Github staff Jake Boxer disables #GamerGate operation disrespectful nod repository

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in ask on (#2T3A)
Little background information,

Last night (October 3) Github developer Jake Boxer disabled the GamerGate github repository containing documents for "Operation Disrespectful Nod". Which contained documents for a letter writing campaign to advertisers for the publishers of the game media articles declaring gamers dead just over a month ago. Here's a link to an image of the removal request for if/when the original tweet is eventually removed.

Jake previously voiced his disapproval for intel pulling ads from Gamasutra claiming: "While we wait for @Intel to correct this, here's @leighalexander's fantastic piece that they pulled ads because of ..." original tweet along with "@leighalexander so fucking angry that this happened. thank you so much for the writing and work that you do." original tweet, Backup Image for both.

Note @leighalexander is Leigh Alexander Editor At Large for Gamasutra, author of 'Gamers' don't have to be your audience. 'Gamers' are over.

Reddit is also up in arms over a "rogue" employee being allowed to delete repositories that, to my knowledge, don't violate Githubs terms of service.

So what's the Pipedot's take on this? Is it ok seeing as Github is a private entity, maybe they don't have to host anything they don't want. Maybe it's time to start migrating my personal repos to other services in case electrical diagramming or web development offends someone.

I could be wrong, but isn't Pipdot's code hosted in Github?

Cross posting to SoylentNews

Re: What? (Score: 2, Insightful)

by vanderhoth@pipedot.org on 2014-10-05 19:12 (#2T47)

I disagree, I see pipedot as a place for us to not only read news, but to discuss it and share ideas. You might not like what others have to say, but when we start censoring some where do we draw the line. What if, just as example, Bryan is pro Gamer Gate and he doesn't like you bad mouthing it? Should you be banned? I don't think so. It comes down to what constitutes as "wrong" and who makes that decision. It shouldn't just be arbitrarily left up to an individual.

Gamer Gate isn't a hate campaign BTW, censorship of people talking about it is part of the reason it exists. Problem being the game media has the platform to say what they want and gamers are already an easy target to demonized. 4Chan, Reddit, all Game media forms pretty much banned and censor discussion of it. So there's no way to spread the message that the movement isn't actually harassing the people the media says it is. The Escapist was allowing discussion, after they updated their code of ethics because of the movement, but they were DDoS and had to drop the form. Twitter and Facebook are the only place now where people can talk and organize.

I submitted some incoherent rambling with lots of links to various things to Soylent and it was rejected... probably because I'm a terrible writer, I don't think they're trying to censor it.

The break down is there's a huge amount of positive along with the negatives going on and a lot of tangential things happening. Game media declared gamers dead. Gamers came together, conservatives, liberals, black, white, male, female, everything in between. Women and minorities formed #NotYourShield to stand up for cis-white-male gamers that were being demonized in the press. The Fine Young Capitalists raised $20,000 to get women into game development with Gamer Gates help. Wikipedia is having a huge editor war over the "Gamer Gate Controversy" page, and it's getting uglier by the day because most of the sources wiki uses are bias and basically reporting on and parroting each others bias articles. Anita Sarkeesian allegedly faked threats to herself to get in on the publicity, otherwise I have no idea why she keeps getting brought up as being harassed, She has nothing to do with anything, but 4Chan practically ripped itself apart when M00t banned discussion during the XOXO conference where he attended a talk by Anita Sarkeesian (can talk about CP and rape, not Gamer Gate). Julian Assange was on reddit and someone was shadow banned right in front of him for asking a question related to censorship of #GamerGate. Kickstarter Mighty Number 9 project's community manager banned people from their forums after they pledged hundreds of dollars for the project. People started a charge back campaign, and are actually getting money back. Several media sites revisited their code of ethics, only the Escapist to my knowledge made and significant changes. 8Chan was formed. Several new game sites sprung to life. Steam updated it's ToS so Curations (I think that's what they're called) have to disclose any monetary/personal connections. Intel pulled ads from Gamasutra. Linux dev threw a fit over it and refuses to update Linux kernel for Intel fixes. Git disabled the Gamer Gate repo.

Despite all that's already been accomplished people still think it's a hate campaign against Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian.

The article was about the fact that a large group of people trying to make a difference were using a public service, not violating ToS, and with a single tweet from someone opposing the group had the repository shut down. It has significant impact on software developers who use the service to host code for any number of projects that could be susceptible to a tweet from opposition or competition.
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