If you’ve been following GamerGate closely, you know that one of the biggest issues facing the gamer community is censorship. We see it time and time again. The other side cannot beat us, unless they rig the game. The shameless charlatans have no qualms about using tactics that take away the free speech of their enemies. It’s a recurring theme throughout the months that we’ve been here, and one that I’m particularly focused on (as I was before GG even started). 

So when I hear about us being censored, it’s something that I have to cover (ABC may be up to some things as well, btw). Today we have a story about GameSpot, one of the major gaming sites. They’ve been around almost as long as I can remember (1996). So when they allegedly start squelching discussion that’s important to gamers, it needs to be exposed. I’m going to excerpt some of the claims for you down below. I linked the story up above, but here’s another link:

“I had an own board for 8 years, before Gamespot actively went out of their way to to destroy the private boards with the new makeover on the site. As I am speaking I have over 70 000 posts on the forums. I’ve shared my opinion with others. I’ve shared ideas and thoughts with other like minded people. I’ve been wrong and i’ve been challenged sometimes. That’s all part of life…

So the last weeks my threads have been locked. The only reason it was locked was because the moderator did not like the GamerGate hashtag and opinions. I even contacted the Community manager as you can see in the pictures and i never broke any Terms of Use on Gamespot. This was never the case, because if it was i would have gotten a warning on the site. Because the rules are clear cut.

The threads I posted never broke the terms of use, yet still got locked. This and this were the last straw.  I posted the first thread just to prove my point of censorship. They had no problems proving it by locking it just a few hours later…

Here are the other threads aswell:

Evidence #1

Evidence #2

and even a third incident about a morally grey line topic which got locked aswell

Evidence #3

There has been a thread about GamerGate with lots of posts, but since I’ve been threatened with suspension by just posting the latest thread, I am not willing to risk to break the ToU and just get that topic locked by bumping an old thread. I am going against something that i believe in and something I have not seen anything similar to it during my ten years on that site…

There has been a thread about GamerGate with lots of posts, but since I’ve been threatened with suspension by just posting the latest thread, I am not willing to risk to break the ToU and just get that topic locked by bumping an old thread. I am going against something that I believe in and something i have not seen anything similar to it during my ten years on that site.”

I looked through this evidence last night, and it looks pretty solid. Although they had allowed GamerGate discussion in the past, it now seems to be off limits. Different GameSpot mods say different things, and threads up getting snuffed out. This is either by ignorance, or by design. At this point, I’m reluctant to give the gaming media orgs any type of benefit of the doubt. But, we’ll see how they respond to this story. If they dig in and say fuck open discussion, we’ll know the deal. On the other hand, Gamespot does have a real chance here to be a speech leader. Silence is never the right option.