Video Game Journalist Responds To Threats In A Unique Way

I’m not entirely familiar with Alanah Pearce or her work with IGN. Granted, my experience with video game journalism has been kind of limited, since I prefer to play video games rather than read complete strangers’ opinions about them. If I do want an outsider’s opinion about certain games, I have friends I can ask. And my fiance stays on top of such news and he tells me pretty much everything I’d ever want to know anyway. Video game journalism hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory in recent years and if I don’t have to ready their social justice screeds, then I don’t.

That being said – I’m not denying that adolescent jackholes on the internet send out rape threats toward journalists. Most of the time, it’s idiot teenage boys who just learned how to use the “F-word” sending these threats. That doesn’t mean that there’s a culture of insidious patriarchy taking over video game fandom – it’s just that teenage boys can be idiots. And sometimes, those teenage boys fail to become mature adults and give the rest of the gaming community a bad reputation that the media can use to say “See! See! Video games make people violent! Ban video games! They’re awful!”

It’s freaking annoying, really.

Which is why I actually kind of like Alanah Pearce’s response to threats. Though, part of me thinks it’s kind of sketchy – finding out an online troll’s personal information (commonly referred to as “doxxing,” which I’m not a fan of). But she doesn’t post their info online for other trolls to harass them. What she does instead is directly contact these boys’ parents and lets them deal with it –

‘Everyone I’ve managed to identify that has sent me a rape threat has been a male, and a surprising amount of them have been young boys, but I don’t stop to ask them their age before banning or reporting their comments,’ Ms Pearce, who is originally from Brisbane, told Daily Mail Australia.
Often she’ll ban and ignore online trolls but, if she can, she’ll inform an authority figure.

 

She said it is important to give cyber-bullies real world consequences for their online actions.

 

‘For anyone who sends me any kind of threat on Facebook, I will go to their profile and try to find personal information,’ she said.

 

‘For young boys I usually look for parents or family listed on their profile, and then send them a screenshot of the abuse their son has sent me.

Well, people often complain that bad parenting is at fault for these kids’ behavior. Might as well let the parents (or another authority figure) deal with it.

Here’s the deal with online trolls – they know how to troll online. They do this all the time. Most of the time, the online trolling is as far as it goes. But bringing the consequences into the real world might be a good way to help curb that, especially when you’re dealing with young boys.

Then again… while I don’t have a problem with Alanah contacting the parents of minors with their obscene behavior, I do think the practice of doxxing can go too far. There have been instances of people bringing up legitimate concerns over journalistic integrity in the gaming industry, but those concerns get choked off because journalists will find out personal information of the people doing the complaining and they’ll contact their employers or neighbors and make up all kinds of awful things about them and ruin their lives. That’s what GamerGate started out with, frankly.

But maybe even some of this grown-up teenagers could do with a talking-to from their mothers.