Teridax has been fucking with me for months on Twitter over a column I wrote back in late October. So, I told him to just go ahead and write an editorial about it. Why not? This is The Ralph Retort, after all. A wide range of voices is something I enjoy. I won’t get into countering too many of his claims in this space, except to say there are very good reasons people took the Zoe stuff badly. Also, Teridax has been provocative this entire time, but that’s for the comment section, if anyone wants to have a go. I will admit that my understanding has grown since the first column, where I basically knew very little about GNAA, weev, trolling, etc. 

Without further delay, here’s the guest editorial.

GUEST POST by Teridax of the GNAA 

I’ve been asked by Ralph to write an editorial regarding his GNAA blog piece from a while back, so I figured I’d give it a try. I’m no professional, but I definitely noticed a number of holes in his telling of things.

First off, the logs in question. These logs were “leaked” (read: screencapped from a public IRC channel by a person who didn’t hide his identity well enough) on 8chan a few days before this article came out, and they say exactly what I and several others have said for months, that the two or three people in GNAA that actually care about GamerGate don’t really give a shit past laughing at the lamer parts. The fact that most people seem to take this write-up as some concrete evidence of false-flagging and shillery just shows me that most people didn’t seem to read the actual screencaps.

The below selection from the logs:

< rabite> Teridax: did u see all the gamergaters
< rabite> saying that because
< rabite> i manipulated SJW reporters
< rabite> and built friendships with them
< rabite> i was being deployed
< rabite> as a false flag gamergate supporter

Gets somehow misconstrued as:

“user rabite talks about gaining the trust of a SJW journo, presumably so he could end up hurting our image.”

I’m doing my best to assume good faith here, but that’s not even close to what was said.

“User Teridax mentions people thinking Zoe Quinn paid him money in order to have people tweet threats at her, since he been so effective with his false-flagging.”

There’s that word again, “threats”. The only mindset where “drop dead” is considered a threat is the same “professional victim” mindset I’ve seen be criticized so many times by GamerGate. By that logic, telling someone to go fuck themselves is a threat sexual assault. Not to mention the actual Zoe Quinn seemed to recognize that I wasn’t entirely serious and retweeted my “threats,” which I guess most of the paranoid seemed to take as a sign that I worked for her.

And my “false-flagging” (lol) was only effective in the sense that it got nerds that take the Internet way too seriously and don’t understand what a troll is to flip out and assume that I expected to be taken seriously.

“Teridax is just a sick little troll with no life. He actually partakes in this sort of thing for personal pleasure. He does it for free, in other words.”

Trying not to get too personal about this, but I’d honestly consider it more sad to be paid to screw around with people online rather than for my own entertainment.

“But hopefully, the media will now start acknowledging that the nastiest tweets aren’t coming from us.”

I’ve never once been in any major media publication for my GamerGate trolls, sadly. Most I’ve gotten is a slight reference on the GNAA Wikipedia article and various Storifies and YouTube blogs angry about me. And even if I did make the media, it would make them look worse than anyone else for actually believing a known bullshitter.

“I also wouldn’t be surprised at all if this group was also behind things like the threat Anita Sarkeesian received before her planned speech at Utah State.”

Ralph is definitely welcome to host his own opinion on his own site, but I’d like to comment that this is a complete stretch.

Even with all these various half-truths and exaggerations, the main point of the article, that not every bad thing to happen in the lives of Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian is the fault of GamerGate, is a valid one. Even so, the answer to avoid being a scapegoat for random internet assholes isn’t to find a scapegoat of your own.