There’s been enough discussion here to know that isn’t true. The movement is well-known to have started with harassment, and when people actually look at what has been talked about and done under its banner - for instance MBD here, here, and here - that’s still almost all it is about.
Nor is it unfair to call a grassroots movement a hate group when it apparently doesn’t care to put the slightest distance between itself and that hate. Indeed, you’re not the first account that has shown up just in time to defend gamergate and will never be seen again, and a lot of them have expressed indifference or outright approval of it.
For the most part, very much so.
I would say that whether someone is run from their home or not, death threats are inherently serious, and that includes any made against gamergaters. Anyone responsible for those deserves our full criticism. But from everything I have seen, those seem to be scarce or questionable; nppayne provided a claim otherwise, but it seems to have accepted anything done right by channers or done wrong to them as gospel without any critical judgment, and that seems to be the rule on that.
Meanwhile it’s been very well-established that gamergate is a movement centered around the harassment and threatening of women. So any attempt to equate them to their critics and targets is plainly false equivalence. And so is describing them as part of a dialog, debate, open communication, or anything of the sort; intimidating people into silence is the exact opposite of that.
It’s not an unreasonable way to look at it, but are these supposed to be that sort of neutral platform?
For instance Kickstarter in its terms of use says “don’t do anything threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, libelous, tortious, obscene, profane, or invasive of another person’s privacy”. I think we’ve seen enough to tell that they wouldn’t allow crowdfunding for something like a new pure-race party, so it should also be reasonable to consider what they do allow.
