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[HISTORY] GamerGate 6th Anniversary Reminder: The allegation that a GamerGate supporter sent rape and death threats to Anita Sarkeesian under the alias of "Kevin Dobson" on Twitter is chronologically impossible
posted ago by LunarArchivist ago by LunarArchivist +5 / -0

There's a significant temporal inconsistency when it comes to the widespread claim made by mainstream media outlets that GamerGate was responsible for sending death and rape threats to her that escaped (and, in some cases, continues to escape) the notice of supporters and critics alike for years. What follows is a brief timeline of events (the exact time zone's unknown, but the Twitter timestamps have been confirmed to be consistent with one another) based on surviving online records:

1. At 10:38 P.M. on August 26, 2014, Anita Sarkeesian tweets that "some very scary threats have just been made against [her] and [her] family".

2. The next day, at 12:52 P.M. on August 27, 2014, she posts a screenshot of the threats she received: a series of what is widely believed to be ten tweets sent within a timespan of three minutes from the infamous "Kevin Dobson" (@kdobbsz) Twitter account. The account is quickly suspended and no archives are known to exist.

3. Less than an hour after the aforementioned tweet, a member of 4chan's /pol/ board starts a thread about the incident with a screenshot of it in the opening post. Within the next thirteen minutes, a responder using PeopleBrowser manages to recover the complete, uncensored series of tweets made from the "Kevin Dobson" Twitter account, revealing two important pieces of information that remain relatively unknown to this day: first, that there were actually thirteen tweets and not just ten, with three additional ones having been sent after the screenshot was taken; and second, they provide an approximate time for the incident, stating that "[the tweets] were posted 18 hours ago" but that she "only posted this screenshot to [the Feminist Frequency] Twitter [account] an hour or so ago". This means that the death and rape threats were originally sent around 17 hours before Sarkeesian's most recent tweet about them, which would be roughly 8:00 P.M. on August 26, 2014.

4. Adam Baldwin "coins" the #GamerGate hashtag in a (now deleted) tweet that was made at 6:22 PM on August 27, 2014, nearly 22 hours after the threats were sent.

Considering that GamerGate proper did not begin until the release of the "Gamers Are Dead" articles on August 28, 2014, we're left with a final discrepancy of at least 28 hours, which makes the original claim that GamerGate was somehow responsible chronologically impossible. The absolute most that someone could contend is that a Quinnspiracy participant sent the threats and later joined GamerGate, but there's absolutely no evidence to support or refute this since "Kevin Dobson" remains unidentified to this day.

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