Fake News: NBC News Attempts to Smear #GamerGate with Unaffiliated Violent Tweets

NBC News attempted to smear the #GamerGate consumer revolt movement with unaffiliated violent tweets in a segment on Monday.

In the segment on #GamerGate, titled “How Gamers Are Facilitating the Rise of the Alt-Right,” NBC News displayed a series of threatening posts sent to progressive feminist Anita Sarkeesian.

The tweets include the #Gamergate hashtag edited onto them. The original tweets did not include the hashtag, and appear to have no connection whatsoever to #GamerGate. An archive of a tweet by Anita Sarkeesian herself, which includes the tweets in question, shows they did not include the #GamerGate hashtag.

The video received 19,000 dislikes and just over 200 likes.

“They actually added the GG hashtag! For real. This is literal fake news,” complained one user on Reddit, who received over 2,500 upvotes.

“The reality of the situation is that NBC doesn’t list who sent those tweets nor the dates. This is because the original tweets that were sent to Anita Sarkeesian had no association whatsoever with #GamerGate,” explained the One Angry Gamer blog. “As you can see, the tweets have no association with #GamerGate. Sarkeesian’s tweet has no association with #GamerGate. Nowhere in Dobson’s chain was #GamerGate mentioned, in fact, nothing about video games was even mentioned, which led some on Kotaku in Action to question if perhaps Dobson was an angry Twilight fan lashing out after Sarkeesian negatively critiqued the series, especially since he makes references to vampires and drinking her blood.”

#GamerGate, which started as a movement to hold gaming journalists accountable for unethical reporting, has frequently been smeared by the media, who have attempted to compare it to the alt-right and white nationalism.