Please forgive me for quoting myself, since I found I was just typing this all over again:
One thing I want to emphasize is that there already was a history of invasion boards, especially 8chan, conducting elaborate driving trollies campaigns against “SJWs”, involving extensive use of sock puppet accounts and other techniques of misdirection. That’s probably why Eron Gjoni contacted them to begin with, when he wanted to attack Zoe Quinn, which is what started this particular campaign. #Gamergate is much bigger, but it fits the pattern of their earlier efforts, and the invasion boards have remained central to coordinating the campaign. It takes very little effort to uncover this. So I don’t think #Gamergate should, or can, be distinguished from the reactionary politics of the invasion boards.
There is, of course, a history of actual corruption in game reviews. #Gamergate alludes to this, but never does more than that. That’s because, when you do look into the history of actual corruption, you find it’s largely a matter of giant corporations paying for positive reviews of lazily designed games, which often used cheap sexism and other offensive content to paint over the poor design and shallow content. And the people complaining about it – journalists, fans, indie game developers – are the very people #Gamergate has been attacking.
