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The anger that erupted when Zoe Quinn was (probably falsely—not that it matters) accused of boning game journalists for good press (a series of events known online as the "Quinnspiracy") has turned #Gamergate into a dog-whistle codeword that lets those in the gamer population who are misogynists couch their adolescent rage at women in concern about the purity of gaming journalists' motives in reviewing games.Despite the low stakes, reactions to the allegations against Quinn were intemperate to say the least. Every forum where games are discussed online temporarily shifted its focus to the scandal, if you must call it that. The loudest and most immature man-children in the gamer world had previously been directing their rage at Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist who hosts a web series about games. Threats and harassment of Sarkeesian and other "social justice warriors" (SJWs) had been an ongoing embarrassment that sane gamers tried to distance themselves from. When the Quinnspiracy broke out, hating a woman suddenly had a moral component. The whole SJW movement was ostensibly a fraud, and she was the smoking gun that proved it.The horde of angry teenagers expressed itself in the usual ways—angry Twitter jokes about rape, angry forum posts calling her a cunt, and epic mansplanations on YouTube. The vastness of the movement to discredit her was immense. "They use astroturfing techniques to make a bunch of Facebook accounts, all have each other tweet each other, and drum up this false sense of grassroots-movement stuff, to make something seem bigger than it is. And that hits you like a tidal wave," she said.
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