Twitter: Internal Reaction to Criticism of Riot Games is to "Terrorize Whistleblowers and Victims"

deepFlaw said:

I'm a little torn, because this seems like a solid enough examination of this.

But ever since screencapping GGers stopped getting them the appreciation they felt they deserved, the person tweeting that thread has been part of a group who likes to raise a fuss about indie devs and journalists they don't like, intentionally causing misunderstandings to slander them. So maybe take their writing and the connections they draw with a liiiittle grain of salt, is all I ask.

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deepFlaw said:

Actually, wait, fuck, I forgot the direct connection here till I got to the end and she subtly started whining about a specific Riot employee.

The person tweeting that thread explicitly hates Soha Kareem, Riot's diversity and inclusion lead. She has spread lies about a "whisper campaign" to disingenuously target Soha in the past. Please keep this in mind when you take her words at face value.

EDIT: And to be clear, this is from years ago; it predates Soha working at Riot.

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Does everyone remember this article from not to long ago?
https://kotaku.com/inside-the-culture-of-sexism-at-riot-games-1828165483

Because this particular story hits on everything I write about (video game news, rampant sexism, trans rights, fascists campaigning to have good people fired) I have been following the aftermath of this pretty closely. Watching their public reaction, seeing what various employees past and present have had to say, and checking out the horrifying abuse thrown at all parties involved, and collecting a bit of info that hasn't been publicly available. And it is really quite ugly

Publicly, Riot's entire response has been PR damage control. Vague platitudes about supporting their fans, hosting a generic 101 "hey, it's important to encourage women and nonbinary people to get into games!" panel at PAX, so there's something to point to and say "we're allies!"
Internally however, their reaction has been to terrorize whistleblowers and victims. And I do mean terrorize. You may already recall that this official statement on their next course of action involved bringing in an outside law firm-



Riot Games outlines plan for culture change in wake of workplace sexism allegationsCompany promises action steps such as third-party evaluations, anonymous hotline, reevaluation of recruiting practices, and new HR hireshttps://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-08-29-riot-games-outlines-plan-for-culture-change-in-wake-of-workplace-sexism


and you may have seen
others discussing how the law firm in question appears to be Seyfarth Shaw, known not for mitigating sexual harassment cases, but for union-busting and similar anti-worker measures:




The Polygon article in the replies there is also worth a read on this.
Needless to say, the result of that has been a big internal push to silence everyone still there speaking out about this, threatening firings, and following through on at least one of those threats. But I said terrorizing.

You may have seen me passing along a few things from a friend over the last few days about how neo-nazis have been terrorizing their parents, forcing them to abandon their home entirely at one point and returning to find it vandalized. In and of itself, that's already a bit more zealous than the usual response when someone's targeted in even the most popular of posts on /r/KotakuInAction/ (which I certainly hope I don't need to stop and explain was set up at the height of Gamergate to serve as a hit list, and still serves that function to this day).

What really makes this incident special though is that this particular thread successfully encouraging violence against someone's entire extended family was started by an employee of Riot games, featuring a collection of screenshots taken from Riot's internal company Slack server, explicitly targeting a particular employee for the "crime" of.. internally raising concerns about how his family has already been targeted by nazis on reddit for some time. The same screenshots also show a fair number of staffers being personally irritated with this, in one instance objecting to the use of the term "sea lion."

Apparently the number of staffers who, lets not mince words, vocally support neo-nazis within the company is great enough that the company has been unable to pin down exactly which of their vocally "SJW"-hating employees has a personal grudge against a fellow staffer strong enough to leak private internal communications staff are not allowed to publicly disclose directly to a neo-nazi message board whose sole purpose is encouraging violence against those mentioned, and the guilty party is still failing to show any remorse as the parents of the target's spouse are being met with nearly unprecedented in-person harassment efforts.

Rather than really crack down and investigate this further, my understanding is that Riot has instead decided to resolve any internal hostility within the company by... firing the employee whose family is under attack at the behest of another staffer. Which would be an incredibly shocking thing for me to learn, if I were not familiar with at least one past incident that was handled in the same way. When said employee's spouse (the one whose parents home has been vandalized) was let go under roughly the same circumstances a number of years ago. Or when I was informed that the particular anti-trans block list that has left a good chunk of us blacklisted within the games industry and press is a Riot employee, in charge of promoting internal diversity no less.

This by the way is a big part of why I'm getting all this out there in the form of a twitter thread, rather than pitching an article to someone (although I'd expect to see plenty of them on the subject shortly as most of this can be confirmed with a quick visit to reddit, and the
rest with anonymous interviews with anyone at, or formally at Riot, many of whom seem understandably keen on exposing what seems to be the most absurdly pro-fascist company this side of Stardock).

Hopefully, justice is eventually served here, but in the meantime, I'd strongly
suggest throwing as much support as you can at anyone currently or formally employed by Riot, and that you uninstall League of Legends yesterday. These people don't deserve a dime of your money.

And if anyone wants to commission a proper article from me here, it gets even worse.

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