AUTHENTIFICATION AT THE EDGE: #”GAMERGATE”-ING THE ASCENT OF THE VERIFIED INTERNET

While platforms may be hard to know, they are increasingly investedin knowing—and policing— users. From “verified accounts” to “two-factor authentication,”platform affordances have proffered metrics of “authenticity” as an antidote to theuncertainties of attention economies, which are ostensibly saturated by fake news,misinformation, and algorithmic radicalization (Haimson & Hoffman, 2016; Caplan, 2020).Yet the platformization of realness claims are often weaponized against the mostmarginalized, as evidenced by recent events like PornHub’s demonetisation of unverifiedaccounts. Early hashtag harassment events like #GamerGate foreshadowed the genderedconsequences of digital realness regimes. In the ascent of “verified account” castes andother digital authenticators, the traditional “black box” conceptualization of platformsrings increasingly untrue. Rather, we argue, the algorithmic reality for marginalized usersbetter resembles Wile E. Coyote’s painted tunnels on the side of mountains: vortexes ofselective porosity that invite some roadrunners and flatten others. Through a CriticalDiscourse Analysis of #GamerGate coverage from 2014 and 2015, we attend to how ideologies of“realness” reproduce along gendered and racialized lines. Our paper builds on recent work onhow the ideation of “realness” embeds forms of communicative and audience-managing labouramong networked creators (Abidin 2016; Banet-Weiser, 2012; Duffy, 2017). The ascent of“authentification-as-safety is historicized within the hashtag harassment event “GamerGate,”our case study and pivotal moment in the platform veracity ecosystem when influencers andjournalists were exhorted to authenticate their lives or lose their livelihoods. Everyone onthe internet knows you’re a dog. Now what?