Gamergate May Have Cycled Through The News, But Trolling Lives On

“Swatting” is a type of harassment where people, usually women with controversial online presences, are targeted by anonymous calls to a police department with reports of emergencies. Police SWAT teams then show up at the door of the target’s house.

Caroline Sinders wrote this personal essay in 2015 after her mother’s house was swatted as backlash against Sinders’ online activism. Swatting was in full force at the time in response to events that began in 2014 within the online gaming community—feminist gamers, writers, and activists became victims of coordinated IRL attacks by a troll-force known as “Gamergate”. Revisiting her story today is an important reminder of the potentially damaging consequences of what rolls out in the digital sphere—ahem, say, a president’s manic tweets.

Before the incident, Sinders, a user-experience designer and researcher for a tech company, had been consistently researching and tweeting about cases of online harassment. But it wasn’t until someone took offense to what she wrote and targeted her mother that she realized how few legal recourses or protections were—and still are—in place to protect victims of this kind of attack.

Swatting is just one tactic of Gamergate trolls: there’s also doxxing, which is publicly releasing someone’s private information, and dog piling, overwhelming someone with evil tweets. Actions like these are consistently leveraged against female-identified, POC, and trans people. And of course this has extended not only to the gamer community but also to those like Sinders who flew “close to the sun”, choosing simply to speak out against harassment.

With Twitter’s banning of Milo Yiannopoulos since this article was written, some have expressed hope that the platform might take further action against troll armies. But the aftermath of Gamergate rolls on. “Gamergate wasn’t the first,” Sinders writes, “they were just the biggest.”