"We handed a loaded weapon to 4-year-olds"

In 2014, Wetherell realized the retweet button was going to be a major problem when the phrase “ethics in game journalism” started pouring into a saved search for “journalism” he had on Twitter. The phrase was a rallying cry for Gamergate — a harassment campaign against women in the game industry — and Wetherell, after seeing that first batch of tweets, watched it closely.

As Gamergate unfolded, Wetherell noticed its participants were using the retweet to “brigade,” or coordinate their attacks against their targets, disseminating misinformation and outrage at a pace that made it difficult to fight back. The retweet button propelled Gamergate, according to an analysis by the technologist and blogger Andy Baio. In his study of 316,669 Gamergate tweets sent over 72 hours, 217,384 were retweets, or about 69%.

Watching the Gamergate tweets pour in, Wetherell brought up his concerns in therapy and then discussed them with a small circle of engineers working in social media at the time. “This is not something we need to think about,” he recalled one saying.
“It dawned on me that this was not some small subset of people acting aberrantly. This might be how people behave. And that scared me to death.”

“It was very easy for them to brigade reputational harm on someone they didn’t like,” Wetherell said, of the Gamergaters. “Ask any of the people who were targets at that time, retweeting helped them get a false picture of a person out there faster than they could respond. We didn’t build a defense for that. We only built an offensive conduit.”