Anika Begay
More moderators, tougher policies, mass bans, mea culpa proselytizing to Congress by leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, and repeated promises to “do better.” They even begged Congress: “Regulate us.”
But at the same time, these companies, particularly Facebook, spent tens of millions of dollars each year on lobbying to ensure that any legislation that might be introduced would not impact their financial well-being.
Eventually, even the small steps companies took to try to make their platforms more secure were removed or forgotten, in what Benavidez calls the “regression of Big Tech.”
“Their values ultimately lie in making money, their bottom line is more important than protecting users or democracies,” Benavidez says. “This year, a major tipping point for democracies around the world, where billions of people will vote, the platforms have washed their hands of the role they play in protecting [the elections].”
Even before Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, right-wing voices were already poisoning the well, reviving baseless conspiracies about the vice president’s fitness to run for president, framing his past relationships as illicit, and attacking his race and gender.
Harris is also a leading advocate for abortion access, another hot-button issue for the right that saw its wildest dreams come true when the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022.
“This year is a year where the question of what women can do and the agency that women have over their bodies and in the public world, that question is being put in the forefront,” Benavidez says. “So it makes sense that the tactics of Gamergate, being that early warning signal years ago about what women can and cannot do, should be back in the spotlight.”
These attacks have become so commonplace that they happen everywhere, all the time, and while we may hear about some of them, like the so-called Gamergate 2.0 from earlier this year, most of them will never come to the attention of the general public and the women targeted by these campaigns will be left to suffer the consequences alone.
“There’s a new Gamergate every week, and no one outside of video game journalism ever covers this stuff, because it doesn’t make any sense,” Broderick says. “It doesn’t really seem important. So these problems get worse over time, because there’s really no way for popular culture in America to talk about this stuff.”
Beyond gaming, the news cycle moves so fast in 2024 that even if someone is paying attention to a coordinated online attack, 24 hours later they’ve likely moved on. That’s how an account like LibsofTikTok is able to direct hate toward the trans community and the doctors and hospitals that help them.
Chaya Raichik, the person behind LibsofTikTok, is supported in her efforts by powerful figures within the GOP who are similarly pushing an anti-LGBTQ+ agenda, and by Musk, the owner of X, the platform where many of these hate attacks originate. Just last month, Musk deadnamed his daughter in an interview, claiming she was “killed” by the “woke mind virus.”
