An online harassment panel canceled due to harassment?
Organizers of the SXSW Interactive conference are taking heat after
announcing they are canceling two panels focused on—of all things—online harassment:
On Monday, October 26, SXSW Interactive made the call to cancel two sessions for the 2016 event: "SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community" and "Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games." We had hoped that hosting these two discussions in March 2016 in Austin would lead to a valuable exchange of ideas on this very important topic.
However, in the seven days since announcing these two sessions, SXSW has received numerous threats of on-site violence related to this programming.
Panel organizers and participants are understandably upset:
The center of the controversy is the ongoing "GamerGate" discussion:
Concern about the panels stemmed from the #Gamergate controversy, a more than year-long culture clash that involves equality for video game players, developers and characters, as well as unethical practices by video-game journalists.
The issue was not stated in either of the panels' program description, but some of the planned panelists had been publicly vocal on the issues. An August event held by the Society of Professional Journalists about the issue was disrupted by bomb threats.
Caroline Sinders of IBM, a speaker on the Level Up panel, posted on Twitter that the panel was about "stymying (sic) harassment in interactive spaces" and that "hopefully we can take this panel discussion to another space and or conference."
At least one major partner is backing out of the conference: