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People can forget to unfollow creators. There are YouTube channels with millions of subscribers that don't get more than a small fraction of that in terms of views. While some of this could be bots, it's also the case that people can just forget to remove a creator from their lists/feeds/follows. Remember, removing is an action, and unless you engage in periodic clean-up or you find a moral reason to dislike the account, you'd be disinclined to remove anyone.
Nyberg's real audience is probably much smaller than her listed count.
While Quartz had an obligation to make their statements factual, I don't think TYT have to cover the pedophilia allegations if they don't think it's relevant. A story about a bot that angers alt-righters is engaging enough for the left as it is.
I don't think it's a nothingburger either. But I don't think Nyberg is or should be anything other than a third or fourth point at best when talking about how Gamergate was villified by the mainstream. She's just too niche for it to be that strong unless you're a terminally online person with an interest in what is now part of the Internet's ancient history.
I didn't think they had an obligation to cover the pedophilia allegations, but I do think it shows that Nyberg and her actions were engaging and significant enough to warrant coverage. Just not the wrong kind.
To clarify, the primary point of making the post was not to demonstrate how Gamergate was vilified by the mainstream. It was to demonstrate just how far a good portion of the prominent figures in that culture war would go to defend and cover up and ignore acts that were frankly indefensible to score points against their outgroup, while at the same time claiming moral superiority.
The part where I said that I do believe the lack of mainstream coverage is because of the people it would implicate was just a side note towards the end of the post. It was not the main point.
This is the part I'm not getting. What is this "good portion"? Dan Olson + David Gerard +...some others? I genuinely don't understand how many people are supposedly involved here.
Leigh Alexander was a key player, who wrote off existing gamers with her nasty "gamers are over" piece. This, together with the support this hateful piece got from the gaming and regular press, who dismissed criticism of her piece as sexism, really energized the GamerGate side. Leigh really was one of the most prominent people on the anti-side, so her support of Nyberg cannot be dismissed as being from a niche player.
I didn't say "niche player", I said "good portion". The claim is that a large number/plurality of anti-GG progressives defended Nyberg, I want to see proof of that.
Secondly, Leigh's tweets, as linked in the top comment, don't even break a 100 likes. The one where she explicitly promoted Nyberg's medium article has 30 likes and 2 quote tweets, with the top response (at least on my end) is someone explicitly referring to Nyberg as a pedophile!
'Good portion' is a vague word that doesn't mean plurality and it definitely doesn't mean large number (you cannot interpret a proportional claim as a claim of absolute size).
In my experience, mainstream publications who write about this stuff tend to not link to the crazy abusers on their own side that they paint as victims, but instead 'summarize' the situation, which are often actually lies. Which makes sense, because if you actually send people to the Twitter of the crazies, they can see that the person is quite crazy, which undermines the narrative. So low like counts are not necessarily inconsistent with being held up as a hero and having influence.
So you can have extremists who are followed by relatively few people, but journalists are among them and they turn them into martyrs for their side. The complaint is actually about the media and other signal boosters doing this. No one would care one bit about Nyberg or Alexander if they weren't held up as heroes in places with a decent amount of reach, while being anything but heroes.
Anyway, I did a quick google search and found that even the Washington Post lied about it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/14/if-we-took-gamergate-harassment-seriously-pizzagate-might-never-have-happened/
The writer is the infamous Sarah Jeong, an anti-white racist who was hired as part of the editorial board of the NYT, until the truth came out, which is itself evidence of how good that side of the aisle is at criticizing their own.
I also found the QZ article mentioned above. I didn't find any mainstream media articles telling the truth. So in my completely unscientific half-assed 'study,' I found that 100% of mainstream media sources had lied.
That said, Nyberg seems to be very obscure overall. But I do find it illustrative that the media can't even be honest when it costs them so little. Simply switching up the narrative to explain that this person is bad, but wasn't at all central to anti-GG would have cost them nothing but a loss of one opportunity to bash the other side.
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