Reflecting on the Targeted Harassment of Women on the Internet, Five Years After ‘Gamergate’ ⇥ nytimes.com

It is very hard to come to terms with the brutality of the tactics honed by abusive people — nearly entirely men — during the “Gamergate” saga, and now used constantly to dehumanize women, queer individuals, and non-white people.

Sarah Jeong was targeted last year for some decontextualized Twitter jokes:

Tucker Carlson did a segment about me on Fox News. The president called me “disgusting” in a tweet. Shortly after the arrest of Mr. Sayoc, the MAGA bomber, the media discovered that he had sent me a death threat on Twitter.

Of the many threats of rape, dismemberment and murder sent to me and to my workplace, at least one was concerning enough that The New York Times filed a police report. But Mr. Sayoc’s tweet at me — a bizarre, confusing insinuation that my corpse was going to be dumped in the Everglades — barely pinged anyone’s radar, let alone my own, until he made the news for mailing pipe bombs.

Charlie Warzel contributed an article documenting the myriad influences on broader culture that are directly linked to the reaction on Reddit and 4chan to a crappy blog post. But the pieces from Jeong and Brianna Wu reflect on the terrible effects these harassment techniques have had on the women who experience them, and they are absolutely worth your time and reflection.