The data suggests that those concerned about journalistic ethics are a minority and that gamergate’s focus is largely cultural not ethical.
Speaking of topsy.com data, the gater’s are now employing it to try to argue that their movement is not about the LWs. They’re using what I’ve christened the “Now with only 2% LWs!” argument. Someone on Ars Technica pointed out, correctly, that less than 10% of gamergate tweets mention the LWs. This is a really deceptive number and it reminds me of lowfat milk.
Bear with me here. A carton of lowfat milk will advertise itself as possessing only 2% fat. This is a trick designed to make people think that 2% of the calories are from fat when, in reality, it means that 2% of the weight of the product is fat. Now milk is about 90% water and water has zero calories which means that only ~10% of the weight of the product has any calories. Therefore 20% of the weight of the caloric part (two is 20% of ten) is fat. Since fat has twice as many calories per gram (~8.8) as a gram of protein (~4.4) or a gram of carbohydrates (~4.4) the fat calories are actually even more than 20% of the total. The USDA requires food companies to list the total number of calories from fat per serving on the package so you can easily check this discrepancy yourself.
How does lowfat milk relate to gamergate tweets? As Humbabella pointed out in the previous thread, if you add up the total number of mentions of not just the LWs but also all the alleged corruption scandals as well as everything on that boycott list it only comes out to about 10% (10.2674237%) of the total number of gamergate tweets (161,688 out of 1,574,767).
Among those 10% of tweets that mention any of the things gamergate complains about, only 9778 are about any of the alleged corruption scandals (Grayson, Shadow of Mordor, Australian games journalism, Hernandez-Anthropy, IGF/Indiecade, the gamejournopros mailing list, and DMCA abuse). If I include Rock, Paper, Shotgun (who published Grayson’s article mentioning Depression Quest) and Kotaku (where Hernandez works) the total is 18,452. The LWs (excluding Alexander) are mentioned 31,101 times, 68% more frequently than the corruption allegations. If I add in the term SJW (like the gater did in his topsy search), the total is 52,574, nearly three times (2.849230436) as many mentions as the corruption allegations. If Alexander is considered an LW, the total is 60,374, more than three times as many mentions as the corruption allegations. So, in the best case scenario, the LWs are talked about 68% more frequently than allegations of corruption.
Here’s an interesting question: What’s in the other 90% of those tweets? Humbabella said most of the tweets she looked at contained no real content beyond the hashtag itself. Now this is, of course, anecdotal so take it with a grain of salt. But whatever it is in those tweets, it sure isn’t the alleged corruption scandals. Maybe those other tweets are the water in the milk.
Here’s the gater’s topsy.com link: http://topsy.com/analytics?q1=%23GamerGate&q2=%23GamerGate%20-SJW%20-ZQ%20-%40femfreq%20-femfreq%20-“Sarkeesian”%20-“Anita”%20-Quinnspiracy%20-%40Quinnspiracy%20-“Zoe”%20-“Quinn”%20-“LW”%20-“LiterallyWho”%20-“LiterallyWu”%20-“LW1”%20-“LW2”%20-“LW3”%20-feminism%20-feminazi%20-“Brianna”%20-“Wu”%20-SJW%20-women%20-woman&via=Topsy
You’ll notice that the link contains a number of search terms I didn’t research in my post: femfreq, quinnspiracy, lw, literallywho, literallywu, lw1, lw2, lw3, feminism, feminazi, women, and woman. Had I included them in my numbers it would have tilted the results even further in favor of the LWs.
