IGDA Names and Shames Online Harassers with the GG Autoblocker
The International Games Development Association, or IGDA, has come out with a resource on how to tackle harassment online. The guide, which can be found here, includes sections for “allies of harassment targets” as well as contact details for external helplines including suicide prevention hotlines. This all seems on the level, and a rather good idea so far, right?
The controversy begins with the recommendation of a twitter bot called The GG Autoblocker. The bot has a blacklist of twitter accounts, based on the following: @Nero, @PlayDangerously, @RogueStarGamez, @FartToContinue, @TheRalphRetort, @_icze4r, @RealVivianJames, and @CHOBITCOIN. It blocks not only these twitter users, but any other twitter account that follows more than one of them, resulting in over 10,000 twitter users being implicated of harassment by association regardless of whether or not they are actually guilty of it. Some of the affected users are even genuine victims of harassment themselves. By the bot’s own description, it “takes a list of the supposed ringleaders of GG, looks at their follower lists. Generates a list of sheeple following more than one account, as well as a list of your followers that might be questionable”.
The official endorsement of the bot has proven to be divisive within the IGDA itself with the IGDA Puerto Rico Chairman, Robert Rosario, appearing on the list himself. He has subsequently threatened to resign unless either he is either removed from the list, or the entire list is disavowed. It all goes to show how half baked the idea was, resembling as it does now something of a frenzied witchunt against online harassment rather than a targeted and well-thought-out countermeasure. Randi Harper, the bot’s creator, responded by saying that if he didn’t want to be on the list then he should not have followed more than one of the blacklisted accounts. Rosario is not the only implicated user to hit back against the list; Mike Cernovich, the man behind the @PlayDangerously account, happens to be a lawyer and is currently looking for ways to bring it down from a legal standpoint.
While it’s a good idea to have some kind of defense mechanism against twitter harassment, a programme so driven by quantitative data is asking for trouble – you can’t write someone off without actually looking at the content of their posts. Thankfully, the makers of the autoblocker seem to be at least considering the idea of monitoring the timelines of at-risk twitter users in order to actually get a sense of whether or not harassment is occurring and by whom. By their own admission, the bot isn’t catching all of the “garbage” that its creator wants it to.
It’s one thing to prevent harassment, but entirely another to silence debate. Given the chipped shoulders of the creators of the GG Autoblocker, I’m inclined to believe that the latter is part of the agenda at play here. The creator of the bot is unjustly the judge, jury, and executioner, but that would imply that there were trials.
UPDATE – Since this article went out, the IGDA have removed the blocker from their ‘resources’ entirely.
Original Source – http://techraptor.net/content/igda-names-10000-people-worst-offenders-online-harassment