Statistical analysis of the people of #GamerGate

moderndaymerlin
1
, ZenithTheOne
2
, GamerGateFan
3
, fringenerd
4
, caz
5
ABSTRACT
We present a statistical analysis designed to test the supposition that the
#GamerGate movement consists of people with mostly right-wing ideologies.
From our sample of 132 reddit users, we nd that
Subject headings:
1. Introduction
The #GamerGate (hereafter referred to as gg) movement has been the subject of much
controversy since the rst use of the term by Adam Baldwin in mid-August 2014. Given the
outspoken political opinions of some of the major gg supporters (e.g. Milo Yiannopoulos,
Christina Sommers), some detractors have formed an opinion that the majority of the move-
ment consists of right-wing political ideologies. In particular, the twitter user and Escapist
writer Bob Chipman expressed the opinion that
1
:
Its NO accident that GGs main media support has come from right-wing bloggers
and think-tanks - its fundamentally anti-change...thats not to say being a conservative
movement makes GG bad, just that it IS a conservative movement.
Given the varied community that plays video games, we aim to test this hypothesis
using data from the website reddit, specically from the community KotakuInAction.
1
twitter.com/moderndaymerlin
2
twitter.com/ZenithTheOne
3
twitter.com/GamerGateFan
4
twitter.com/fringenerd
5
www.reddit.com/user/caz-
1
https://twitter.com/the moviebob/status/517461028201066496
2
2. Data
The data were collected by the reddit and twitter user ZenithTheOne, who asked users
to ll in The Political Compass test
2
. This test returns the users position on a 2-d graph
with axes Left-Right ( The biggest issue in using this to asses a persons political stance is
the potential bias in the questions. The website addresses this in the FAQs, saying that The
propositions should not be overthought. Some of them are intentionally vague. Their purpose
is to trigger buzzwords in the mind of the user, measuring feelings and prejudices rather
than detailed opinions on policy. Incidentally, our test is not another internet personality
classication tool. The essence of our site is the model for political analysis. The test is
simply a demonstration of it.
As a proxy for political opinion in Western society, and for the purpose of this test, the
position the user returns on the compass will be taken as valid. However, it must be stated
that given the potential for the user to want to appear to be more politically correct, this
test should be repeated anonymously.
3. Analysis
Figure 1 shows the distribution of data points from the 132 people who returned infor-
mation.
As can be seen from this, it is immediately apparent that the majority of points are
located in the Left-Libertarian quadrant. There also seems to be a trend downwards,
however, the large amount of scatter in the data results in an R-squared value of 0.15313
indicating that a simple linear model is not a good t, and we must analyse the statistical
signicance using a probability distribution.
Figure 2 shows the probability distributions of the x- and y-axis data from Figure 1. As
can be seen from this, the distributions are weighted towards lower values in both variables,
indicating a preference to the more left-libertarian quadrant. Working out the mean and
standard deviation gives -2.816 and 3.964 respectively for the left/right variable and -4.144
and 2.434 respectively for the libertarian/authoritarian value.
The most striking representation of this data is in the form of a contour plot as provided
by reddit user caz-. shown as Figure 3. This is an excellent demonstration of the results of
the survey, as it shows the concentration of points in an easy to interpret manner.
2
www.politicalcompass.org/test
3
4. Summary
We have demonstrated that of the limited sample we have, the users do not appear to
be a majority of conservatives. We have also shown that the sample lies well away from the
people who Milo Yiannopoulos provided in his image as being anti-gg. This is an interesting
result, as it does indicate there could be a fundamental political dierence between the
outspoken anti-gg gureheads and the pro-gg supporters as a whole. The political dierences
between the more outspoken pro-gg gureheads is much less apparent, and still follows the
general trend in the data.
Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the users who contributed to the survey,
and everyone using the #GamerGate hashtag.
Facilities: twitter.com, reddit.com, pastebin.com
4
Fig. 1. Plot of the political opinion vs. the lib/auth rating of users who completed the
survey. Also included are the points predicted by Milo Yiannopoulos as to where a number
of people may lie on the plot. The blue points are people who can be said to be broadly
pro-gg, while the red are anti-gg. Note how the red points lie well away from the majority of
users, and indeed lie well away from the trend towards the upper right quadrant. The green
point is the average as returned from the probability analysis.
5
Fig. 2. Probability distributions of the variables in Figure 1. The political opinion is shown
in red, while the libertarian/authoritarian is shown in blue. Note how the distribution is
weighted towards the lower numbers in both cases, indicating a mostly libertarian and leftist
sample.
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Fig. 3. Heat map of the data from Figure 1.