Unfortunately, harassment is not new. Nor is comparison of an organization that seems to make a core value of sex-based harassment to an organization that made a core value of race-based harassment necessarily invalid. The difference between "keep blacks out of white society" and "keep women out of gaming culture" is a difference, not of kind, but of degree.
Really?
This attempt at equating Gamergate with the KKK is nothing less than ludicrous. First off - because it does seem like some basic facts need to be cleared - the KKK is a formal organisation. There's leadership. There's hierarchy. There's rank and file. There's an explicit official creed whose adoption and profession of faith are indispensable to becoming and remaining a member in good standing. Needless to say nothing remotely similar happens in Gamergate.
Given the very decentralized informal nature of Gamergate, pretty much anyone - including detractors, impostors - can go on Twitter and babble all sorts of rubbish and punctuate the 140 characters with the Gamergate hashtag. There's no central authority to authenticate and vouch for those tweets. To omit this very foundational fact from one's analysis is grossly misrepresenting Gamergate, I think.
Secondly, it is also a gross misrepresentation to pinpoint the shunning of women from gaming as the core goal of so-called mainstream Gamergate. It so evidently is not. Have some fringe lone wolves made derogatory remarks towards female gamers while using the Gamergate hashtag? Yes, they have. Is that behaviour representative of so-called mainstream Gamergate, an indication of their goals and methods? Absolutely not. Please notice the disparity. It's not the fringe lone wolves in the KKK that do the trademark things the KKK is infamous for.
So to boil down the difference between the two not to a matter of nature but instead to a matter of degree is toying with words and cannot be taken seriously. The KKK leaves a bloody legacy, a trail of real, often dead, victims behind. The way I see it honouring their memory entails not downplaying the KKK's actions by associating them to words on Twitter.
Lastly, I'd like to add that I'm not that sympathetic to Gamergate's central cause, which is to expose the alleged corruption in gaming journalism. That however doesn't send me conflating what they aim to achieve with what a few crackpots inflict upon the world via Twitter.
