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This book argues that online harassment communities function as Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) where the collective goal is to ruin peoples' lives. Framing these communities like ARGs highlights ways to limit their impact in the future, partly through offering people better ways to control their own safety online.
The comparison also underlines the complicity of social networks in online harassment, since the communities use their designs as tools. Social networks know this, and need to work on minimizing the problem, or acknowledge that they are profiting through promoting abuse.
List of contents
1. Introduction: The Breadth of Harassment Culture, and Contextualising Gamergate.- 2. Networked Publics of Abuse.- 3. Exploring the Overlap Between Hatemobs and ARGs.- 4. Gaming the Rules.- 5. Problematic Tools and Platform Complicity.- 6. Reshaping the Landscape.- 7. Conclusion: The Christchurch Call to Action Summit, And What Follows.
About the author
Kevin Veale is a Lecturer in Media Studies for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Massey University in Aotearoa-New Zealand. His work focuses on storytelling across media forms, and exploring the ways that different forms of mediation shape the affective experiences of the stories they mediate.
