Category Archives: Gamergate

A Statement on Kiwi Farms for GamerGate and KiA

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I saw a statement on KiA2 earlier, from Null, which was gaining sympathy from a very small number of misguided people, about the deplatforming of Kiwi Farms. It deserves a response. Kiwi Farms is paedophile, criminal, stalking, terrorist trash. It has nothing to do with free speech.

In 2015, whilst passing through law school, doing my GDL and later my LL.M LPC, I received a police warning for alleged, “harassment” of the Block Bot team (made up of transgender activists) in support of Gamergate. It was frightening to me, and if it had not been revoked, could have been damaging or stopped me finishing my studies. But it was revoked. Using my burgeoning litigation skills I extracted a formal rescindment and apology from Cambridge police. The police apology letter is still up in my article and I reproduce it below. In our society, boycott campaigns are legal. It is legal to write to someone’s employer to draw their attention to egregious wrongdoing even outside their job, or organise a boycott of said company. Free speech is a wide and important protection. If anything, KiA in recent years is too timid about boycott and advertisement cancelling campaigns. Free speech does not however, extend to Kiwi Farms and its satellites, which are forums for exchanging child pornography, defamation and cyberstalking individuals, including children, to death.

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The Police official rescinding the ‘harassment’ notice that had been given on the basis of allegations by Sarah Brown of the Block Bot team.

Ironically, Sarah Brown, like Keffals, is transgender. Like many, I have had to fight for my right to free speech against aggressive transgender activists. I understand how upsetting this ideology can be. Kiwi Farms and their supporters are desperate to convince the unwary that their being deplatformed is something to do with that, that it means no one can criticise transgender persons. That is a ridiculous lie. The new British Prime Minister Liz Truss, has expressed strong views and also on forcing social media companies not to deplatform Conservatives. Laws are being passed this year. Those are views she holds not just in public, but in private. As a Conservative member and blogger, I have met both candidates for leadership of the Conservative Party. Liz Truss spent a good chunk of a Christmas Party I went to last year telling us her very strongly held views on free speech and transgenderism, as well as the need to protect spaces for biological females, and the need to protect children.

That will not help Kiwi Farms. Kiwi Farms is a stalking and terrorism forum run by an avowed paedophile that does and permits things that are illegal even in 1st Amendment jurisdictions, let alone Europe or anywhere else. At no point in history has a proposition along the lines of, “Paedophiles unite for stalking! Yay!”, been legally or socially acceptable. Below, I post an exchange between Joshua Moon and Gandi.net, one of many hosting companies in many companies that deplatformed his site for hosting illegal child pornography, until he had to start his own hosting company, 1776 Hosting. Which has now had its IP addresses rescinded by the Australian government for illegal content.

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Joshua Moon claims that he did not know there was any child pornography and begs Gandi.net for just one more chance. And fails. Click for full size.

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Paizo: Abuse of Female Whistleblower by Wizards of the Coast Author Jessica Price

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Jessica Rice publicly attacks Tonya Woldridge, an employee of a commercial rival, in profane terms. She later reveals it is because Woldridge blew the whistle on disputed allegations Price made in a private workplace forum. Are Chris Cox, CEO of Wizards of the Coast, and Brian Goldner, Hasbro CEO comfortable with this behaviour? Click for full size. Original tweet (archive)

Paizo is a small company that makes Pathfinder, a niche competitor to Dungeons and Dragons aimed at people who prefer old fashioned, complicated rules to newer more streamlined ones. It is best known for the IP behind the Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, PC games. After the dismissal of the Paizo Customer Service and Community Manager, Sara Marie Teter, an online mob of angry extremists have been demanding change, resignations and and an independent investigation into the supposed, “wrongful termination”, despite the fact that the dismissed staffer does not appear to have alleged wrongful termination. The mob, whose anger has been fuelled by fired, former Paizo staffer Jessica Price, has focused its ire on another female member of staff. Worse, one of her explicitly stated motives was that the victim disclosed content from a “private” workplace forum run by Price. Price is now an author on multiple Wizards of the Coasts (WotC) products. MHN contacted WotC and parent company Hasbro to ask for an explanation.

Jessica Price is a contentious figure in the niche world of science fiction, science fiction and gaming. She is known for regularly criticising former employers including Microsoft (archive), Paizo (archive) and ArenaNet (archive).

Most recently, she has attacked a former Paizo employee, Tonya Woldridge, Paizo’s Director of Community – and it is not okay. The vicious attack is problematic not because of its profane nature, nor because it looks remarkably like cyber-bullying, but because her express motivation (archive) is that Tonya Woldridge made what would, here in the UK, be a legally protected disclosure about potentially illegal and immoral conduct by Price. Similar whistleblowing protections also apply in some states of the United States. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not alleging that Price has violated any US law. I am merely alleging that she is morally guilty of bad behaviour against a former colleague because of that colleague’s behaviour.

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Jessica Rice makes clear her motives for her vicious attacks on Tonya Woldridge. It is because Woldridge blew the whistle on disputed allegations Price made in a secret workplace forum. Original tweet (archive).

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FSU Associate Professor Heather Urbanski, WorldCon Head Listener – Has Been Accused of Inappropriate Conduct by Multiple Students – Failed to Respond on WorldCon Child Torture Materials Complaints

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Associate Professor of English Heather Urbanski of Fitch State University (FSU) is also the Area Head of Listening at the World Science Fiction Convention 2021. This Orwellian title means she is in charge of the department that handle complaints about breaches of the code of conduct, including sexual harassment and suchlike. It is a title roughly equivalent to, “Head of Safeguarding”. Yet, MHN can exclusively reveal that in her work as a Professor at Fitchburg State University she has, according to RateMyProfessor.com, been accused of of improper behaviour by at least 20 of her students. If true, some of these allegations would appear to meet some definitions of abuse such as bullying or demeaning behaviour. 91% of her students on the site rate her as “Awful”. At the same time this week, she has been condemned by members of an abuse survivor group this week for failing to deal with complaints about distribution of child torture material by reviled z-list author Jason Sanford. Will FSU and WorldCon officials investigate?

Image showing on the left Heather Urbanski's current RateMyProfessor grade of 1.4, on the right her picture with the question, "Enabler?" over it.

Associate Professor Heather Urbanski of Fitchburg State University gets a grade of 1.4/5 (28%) on ratemyprofessors.com. On the site, students have accused her of improper conduct towards them that the university does not appear to have investigated. She has also attracted controversy in her role as, “Listeners Area Head” at WorldCon2021. Members of a group for child abuse survivors have criticised her for failing to take robust action against Jason Sanford, “I don’t think she is a fit person to work in any kind of school […] metaphorically, it [is] like they are holding down a child to be raped and tortured.”, said one.

The current controversy over WorldCon has been brewing for years. There have always been disagreements and kerfuffles in fandom. It is an arena defined by poor social skills combined with extremely passionate interest. In recent years however, vicious political division has erupted throughout fandom such as with the 2014 #GamerGate controversy. Similar concerns have hit WorldCon, with right-wingers feeling they had to organise a slate of candidates for awards to overcome systemic discriminatory bias (archive). Concerns about inappropriate attitudes to paedophilia and child protection have also been an issue for decades and have been well-documented, for example in, “The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon” by Moira Greyland and Vox Day.

The most recent scandal to hit WorldCon is its disgraceful conduct towards respected female publisher Toni Weisskopf. Weisskopf is the publisher of Baen Books, and last month was the subject of a deeply unethical and misleading hit-piece by Jason Sanford, a bad-to-awful amateur science fiction author. In response, WorldCon removed Weisskopf as a Guest of Honour, making a public statement condemning her (archive). The unjust response of WorldCon to the obviously inaccurate and misleading article led to public criticism of WorldCon and withdrawal of top science fiction authors including David Weber (archive). Weber’s withdrawal is a huge blow to Worldcon. He is vastly more famous than nearly everyone else involved. Not only is he one of the few people involved whose name I recognised, I actually own some of his books. Like, actual paper copies.

Investigation by MHN revealed that Sanford had been openly distributing and selling stories involving harm to minors and minor-bodied fictional creatures. One of these, “The Wheels on the Torture Bus Go Round and Round” involved child torture and what could appear to be grooming. Some of Sanford’s supporters have been trying to minimise the stories, but complaints were made to WorldCon. Heather Urbanski is the “Listeners Area Head” at WorldCon (staff list / archive), the department in charge of dealing with Code of Conduct complaints. As some feared retaliation, I posted my article and the complaint in their Facebook group on the basis that as I am not an attendee, I cannot be banned. I also emailed the official CoC contact email.

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Big Tech Unites Planet … Against Them, Over Political Censorship

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I never thought I would see a day when German President Angela Merkel would defend Donald Trump (archive). But, she gets it. Social media is now a key way people discuss politics. So, when a person is banned for their opinions, it is like the phone company saying you cannot talk on their phones, because they do not like what you say. That is not to say some measure of control is important – terrorism is illegal on an old fashioned phone and it should be illegal on social media. However, it is not for Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey to be deciding what is acceptable speech.

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Social media censors the speech of vulnerable groups but frequently fails to censor child pornography and extremist anti-Semitism.

Imagine you are a politician. You observe, in the middle of a US Election, a group of powerful companies undermine a candidate’s campaign then ban them on contentious grounds. That candidate is the incumbent President of the United States of America. Regardless of party or nation, a chill would hit your stomach. Because, if it can happen to the most powerful politician on Earth, it can happen to you. Boris Johnson here in the UK gets it. He got it in November, according to the Daily Mail (archive). Merkel gets it. the French get it. It is now a priority in nearly every Western Nation. Trump’s ban hit them where they live.

The ban of Parler too was crass. It was as if Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg put on tutus and, “We am r hav oligarchy an’ monopoly iz sexi” t-shirts before doing a high-kicking song and dance routine about their excessive market power on the front page of YouTube. In the short term it revealed their power. In the long term it all but guaranteed that power will be taken away.

The problem is that Zuckerberg and Dorsey are not politicians. They had a metallic fist that they had hidden in a velvet glove behind impenetrable walls of complexity such as post ranking algorithms. Their soft power, had they kept it soft, would have been hard to challenge and could have stayed obfuscated – at least enough to deter politicians and keep it a lower priority issue. Instead, they made the fatal, politically maladroit decision to take off that glove and reveal the stainless steel cyborg fist by starting banning mainstream commentators and politicians. They had the power but not the wisdom as to use it discreetly.

Big Tech are alleged to have sought to influence elections not just in the United States but in other countries such as Uganda, which has banned them until at least after the election. North Dakota already has legislative proposals (archive).

Every politician in the world now agrees there needs to be regulation to protect speech. In the UK and US this favours the right. Because, as soon as the government becomes the arbiter of who and what the social media companies can ban the 1st Amendment applies. In the UK, whilst our free speech laws are weaker they are still more permissive than Twitter. In a December judgement, British judges held that mis-gendering was protected speech (archive). In the UK, when a private institution is carrying out a public function, it is subject to the Human Rights Act 1998 (which includes the UK equivalent of the 1st Amendment).

Another group likely to benefit is #GamerGate. For years, they complained of social media censorship. Now, nearly every government in the world has rushed it to near the top of their agenda. The politicians have been hit where they live. Suddenly, the arguments of the likes of Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian seem immeasurably less convincing. Even in defeat, Trump may end up winning one of the most important fights in the free world today.

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Lewisham Deptford Labour Youth Officer Verity Nevitt and Sister are being Sued for Libel, Harassment and Misuse of Private Information. Tweets Admit Drug Abuse and Paid Sugarbaby Sleaze

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As a proven victim of sex crime (proven in a court, not a Tumblr post) I obviously sympathise with people who feel that attempts have been made to gag them. Equally however, there is little more vile than a false allegator or someone who wastes law enforcement time. Aside from causing huge distress to the falsely accused (who have rights too, of course) it draws resources from real victims. If a person in one place wastes the time of specially trained officers, somewhere a woman or a child may be raped with no redress. Such people deserve the harshest condemnation. The foreseeable consequence of squandering police resources is the image of a vile rapist or paedophile thrusting into a screaming victim. It is that simple. Verity Nevitt, Youth Officer of Lewisham Deptford Labour, is being sued, accused with her sister of making false allegations.

Verity Nevitt Seeking Arrangement2019-10-21

Verity admits to being a former member of Seeking Arrangement, a site known for prostitution. She also muses about joining the website, ‘OnlyFans.com’. Verity has denied offering sexual services in an email, but has not stated what services she did provide or what services she contemplated providing on OnlyFans. Click for full size.

The Youth Officer for Lewisham Deptford Labour Party, Verity Nevitt, is currently subject to a High Court restraining Order along with her sister Lucy. A summary of the case is that Lucy and Verity are being sued for alleged harassment / stalking of a male Lucy and Verity accuse of rape and sexual assault. They are also sued for libel and misuse of private information. It is important to note that the case has not yet been tried – so the allegations are not yet decided. However, at least one judge thought there were grounds to grant an interim Order.

The Order restrains Lucy and Verity (or anyone else) from naming the man they have accused or providing information likely to identify him. Because of the Order protecting him, I can say no more about his identity. The Order is interim, and may be discharged – an application has been made and Mrs Justice Steyn is currently considering the case following a hearing on Thursday 30th April 2020. I will be interested to read the judgement. Steyn J did a very detailed and thorough job in Baker v Hemming.

Lucy and Verity spent the night with the man after an evening where it is said that they had consumed alcohol and drugs. The dispute is that they say that he raped Lucy and sexually assaulted Verity. He has produced texts and other communications he says prove this is not the case and in which they he asserts they admitted nothing happened. Having seen the texts and posts, police have dropped the rape and sexual assault investigation.

Verity and Lucy have expressly waived their anonymity as alleged victims of sex crime and demanded they be named. They have named and pictured themselves online as the ‘victims’ in the case. After a hearing today, Mrs Justice Steyn made an interim Order that they could be named in relation to the proceedings provided that no details are published likely to identify their alleged victim. This is brave given their copious social media posts admitting to drug use and discussing mental illness. In Verity’s case, she has admitted to institutionalisation and self-harm. She has also admitted to membership of the website SeekingArrangement.com and mused about creating an account on the website OnlyFans.com (archive).

Seeking Arrangement (now known as ‘Seeking’) is well known as one where young women can arrange to meet an older man … for a very large fee. It is generally considered synonymous with prostitution, although not all of the companions offer sexual services – some insisting the sex is merely coincidental and others offering only platonic escorting. Many would say even the latter is sex work. Regardless of what services they offer, women who participate are called, “Sugar Babies”, by the site. Verity denies sex work, but has not clarified further as to what services she claims she did provide (or contemplated providing in the case of OnlyFans). In an email, Verity asked me to research the site, so I did. Vanity Fair published quite a detailed piece on Seeking Arrangement, in which it detailed the experiences of women who could charge as much as $700 per hour for sex (archive).

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Zoe Quinn’s Lethal Lies Must End Her Career, Plus Those of Supporters Jess Conditt and Laurie Penny

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Zoë_Quinn_(2015)_(cropped)

Zoe Quinn image via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Recently, I reported on the tragic death of Alec Holowka, a troubled game developer who killed himself after Zoe Quinn made allegations about him on Twitter. My initial articles [1] and [2] covered the weaknesses in her story and the false claims of corroboration by journalists and Holowka’s despicable former business partner Scott Benson. Since then, a site called the Post Millennial has disproven at least two of her allegations based on her tweets (archive). Some have questioned the veracity of the screenshots on the Post Millennial, but I have an independent source with access to Zoe’s Twitter and have confirmed these tweets are still there and have seen them with my own eyes. Below I even include some tweets not in the Post Millennial’s article. It is their scoop, but I can totally confirm and expand on it. My source still has access so anyone with an interest in searching her tweets please mail me, contact per the ‘Tip Us Off’ page.

The Claim – ‘physically confined’

In the post below, Zoe Quinn claimed that –

  • she agreed to visit Alec Holowka for two weeks only
  • Holowka promised to buy her a ticket back after two weeks, but reneged
  • she was physically confined to his apartment
Zoe Quinn Claims

Zoe Quinn’s allegations, now proven to be contradicted by her own words.

In fact, her tweets below prove that –

  • the original timespan of the trip was unspecified (she wrote, ‘??? weeks’) and this disproves the claim it was set at two weeks (and the associated claim Alec promised to buy her return ticket)
  • She repeatedly went out, even after the first two weeks during the period of alleged confinement

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When the Corpse is Barely Cold: Scott Benson and Engadget’s Jess Conditt Vilify Tragic Alec Holowka

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Engadget Senior Editor Jess Conditt. Her vile and uncritical coverage of Zoe Quinn’s unproven allegations burdens her with moral culpability for Alec Holowka’s unimaginable suffering and the death of this vulnerable, tragic and disabled man.

Speaking ill of the dead has always been thought of as wrong. A thing inherently bad and a sign of poor character. So it is unsurprising that the despicable Scott Benson and Jess Conditt have been doing that to Alec Holowka in a desperate and futile attempt to salvage their ruined reputations.

Alec Holowka was a successful game developer who tragically suffered from mental illness. Despite his disabilities, he had made a success of his life until it was cruelly taken away from him by Zoe Quinn. Quinn is a controversial figure in the gaming industry. In 2014 a former boyfriend called Eron Gjoni accused her of abuse including various kinds of sexual misconduct. Another man, Wolf Wozniak, bravely came forward and accused her of sexual harassment.

Quinn applied for a restraining order against Gjoni which was granted. However when he appealed, backed by donations from the community she applied to have the order vacated and records of it expunged rather than face him in court as I reported in my article, ‘Epic Gjoni Win‘. She did not want the substance of their dispute argued.

As my previous article sets out, Quinn is presently under pressure to explain how she spent $85,000 she took in a Kickstarter campaign for a game she has yet to release. It was due in 2017. As a key anniversary approached she came out on Twitter to accuse Holowka of imprisonment, sexual assault by penetration and emotional abuse. Left wing media including the horrific Jess Conditt piled on, ignoring Quinn’s history, court failure and financial pressure. Holowka’s so-called friends at the gaming cooperative Night in the Woods cut ties, claiming that they had “[…] corroborated just about all of it […]” (archive). So suddenly Alec became a pariah, under attack from all sides by Quinn’s unthinking, thuggish followers on Twitter.

Tragically, Holowka killed himself and of course, as I pointed out in my last article, Benson’s claims of corroboration could not possibly be true. The reason? Zoe herself had admitted there were no witnesses. She said that Holowka acted “normal” when other people were arround. The awful cravenness of Holowka’s decision to sever ties with a colleague and his misleading statements about the controversy no doubt contributed to Alec’s decision to end his life.

Now however, Benson has gone further. In a lengthy, near ten-thousand-word Medium post (archive) he sets out his alleged experience with Alec. He posted a link on Twitter, retweeted by Conditt. It is a sickening and, in this context, heinously misleading tarring of his friend’s memory. The friend he betrayed.

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Blood on their Hands: Verizon’s Jess Conditt, Dana Wollman, Guru Gowrappan, Hans Vestberg and the Death of Alec Holowka

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On August 31st Alec Holowka died. It is believed this vulnerable and mentally ill man took his own life after allegations of abuse were made about him on Twitter and Instagram by ‘game’ ‘developer’ Zoe Quinn, causing him to be dismissed from his job and targeted by a mob of Twitter vigilantes. The unproven accusations against him have been given enough oxygen – this article is the first in a series forensically analysing Quinn’s allegations, her unintentional and damning admissions and the wrongdoing of those reporters who irresponsibly reported on the matter. I begin with Engadget / Verizon’s Jess Conditt and her editor Dana Wollman. Credit is also due to Verizon Media CEO Guru Gowrappan and his boss Verizon Inc CEO Hans Vestberg. In my view Jess Conditt and Dana Wollman, whilst legally innocent of murder, are morally guilty of his death. They are abusers who contributed to the vigilante mob that drove him to his death, whilst Vestberg and Gowrappan have yet to take action to condemn them.

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Hans Vestberg, CEO of Verizon, leads a company tainted by the blood of tragic Alec Holowka. Will he show leadership and make things right?

I am a UK law blogger who has passed the solicitor’s (attorney’s) exams called the LL.M LPC. I have not sought to practice as a lawyer, my day job being Director of an IT company, but I have nearly 10 years experience helping people in court, only ever pro-bono as a McKenzie Friend. In the reported case Re TL EWCOP 1 [2017] I was praised by Mr Justice Baker for my work in a case in which a man known as PL had been exonerated of abuse, a restraining order lifted and had contact reinstated with his disabled daughter. Recently I helped former MP John Hemming win two libel cases and in a third he has obtained a substantial costs order against a woman called Esther Baker who wrongly accused him of cult rape. The costs order and resulting bankruptcy petition against Baker are here. I know a lot about challenging false allegations.

It is well known that Zoe Quinn was accused of sexual impropriety by her former boyfriend Eron Gjoni here (archive) and of sexual harassment by Wolf Wozniak (archive). Gjoni accused her of obtaining his consent to unprotected sex by deceitfully claiming she was faithful to him. Wozniak accused her of ‘harassment’ although to be fair his allegations are regrettably unparticularised. One thing I hate more than people who take their accusations to social media and not the authorities is people who make vague allegations without details that can be proven or falsified.

After Holowka’s death Quinn has deleted her allegations against him and deactivated her Twitter account. However, Quinn’s Twitter allegations have been collected in this archive whilst her Instagram allegations have been collected here. A point that leapt out at me from Quinn’s allegations that has not been picked up elsewhere is that if we believe her evidence there are at least two more men, unconnected men, who have made allegations against her of sexual wrongdoing. Four unconnected accusers is a sign there is likely something to these allegations.

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This is Frame 1 of Quinn’s Instagram allegations. If true, there is a man she had a sexual encounter with that she claims is sexual assault and he made contemporary complaints she had falsely accused him. This is a third unconnected accuser of Quinn. We will call him QaA (Quinn accuser ‘A’).

In this Instagram image Quinn identified a man with whom she had a sexual encounter. She frames it as assault but admits that he also accused her, contemporaneously not years later on social media, of making false allegations. We will call him QaA (Quinn accuser ‘A’). If we accept her account that he exists, he is the third unconnected male to make allegations of abuse against Quinn.

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PC Gamer’s Lawyers Clarify Andy Chalk Article on Jessica Price, Do Not Allege Harassment

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After the dismissal of writer Jessica Price from MMO developer ArenaNet on 05 July 2018, the media had a feeding frenzy. One particular article by Andy Chalk in PC Gamer quoted Price in its headline as calling her firing an ‘active solicitation of harassment’. After representations from Matthew Hopkins News, PC Gamer parent company Future PLC have conducted an investigation and now their lawyer has clarified that, “[…] For the avoidance of doubt, Future does not allege that [Arena Net CEO] Mr O’Brien is guilty of the criminal offence of harassment […]”.

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Jessica Price, fired ArenaNet Developer, has a history of inappropriate media posts such as this one about the death of popular Youtuber “Total Biscuit”.

In fact the sacking of Jessica Price was unsurprising. Price had not only been rude to a popular fan of the firm with no provocation, but had a history of inappropriate social media conduct including celebrating a cancer victim’s death. What is disturbing is the behaviour of a small number of gaming journalists who have enabled her to vilify the company by giving her complaints a platform, including Andy Chalk at PC Gamer and Ben Kuchera at Polygon. This can only reflect adversely on Vox CEO Jim Bankoff and Future PLC CEO Zillah Byng-Maddick.

On 23 April 1991 jewellery chain CEO Gerald Ratner gave a speech about his products in the Royal Albert Hall. It destroyed his business. Joking, Ratner described his jewellery as “total crap” before going on to say that an earring sold by his firm was, “cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn’t last as long”. The speech wiped £500 million off the value of the company leading to Ratner’s departure as CEO. In the modern world of social media and instant communications, companies are even more vulnerable to the instant destruction of their brand by inappropriate communications by employees.

On 3 July 2018 Jessica Price, an writer at Guild Wars 2 developer ArenaNet opened a thread about writing for characters in online games. A well known streamer @DeroirGaming, made an innocuous comment –

“Really interesting thread to read! However, allow me to disagree *slightly*. I dont believe the issue lies in the MMORPG genre itself (as your wording seemingly suggest). I believe the issue lies in the contraints of the Living Story’s narrative design;”

He went on to suggest branching dialogue as an option. In response, Price posted the following, embedding his tweet –

“Today in being a female game dev: “Allow me–a person who does not work with you–explain to you how you do your job.””

Price was accusing Deroir of sexism for a polite suggestion on a public platform. The essence of this argument was that he was demeaning her experience as she was an experienced writer and he a mere plebeian unqualified to comment. By this argument, no ordinary fan could ever comment on a game to a developer without demeaning them. Unsurprisingly this gratuitously rude absurdity, which demeans real victims of sexism and abuse, was not accepted by the game’s fans.

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Abaddon Publishing’s David Moore, FantasyCon 2017 and Punching Trump Supporters (and the Disabled)

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Racism on our streets is a repugnant sight but this author has campaigned against the extremists for 20 years without the need for violence. Vigilante violence is never acceptable, leading to harm against bystanders, victims of mistaken identity and the vulnerable. That is why it is so serious when extremists like Abaddon Books’ Commissioning Editor David Thomas Moore (who is attending FantasyCon 2017 this year) normalise or advocate violence. HWS Events, which is organising the event, has made a statement about this after receiving legal correspondence from MHN, reminding attendees of its harassment policy and right to exclude anyone who threatens violence.

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“IS IT OK TO PUNCH THE SITH?” asks this image on David Moore’s timeline. Comments by his followers make it clear they take it to mean Nazis. And by Nazis, they mean Trump supporters. Click for full size.

“Is it okay to punch Nazis?”, asks the far Left. The question is seductive, bringing to mind the first recent Captain America film or perhaps Indiana Jones, exciting stories of a world at war in a simpler time. Abaddon Books’ Commissioning editor David Moore poses the question on his Facebook timeline in a somewhat loaded form, “Is it okay to punch the Sith?” In a wartime drama or a science fiction fantasy world the answers might seem simple – but the real world is no longer at war and the questions are no longer simple at all. Looking at the replies to the question, what David’s followers understand is “Is it okay to punch people whom I disagree with?” And the troubling answer they give is, “yes”. A specific example given is Donald Trump’s presidency.

A dictionary definition of extremist is here – “A person who holds extreme political or religious views, especially one who advocates illegal, violent, or other extreme action.” (archive).

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