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2016/09

Gizmodo Incites Harassment On Female #GamerGate Supporter, Forces Her Off Twitter

OAG Staff

After having feigned concerned for females in gaming, sites like NeoGaf and Gizmodo have shown their true colors, inciting their userbases to send harassment toward a right-wing #GamerGate supporter. Why? Because she’s the girlfriend of Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, and it turns out both of them support Donald Trump. [Update: According to a Facebook post, Palmer Luckey states that he actually supports Gary Johnson]

While sites like Ars Technica attacked Palmer Luckey for his political leanings, other sites like Gizmodo and NeoGaf made it personal by going after his love life.

Gizmodo published an article on September 23rd, 2016 where they dug up Luckey’s personal affairs and made everyone aware of his romantic affiliations with Nicole Edelmann, who went by the online Twitter handle of Nikki Moxxi. She posted cosplays on her channel and interacted and engaged with Trump supporters and #GamerGate advocates.

By pointing people to her Twitter account and personal information, Edelmann began receiving untold amounts of harassment that eventually led her to close down her account. You can see that her account no longer exists according to an archive.

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Previously, you could see that her account had plenty of content on it before it was unceremoniously deleted. An archive of her account before deletion can be viewed here, where it shows that just before the articles were published on Gizmodo and other sites, she was still plenty active on Twitter.

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The Twitter fallout can be chronicled just by following the responses toward Moxxi following the publication of the Gizmodo piece, as pointed out by user TheLOTDreport.

Previous to her deleting her account, you had egg accounts and others sending harassment.

Others began tagging in Nikki on Twitter as the stories began going viral to make people aware of her association with Luckey.

According to an archive, a lot of it was basically dogpiling from people who were made aware of Nikki’s presence on Twitter, which resulted in plenty of people searching her out and doing what usually happens when someone is outed in a negative way in the media.

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Other gaming sites that lean heavily toward the left-wing oriented media have also jumped in on attacking Nikki and Palmer Luckey for their perceived political affiliations. As pointed out by Nick Monroe, various members of NeoGaf made the issue personal against Nikki.

The harassment got so bad that one user on NeoGaf named omgfloofy made a post stating the following…

“The number of times I saw people shit talking about Nikki’s twitter in here on top of people posting about her on Gizmodo that she has deleted her account due to the harassment she’s seen.

 

“People tweeting at her that she’s a hateful fucker and to fucking kill herself.

 

“Seriously, guys? This is what you want to do? You bitch and moan and whine about inciting harassment on women in gaming, and you take part in this kind of shit on her?”

 

[…] “maybe people here should take a moment – a good long fucking moment – to look in the mirror before they start judging other people”

As pointed out by Twitter user Jason Miller, the user was banned for objecting to NeoGaf engaging in groupthink harassment toward someone supporting #GamerGate.

The general response from people following sites like Ars Technica, The Daily Beast and Gizmodo has been that Palmer Luckey and his girlfriend are “juvenile assholes” for supporting Donald Trump and #GamerGate (the latter of which helped financially bankrupt Gawker for unethical journalism).

Some users in the comment sections did warn that groupthink harassment against people with opposing views was a dangerous way of thinking.

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