in Canada, told me he’s noticed many advocates in that country using the first approach. He thinks that’s a mistake.
“When you’re arguing for a behavior that’s for the common good,” he told me, “you may be more successful with the reasonableness frame” — especially when the behavior requires a bit of initial sacrifice on the self-interest front, as a carbon tax does.
In other cases, however, embracing rationality can serve you better.
The researchers asked participants to imagine that they were caught up in a negotiation or legal dispute. Who would they rather have acting on their behalf: a rational agent or a reasonable agent? Participants favored the rational agent — which makes sense, because they’re looking for someone who’ll keep them from getting a raw deal or a prison sentence.
The point, the authors say, is that “preferences for rational or reasonable agents are conditional on situational goal demands.”
This echoes recent research by other psychologists like Molly Crockett at Yale, who has shown that we prefer different types of moral agents in different social roles. When we’re looking for a spouse or a friend, we prefer deontologists, who believe that an action is moral if it’s fulfilling a duty — and that we have special duties toward special people like our partners and pals. But when we’re looking for a political leader, we prefer utilitarians or consequentialists, who believe that an action is moral if it produces good consequences — and that everyone equally deserves to benefit from the good.
In the moral domain, applying deontology in some cases and consequentialism in others might come off as inconsistent. Yet it may actually be the wisest thing to apply different moral philosophies in different relational contexts.
And the same may be true in the realm of decision-making.
“Irrational behavior,” says the study, “may not necessarily be a sign of failure to understand game theoretical principles but rather an attempt to follow a competing folk standard of reasonableness.”
That’s academese for: When you see someone acting in a way that seems irrational and you’re tempted to write that off as a stupid mistake, think again. Maybe they’re not failing at rational decision-making. Maybe they’re succeeding at reasonable decision-making, which they’ve deemed more appropriate for that situation.
We need to recover a richer notion of rationality
Let’s get clear on something: Nobody is arguing that rationality is a bad thing. It’s more that our understanding of rationality has, over the past few decades, become impoverished.
“What philosophers since the Enlightenment meant by rationality is much more complex than what economists talk about now,” Grossmann told me. “If you look at Immanuel Kant or Adam Smith, their notion of rationality is much more nuanced and it does include social norms. Yet behavioral economists have this very narrow notion of rationality: abstract, formal, self-interested, and not at all about social norms.”
In other words, rationality used to be this capacious concept that included reasonableness. By ripping reasonableness out of it, we ended up with a standard of judgment that the average person won’t see fit to apply in all situations — and then we assumed that indicates there’s something wrong with them.
According to Grossman, we’ve lost the more useful notion of rationality, but “the reasonableness standard can help to recover it.”
We shouldn’t extrapolate too much from this single study of his. It’s got its limitations. For example, although the researchers can show association — the more the participants view themselves as rational, the less money they donate; the more they view themselves as reasonable, the more money they donate — they cannot say for sure what motivation is driving people who opt for reasonableness over rationality. We need a lot more research before we can draw any sweeping conclusions.
But it’s worth noting that this study is part of a larger trend: Grossmann and Crockett aren’t the only ones currently challenging our inherited picture of rationality. The past year alone saw the publication of three books by three professors who question what role rationality can and should play in our lives: Can Science Make Sense of Life? by Sheila Jasanoff, Irrationality by Justin E.H. Smith, and The Territories of Human Reason by Alister E. McGrath.
All three books suggest rationality is not a single unchanging thing; it has a history, and it takes different forms in different times, cultures, and situations. And all three ask: What would it look like if we challenge today’s prevailing notion of rationality and put it in its proper place by recognizing that there are actually multiple rationalities, each adapted to the tasks of a particular domain?
That question, it seems, is gaining traction.
Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.
Future Perfect is funded in part by individual contributions, grants, and sponsorships. Learn more here.