Internet Abuse Quotes

“We should be judging the effectiveness and value of any of our solutions by how well they'd work for people with the least institutional power.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“Seeing people who personally profited off the abuse against me being selected for Trump's cabinet scares the hell out of me. I don't know how to express to anyone the extremely weird issue of having your personal trauma wrapped up in international trauma.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“Most of the activists and survivors I know... knew the loudest, most hyperbolic garbage will rise to the top if left unchecked. We knew enough people in charge either don't understand, don't care, or are part of the problem.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“So do you go to the police or not? Well, if you don't, people will claim that the abuse wasn't real because theres no police report about it. If you do enter the system, you have to accept that all of what I've detailed in this chapter is what you're facing; be willing to sign up for the years-long process in the event that case actually goes to trial; know you have little chance of seeing justice because legislation and law enforcement have not yet caught up with the pace of online crime; and, even if you re successful, accept that a court order may not do much to stop an obsessive abuser.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“In some situations, the attempts to "do something about this" can directly stress the person being targeted or make their situation worse. One example from my own experience is that people frequently screenshot and send me something horrible someone has said about me to give me a "heads-up" when I have purposefully reorganized my life to keep that stuff as far away from me as possible.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“We should be judging the effectiveness and value of any of our solutions by how well they'd work for people with the least institutional power. Aside from idealism, it's pragmatic—if marginalized users are the people being targeted the most and being targeted the worst, then designing solutions that focus on the majority and treat the marginalized users as edge cases is not logically sound, because they aren't. Conversely, there's no reason to assume that the solutions that work for the people who need it most wouldn't also work for people who aren't as much at risk.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“...when someone comes to me who possesses any traits that stray from what might appear in an American i950s-era sitcom, their identities are part of their abuse. They are targeted by certain people who want them to suffer for existing.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“Much of the existing dialogue around the issue of online abuse frames it as violence against women, and that's a major problem. Most of the space being taken up focuses on gender and ignores race, sexuality, and every other type of identity and the intersections thereof. Yet most of the people whom I consider to be the top experts on online abuse and how to defeat it are not white.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“I don't care if he posts about what he had for lunch sometimes; I want to know why that somehow gives him a free pass to post death threats on your service.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“How do you tell someone that the people who could have stopped it saw what was happening to them and, even though you fought tooth and nail, were determined not to care?”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“While online abuse can happen to anyone, it is by no means an equal-opportunity occurrence. We're dragged the same sort of cultural baggage that we live with offline into online spaces like a gross piece of toilet paper stuck to our shoes.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“People are allowed to find you gross and threatening according to the nature of the free speech you choose to defend.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship