Vidcon has made a statement about Sarkeesian's harassment towards Sargon It seems to have been written by Hank Green: https://medium.com/@VidCon/vidcon-debrief-e6bb4e187a28 The relevant section: Who’s Harassing Whom? VidCon has a tagline, it’s “For people who love online video.” But, of course, in addition to celebrating, this event has also always been about confronting difficult issues our community faces. It is openly known that women on the internet are subject to far greater amounts (and intensity) of harassment and abuse than men. This is a pattern and it’s pervasive. Running this event, we have to be aware when a creator has potentially dangerous harassers or stalkers, and our list for our female creators is a whole lot longer than the list for male creators. That’s just one reason why we had a panel called “Women Online” featuring women who had received a variety of kinds of abuse, from repeated sexual advances to stalking to years of targeted harassment. There is a fairly prominent genre of social/political commentary on the internet that focuses on specific individuals as a path to attack ideas and build outrage. These creators do not violate harassment policies, but the result is often that the vitriol of their followers ends up focused not on ideas, but on people (usually women.) Many people in these communities end up believing the righteous thing to do is threaten, harass, and dox the thinkers they’re arguing with. Whether or not this is an intentional strategy to cultivate harassment or an awful side-effect, the result is some of the worst discourse and most intense harassment on the internet. This year, we had a contingent of attendees (some who paid, some who snuck in with fake passes) who had been either perpetrators of this harassment, or had, for years, watched as the outrage they cultivated resulted in followers doxxing, harassing, intimidating, and even threatening the lives of the creators on these panels. It is difficult to imagine that this group of people (who are aware that their channels have been base-camps for years of harassment of some of our panelists) did not realize that their arriving early to fill up the three front rows of a panel was going to be intimidating. In any case, it looked like intentional intimidation to most people in attendance, and the panelists were understandably on edge throughout the discussion. During the panel, a panelist called out one of the audience members for being someone who has made her life very difficult, and wished she didn’t have to give him attention because he was a “garbage human.” Look, we don’t want our panelists to insult our audience members, even when we completely understand that the comment exists in a much broader (and pretty messed up) context. Even when people have said hateful things that everyone in our office disagrees with, we have a policy, and it exists not just to protect people at the show, but to protect our ability to have these conversations. Our founder, Hank Green, talked with our panelist and said two things: He told her that her comment had violated our policy, but that he understood that there was a broader context (which to be clear, we were blissfully ignorant of until this weekend, and remain inexpert in.) He apologized to her for not having been more aware of and active in understanding the situation before the event, which resulted in her being subjected to a hostile environment that she had not signed up for. We agreed that she would go forward and continue on as a panelist on a later panel. This is a difficult situation to build policy to alleviate, but we ask that all of the people involved consider the power of our actions and statements both online and in the real world. But one specific note, if people attend VidCon to collect footage to later use in videos that criticize not just ideas, but focus the outrage of their followers on individuals, they will not be welcome back. Paraphrasing: Lots and lots of words dancing around the fact that Sargon did nothing wrong. He acknowledged that Sarkeesian broke the rules, and apologized to her for not appropriately considering her special circumstances. Sargon may be kicked out in the future for violation of special unwritten rules that only apply to him. He does not mention that Sarkeesian’s also harassed Boogie, a fellow panelist for whom none of her “special circumstances” apply. Boogie has mentioned that he was very nervous about this event because he believed that if Sarkeesian harassed him, it was more likely he would be kicked out than she would be. Hank Green just confirmed Boogie was right.