GamerGate is an echo chamber. It's a reality distortion field created by the fact that everyone is in a small group talking to each other. The very nature of twitter, in particular, creates this sense where everyone is agreeing with each other, and all dissent appears invisible, until someone on the 'anti' side does something stupid enough that they can all dogpile.It only takes a few key people as well. A couple of weekends, I deleted the 10 most aggressively pro-GamerGate people from my feed (the ones who were literally tweeting hundreds of messages a day), and my feed changed instantly from one that would convince you that the games media was on their last legs, to one where gamergate was an annoying sideshow.On Twitter, I read somewhere that a mere 6500 people account for about 90% of all new posts with the #gamergate hash (this is from memory, I can't find that data now). Similarly, Randi Harper's block script only needs to block about 8000 people to make your twitter feed read, as other people have put it, 'like twitter again'. This all discounts a lot of passive users - people who may be pro-gamergate but aren't talking - but to the original point, the GG narrative is one being pushed by a relatively small, insular core, who are all reinforcing each other and ignoring the opposition, and they're really good at convincing themselves that they are indeed the cresting of a massive tsunami.Before #gamergate, I had no idea how Mitt Romney could look at the polling data and believe he was going to win the presidency. Now I know. Social media just warps all perceptions, because your SM is so likely to be filled with people who agree with your point of view. The ramifications of THAT are actually pretty terrifying.

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