For luckier people than me, this week will have been the first time they’ve ever heard of Carl Benjamin (or Sargon of Akkad, as he is better known online). The fact that a Ukip candidate has been discovered to have said something hideous felt like such routine news, it would hardly have registered with me if I hadn’t immediately recognised the candidate in question.
Benjamin tweeted in 2016 that he “wouldn’t even rape” the Labour MP Jess Phillips. He revisited the topic in a recent video on his million-subscriber YouTube channel and is now being investigated by the police. It’s a sorry story from a candidate in the European elections, but Phillips is far from the only woman Benjamin has harassed online. He has built his entire platform on it.
Most women who were working in or around the video games industry in late 2014 know exactly who Benjamin is. He was one of the more vocal figureheads of Gamergate, an online “movement” that began when an aggrieved man spread malicious gossip about his game developer ex-girlfriend. It metamorphosed into a coordinated harassment campaign against a huge number of women, under the smokescreen of anti-censorship and concern over ethics. It is now impossible not to see Gamergate as a foreshadowing of a disease that has since engulfed political and public life.
What people such as Benjamin want, with his disgusting speculation about whether female politicians are rape-worthy, is to bring the rank misogyny of the worst online spaces into public life. It is Trumpian trolling transferred into British politics. People such as Benjamin believe in a form of free speech with impunity that dictates that if women wish to exist publicly, create things or have an opinion, they should expect all the harassment, degrading commentary and ceaseless mean-spirited scrutiny that will inevitably follow. This was the message of Gamergate, back in 2014. It is now the message of a significant swathe of fringe politics, usually packaged with a heavy dose of racism.
The targets of Gamergate – almost all of whom were women – got a deluge of execrable abuse. I was the UK editor of Kotaku at the time, a video game website that was one of their prime targets: they even named their subreddit after us. We had people emailing our bosses trying to get us fired, sending video game publishers hundreds of faux-polite emails containing 1,000 words of conspiracy theories, and Microsoft Paint diagrams illustrating how feminists and social justice warriors were ruining video games.
We had people trying to find out where we lived, where our parents lived, digging around online for some compromising ancient forum post, tweet or photograph to undermine us. Some Gamergate targets got threatening phone calls and physical letters. Some received threats against their families. All forms of social media became unusable. Grifters like Benjamin egged on the masses with YouTube rants against women who’d ever been critical of video games, and feminism’s cancerous effect on gaming.
He has since expanded the audience he built on anti-feminism and anti-political correctness by embracing anti-immigration rhetoric, too, making it no surprise that he gravitated towards Ukip. As Buzzfeed recently documented, his fans’ Discord chat server is rife with “white supremacism, antisemitism, support for the Christchurch mosque terrorist, and discussions about murdering members of the European parliament”. What a delightful following.
For many women this abuse got bad enough to get the police involved. This largely turned out to be pointless, because the police’s advice to victims of online harassment essentially amounted to “why don’t you stay off the internet?”, as if the internet were some parallel universe that had no bearing on real life.
This kind of rhetoric is just as prevalent in the real world: on the streets outside Westminster, in politics, behind presidential pulpits, in Charlottesville. So, thanks for that, law enforcement. Perhaps it might have been an idea to hold people responsible for their targeted, sometimes violent harassment or hate speech, rather than making it the victim’s responsibility to avoid looking at it. Instead people such as Benjamin, who established themselves as anti-feminist mouthpieces in 2014, have forged alliances with other “alt-right” agitators – including Milo Yiannopoulos, who recently announced he will be joining Benjamin on the campaign trail – and are now speaking at Brexit rallies and running as MEPs for Ukip.
At the time, people who weren’t being subjected to the sharp end of the abuse often dismissed the perpetrators as keyboard warriors who wouldn’t dare look a person in the eye in real life. For some this might have been true, but for others there was no distinction between online and real life. This is especially true for the teens and young adults who have grown up with the internet in their pockets.
You can’t pretend the internet and what happens there is some weird alternative reality any more, not when young men radicalised by 8chan and incel forums go out and commit mass shootings, leaving behind manifestos written in the meme-language of their favourite haunts. The tech platforms have failed, time and time again, over many years, to address this problem, and have ignored the thousands of women and minorities who have pointed out the nature and scope of it. If people can say things online with impunity then it is perhaps only natural that they should expect to say the same things in person. Twitter, Reddit, far-right YouTube and the rest have created a version of “discourse” where this is seen as acceptable and inevitable.
I wonder sometimes what could have happened if people had properly listened to the women subjected to the worst of the Gamergate movement, instead of writing infuriating, prevaricating think-pieces gamely digging for legitimate grievances within the mountain of straightforward gendered harassment. Instead it took Donald Trump’s election two years later, led by some of the same forces (including Steve Bannon and his coterie of far-right Breitbart shock jocks), to prompt the tech platforms and wider society to notice that something very bad was going on, and that online discourse was definitely enabling it.
If the women of the games industry had been listened to more closely in 2014, would it have taken five more years before toxic bullshitters such as Alex Jones and Yiannopoulos were banished from Twitter and Facebook? Would it have taken so long for online hate speech to become a prosecutable offence? Might white supremacy have spread so easily online, along with misogyny? Would an anti-feminist YouTuber have gained enough of a platform to be running for the European parliament?
In the end Gamergate was about nothing of worth, and it achieved nothing of worth. Women are still here, still making video games and talking and writing about them, though some of us are perhaps a little more wary and employ many more Twitter filters.
But it showed us how technology spreads and enables mass harassment campaigns, and how extremism can become normalised for the people who take part in it. It showed us how malicious, meretricious, controversy-courting nobodies such as Yiannopoulos and Benjamin could amass large followings of disillusioned people and committed trolls, and use them to inflict damage on others and on political life. We should have learned more from it. People should have listened.
• Keza MacDonald is video games editor at the Guardian
