More moderators, stricter policies, mass bans, Mea culpa campaigning in front of Congress leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, and repeated promises to “do better.” They even pleaded with Congress: “Regulanos.”
But at the same time, these companies, and Facebook in particular, were… spending tens of millions of dollars each year, lobbying to ensure that any legislation that might be introduced would not be of the sort that could affect their financial well-being.
Ultimately, even the minor steps companies took to try to make their platforms more secure were eliminated or forgotten, in what Benavidez calls “The decline of big tech.“
“Their values, ultimately, lie in making money; their bottom line is more important than protecting users or democracies,” Benavidez said. “This year, a critical point for democracies around the world, where billions of people will vote, the platforms have played up the role they play in protecting[the elections].”
Even before Harris By the time she became the presumptive Democratic nominee, right-wing voices were already poisoning the well, sharing baseless conspiracies about the vice president’s eligibility to run for president, framing her past relationships as illicit and attacking her race and gender.
Harris is also a leading advocate for abortion access, another contentious issue for the right that saw its wildest dreams come true when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
“This year, the question of what women can do and the agency they have over their bodies and in the public world is a central issue,” says Benavidez. “So it makes sense that the Gamergate tactics, which were the first signal years ago about what women can and cannot do, are back in the spotlight.”
These attacks have become so normal that they happen everywhere, all the time, and while we may hear about some of them, such as the so-called Gamergate 2.0 earlier this year, most of them will never come to wider attention, and the women who are targeted by these campaigns will be left alone to deal with the consequences.
“There’s a new Gamergate every week and nobody outside of gaming journalism is talking about these issues because they don’t make any sense,” Broderick says. “They don’t really seem important. So these problems get worse over time because American popular culture has no way to talk about these things.”
Beyond gaming, the news cycle moves so quickly in 2024 that even if someone pays attention to a coordinated online attack, 24 hours later they’ve probably moved on to something else. Here’s how an account like LibsofTikTok can direct hatred towards the trans community and the doctors and hospitals that help them.
Chaya Raichik, the person behind LibsofTikTok, has the support of powerful figures within the Republican Party who are also pushing an anti-LGBTQ+ agenda, and of Musk, the owner of X, the platform where many of these hate attacks begin. Last month, Musk named his own daughter in an interview, stating that she was “killed” by the “awake mind virus.”
