Zoe Quinn courtesy Zoe Quinn
Game developer Zoe Quinn made national headlines last year as the first target of Gamergate, an online movement of angry videogame fans that has inspired widespread harassment, particularly against female games critics and professionals. After suffering vicious and persistent abuse by anonymous online mobs—including death and rape threats that drove her from her home—Quinn is turning the tables on harassers with the launch of Crash Override, a task force devoted to helping targets of online harassment.
Co-founded by Quinn and fellow game developer Alex Lifschitz, the Crash Override network provides advice, resources, and support from survivors with personal experience to those facing harassment. The network, which officially launched Friday, also offers access to “experts in information security, whitehat hacking, PR, law enforcement, legal, threat monitoring and counseling.”
Quinn and Lifschitz, who are currently funding the initiative themselves, hope that Crash Override will fill an important gap for people targeted by online abuse. As Quinn knows first-hand, it’s often difficult to find good advice about how to protect yourself from online harassment or know where to turn, especially when the responses from both Internet platforms and law enforcement tend to be either inadequate or nonexistent.
Almost six months after Gamergate made her a target for angry videogame fans opposed to the diversification of gaming culture, Quinn still experiences daily harassment. Moreover, the people who have made a hobby—and in some cases, a part-time job—out of harassing her show no signs of letting up.
“When this started happening, it was like getting hit by a meteor,” says Quinn. “The life I had before this is over. So it’s about trying to figure out how to move forward, how to make sense of it. So people have been through this and not known what to do and felt helpless. … So much of our control over our own lives has been taken away from us. This is one way we can take it back, to decide what happens to us, and try to help other people decide what happens to them.”
Building a Network
Although Quinn, a developer on the interactive fiction game Depression Quest , describes her experiences with online abuse as very painful, she says they’ve also helped her develop specialized knowledge and skill sets for dealing with online harassment, an issue that is often poorly understood even by those who want to help combat it.
“Even people who are knowledgable about technology or culture or gender politics sometimes give advice that wouldn’t work or apply or might be actively harmful,” says Lifschitz. “They’re just making their best guess. We realized that people needed a resource of people who had experienced it and could give them best practices and advice.”
When Quinn first became the target of an anonymous cybermob, she was buoyed by how many other people with similar experiences reached out to her and offered support. “Everybody sort of has the same story, especially in terms of being failed by preexisting systems that are supposed to help people,” Quinn says. “[Crash Override] started out with me thinking very informally, ‘Wow, there are a lot of people who want to help and who have been through this who already reach out and help people they see in similar situations.'”
As time went on, Quinn stepped into a support role as well, reaching out to other people being targeted for abuse and offering whatever help and advice she could. Sometimes, she and Lifschitz contacted folks preemptively when they saw anonymous users planning attacks on people, and assisted their targets in protecting themselves. As they worked to develop better methods for defending against abuse, both for themselves and for others, they developed a loose network of experts in various fields who were willing and able to help. “[Crash Override] is an extension of the informal services we were offering to people for a long time,” says Lifschitz.
One of their recent cases involved Israel Galvez, a web developer who spoke up against Gamergate after he watched a friend get harassed and doxed last fall. His vocal condemnation made him a target for doxing and harassment as well, which he says has ranged from minor pranks like sending pizzas to his house to more serious incidents like impersonating him on craigslist to portray him as a sex offender, and even making false reports about him to law enforcement.
“One of the users submitted a false report to my local police department’s tip line, resulting in five police officers showing up at my address near midnight,” says Galvez, describing a harassment technique often called SWATting. “The tip told police that I was depressed, building bombs, and armed with a handgun.”
Although SWATting can be very dangerous for its targets—and potentially lethal, especially when officers raid homes anticipating armed resistance—Galvez says his situation was defused far more easily because he had made a preemptive call to the local police on the advice of Crash Override, and warned them that this might occur. “Dealing with the police is a new thing for me, and Crash Override has helped me immensely with staying safe,” Galvez says.
Dealing with an Unprecedented Form of Abuse
Since Friday’s announcement, the two co-founders say they’ve gotten a very positive response not only from the general public but from both survivors of abuse and experts who want to lend a hand. Lifschitz believes there’s a reason that people are responding with so much excitement: They’re addressing a form of abuse that is growing more visible and frightening at a time when few platforms or authority figures are willing to offer solutions and support.
“This kind of harassment is unprecedented, and when I say unprecedented I mean that even the people who run the networks where it takes place are often unequipped to deal with it,” says Lifschitz. “We hear so many stories from people who have been utterly failed—by society, by information technology, by people who told them over and over again, ‘This is not our problem,’ and left them out in the cold. Part of our longer term outreach is to create a dialogue with the people who run and curate these platforms and highlight the need for better practices and infrastructure.”
Social media platforms can give anonymous mobs instant and direct access to their targets with few to no consequences for misbehavior; the Internet’s incredible ability to disseminate information freely and easily often means few barriers exist to posting home addresses and phone numbers of potential victims through a variety of online platforms, so that countless others can perpetuate the attacks. Like-minded abusers often gather in anonymous online message boards to organize and encourage escalating forms of harassment, which are designed to leave their targets feeling frightened, violated, and overwhelmed.
For Survivors, By Survivors
Every case of harassment is different, says Quinn, which is why Crash Override works to provide responses that are individually tailored to both the situation and the platforms where it’s taking place. They also plan to provide more general resources for online safety on their website; they’ve already released one guide about how to shore up your online information if you’re concerned about being doxed.
More guides will follow, including a primer for dealing with law enforcement around Internet-related issues. Because online harassment is such a new form of abuse, law enforcement officers sometimes don’t regard it as serious—or aren’t familiar with the technology involved and need to be educated so they can understand the technological framework around the offenses being committed.
“This form of harassment is really difficult to comprehend for someone who doesn’t innately understand this kind of Internet culture, so educating the authorities and the police is vital,” says Andrew Todd, the gaming editor at the entertainment website Badass Digest, whose critical coverage of Gamergate also attracted the attention of harassers. “There’s this sense that the Internet isn’t a real place, but as we’ve seen, it bleeds over into the real world. These are criminals we’re talking about, and the fact that the law hasn’t caught up to this form of harassment yet doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t.”
Last week, Todd’s personal phone number and home address were published on the message board 8chan, where he also saw messages from anonymous posters who were brainstorming ways to harass him. Part of what initially made the experience so frightening was the lack of an established network of support or resources to address the issue. “You get very panicked and you don’t know what to do when your identity is violated like that,” he says.
Shortly after his information was published, however, Crash Override reached out to him and provided advice for securing his online information and dealing with police, as well as emotional support from people who knew first-hand how it feels to experiences these sorts of attacks. “I saw someone describe it on Twitter as fighting terrorism with empathy, and that is what they do,” says Todd. “They came across to me in my dealings with them as genuinely big-hearted people who had suffered in the past and wanted to help other people mitigate their suffering.”
Quinn says she hopes that Crash Override can provide more people with the sort of support that she received from other survivors when her harassment was at its worst.
“It’s very alienating to become a target, and it can be really difficult to try and explain to people, to family members,” Quinn says. “One of the people we helped, his mom unplugged his Internet and said [the harassment] was his fault for trying to be a person online. That response is common, and it’s horrible. Being able to talk to somebody who knows exactly what it’s like, who knows how bad it is and isn’t judging you or telling you to get over it, it’s hugely helpful.”
Although Todd and Galvez credit Crash Override with helping them address the practical concerns that accompany online harassment like information security and dealing with law enforcement, they both cite the emotional support offered by other survivors of online harassment as equally valuable.
“I’ve learned a lot about online security from them, but just knowing there are people who have my back is very useful,” Todd says. “In any form of harassment, what the harassers want to do is make you feel powerless and afraid and alone. And when there are people who can make you feel not powerless and not afraid and not alone, that means the world.”
Indeed, as we finish the interview, Quinn and Lifschitz ask me to take care; for many journalists and writers—including Todd—publishing an article critical of Gamergate or online harassment is all it took to make them targets as well. “If for some reason they decide to go after you, please call us,” offers Lifschitz, who says they’d be happy to help. “That’s a comforting thought,” I reply. And it is.
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