SXSW drops 2 gaming panels

Festival cites threats of violence; critics blame ‘GamerGate.’

South by Southwest Interactive is facing the largest public backlash in its 23-year history after it canceled two panels related to video gaming culture online.

The conference, which is scheduled for March 11-15, on Monday announced it had received threats of on-site violence and was taking the pan

els — one called “SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community” and the other “Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games” — off its schedule.

The move sparked a public outcry from panelists and prompted two large online

media organizations, BuzzFeed and Vox Media, which owns the popular tech website The Verge, to say they would pull out of SXSW 2016 entirely unless the panels were reinstated.

Late Tuesday afternoon, SXSW Interactive’s longtime director, Hugh Forrest, posted on SXSW’s site that the festival was listening to concerns and working on a solution. “We

will provide more information

soon,” he wrote.

Earlier in the day, criticism spread from tech sites to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post and other publications, opening up an ongoing, vitriolic debate over “GamerGate,” a term used by those who say that they believe they are crusading for fairness in game journalism and against censorship.

On the other side are many who believe that the GamerGate movement has increased instances of online harassment and bullying, particularly toward women and minorities.

BuzzFeed and Vox Media blamed SXSW for giving in to threats and allowing for a culture of harassment as reasons for conditionally withdrawing staff from the festival.

The “SavePoint” panel was pulled together late in the SXSW PanelPicker process with the help of users on a Reddit discussion forum and was to include a San Diego TV reporter and Society of Professional Journalists President-elect Lynn Walsh, porn star Mercedes Carrera, game developer Nick Robalik and Perry Jones, the founder of The Open Society, which said late Monday that it would carry on with the panel concurrently with SXSW.

“This has been a backup plan from square one and now we are forced to act on it,” Perry wrote on a blog post. “We will organize, fund, and host the panel ourselves.”

SXSW didn’t reveal whom the threats were directed toward, only that “in the seven days since announcing these two sessions, SXSW has received numerous threats of on-site violence related to this programming.” The Austin Police Department confirmed Tuesday that it has been in contact with festival representatives and is waiting for more information from SXSW.

Panelists said they weren’t warned in advance that their panels would be canceled or what threats were made.

Randi Lee Harper, founder of Online Abuse Prevention and organizer of the “Level Up” panel, said in an email Monday evening that she was aware there might be threats, but that the festival didn’t take that concern seriously until too late.

A string of comments, negative and positive, for her panel were on the PanelPicker page, but Harper said she largely ignored those comments and alerted SXSW.

“SXSW stated that they were aware of the situation and took that into account when they approved our panel,” she wrote in her email. She said she received an email Monday morning saying the panel was canceled.

Unfortunately, Harper said, this isn’t unusual at tech conferences where she’s been a speaker. “Every conference I’ve spoken at has been the recipient of mob harassment, from email campaigns to spamming mutilated bodies in conference hashtags on Twitter,” Harper wrote. “At one conference, someone that had been threatening me had to be physically removed, luckily prior to my arrival. ... However, I’ve never had the experience of a conference canceling my talk. This was very unexpected.”

SXSW Interactive left in place a panel about Internet etiquette and sports that specifically mentions “GamerGate” in its description.

“I don’t think it has to do with the subject matter of the panel, as dealing with reporting systems in video games isn’t really that controversial,” Harper wrote in her email. “Instead, this looks more like SXSW caved to the demands of a mob determined to silence women.”

In a statement to the American-Statesman, Robalik, of the New York game company Pixel Metal, said the issue “is not as black-and-white as it seems.”

“It’s unfortunate that we are not mature enough to have a rational, cool-headed discussion about this issue. Free speech is supposed to be about listening to the ideas that we aren’t comfortable with,” he said. “I’ve been in the trenches of this debate since the very beginning, so I refuse to boil this down to a simple anti-woman issue.”

On Tuesday morning, Arthur Chu, an Ohio voiceover artist and writer, wrote a lengthy piece for The Daily Beast providing more background on what went on behind the scenes with SXSW over the two panels canceled and a third panel — which would have included Chu, game developer Brianna Wu and Digital Sistas founder Shireen Mitchell — on the topic of improving online culture.

According to Chu, that panel was nixed by SXSW before last week’s announcement of panels.

Chu wrote: “SXSW’s actions throughout this whole ordeal have been unprofessional, self-serving, and mendacious. They have never really taken seriously the idea of actively working to curb harassment or keep people safe; their one consistent motivation throughout has been the opposite — exploiting people’s abuse for drama and clicks.”

In recent years, SXSW Interactive has made efforts to make the festival more diverse, making diversity an official track of the festival and promoting a more equal mix of men and women.

Those efforts, however, haven’t always been successful. A March 2015 panel featuring Jesse Jackson and #YesWeCode founder Van Jones on the subject of diversity and technology was poorly attended.

Both BuzzFeed and Vox left the door open for letting staff participate in SXSW if the panels were reinstated. “We will feel compelled to withdraw them if the conference can’t find a way to do what those other targets of harassment do every day — to carry on important conversations in the face of harassment. We hope you can support the principle of free speech and engage a vital issue facing us and other constituents on the event,” BuzzFeed’s publisher, editor-in-chief and president of motion pictures wrote in a letter to Forrest published on the company’s website.

Last year, GamerGate became a huge story in the technology industry, opening up a larger debate about the treatment of women in the gaming industry. A year ago, Feminist Frequency founder Anita Sarkeesian spoke on “The Colbert Report” about GamerGate at the height of the controversy.