Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Doxxed, harassed and silenced: the fallout of Gamergate 2.0

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

Remember Gamergate? Well… it's happening again. After writing an exposé about how a video game consultancy was attacked, journalist Alyssa Mercante found herself in the crosshairs of a targeted harassment campaign.Alyssa joins Taylor to discuss what it's like being at the center of an organized smear campaign, how she's fighting back.

This is somebody who has been making videos about me for months. You know, the next thing I knew someone was posting pictures of the inside of my apartment. Remember GamerGate? Women speaking out online have also been met with attacks via social media using the hashtag GamerGate. What started as an online spat about the ethics of gaming journalism quickly escalated into a full-blown culture war. It helped catalyze the alt-right movement, which secured power and prominence during the 2016 election cycle. Well, it's happening again. Back in March, journalist Alyssa Mercante wrote a story about how Sweet Baby Inc.,

a video game consultancy, had been helping gaming companies attract more diverse audiences. Alyssa's story was deeply reported and factually accurate, but the reaction to it quickly took on a life of its own. Within days, Mercante had been threatened, doxed, and was the target of a vicious hate and harassment campaign that's become known as Gamergate 2.0. Today I'm talking to Alyssa about what it's like to be at the center of an organized smear campaign, how she's fighting back and why the mainstream media continues to be complicit in these attacks. Hi, Alyssa. Welcome to Power User. Hi, thanks for having me. All right, so for people who don't know who you are,

you're a pretty well-known online culture video game journalist. How did you get started in this space? I've been writing about video games for my whole life, but in terms of it being my career, it's been the last five or six years. I was at Games Radar, and then I went to Kataku, which is owned by GeoMedia. and my reporting has always been on video games and the culture surrounding it, but only lately has it kind of become the topic of everyone's conversation. So you wrote this article about a company called Sweet Baby that really blew up and proved to be very divisive on the internet. It also seems to have sparked this months-long harassment and abuse campaign. Tell me about the article and kind of what you hope to achieve by writing it.

What was the crux of that story? Sure. So in the darker corners of the internet and message boards that probably the average internet user, would never come across. I noticed a conspiracy theory was kind of making the rounds about this particular consulting group and what they do in the video game industry. Consulting groups in the video game industry are a lot like how they are in the movie industry. They'll get called in by studios making games and do a pass on the script or they'll offer insights into a character. Sometimes they do sensitivity reads. It's kind of like they wear many hats and they do very, very different things. This one consultancy group, Sweet Baby, Inc., was being accused of forcibly injecting

woke ideologies and characters into contemporary big budget video games. And it was being used as sort of a cudgel as to why there was a black lead character in, you know, an award-winning game from that year. And I started looking into the people who had created this group, ostensibly monitoring any game that this consultancy firm Sweet Baby had been involved. in and found that they had their own discord, which is like an instant messaging service commonly used in the games industry, used for people who are looking for people to play other games with. And that discord was full of racist, vitriol, homophobic slurs, misogyny, all the kinds of stuff

that I hadn't really seen at that level online in a while. So you notice that Sweet Baby, which is this consulting firm, had been increasingly involved in all of these video games that were being, it seems like the target of backlash, like you mentioned. So you kind of dug into what was fomenting that backlash and found this group of people that were really dedicated to tracking this consultancy firm, Sweet Baby, and it seems like producing coordinated harassment campaigns against any game that I guess danged to partner with this consulting firm. Yeah. And honestly, once the piece that I published went live and that piece also included interviews with the people who work for Sweet Baby Inc. Because the goal of the piece was to sort of tell you exactly what a consultancy firm does and what it doesn't do and try and debunk. this theory in the clearest terms possible. Unfortunately, the moment that piece went live, the new conspiracy theory cropped up, which was that games journalists were running defense for

this company, and then it just kind of, the attack spun off of that and just started getting worse and worse. So any game that was even remotely connected to Sweet Baby Inc, anybody who worked at Sweet Baby Inc, a lot of people who were just women or people of color or queer folks who were writing about this or talking about this online, they were just the target of this harassment campaign and it has not stopped. It's been nonstop since March, actually. As you mentioned, there are so many of these consultancy groups that go around and consult on things like diversity and also just helping these game companies, like you mentioned, appeal to different audiences, right? You don't want to just appeal to one demographic when you're making video games. Why do you think Sweet Baby

specifically has become such a target? I think it's a perfect storm of stuff. I think it doesn't help that Sweet Baby is run by a black woman named Kim Bel Air. I don't think it helps that a lot of their employees are people of color or queer folks or non-binary people. I don't think it helps that the video game industry, which grew exponentially during the height of the pandemic where more and more people were buying game consoles and playing games that had never been involved in this industry before. And all of the video game studios started hiring more people, looking to make more money, which resulted in mass layoffs the last two years. I think people have also noticed that there is a perceived decrease in quality of some types of games,

you know, games that are made with microtransactions so that you'll buy the game, but then you'll keep buying stuff in that game because you want to wear a cool outfit or you want to have a cool weapon. And those games are launching and then failing kind of miserably. And Sweet Baby Inc. was involved in one or two games that did not do very well. But unfortunately, what happened with Sweet Baby is it just became this kind of catch-all term for anything that they deemed to have any sort of DEI in it, diversity, equity, and inclusion. So if there was something that had a black character or a female lead, it was sweet baby treatment.

Sweet baby must have touched it. So now it's kind of spun out into a lore that in many cases is completely untrue that this development company hasn't even worked on most of these games. About a decade ago, there was this movement online called The Gamer Gate, which obviously you and I are very familiar with. It was this really coordinated harassment campaign. against a bunch of women in video games, journalism, bad faith attacks, and smears. And it was really this ultimately served as a sort of blueprint for how the far right would come to weaponize the internet. That received quite a bit of attention after the fact. There was a bunch of think pieces about it in 2017, 2018, 2018, 2019. Like, wow, wasn't that

bad, right? Good thing that was over. It does seem like, though, things kind of went underground or at least weren't so bad for a while. In the past year, really with this new sort of campaign against Sweet Baby and some of the journalists involved like you. It seems like this, we're experiencing almost a Gamergate 2.0. What do you think has led to this resurgence? There's so many things and I keep saying perfect storm and it feels like a cliche that I've repeated so many times when talking about this, but it is sort of that is being an election year and all of the kind of political disagreements and conversations that happen around

an election year certainly make the internet an interesting place. I mean, we know that the far right and the people who helped propped up Donald. Trump's first run for president, we're directly pulling from the playbook of GamerGate. And I don't think it's a coincidence that we started seeing it kick up again during an election year. And you can see that there are people who are in the now president-elect circle saying very similar things to what Gamergate 2.0 or the people who are inciting this harassment campaign say in terms of, you know, this company is infested with DEI or we need to end awokeness and the issues that the gamers have with video games and the diversity of the industry

can easily be applied to larger political issues that they may have and this sort of belief that there's this massive countrywide conspiracy to elect people or put people into jobs who don't deserve it because they're a minority or to cancel people because they don't think that that's fair and I think that combined with the way the Gamergate just kind of eventually disappeared also meant that a lot of the major players in the video game industry didn't really have to acknowledge it. You didn't have to have Microsoft say, this is screwed up and you shouldn't do this. Or Sony say, we stand with the people who you are accusing of not being ethical in terms of journalism. And I think what happened when this started kicking up again in March was there were a lot of major companies and a lot of major people in the industry

who kind of stuck their head in the sand, hoping and praying that they wouldn't get the eye of Sauron on them, that they wouldn't start to get these people looking at them and attacking them. And unfortunately, that ends up being a sort of tacit approval of the way that these people are behaving, or at least giving them the space to feel like, well, they can continue to get away with this. It seems like this campaign has obviously spanned the internet. It's all over YouTube, Twitch, every social platform. But so much of this coordinated harassment and attack stuff seems to be happening on Twitter or X rather now, especially under Elon.

What role do you think has Elon's X and its sort of toxic algorithm played in boosting this GamerGate 2.0? There's a couple of things. First of all, the terms of service that X slash Twitter has in place are clearly not being policed or monitored as well as they should be or as well as they were before Elon Musk took over. There are clear-cut violations of terms of service. I mean, people with slurs in their names. But it's not just the terms of service, right? I guess what role do you think the actual algorithm plays? the fact that you have these like right wing figures that are able to amass so much power on that

platform. I mean, it has to do with the monetization also of hatred and harassment. I mean, you can buy a blue check now and you can farm engagement off of that by, you can buy to have your account, have a blue check next to it and earn money off of all of the engagement on your tweets. And so if you tweet something incredibly controversial or something that's going to get a lot of interactions, you're going to get more money. And those things are also boosted through the algorithm to people's homepages. I mean, I obviously have another Twitter account that I use to monitor things. And that account is the entire homepage is just filled with absolute horrible, racist, homophobic, transphobic, harassment, abuse, all of these things. And it's just not stopping.

It's not being taken down. And it's being pushed to the top of the page and pushed into people's eyes. And they're rewarding that by giving people monetary payouts for when their tweets hit big. Talk to me about the structure of these harassment campaigns because I feel like there's a few big people at the top that are these mainstream content creators that are sort of instigators, but they love to wipe their hands of these things and say, well, I didn't do anything. I didn't personally call for, you know, XYZ. Can you sort of walk me through the hierarchy of how these different sort of harassers operate and where they land? There's usually always in this instance of harassment campaigns, a few leaders who are most of the time very careful with what they say.

and what they share. I mean, you're rare that you're going to see someone who has 150, 250,000 Twitter or ex-followers outright in sight violence or threaten someone or anything like that. But what they will do is they will point ceaseless harassment at, or they will point endless fingers towards specific people in a way that they think is coy by saying, oh, well, I know this person, and here's a picture of clearly a person of color, is involved in this game that didn't do well and they probably don't like you, the gamer, and they rile up a base of smaller content creators who tend to be a little bit more loose with the stuff that they say,

a little bit less careful with what they're inciting, a little bit more harassy with their videos and their comments. And then below that, you get sort of like anonymous foot soldiers that are just in droves. And those are the people who often or not are the ones in my inbox or in other people's inbox with outright threats or in my emails, in my Instagram, finding my family's information, those anonymous people who are watching all of this content, taking in all of this content, and being pointed towards people that they should be angry towards for some reason. They're not sure why. And that's when you end up getting this sort of wave and crest of harassment because the leaders are just innocently pointing out people, but the undertones are very clear

what they want to happen there. And it's the foot soldiers that will always carry that out. throughout this story on Kataku, and it kind of blows up. It becomes this viral piece of journalism that, of course, all of these awful people hate. Tell me what happened next to you. Part of the reason why it got so bad for me in terms of harassment was because I refused to back down, and I refused to apologize for nothing that I had done wrong, but just for being who I was. And in the immediate aftermath, there was a lot of finger pointing that this piece was untrue or purposefully leaving things out or none of this is correct. And when I was pushing back at that, that started kind of the waterfall of harassment. So I started becoming this kind of stand-in for everything that was wrong

with games journalism. My faces plastered over hundreds of YouTube videos, watching my every move. I was getting threats in my work email and my personal email. I had to warn my parents to be careful because their address was circulating the internet. And it was just kind of your bog standard harassment campaign. They go after every piece of social media you have. They try and find every bit of personal information they can. And they're kind of obsessing over everything you do. I was joking that they like probably had my menstrual cycle charted, but it really feels like that at a certain point. Like it is nonstop and it's every breath you take. Somebody is archiving it and putting it in these darker corners of the web, which eventually bleeds into the more typical places that people would go,

like Twitter and YouTube. And how has that affected your ability, to do journalism and to further cover these issues. I mean, it does feel in some ways like you're a pariah. There's a lot of people in the industry who have been incredibly supportive to me in private, but not as supportive as I'd like them to be in public. And, you know, my company when I was at GeoMedia was very clearly unhappy with what was going on and very clearly unhappy with the way that I was reacting to it. And it ended up reaching ahead where I could no longer work there.

It wasn't working for anybody. And now I'm in this sort of in between where I really want to keep reporting on this stuff. I think it's crucial to keep reporting on this stuff. I don't want to disappear because that is what the goal of that harassment campaign always is. It's why when people have been making videos about me, they've said, well, why didn't you just go the way of Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkesian, who were two women that were kind of focal points of the first Gamergate, who drastically decreased their internet presence over the last decade. They want you to go away and they want to scare you off the internet. And I just kind of am refusing to do that.

But it does make it very hard because then you start to wonder how many companies want to publish something with my byline because they're going to get dog piled on or they're going to start to get harassed. And I've seen it in a small scale with my recent bylines at Rolling Stone. They're just anytime they see my name anywhere, they're jumping on it like dogs with a bone. And it really is upsetting because at the end of the day, you know, I was doing my job and I was doing it well. And I think being put in a position where you feel like you might not be able to do it anymore is

a complete bummer. It's horrible, but we see this happen constantly. I mean, I've reported on so many of these campaigns, especially against women journalists. And it happens to, you know, women across the board, especially women covering online culture, as you mentioned, and video games, because I think these are very hyper online engaged, radicalized communities. Why do you think media organizations are so scared? Like, why do you think they have learned nothing from Gamergate 1.0? Like, was there any improvement here? Because it seemed like there was this whole reckoning around it. But now we have it happening again. and those same media companies that were publishing the, you know, think pieces about, wow, wasn't that awful? It seems like they're making the same mistakes again.

Yeah, I think ultimately it all comes down to worrying what's going to affect your bottom line. And that's also why I think the video game industry leaders and these companies and publishers stay quiet as well. Because I think they worry that the moment that you take a stance against something like this, you alienate a part of your audience. And in a media landscape where websites are shuddering left and right and shutting down or selling, or people are getting laid off. I think there's a fear that you would alienate people by loudly standing behind your employees who are getting harassed. In some cases, I also think there are some people who are at the tops of these businesses that aren't necessarily all that

worried about the way that these people behave. And maybe they don't necessarily disagree with some of the things these people say. The people who are in positions of power at these places are there for a reason. And I don't think they want anything that could upset that power balance. And I think seeing that somebody is getting sort of endless abuse for something that is a fairly left-leaning but innocent stance on something scares people who are at the top because they wonder, well, what happens if I take a stand? And so I think they're just quiet. I think quite honestly, they're cowards. I think a lot of people are really just worried about their KPIs or they're really just worried about their page views. They're worried about how much money they can make for the site. And they think if we make a statement

saying stop harassing someone, that section of the internet will no longer entertain us and no longer read us. And I think it really just is, it's cowardice, pure and simple. In some cases, I think people are, like I said earlier, afraid of that eye turning towards them and attacking them. But that's why I've called for video game industry leaders and companies to issue a joint statement that's just signed by a bunch of people. It doesn't need to be this sort of granular back and forth with these bad actors online. It could just be something as simple as the video game industry is diverse. The people writing about it are diverse. There's no conspiracy theory here. Please stop harassing people. We don't stand with it. Sign every big leader in the industry, but that's not happening. I feel like there's also,

you know, what these people fundamentally prey on is also the public slack of media literacy. These independent content creators are able to kind of go out. They're able to weaponize the traditional media because they know the traditional media is certainly not going to cover these campaigns. The traditional media doesn't really cover harassment campaigns against marginalized people generally. And so they're able to kind of push these narratives unchecked. There's also this idea from a lot of the same people in positions of power of don't feed the troll. right that you love to hear that saying all the time they say don't feed the trolls and it seems like that kind of ignores the way the internet is currently set up right where there are these people that have these powerful megaphones that can push these really dangerous and defamatory narratives about someone and if you don't respond I feel like you just create this vacuum for these narratives to thrive so I guess how do you feel about that don't feed the trolls advice and how have you sought to fight this misinformation and smear campaign against yourself it's so funny that that you say that because that was actually something that was said to me multiple times by some

people who I will not name when I was still working at Kataku. And it frustrated me twofold. One, exactly what you're saying, the conversation of, well, this is defamation against me. It's also insinuating or saying outright that my journalistic practice is unethical or that I'm lying throughout a published piece and not saying anything about that kind of stuff does, again, is a little bit of a tacit approval. It's a little bit of a, ooh, I don't want to say anything because I don't want them to pick that up and run with it. But when you don't say anything, they're running with it anyway. And I've learned that even when I don't say something that could piss them off, they will find something to get angry about, whether it's a tweet from 10 years ago or it's a retweet.

There's something that will consistently drive this outrage machine. So I believe you have to be smart with what you're pushing back on. And in some cases at first, I kind of felt like, like I was Captain America in that one scene, whatever movie it is, where he fights like eight guys in an elevator. I kind of felt like I had to just go at everybody who was saying everything ridiculous about me because the ridiculous level got to something that was, I mean, it was comical at a certain point if it wasn't tied to such scary, violent threats, but it got exhausting. And then I got to a point where I was like, okay, what are things that are just really easily disproven things that these big leaders are saying about how

Call a Duty added bullets that had the trans flag on them so you can kill people as a trans person and I had to debunk that because I was like that's an easy thing to knock down and say this is completely untrue but what's frustrating is the outraged people that people who are consistently feeding this outrage machine you can prove that something is untrue unequivocally and they'll just move on to the next thing and so I don't really know what else can be done a side from kind of constantly going up, that's wrong, that's wrong, because without these people being deplatformed from places like Twitter or YouTube for spreading disinformation or other things that

obviously get into illegal territory, they're just going to keep doing this because they're still getting the views and they're still getting the likes. But the other thing that I thought about, don't feed the trolls, is how inherently violent it feels to tell a woman being incessantly harassed online that their behavior has something to do with why that's happening. It really feels like when someone says that they were sexually assaulted and somebody asked them, well, what were you wearing? Or you shouldn't have had so much to drink. It just feels like your mere existence and the fact that you don't want to lay down and take it is why it's happening to you. And it's so upsetting and frustrating. And also, if you do lay down and take it, it's worse, right? Like I think that's what people, these, especially these sort of people in positions of power that make that comment, they think that if you don't respond, it goes away. That's not true. They just don't have to see your response. to it, right? It's out there. It's manipulating, you know, people's perceptions of you. I also think it's a

huge problem. I mean, you mentioned that you had to leave your job and stuff that people that run these media companies and are in positions of power, they will throw any woman right under the bus if there's any hint of controversy, whether it's deserved or not. And I think that that is really scary because we see men court controversy all the time. We see straight men able to ride these cycles out. And it's like, oh, well, you know, he's really bombastic and he's a fighter. They're never framed as like controversial. Men can use controversy and it is seen as like them standing up for themselves or them taking control of the narrative or, you know, fighting back bravely against, you know,

these bad actors. When women try to do anything like that, they're chastised. And like you said, these media companies will run scared. They will throw you under the bus so fast because they believe falsely that throwing you under the bus will quell the controversy. In fact, it's like giving, it's like throwing, you know, red meat to the sharks, right? Absolutely. I mean, I've said this before, like cancel culture does exist, just not in the way that the right wing people would have you think it exists, because you can see someone like Johnny Depp and that entire case against Amber Hurd, oh, no,

it's going to ruin his career. Oh, no, she's trying to cancel him. Well, who is still doing, you know, Dior Savage commercials for Cologne and who is living a quiet life in another country with their kid. And I think, you know, I saw that firsthand. I saw how quickly this bombardment of people sending emails to my job and sending emails to places that I'm freelancing at, this clear attempt to de-platform me, which is so ironic considering how often the right wing screams about cancel culture and how it's ruining everything. But the only time I've ever seen someone actually suffer from cancel culture or have any sort of ramifications for anything has been a woman or a person of color or a queer person because they dared to push back against the ruling elite and the other people

around them. And I just think it's ironic that we're sitting here worrying and bleeding about that when the only people who have suffered from it are the ones who are already in a bad enough position. It's incredibly frustrating. Yeah. Well, I think one way, at least I found, to kind of help mitigate these harassment campaigns is to cover them and to educate people about them so that when they see a campaign like this, they say, oh, that's what this is. Oh, this is coordinated networked harassment, I can recognize it for what it is instead of just saying, why is Alyssa so controversial or whatever. But I've noticed that the mainstream media, traditional media generally doesn't cover these things. Like, you know, for someone like you, right? Like, where do you even go to get your story out? It's not like there are journalists in these traditional outlets that even talk about these massive campaigns that are happening online. Generally, the traditional media tends to ignore the internet, I think, unless they're writing about how like among us, you know, is a problem. Um, That's the extent of the game journalism. How do you educate people about these campaigns?

How can we educate the public on how to recognize coordinated, you know, smear campaigns? You're absolutely right. I spoke to the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, like immediately after my piece went live and the harassment started in March. It was an incredible interview. I was really proud of it. We talked about the harassment campaign. And then it was very clear that some people did not want me to continue to talk about this anymore. So I kind of went quiet in terms of going and looking for places to have this conversation.

But I kept having it on social media. I kept having it on TikTok or in my Instagram stories, just showing people just kind of the massive amounts of harassment and abuse that I would get on the daily. I mean, today somebody sent me a picture of their penis in an Instagram message saying, you know, since you're such a whore, you're going to have this in your mouth soon. And I think people don't realize that when it happens like this and when it happens to, you, it is kind of a nonstop barrage that anytime you pick up your phone, it's a very likely chance that you have something in one of your inboxes that would make my grandmother faint at the dinner table. I would love for traditional media to cover this more. I've seen actually a bunch of the content that you've posted. I think you posted a great TikTok recently sort of documenting your

emotions and going through this over the past few months. And I feel like you've done a lot to raise awareness about this on your own channels. You're also pursuing legal action, which I think is something that most people don't do. Can you tell me about your lawsuit and how, you know, your decision to pursue justice through that system? Yeah, I mean, the first time Gamergate happened in 2014, the internet was such a foreign concept to most lawmakers, judges, attorneys that most of the women who kind of raise these issues, even with their police departments, when they would call and say, hey, somebody's threatening to come to my house. The overall response would just be kind of one of confusion. What do you mean? There's someone online is threatening you. They're not there.

in person, right? So you're fine, right? It's not an issue, right? On a legal end, it was very difficult to kind of nail down exactly what these people were doing that was illegal, because there just weren't very many instances of lawsuits happening or proceedings going through that made it very clear that this kind of behavior was unacceptable. That has changed somewhat in the last 10 years. It's gotten a little bit easier to pinpoint illegality on the internet in the obvious ways of death threats and things like that. I kind of agree with you in some of these points. dealing with my own harassment. Like, sure, police understand the concept of the internet a little bit better. You might get a judge that understands how Twitter works. But I don't think there's any sort

of real comprehensive legal precedent for holding these types of campaigns accountable. So how are you approaching it with this suit? So I'm suing one of the people who have been making content about me since March. His name's Jeff Tarzia. He's a content creator who primarily makes videos on YouTube. I'm suing him for defamation, stochastic terrorism, organized harassment, a couple of things that we kind of went through at length, you know, the benefits to any of these points. Alyssa Mercante has filed a lawsuit with me. It's a very frivolous, 54-page attempt at doxing me and attacking me and silencing me that isn't going to work, and it never does. This is somebody who has been making videos about me for months, many of which include thumbnails of me and

interesting photos taken from, I don't know, where he found them online, and a lot of them contain pointed language that is technically legal, but some of them contain outright defamation. And obviously, he is one of those below the big, big guys in terms of the organizers of this harassment campaign, but he is someone that has quite a large following. And a lot of the people who have seen the videos he's made about me have echoed the things that he said about me in my DMs and elsewhere and it's just been very clear that there has been a lot of slandering of my name and my character and my ability as a journalist. And so for me and my legal team, it was the best case scenario of who we should try to have some modicum of a consequence for. There is clear-cut

examples of what we believe are defamation and there is a laundry list of content that this person has been making about me for months and making money off for months. So I'm hoping I'm hoping. I don't know how confident I feel because the legal system I still feel is very far behind, but I'm hoping that this could be something that people could look towards as a rare example of somebody latching on to the back of a harassment campaign and benefiting financially off of it while, you know, seriously affecting the life of one person in their sights. You know, I think my life has changed dramatically because of all of this. And I don't think that's fair. So we'll see. Yeah. I think the profit is.

a key part of it. In the meantime, I guess what can people do to support those who are targets of this type of stuff? I mean, to support your work and stuff now that you are independent, like, how, I don't know if you can pay your legal fees, like how it's been going? How can people get involved who want to put a stop to these types of cycles? There's a couple of things. Obviously, I started a Patreon and I regularly stream on Twitch now. It's twitch.tv.tv slash Alyssa Merck. I'm trying to do kind of a hybrid gaming and covering like tech and video game news just kind of testing it out to see if that medium is a good place to have these kinds of conversations and I have my Patreon which I'm doing some original writing on some behind a paywall some not I'm applying for jobs you know obviously trying

but in terms of support I mean just getting the word out there and also honestly it seems so silly but reaching out to me and just like giving me a virtual pat on the back or and I've got your back is huge. And also for the larger people, the people who are not, you know, just us slowly journalists that are, you know, struggling to make rent in New York City or elsewhere, but the people who are leaders at these companies and leaders in these spaces, I think a little bit more vocal support for not just me, but the other people who are facing harassment, I think, would be huge. Again, that vacuum of not saying anything leaves a lot of space for people to continue to pile on. And also, I would say, if you come across something that is so blatantly

violating terms of service, at least give it a report. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. But it's better than just me feeling like I'm constantly monitoring my own harassment, which gets exhausting. Well, it's traumatizing, right? I mean, you are forced to because, and I hate this idea as well, where it's like, well, just don't read it or whatever. For your own safety, you do need to read what people are saying, again, to report threats, to escalate things. And there is no service that can just go in. And I've always wanted something like this, just like monitor all of your mentions, right? Like celebrities have, I guess, and like deal with things and escalate things. So you manually have to read the most vicious stuff about you. I mean, I think it would lead any normal

person to have severe PTSD and trauma. Sometimes you think that you're okay and then you just kind of have like a moment where either you're just so tired that you break down or for me, I would just read these things all day and almost like a hard crash obsession at a certain point where I was like, this can't get any worse, right? It can't get any worse, right? And then it would get worse and worse. And I think I started noticing that like even the most innocuous comment after me reading something terrible all day would be the thing that broke me.

And I think it was just the volume after a while. And the fact that it doesn't stop is pretty wild. I mean, you know, my old company did offer delete me, which is a service that's supposed to keep all of your personal information offline. But these people who are the worst actors in this space, I mean, these are the ones who were gathering in these really strange, dark corners of the internet. These people, this is their entire life, finding information about people. And so having that service only kept them away from finding my information out for a little bit.

And then they found it anyway. They found it through some sort of loophole or some mistake that somebody had made. And, you know, the next thing I knew someone was posting pictures of the inside of my apartment. And so it is scary. It is overwhelming. And it's also very difficult to explain it to someone. who's not always online because there is that kind of. We'll just turn off the computer. It's not that simple. There's also the idea of where there's smoke, there's fire. And I think we see this,

especially when we look at women and marginalized people. It's this idea of, I like Alyssa, and her reporting seems good, but she's so controversial. They just say this about everyone. Obviously, I get it too. Like, we all see this happen. And it's how they drive people, marginalized people, women, like out of the industry by stigmatizing them. And if you respond, you're asking for it. And if you don't respond, you're just going to be steamrolled and absolutely have put up no fight while your entire career is destroyed. And the narrative about all of this hard work that you've done for years is twisted. And you just become sort of known for your controversy, which is what they want, right? Because you are doing good journalism and they don't want you to know,

they don't want you to be known for your journalism. They want you to be known as controversial because it makes it easier for you to be dismissed. Absolutely. And it has been incredibly especially since we filed the lawsuit. Last week we just filed it, which it was in the works forever. It's been incredibly difficult for me to sort of measure, to take measured approaches to this kind of stuff because it is very frustrating to see, especially within the last few days since the filing, even more defamation lies and slander spread that I just kind of have to sit on. And that is something that I understand it. And I know that it's short-term pain for potentially long-term gain. or at least some type of consequence for somebody who has been doing this. But I think I prepared myself for it, but I don't think I prepared myself enough because now it's gotten to another level that I'm like, can this go any higher? Like what the limit does not exist?

Like, why is this happening? I completely empathize. Yeah, I'm sure you do. I'm so sorry, you know, for what you've gone through. But your work is amazing. I hope people follow you. I'll watch your streams on Twitch, support your Patreon. And I hope that more online culture, you know, writers,

pay attention to this, and I hope that these mainstream media companies that continue to throw journalists under the bus, pay attention to what they're doing because I think it's, you know, it's been very concerning the past couple years watching these media companies, again, just sacrifice women, people of color, anybody deemed controversial because they think that that will sort of distance themselves from controversy. In fact, what they have shown is that they are willing to bend the knee to these really nefarious people online. And once those people recognize that these media companies will cave to that sort of external pressure, it gets even worse, right? They get even more power. They don't stop at one journalist or one woman. No, unfortunately, as much as you and I try,

we can't fight every fight and win, make these massive, massive strides without support of larger media organizations or even louder voices in the industry. Because, yeah, it's very easy to push one of us or both of us off to the side and write us off as controversial figures just for, guess what, someone else to step into that space and have that happen to them too because now the bad actors have learned that when they behave badly when they throw their toys out of the pram someone will pick them up and put them back in and they'll get a pat on the head for it and yeah i think the more that that happens the more that this will continue well alissa thank you so much for sharing your story and chatting with me today thank you for having me it was a great time that's all for the show you can watch full episodes on

my youtube channel at taylor lorenz power user is produced by travis larchuk and jelani carter our executive producer is zach mac if you like the show give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. In the meantime, subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.co. That's usermag.com. See you next week.