A positive outcome of Gamergate: the coining of the term “Sea Lioning”, and some interesting data to boot

Wondermark comic by David Malki. Click to see the source.

In a new post on Medium, Andy Baio (creator of Upcoming, former board member and CTO of Kickstarter, blogger at Waxy.org, co-founder of the XOXO Festival, and yes, a friend of mine) writes:

Two months ago today, actor Adam Baldwin was the first to use the #Gamergate hashtag on Twitter, solidifying a name for the movement that’s dominated all conversations in gaming since. Depending on where you sit on the issue, it’s either a widespread campaign of harassment against women or, actually, about ethics in videogames journalism.

Anyone who’s mentioned the #Gamergate hashtag in a critical light knows the feeling: a swarm of seemingly random, largely-anonymous people descending to comment and criticize.

I’ve been using Twitter for eight years, but I’ve never seen behavior quite like this. This swarming behavior is so prevalent, it got a new nickname — “sea lioning,” inspired by David Malki’s Wondermark comic [pictured above — Joey].

Also worth reading: Andy’s essay, in which he describes his findings from running an analysis of three days’ worth of tweets with the hashtags #Gamergate and #NotYourShield. His findings:

• Most of the tweets — about 69% — were retweets.
• Many of [Gamergate’s] proponents are using newly-created, often pseudonymous, accounts.
• Roughly 25% of all Gamergate activity is from account created in the last two months, which is about when the whole mess began.
• There’s little overlap between the communities. If you take a look at this closeup of a graph showing the connections, the pro-Gamergate site includes such charming Twitter accounts as RooshV (the pickup artist about whom I wrote earlier), the account for the “Red Pill” site Return of Kings, and MGTOWKnight (MGTOW is short for Men Going Their Own Way). If you wondered why the Gamergate crowd sounds a lot like the “Mens’ Rights” man-babies, it’s because their causes are aligned. I’m quite content not to get mixed in with that sorry lot.
• The top RTed users are pro-Gamergate; the top RTed tweets are against.

The concluding statement is a good summary:

This network visualization is as good a metaphor as any for #Gamergate. Two massive, impenetrable hairballs of people that want little to do with one another, only listening to their side and firing volleys across the chasm.

Andy’s made his data available to everyone. If you’ve got the time and the data-crunching skills, you can download the data he used in CSV format or as a MySQL dump (each is about 40MB in size).