I learned two new “G” words last night: GamerGate and Gawker. Perhaps I’ve been living under a rock, but until about 8pm yesterday evening, I’d heard of neither of them. Then, suddenly, according to the Twittersphere, we had come out in support of GamerGate - which was news to all of us. I’d therefore like to set the record straight.
First, as I understand it, what has been claimed is this: that we have withdrawn advertising from Gawker following pressure from GamerGate. It would, in fact, be impossible for us to withdraw advertising from Gawker, because we have never knowingly advertised through Gawker in the first place; we have never had any form of relationship with Gawker. Not that this was a conscious avoidance - Gawker just wasn’t something that was even on our cultural radar. We do very little advertising, as it very rarely has much effect for us. Back in the summer, we did run a promotion with StackSocial, who pushed Scrivener through social media and various sites, and from what I understand, we appeared briefly on Gawker through that promotion (although we never saw the advertisement ourselves, and Gawker wasn’t on the list of sites StackSocial advertises with).
Following that, we received a number of emails from apparently concerned Scrivener users, expressing disappointment at our involvement with Gawker, and providing numerous links purporting to show Gawker as an evil, sexist and bullying entity. (It turns out that these emails may not have been from Scrivener users, as I have since learned that GamerGate supporters routinely send these exact same emails to many companies.) This is where we went wrong. The person who responded to those emails (actually two people responded to the emails, but using the same reply as written by one person), having never heard of GamerGate or Gawker either, was somewhat naive in his reply. He thought he was merely reassuring an upset user that we wouldn't knowingly get involved with companies with bad reputations for bullying or sexism. (If we ever receive a complaint from a user about a company we have been associated with, we always take it seriously as we do our utmost to work only with ethical and like-minded companies.) Unfortunately, then, he wrote his reply without knowing anything about GamerGate and without actually researching the allegations about Gawker, and also over-stepped the mark a little in his reassurances. He certainly had no idea that he was unwittingly stepping into the GamerGate controversy.
Below is his stock reply that was sent to those who wrote to us complaining about our apparent association with Gawker (to put it in context, all of the emails we received contained multiple links pertaining to Gawker, and claims about large and reputable companies dropping support of that site). This is the reply that was posted on social media by GamerGate as though we were coming out in support of them:
