You're fuckin unhinged kid. I don't think women are safe around you.

The similarities between Gamergate and the far-right online movement, the “alt-right”, are huge, startling and in no way a coincidence. After all, the culture war that began in games now has a senior representative in The White House. As a founder member and former executive chair of Brietbart News, Steve Bannon had a hand in creating media monster Milo Yiannopoulos, who built his fame and Twitter following by supporting and cheerleading Gamergate. This hashtag was the canary in the coalmine, and we ignored it.

Brianna Wu was one of women targeted for abuse and death threats. Photograph: Boston Globe/Boston Globe via Getty Images Lest we forget, Gamergate was an online movement that effectively began because a man wanted to punish his ex girlfriend. Its most notable achievement was harassing a large number of progressive figures - mostly women – to the point where they felt unsafe or considered leaving the industry. Game developer Zoe Quinn was the original target. Anita Sarkeesian’s videos applying basic feminist theory to video games had already made her a target (because so many people have a difficulty differentiating cultural criticism from censorship) but this hate was powerfully amplified by Gamergate – leading to death threats, rape threats, and the public leaking of personal information. Other notable targets included developer Brianna Wu, actor Felicia Day, and prominent tech-culture writer Leigh Alexander, whose provocative article on the tyranny of “game culture” offered stark warnings that still resonate powerfully: “When you decline to create or to curate a culture in your spaces, you’re responsible for what spawns in the vacuum.”

This is well documented. Why don't you put aside your biases for a moment and actually read into it?