 How's everyone doing? Awesome. So my name's Anita Sarkeesian, and I run a video web series. Oh, one second. I run a video web series called Feminist Frequency, where I deconstruct the representations of women in popular culture. So I look at TV shows, movies, comic books, and video games. Now, I've been playing video games since I was about five years old. And it's no secret that the video game industry boasts some of the most sexually objectified stereotyped and downright oppressive portrayals of women in any medium. So as some of you might know, last year I decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign to create a series of videos that would look specifically at the way women are portrayed in video games. The idea being that if you were interested, you could choose to donate. And if you weren't, you could choose not to donate. Seems pretty straightforward, right? What could possibly go wrong? So I'm a pop culture critic. I am a woman, and I'm a feminist. And I'm all of these things openly on the internet, which means that I'm no stranger to some level of sexist backlash. I've sadly come to expect the typical gendered slurs, insults, and jokes that usually involve kitchens and sandwiches every time I open my computer. But this time, it didn't stop there. The situation quickly escalated. And I found myself the target of a vicious and sustained harassment campaign, waged by literally thousands of entitled male gamers. This was to a scale that I hadn't experienced before. And even people who were pretty jaded by this stuff were pretty taken aback. The next few slides come with a very big trigger warning. All of my social media accounts were flooded with misogynist hate, including threats of violence, death, and rape. So this was Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Formspring, my Kickstarter campaign, Flickr, my website. The Wikipedia article about me was vandalized with sexist and racist slurs and pornographic images. And when you look at the history of the edits to the page, there were a few dozen IP addresses involved. So this wasn't just one individual. Attempts were made to hack into my website, my email, and other online accounts. Denial of service attacks were launched on my website and knocked it offline for days at a time. Incidentally, this is still happening. Campaigns were launched to flag and report my Kickstarter campaign, my YouTube videos, and my Twitter account as spam, fraud, even as terrorism in an effort to exploit the reporting functionality to get my account suspended. So what they were doing is they were using the anti-harassment function to harass me. Some people organize mini campaigns to report me to the FBI and the IRS. Pornographic drawings of my likeness, being raped by video game characters, were sent to me over and over again. They signed me up for pornographic mailing lists, pornographic dating sites. They Photoshopped my head on pornographic images. And in this case, in these cases of gendered harassment, pornography is used as a weapon. Attempts were made to dox me. And that means that they were collecting and publicly distributing or attempting to collect and publicly distribute my personal contact information, such as my home address and phone number. So what did I do when this happened? I mean, what would you do? In addition to trying to lock down my online presence and try to shield myself and my privacy, I meticulously documented everything. So one of the consequences of living in a culture of sexism is that people don't believe women when they say they're being harassed. That they don't think it's that bad or that we're just being too sensitive, right? It's just online. It doesn't have any real world impact. So I had long discussions with my team about whether to share any of it, why we're sharing it, what is the purpose of it. Because there are risks involved to doing that. There was very real concerns about my personal safety. But being silent and not talking about it isn't helping. So I strategically shared some of what was happening in an effort to help contribute to the already ongoing conversation about gendered harassment. Now I suspected that the harassment might escalate when I did this. And it did. Sometimes in ways I was not expecting, including a game. If you can even call it that, it's more like an interactive violence against women experience. The game was made and passed around and players were invited to beat the bitch up where upon clicking on the screen, a photo of me would become increasingly battered and bruised. So obviously I was not intimidated. I didn't back down and I didn't cancel my project. And so far I've released three videos in my series. But still attempts to discredit and silence me a year later continue to this day. Recently the harassers collectively organized a falsely flagged one of my finished Trope Sources Women YouTube videos on mass and successfully had it removed from YouTube for a couple of hours. And they also made videos showing each other how to abuse the YouTube flagging system to encourage more participation in order to be more effective. So all of this is pretty grim stuff. And I found that the traditional terms that we often use to describe online harassment were not really adequate to explain this phenomenon. Well words like cyber bullying or trolling could be applied to some elements of what of the abuse I received. Really the best way that I can describe it is as a cyber mob. So what's a cyber mob? Well I first heard the term from law professor Danielle Citron who's been studying cyber civil rights for many years now. And cyber mobs have some unique elements. So based on my experience in those of other women I found that a cyber mob happens when a dominant group with a shared worldview comes together to try to collectively shame, harass, discredit and destroy a target using abusive online strategies. Members of cyber mobs typically delight in a form of cooperative competition with each other to ramp up the level of cruelty aimed at their target. Besides harming and silencing the target the underlying goal of the cyber mob's actions is to reinforce their position of social dominance over members of marginalized or relatively powerless groups. So one of the things that I found fascinating but also deeply disturbing is that this cyber mob referred to their behavior as a game. So in their minds they fabricated this grand fiction in which they're the heroic players of a massively multiplayer online game working together to bring down a powerful enemy and stop her oh so evil plan. And apparently they cast me in the role of the villain. And determined that my diabolical master plan is to make a handful of videos on YouTube. Like it's this notion that I'm some feminist overlord and I'm going to destroy video games forever. But as much as this is a disturbing analogy I think that it's really helpful in understanding how a cyber mob actually operates. So who are the so-called players of this game? Or who are the players of this so-called game? Usually when we think of online harassment we think of teenage boys in their parents' basements but that's just not the reality of the situation. While there were undoubtedly some boys involved I was also attacked by thousands of grown men. And this isn't totally surprising considering the fact that the average age of gamers in the US is approximately 30. Where is this game played? Well perpetrators turn the entire internet into a battlefield. So in my case they focus their attacks on all of my social media accounts everywhere and anywhere that I existed. But these players also have a home base from which they plan their raids and coordinate their attacks. These are largely anonymous and unmoderated internet forums and message boards like certain parts of Reddit and certain parts of 4chan. These are spaces with no real mechanisms for accountability. And it's important to note that anonymity is not the only factor behind or necessarily the cause of online harassment. In fact many of the men who came after me used accounts with their real names, with their real photos, with their real places of work, their real education publicly listed. So the lack of accountability coupled with the performance of harassment for an audience of peers were core to the driving of this campaign of hate. So why were they doing this? What's the goal of this game? Well the immediate explicit goal is to take down the villain and in so doing save video games for me and my dastardly feminist schemes. So to this end the perpetrators try to silence and discredit me and stop my project. But the larger implicit goal, and I think that this is actually more important, is to really try and defend the status quo of gaming as a male dominated space and to preserve all of the privileges and entitlements that come with an unchallenged boys club. What type of game is it? Well it's fundamentally a social one. Now we don't usually think about online harassment as a social activity, right? But we know that participants in this so-called game are typically not acting alone. Instead they're loosely coordinating their actions with each other. And the social component is a powerful motivating factor and it works to provide incentives for others to participate in and to escalate the harassment as a way to earn the praise and approval from their peers. They're doing it for an audience and they're doing it for each other. So through this process perpetrators have created an informal reward system where they're earning the praise from their peers by engaging in increasingly brazen and abusive attacks. So the harassers would document and share evidence of their attacks by posting screencaps back on the message boards. So it acted kind of like trophies or achievements. So these screenshots would be things like the screenshot of the Wikipedia vandalism or a screenshot of my site being knocked offline to sort of brag about what they were doing. So this serves to encourage or dare others to join in on the harassment. And it creates a scenario where boys and men use macho posturing and the performance of misogyny for each other by showing off their excitement and their participation in the harassment. So this game analogy is helpful in understanding how cyber mobs operate, but the thing is, it's not a game. It's an overt display of angry misogyny on an enormous scale. It's not just boys being boys. It's not just the way the internet works and it's not gonna go away if we stop talking about it or ignore it. These are all common excuses used to defend or brush off this behavior. Women who are harassed are told to grow a thicker skin to toughen up and to stop being so sensitive. But I don't think the price of admission to the world of gaming should be to disconnect from our emotional capacity or to distance ourselves from our own humanity. It's not a fair trade. It's simply not okay to ask people to jettison their ability to feel in order to deal with a constant barrage of slurs and abuse. Now, one reason for these attacks could be because the industry has been male dominated for so long and we're currently witnessing the very early process of actually changing and transforming into a more inclusive space. This is a transformation that is long overdue. However, some male gamers with a deep sense of entitlement are terrified of this change and their resistance is manifesting in sexist and misogynist comments in harassment and in cyber mobs like the one that came after me. Now, it's probably no secret that far too many women are being targeted by cyber mobs or just dealing with any level of online harassment but this isn't just women in gaming or tech spaces. These are women who are participating or working in any traditionally male dominated space. One study found that between the years 2000 and 2012, 72% of online harassment victims were women. So this is clearly a gendered issue. Now, there are very real consequences to the people being targeted, to the women being targeted. There's very real emotional harm that happens and it raises their level of vulnerability to possible physical harm and stalking. But there's also consequences to people who are watching this behavior and watching the harassment. It has a chilling effect because it discourages other women from wanting to participate because they don't want to get harassed either. So the end result is that these harassment tactics work to reinforce and normalize a culture of sexism wherein men who harass are supported by their peers and are rewarded for their sexist attitudes and behaviors and where women are silenced, marginalized and excluded from full participation. So what do we do? How do we intervene to help prevent or reduce gendered harassment in online spaces? Well, I'd like to share a quote from Howard Zinn which I think can be really instructive. You can't be neutral on a moving train. We all have to participate and we all have to take responsibility. Even if you aren't doing the harassment, it's still our responsibility. It's not a problem that only women need to deal with and it's something that people of all genders need to be actively involved in countering. So we can kind of think of sexism as air pollution, right? This big toxic cloud that we're all breathing in and even if we aren't actively making a toxic, we all have a responsibility to clean up the mess. Now in my case, many people of all genders publicly supported me and showed solidarity with me and my project. There were blog posts and news stories and little comics and fan art and videos. And I think that one of the things that we can do, and this seems so obvious and almost too simple, but it's really crucial that we believe women and we listen to women when they say they're being harassed. The first step is to actually acknowledge and not belittle women's experiences when they talk about this, to give them the benefit of the doubt. And then we can be vocally and actively supportive in helping facilitate a change in our culture. So I really do believe that we can work together and we can collectively organize to try to create a cultural shift where women without threats of fear or intimidation can be full and active participants in our digital world. Thank you.