Latest news with #Nearly
Scottish Sun
05-05-2025
- Health
- Scottish Sun
I'm an intensive care doctor – this is what it's really like to survive your own death, and attend your own funeral
From a teen boy whose life was changed forever when he was struck by lightning to a woman whose suicide attempt had a 'remarkable' ending, Dr Matt Morgan shares the poignant lessons he's learned from witnessing patients coming back from the brink SECOND ACT I'm an intensive care doctor – this is what it's really like to survive your own death, and attend your own funeral Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) FOR more than 20 years, Dr Matt Morgan has borne witness, standing at the bedside of patients tiptoeing between life and death. He watched as Roberto, a 29-year-old climber, whose heart stopped for over eight hours - longer than anyone else in history - came back from the dead... before something extraordinary happened. 6 Dr Matt Morgan, an intensive care doctor, says listening to the words of those who have cheated death will help you realise you have two lives 6 'The second begins when you realise you only have one,' he says Credit: Getty And the intensive care doctor recalls another patient Summer who, after years of battling depression tried to take her own life. Seven weeks after her death, she opened her eyes and what came next in Summer's journey was "even more remarkable", Dr Morgan tells The Sun. In a small red book that he kept on him at work, he scrawled down their 'whispers of life' - a power that medicine alone could never match. Those words became his third book: A Second Act– What Nearly Dying Can Teach Us About Really Living. Here he shares an extract with Sun Health... MY life felt like a treadmill - always moving but never really getting anywhere. I'd wake up, go to work in ICU, save lives, and repeat. Death was just the end of a shift, a flatline on a monitor I'd try to jolt back into rhythm. But everything changed when I started really listening to my patients - especially the ones who had died and come back. Their hearts had stopped for minutes, even hours - but it gave them purpose. Some had collapsed from lightning strikes or overdoses, others from heart transplants or freezing to death. And yet, against all odds, they survived. Watch as 'dead' man 'comes back to life' at funeral moments before cremation Sharing their stories turned my treadmill of a life into a dance floor. Ever since I started listening to those on the brink of life, I've been moving to a different beat. So could you. Take Roberto, a 29-year-old climber buried in an avalanche. His heart stopped for over eight hours - longer than anyone in history. When he woke up, he was alive, but his past was gone. No memory of his parents, his friends, or his life. Then, something extraordinary happened. His father played footage from his last climb. As the frames flickered to life, so did Roberto. 'Bang - everything came back in one second!' he said, his face alight with joy. 'Like a switch was flipped. From that moment, my recovery accelerated. I knew I would return to the mountains.' Hosting my own funeral punched me in the gut - not with sadness, but gratitude Dr Matt Morgan We share 3.5billion images every day - the same number as heartbeats in a lifetime. But instead of taking more, looking back at old photos can be just as powerful. Studies show that reminiscing doesn't just trigger joy and nostalgia; it strengthens memory, deepens relationships, and even lowers stress. Photos anchor us to the people, places, and moments that shape us. Even the silly, awkward ones have a role. Laughing at past mistakes releases endorphins, our body's natural stress relievers. 6 'Everything changed when I started really listening to my patients - especially the ones who had died and come back,' says Dr Morgan 6 He says we all need to cherish our time Credit: Getty Psychologists say we have two selves - the experiencing self and the remembering self. One craves instant pleasure; the other collects moments that last. Knowing this can help us live better. Don't just chase what feels good now - choose experiences your future self will cherish. I learned this the hard way. Recently, I braved a terrifying water slide with my daughter. I hated every second. But now? My remembering self replays that moment with joy - proof that fleeting memories can last forever. Struck by lightning ED was just 17 when his life changed forever. A football-mad teen from Kenilworth, Warwickshire, he was enjoying a typical Friday night with mates, heading from the pub to the fairground. But as the rain poured and they crossed Abbey Fields, tragedy struck. A lightning bolt packing 300 million volts hit Ed and his best mate Stuart. The blast sent Emma flying, Stuart to the ground, and Ed's heart into cardiac arrest. A fireman heard the deafening strike from 200 metres away and sprinted to the scene. Ed was found first, given CPR, and miraculously brought back to life. Stuart wasn't so lucky; despite efforts to revive him, he tragically died just shy of his 17th birthday. Ed had been further from the tree, hit by a less direct strike, and saved by sheer chance. He woke up in the ambulance, but survival brought its own storm. Grief and survivor's guilt consumed him, leading to years of bad choices, drugs, and alcohol. Moving away didn't help; the shadow of Stuart's death followed him everywhere. It wasn't until Ed began volunteering at Warwick Hospital, supporting others through tough times, that he found purpose. Now a father to Toby, Ed tells his son he loves him daily - something he wishes he could have said to Stuart. The lightning didn't just stop Ed's heart; it gave him a second act. Today, he's living with his past, not reliving it, and proving that even after life's fiercest storms, there's hope. Then there was 25-year-old Summer, whose teenage years were stolen by depression and anorexia. While her friends swam on sunny holidays and partied in dark nightclubs, she journeyed through mental health units across the country. Eventually, she reached breaking point and tried to end her life by taking an overdose of prescription pills, which caused her heart to stop beating. Seven weeks after her death, Summer opened her eyes. Intensive care saved her, but what came next was even more remarkable. CHOOSE A PURPOSE Instead of being trapped by pain, she chose a purpose - becoming a mental health nurse to help others through the darkness she once knew too well. She couldn't make my book launch. She was busy saving lives. 'We all will have terrible days, loss, sorrow and heartbreak, but there will also be happiness, contentedness, and joy,' she says. 'In the end, everything happens to everyone. Expect it, it is what it is.' 6 I think everyone should have a funeral before they die - it'll punch you in the gut Credit: Getty 6 Dr Morgan's second book - A Second Act - What Nearly Dying Teaches Us About Really Living But the wildest lesson came when I put these ideas into practice - at my own funeral. Picture this: eight friends, a remote cottage in the Pyrenees, no phones, no distractions. Just eulogies for each of us, written by those who love us. A favourite song, a celebrant declaring us dead. I listened as my friends roasted my cooking, my daughters giggled about my dad jokes, and my wife called me her anchor. It punched me in the gut - not with sadness, but gratitude. Why do it? Because most people only hear what matters when it's too late to act on it. I think everyone should have a funeral before they die, just like I did. We all have two lives. The second begins when you realise you only have one Dr Matt Morgan So how do we really live? It's not rocket science. But it's not easy either. My job taught me that life is an emergency - every second counts. Death isn't the enemy; it's the nudge to dance harder. A second act isn't about dying and coming back - it's about waking up to the life you already have. We all have two lives. The second begins when you realise you only have one. You don't need to die to figure that out. But maybe listening to the whispers of those who did will help. A Second Act: What Nearly Dying Teaches Us About Really Living, by Dr Matt Morgan (Simon & Schuster, £20) is out now.
CNN
23-03-2025
- Politics
- CNN
How Gamergate foreshadowed the toxic hellscape that the internet has now become
It's not uncommon these days to hear the internet described as a hellscape. Hate speech proliferates in online spaces. Algorithms designed to maximize user engagement amplify divisive content that inevitably leaves us outraged. Disinformation and misinformation spread on social media at rates seemingly impossible to contain. If that weren't enough, bad-faith actors exploit these dynamics, distorting reality for part of the population and deepening political divides. People who were paying close attention to certain corners of the internet saw this reality coming more than a decade ago in Gamergate, in which an angry online mob waged a virulent harassment campaign against women and diversity in the video game industry. Gamergate was one of the earliest indications that what happened online could have major implications offline — and that a few people who understood the mechanics of the internet could manipulate it to advance a nefarious agenda. Those who experienced the harassment firsthand warned that if not taken seriously, the behaviors underlying Gamergate would fester. In the years since, as some experts and observers see it, social media platforms on which Gamergate transpired failed to adequately combat toxic content and online abuse, while lawmakers, traditional media outlets and much of the public failed to see its relevance beyond the world of video games. From flooding the zone to the use of memes, the tactics once employed by a niche community of gamers are all too familiar today — they've since developed into a political strategy that's routinely used in the halls of power. To use a popular internet shorthand, 'everything is Gamergate.' On August 16, 2014, a 24-year-old male programmer posted a more than 9,000-word tirade about the dissolution of his relationship with video game developer Zoë Quinn. The rambling account contained screenshots of their private correspondences and accused Quinn, among several allegations, of sleeping with a journalist for the gaming site Kotaku in exchange for a positive review. 'There was no proof of this supposed illegitimately obtained review, just repetition of the Manifesto's accusations mixed with such conspiratorial conjecture that it would make someone wearing a tinfoil hat instantly sprout another, tinier tinfoil hat on top of it,' Quinn wrote in 'Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life.' In reality, the reporter never even reviewed the game, and Kotaku said at the time that its leadership team found 'no compelling evidence' that the writer had traded favorable coverage for sex. But the ex-boyfriend's rant quickly attracted the attention of online forum 4chan users, who seized on the alleged relationship between Quinn and the Kotaku writer. The events mutated into a leaderless harassment campaign known as Gamergate, eventually moving from 4chan to more mainstream social media platforms. Anonymous gamers made rape and death threats against Quinn, feminist gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian, game developer Brianna Wu and others who advocated for a more inclusive gaming industry, and released private information about them. The campaign's participants also pressured companies to stop advertising on gaming sites that they viewed as critical of gamer culture. Gamergate activists claimed they were concerned about ethics in games journalism. But really they seemed to be responding to a perceived loss of status, said Adrienne Massanari, a scholar who researches digital culture and author of 'Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right.' For a long time, video games were seen as the domain of young White men. When that was challenged, whether by a game developer subverting industry norms or a woman calling out stereotypical female characters, a core contingent of gamers saw it as political correctness run amok, Massanari wrote in her book. And that sentiment soon expanded beyond video games. 'There was a story on offer pretty quickly after Gamergate started gaining traction that it wasn't just about games,' she told CNN. 'It wasn't just that you were no longer the center of a pop culture universe. You're no longer the center of political life.' Gamergate wasn't the first instance of harassment in gaming communities, but it was the first time it reached that scale, Massanari wrote in her book. What was notable about Gamergate, she told CNN, was the internet savvy of its participants, who manipulated social media to perpetuate abuse and promote their cause. Put simply, they gamed the system. On Twitter, for instance, Gamergaters flooded the mentions of particular users as a form of harassment. They also used Twitter's hashtag and retweet functions to control public narrative. By generating a volume of activity on the platform, they could make it seem like a particular message was trending, even if only a small group of users was behind the posts. One notable example was #NotYourShield, which purportedly represented women and minority supporters of Gamergate who were tired of feminist activists claiming to speak on their behalf. Chat logs later revealed that #NotYourShield was not an organic social media trend or movement but rather a campaign orchestrated by a small number of 4chan users using false online identities, seemingly in an attempt to defend Gamergate against criticisms of racism and misogyny. While much of the harassment and public campaign happened on mainstream social media such as Twitter and Reddit, Massanari said Gamergate was coordinated on more niche platforms — an organizing strategy that, up until then, had been applied primarily by pro-democracy, social justice activists. 'Gamergate was that moment when people started realizing that you weren't going to necessarily see activism always be this net positive thing,' Massanari added. The extent of harassment and abuse that Gamergate's victims experienced — forcing some to leave their homes and go into hiding — showed just how badly tech companies had failed to protect their users, Massanari and others said. As some in the tech industry see it, Gamergate activists were able to weaponize social media precisely because of how those platforms were designed. The problems, in other words, weren't a bug but a feature. Silicon Valley leaders, committed to upholding free speech, were overly permissive in their approach to online content, said Jason Goldman, who served as Twitter's first vice president of product and later as chief digital officer in the Obama White House. And because they were mostly White men who didn't experience the online harassment that women and minorities did, Goldman said they were naive about the possibility that their platforms could cause harm. 'There weren't enough people around who personally had skin in the game,' he said. Leslie Miley, an engineer who worked at Twitter from 2013 to 2015, said he and others in the company started to recognize how the platform was being misused, but Twitter lacked the robust infrastructure needed to effectively combat the toxic behavior. 'We're playing a global game of Whac-a-Mole, and we need an army of octopus to do it,' he said. 'And guess what? We don't have an army of octopus.' In response to those challenges, Twitter built out teams on user services and trust and safety, as well as an extensive policy framework around content moderation. But executives were also reluctant to take bold actions — such as banning certain accounts or shutting down some discussions — that might reduce Twitter's user base and therefore negatively affect the business, according to Miley. 'They were allowed to organize, they were allowed to spread, and they were allowed to create content much longer than they should have,' he said, referring to Gamergate activists. Faced with mounting pressure, Twitter later instituted more aggressive policies that permanently banned accounts for repeated violations of its rules. (Such accounts were restored en masse during Elon Musk's takeover of the platform, which is now known as X. After advertisers and critics expressed concerns, however, X reported last fall that it was continuing to police harmful content, including suspended accounts and removing and labeling posts that violated its rules. CNN has reached out to X for comment.) Reddit, Massanari wrote in her book, became less willing to tolerate far-right speech over the years. The company went on to ban more than 2,000 subreddits that it said promoted hate based on identity or vulnerability, among other changes to its content policy. Recently, the platform also announced it would begin warning users who upvote violating content. A Reddit spokesperson told CNN that current company policy prohibits hateful and violent content on the platform. But social media companies still struggle to balance the need to police abuse on their platforms, their foundational values of giving everyone a voice and the risk of alienating some users, Massanari said. In some instances, content policy changes have been met with outrage and backlash from users who had grown accustomed to digital spaces with few restrictions. 'If you imagine this big aircraft carrier that's turning, it's very hard once all those norms have been set up to start incrementally trying to reshape that space,' she said. Gamergate's impact went beyond the gaming universe. It mobilized a new generation of disaffected, young men into becoming politically active, Massanari wrote in her book. The movement found sympathetic allies in far-right media figures and internet personalities, many of whom built their names by championing the Gamergate cause, per Massanari. Pro-Gamergate influencers, in turn, exposed their followers to other political ideas, including a broad suspicion about contemporary institutions that they viewed as too beholden to identity politics and political correctness, she wrote. Political strategist Steve Bannon understood the power of this dynamic acutely. 'You can activate that army,' Bannon told Bloomberg reporter Joshua Green in 2017. 'They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.' But as Charlie Warzel put it in a 2019 piece for The New York Times Opinion, Gamergate's 'most powerful legacy is as proof of concept of how to wage a post-truth information war.' Gamergate gave rise to a pattern of sowing confusion and chaos in the information landscape, Massasnari said. Participants elevated new conspiracies and used memes and ironic rhetoric to send coded signals, allowing them to claim plausible deniability about troubling aspects of the movement. Traditional newsrooms struggled to cover these communities and forces responsibly, giving equal weight to 'both sides' even if one side wasn't arguing or acting in good faith, according to a report from Whitney Phillips, a scholar and author of 'This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture.' In some cases, they inadvertently amplified extremist ideology. In an eerily prescient article for Deadspin in 2014, Kyle Wagner predicted that this pattern would become the future of political and cultural battles. 'What we have in Gamergate is a glimpse of how these skirmishes will unfold in the future—all the rhetorical weaponry and siegecraft of an internet comment section brought to bear on our culture, not just at the fringes but at the center,' he wrote at the time. 'What we're seeing now is a rehearsal, where the mechanisms of a toxic and inhumane politics are being tested and improved.' Over the years, the Gamergate playbook would be replicated in conspiracies such as Pizzagate and QAnon, as well as the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The legacies of Gamergate are complicated and far-reaching. In one sense, per some scholars, Gamergate was a battle between an increasingly diverse society and a group of White men who felt threatened over those societal shifts. At least within the realm of video games, Gamergate supporters seem to be losing: The gaming industry workforce is significantly more diverse than the US workforce more broadly, and studios and developers are adopting more inclusive storylines and characters. Still, the backlash against diversity persists — in video games and on a much grander scale, in President Donald Trump's elimination of federal DEI programs. Meanwhile, Gamergate did force more people in the tech industry to reckon with abuse and harassment. And while major companies have rolled back some efforts to curb harmful content on their platforms, others in the tech sector are building new social technologies with the lessons of Gamergate in mind, said Evan 'Rabble' Henshaw-Plath, a member of Twitter's founding team. For Henshaw-Plath, the enduring lesson of Gamergate was that social media platforms as they were originally envisioned were only as good as the people using them. 'What happened with Gamergate is inherent to what happens when you take human nature and you give them a tool that potentially puts the entirety of humanity in the same conversation,' they said. 'All of humanity's problems, dynamics and difficulties can get amplified if we design a system that doesn't account for them.' But that doesn't mean a toxic internet is inevitable, said Henshaw-Plath and others. Regulators can implement rules to improve content moderation and mandate transparency by social media platforms. Tech companies can diversify their top ranks to help ensure their platforms are designed to be safe for everyone. And people in the industry can create new systems that put more power in the hands of users — like what X competitors Bluesky and Mastodon are doing. For many users, social media platforms were once an exciting, and even transformative, space for community. With some radical reimagining, Henshaw-Plath said, they might experience that feeling again.
CNN
23-03-2025
- Politics
- CNN
How Gamergate foreshadowed the toxic hellscape that the internet has now become
It's not uncommon these days to hear the internet described as a hellscape. Hate speech proliferates in online spaces. Algorithms designed to maximize user engagement amplify divisive content that inevitably leaves us outraged. Disinformation and misinformation spread on social media at rates seemingly impossible to contain. If that weren't enough, bad-faith actors exploit these dynamics, distorting reality for part of the population and deepening political divides. People who were paying close attention to certain corners of the internet saw this reality coming more than a decade ago in Gamergate, in which an angry online mob waged a virulent harassment campaign against women and diversity in the video game industry. Gamergate was one of the earliest indications that what happened online could have major implications offline — and that a few people who understood the mechanics of the internet could manipulate it to advance a nefarious agenda. Those who experienced the harassment firsthand warned that if not taken seriously, the behaviors underlying Gamergate would fester. In the years since, as some experts and observers see it, social media platforms on which Gamergate transpired failed to adequately combat toxic content and online abuse, while lawmakers, traditional media outlets and much of the public failed to see its relevance beyond the world of video games. From flooding the zone to the use of memes, the tactics once employed by a niche community of gamers are all too familiar today — they've since developed into a political strategy that's routinely used in the halls of power. To use a popular internet shorthand, 'everything is Gamergate.' On August 16, 2014, a 24-year-old male programmer posted a more than 9,000-word tirade about the dissolution of his relationship with video game developer Zoë Quinn. The rambling account contained screenshots of their private correspondences and accused Quinn, among several allegations, of sleeping with a journalist for the gaming site Kotaku in exchange for a positive review. 'There was no proof of this supposed illegitimately obtained review, just repetition of the Manifesto's accusations mixed with such conspiratorial conjecture that it would make someone wearing a tinfoil hat instantly sprout another, tinier tinfoil hat on top of it,' Quinn wrote in 'Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life.' In reality, the reporter never even reviewed the game, and Kotaku said at the time that its leadership team found 'no compelling evidence' that the writer had traded favorable coverage for sex. But the ex-boyfriend's rant quickly attracted the attention of online forum 4chan users, who seized on the alleged relationship between Quinn and the Kotaku writer. The events mutated into a leaderless harassment campaign known as Gamergate, eventually moving from 4chan to more mainstream social media platforms. Anonymous gamers made rape and death threats against Quinn, feminist gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian, game developer Brianna Wu and others who advocated for a more inclusive gaming industry, and released private information about them. The campaign's participants also pressured companies to stop advertising on gaming sites that they viewed as critical of gamer culture. Gamergate activists claimed they were concerned about ethics in games journalism. But really they seemed to be responding to a perceived loss of status, said Adrienne Massanari, a scholar who researches digital culture and author of 'Gaming Democracy: How Silicon Valley Leveled Up the Far Right.' For a long time, video games were seen as the domain of young White men. When that was challenged, whether by a game developer subverting industry norms or a woman calling out stereotypical female characters, a core contingent of gamers saw it as political correctness run amok, Massanari wrote in her book. And that sentiment soon expanded beyond video games. 'There was a story on offer pretty quickly after Gamergate started gaining traction that it wasn't just about games,' she told CNN. 'It wasn't just that you were no longer the center of a pop culture universe. You're no longer the center of political life.' Gamergate wasn't the first instance of harassment in gaming communities, but it was the first time it reached that scale, Massanari wrote in her book. What was notable about Gamergate, she told CNN, was the internet savvy of its participants, who manipulated social media to perpetuate abuse and promote their cause. Put simply, they gamed the system. On Twitter, for instance, Gamergaters flooded the mentions of particular users as a form of harassment. They also used Twitter's hashtag and retweet functions to control public narrative. By generating a volume of activity on the platform, they could make it seem like a particular message was trending, even if only a small group of users was behind the posts. One notable example was #NotYourShield, which purportedly represented women and minority supporters of Gamergate who were tired of feminist activists claiming to speak on their behalf. Chat logs later revealed that #NotYourShield was not an organic social media trend or movement but rather a campaign orchestrated by a small number of 4chan users using false online identities, seemingly in an attempt to defend Gamergate against criticisms of racism and misogyny. While much of the harassment and public campaign happened on mainstream social media such as Twitter and Reddit, Massanari said Gamergate was coordinated on more niche platforms — an organizing strategy that, up until then, had been applied primarily by pro-democracy, social justice activists. 'Gamergate was that moment when people started realizing that you weren't going to necessarily see activism always be this net positive thing,' Massanari added. The extent of harassment and abuse that Gamergate's victims experienced — forcing some to leave their homes and go into hiding — showed just how badly tech companies had failed to protect their users, Massanari and others said. As some in the tech industry see it, Gamergate activists were able to weaponize social media precisely because of how those platforms were designed. The problems, in other words, weren't a bug but a feature. Silicon Valley leaders, committed to upholding free speech, were overly permissive in their approach to online content, said Jason Goldman, who served as Twitter's first vice president of product and later as chief digital officer in the Obama White House. And because they were mostly White men who didn't experience the online harassment that women and minorities did, Goldman said they were naive about the possibility that their platforms could cause harm. 'There weren't enough people around who personally had skin in the game,' he said. Leslie Miley, an engineer who worked at Twitter from 2013 to 2015, said he and others in the company started to recognize how the platform was being misused, but Twitter lacked the robust infrastructure needed to effectively combat the toxic behavior. 'We're playing a global game of Whac-a-Mole, and we need an army of octopus to do it,' he said. 'And guess what? We don't have an army of octopus.' In response to those challenges, Twitter built out teams on user services and trust and safety, as well as an extensive policy framework around content moderation. But executives were also reluctant to take bold actions — such as banning certain accounts or shutting down some discussions — that might reduce Twitter's user base and therefore negatively affect the business, according to Miley. 'They were allowed to organize, they were allowed to spread, and they were allowed to create content much longer than they should have,' he said, referring to Gamergate activists. Faced with mounting pressure, Twitter later instituted more aggressive policies that permanently banned accounts for repeated violations of its rules. (Such accounts were restored en masse during Elon Musk's takeover of the platform, which is now known as X. After advertisers and critics expressed concerns, however, X reported last fall that it was continuing to police harmful content, including suspended accounts and removing and labeling posts that violated its rules. CNN has reached out to X for comment.) Reddit, Massanari wrote in her book, became less willing to tolerate far-right speech over the years. The company went on to ban more than 2,000 subreddits that it said promoted hate based on identity or vulnerability, among other changes to its content policy. Recently, the platform also announced it would begin warning users who upvote violating content. A Reddit spokesperson told CNN that current company policy prohibits hateful and violent content on the platform. But social media companies still struggle to balance the need to police abuse on their platforms, their foundational values of giving everyone a voice and the risk of alienating some users, Massanari said. In some instances, content policy changes have been met with outrage and backlash from users who had grown accustomed to digital spaces with few restrictions. 'If you imagine this big aircraft carrier that's turning, it's very hard once all those norms have been set up to start incrementally trying to reshape that space,' she said. Gamergate's impact went beyond the gaming universe. It mobilized a new generation of disaffected, young men into becoming politically active, Massanari wrote in her book. The movement found sympathetic allies in far-right media figures and internet personalities, many of whom built their names by championing the Gamergate cause, per Massanari. Pro-Gamergate influencers, in turn, exposed their followers to other political ideas, including a broad suspicion about contemporary institutions that they viewed as too beholden to identity politics and political correctness, she wrote. Political strategist Steve Bannon understood the power of this dynamic acutely. 'You can activate that army,' Bannon told Bloomberg reporter Joshua Green in 2017. 'They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.' But as Charlie Warzel put it in a 2019 piece for The New York Times Opinion, Gamergate's 'most powerful legacy is as proof of concept of how to wage a post-truth information war.' Gamergate gave rise to a pattern of sowing confusion and chaos in the information landscape, Massasnari said. Participants elevated new conspiracies and used memes and ironic rhetoric to send coded signals, allowing them to claim plausible deniability about troubling aspects of the movement. Traditional newsrooms struggled to cover these communities and forces responsibly, giving equal weight to 'both sides' even if one side wasn't arguing or acting in good faith, according to a report from Whitney Phillips, a scholar and author of 'This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture.' In some cases, they inadvertently amplified extremist ideology. In an eerily prescient article for Deadspin in 2014, Kyle Wagner predicted that this pattern would become the future of political and cultural battles. 'What we have in Gamergate is a glimpse of how these skirmishes will unfold in the future—all the rhetorical weaponry and siegecraft of an internet comment section brought to bear on our culture, not just at the fringes but at the center,' he wrote at the time. 'What we're seeing now is a rehearsal, where the mechanisms of a toxic and inhumane politics are being tested and improved.' Over the years, the Gamergate playbook would be replicated in conspiracies such as Pizzagate and QAnon, as well as the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The legacies of Gamergate are complicated and far-reaching. In one sense, per some scholars, Gamergate was a battle between an increasingly diverse society and a group of White men who felt threatened over those societal shifts. At least within the realm of video games, Gamergate supporters seem to be losing: The gaming industry workforce is significantly more diverse than the US workforce more broadly, and studios and developers are adopting more inclusive storylines and characters. Still, the backlash against diversity persists — in video games and on a much grander scale, in President Donald Trump's elimination of federal DEI programs. Meanwhile, Gamergate did force more people in the tech industry to reckon with abuse and harassment. And while major companies have rolled back some efforts to curb harmful content on their platforms, others in the tech sector are building new social technologies with the lessons of Gamergate in mind, said Evan 'Rabble' Henshaw-Plath, a member of Twitter's founding team. For Henshaw-Plath, the enduring lesson of Gamergate was that social media platforms as they were originally envisioned were only as good as the people using them. 'What happened with Gamergate is inherent to what happens when you take human nature and you give them a tool that potentially puts the entirety of humanity in the same conversation,' they said. 'All of humanity's problems, dynamics and difficulties can get amplified if we design a system that doesn't account for them.' But that doesn't mean a toxic internet is inevitable, said Henshaw-Plath and others. Regulators can implement rules to improve content moderation and mandate transparency by social media platforms. Tech companies can diversify their top ranks to help ensure their platforms are designed to be safe for everyone. And people in the industry can create new systems that put more power in the hands of users — like what X competitors Bluesky and Mastodon are doing. For many users, social media platforms were once an exciting, and even transformative, space for community. With some radical reimagining, Henshaw-Plath said, they might experience that feeling again.
Yahoo
04-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
New test score labels seek positivity, ditching the term 'standard not met' for 'below basic'
In a quest to help parents understand how their children are really doing in school — but not make them feel bad in the process — state officials are moving this week to change the way they describe student performance on standardized tests. Student scores have been ranked in one of four categories on California's annual tests in math, reading and science: Standard Exceeded; Standard Met; Standard Nearly Met, or Standard Not Met. But the consortium that manages the Smarter Balanced test told California officials in a presentation last September that there has been confusion about what those levels mean. The consortium — which includes representation from California — suggested new labels, according to state officials: Advanced, Proficient, Foundational and Inconsistent. The State Board of Education was prepared to adopt them in November. But concerns were raised by advocacy groups, who said the terms for the two lower levels were confusing and potentially misleading. They also chastised the board for not seeking any public input, which officials then agreed to do. The process pushed back the decision to the Wednesday meeting of the State Board of Education, where officials can take into consideration the work of focus groups that included students, parents, educators and advocates. Some participants didn't like the original terms Standard Nearly Met and Standard Not Met, calling them vague, according to a state report. Some perceived the term for the lowest level as failure and noted that it "was often received as discouraging or demotivating,' the report said. And they didn't like Foundational or Inconsistent, again saying the terms were confusing. Another set of labels is also up for consideration: While Advanced and Proficient remain unchanged, the proposed names for the two lower-scoring categories are Basic and Below Basic. Advocacy groups appear to support the latest proposal, which the state board can adopt or further modify. If approved, the new terms would be the same as those used for many other standardized tests, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP, known as the nation's report card. The debate over test labels comes as national and state state scores remain low and have generally failed to recover from the pre-pandemic levels of 2019. Math and English test scores of fourth- and eighth-graders largely held steady or declined nationwide over the last two years — results that were about the same in Los Angeles and California. The current proposal "is a step forward in providing parents with an accurate picture of how well their children perform in school," said Natalie Wheatfall-Lum, director of education policy for EdTrust-West, an Oakland-based advocacy group. "However, our focus should be on providing clear descriptions of these labels so that parents can understand how well their children are performing in school, recognizing that a state assessment is one way to measure that." Given that grades, teacher feedback and comparison with peers can be subjective or vary from class to class or from school to school, "the standardized score and its label might be important in shaping how well students and parents understand the students' skill levels relative to a common standard," said Sean F. Reardon, professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford. "For that purpose, [tests] should have simple, transparent labels." All the same, he added, "a once-a-year, four-category score label is a pretty crude way of telling parents or students how they're doing. Teachers and schools can convey information to parents much more frequently and with more nuance than a state test report." California's Smarter Balanced test is computer-based. If students are doing well, the program sends the student harder questions. If the student is faring poorly, the program sends easier questions. The goal is to get a more precise reading of a student's skills, but the test represents only a snapshot of a student's performance. Experts acknowledge that the prime goal of education is not high scores on standardized tests — which are an imperfect measure of deep and relevant learning. Still, tests provide a marker to help keep students, teachers and schools on track toward skills students are supposed to be learning in each grade. And by this marker, students in California and across the nation could be doing much better. Read more: Low math and English scores mark the nation's report card, California and L.A. included Not only are few students scoring as Advanced or Proficient, but fewer are achieving this test's version of a Basic ranking, the next level down, according to the overall results from NAEP. On the most recent results from this test, for example, the percentage of L.A. students who scored as Proficient or better in fourth-grade math was 27%. For California it was 35%. In fourth-grade reading, 25% of L.A. students tested as proficient or better. California's rate was 29%. On California's tests, student proficiency rates are higher, but still widely trailing pre-pandemic achievement levels that themselves were considered unacceptable at the time. And yet this reality is coupled with research indicating that parents think their children are doing quite well in school — possibly because of grade inflation. Both rounds of proposed changes were meant to provide clarity. There also was a goal of expressing student performance in a positive way — called an "asset-based" approach — even if the scores themselves are low. So, rather than sending out the message of Standard Not Met, the term proposed in November was Inconsistent. One board member suggested that term, too, might be too negative. Maybe "developing" was a better choice. Even the original terms had euphemistic elements to them. The phrase Standard Nearly Met, for example, includes a wide range of scores — some that were in fact nearly Proficient and others that ranged nearly to the lowest category. In the November proposal, Foundational and Inconsistent drew strong outside objections. "We are deeply concerned," wrote the groups, which included EdTrust-West, Children Now, California Charter Schools Assn., Alliance for a Better Community and Teach Plus. "The reality we are facing is many students across California are facing significant challenges when it comes to meeting grade level standards, particularly many low-income students, students of color, English learners, and students with learning differences," the letter stated. "The proposed changes to these achievement level descriptions would make the data more confusing and misleading." Calling scores Foundational or Inconsistent "will only serve to obfuscate the data and make it even more challenging for families and advocates to lift up the needs of our most underserved students and ensure they have the support needed to thrive." If approved, the new categories are "the most common set of labels across the 50 states," said Morgan Polikoff, professor of education at the USC Rossier School of Education, who was not involved in the decision. "My personal preference would probably be for as many states as possible to use consistent labels." The latest proposal is an improvement, said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University. "I do question whether what may be a slight improvement in clarity is a distraction from the real issue: solving for the fact that California students are not mastering core subjects." The four achievement labels used by NAEP will not mean exactly the same thing if they are adopted in California. In general, the NAEP labels represent a more rigorously evaluated exam. Advanced or Proficient are harder to achieve on NAEP than on California tests based on research that compared state tests to the national NAEP exams. In addition, the discussion at the state board meeting in November included the concept that students who are one level below Proficient should still be viewed by the public as working at grade level — even if they might require extra support to achieve grade-level standards. This direction alarmed advocates who said they want families to get a clear message when their child is not proficient. Overall, the state tests offer a more precise check than NAEP on what students in California are supposed to be learning. The NAEP test, in contrast, tests a small sample of students to allow for state-to-state comparisons and does not send student scores to families. It's what happens with the information that's ultimately important, said Thomas Kane, professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. If teachers explain to parents what a low score means, "parents are more likely to listen to their child's teacher than to take to heart a government form letter that arrives in the mail. But it's a difficult conversation to have and many teachers avoid it. It would benefit teachers, parents and students to provide an excuse (i.e. requirement) to have that conversation." Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
04-03-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
New test score labels seek positivity, ditching the term ‘standard not met' for ‘below basic'
In a quest to help parents understand how their children are really doing in school — but not make them feel bad in the process — state officials are moving this week to change the way they describe student performance on standardized tests. Student scores have been ranked in one of four categories on California's annual tests in math, reading and science: Standard Exceeded; Standard Met; Standard Nearly Met, or Standard Not Met. But the consortium that manages the Smarter Balanced test told California officials in a presentation last September that there has been confusion about what those levels mean. The consortium — which includes representation from California — suggested new labels, according to state officials: Advanced, Proficient, Foundational and Inconsistent. The State Board of Education was prepared to adopt them in November. But concerns were raised by advocacy groups, who said the terms for the two lower levels were confusing and potentially misleading. They also chastised the board for not seeking any public input, which officials then agreed to do. The process pushed back the decision to the Wednesday meeting of the State Board of Education, where officials can take into consideration the work of focus groups that included students, parents, educators and advocates. Some participants didn't like the original terms Standard Nearly Met and Standard Not Met, calling them vague, according to a state report. Some perceived the term for the lowest level as failure and noted that it 'was often received as discouraging or demotivating,' the report said. And they didn't like Foundational or Inconsistent, again saying the terms were confusing. Another set of labels is also up for consideration: While Advanced and Proficient remain unchanged, the proposed names for the two lower-scoring categories are Basic and Below Basic. Advocacy groups appear to support the latest proposal, which the state board can adopt or further modify. If approved, the new terms would be the same as those used for many other standardized tests, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP, known as the nation's report card. The debate over test labels comes as national and state state scores remain low and have generally failed to recover from the pre-pandemic levels of 2019. Math and English test scores of fourth- and eighth-graders largely held steady or declined nationwide over the last two years — results that were about the same in Los Angeles and California. The current proposal 'is a step forward in providing parents with an accurate picture of how well their children perform in school,' said Natalie Wheatfall-Lum, director of education policy for EdTrust-West, an Oakland-based advocacy group. 'However, our focus should be on providing clear descriptions of these labels so that parents can understand how well their children are performing in school, recognizing that a state assessment is one way to measure that.' Given that grades, teacher feedback and comparison with peers can be subjective or vary from class to class or from school to school, 'the standardized score and its label might be important in shaping how well students and parents understand the students' skill levels relative to a common standard,' said Sean F. Reardon, professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford. 'For that purpose, [tests] should have simple, transparent labels.' All the same, he added, 'a once-a-year, four-category score label is a pretty crude way of telling parents or students how they're doing. Teachers and schools can convey information to parents much more frequently and with more nuance than a state test report.' California's Smarter Balanced test is computer-based. If students are doing well, the program sends the student harder questions. If the student is faring poorly, the program sends easier questions. The goal is to get a more precise reading of a student's skills, but the test represents only a snapshot of a student's performance. Experts acknowledge that the prime goal of education is not high scores on standardized tests — which are an imperfect measure of deep and relevant learning. Still, tests provide a marker to help keep students, teachers and schools on track toward skills students are supposed to be learning in each grade. And by this marker, students in California and across the nation could be doing much better. Not only are few students scoring as Advanced or Proficient, but fewer are achieving this test's version of a Basic ranking, the next level down, according to the overall results from NAEP. On the most recent results from this test, for example, the percentage of L.A. students who scored as Proficient or better in fourth-grade math was 27%. For California it was 35%. In fourth-grade reading, 25% of L.A. students tested as proficient or better. California's rate was 29%. On California's tests, student proficiency rates are higher, but still widely trailing pre-pandemic achievement levels that themselves were considered unacceptable at the time. And yet this reality is coupled with research indicating that parents think their children are doing quite well in school — possibly because of grade inflation. Both rounds of proposed changes were meant to provide clarity. There also was a goal of expressing student performance in a positive way — called an 'asset-based' approach — even if the scores themselves are low. So, rather than sending out the message of Standard Not Met, the term proposed in November was Inconsistent. One board member suggested that term, too, might be too negative. Maybe 'developing' was a better choice. Even the original terms had euphemistic elements to them. The phrase Standard Nearly Met, for example, includes a wide range of scores — some that were in fact nearly Proficient and others that ranged nearly to the lowest category. In the November proposal, Foundational and Inconsistent drew strong outside objections. 'We are deeply concerned,' wrote the groups, which included EdTrust-West, Children Now, California Charter Schools Assn., Alliance for a Better Community and Teach Plus. 'The reality we are facing is many students across California are facing significant challenges when it comes to meeting grade level standards, particularly many low-income students, students of color, English learners, and students with learning differences,' the letter stated. 'The proposed changes to these achievement level descriptions would make the data more confusing and misleading.' Calling scores Foundational or Inconsistent 'will only serve to obfuscate the data and make it even more challenging for families and advocates to lift up the needs of our most underserved students and ensure they have the support needed to thrive.' If approved, the new categories are 'the most common set of labels across the 50 states,' said Morgan Polikoff, professor of education at the USC Rossier School of Education, who was not involved in the decision. 'My personal preference would probably be for as many states as possible to use consistent labels.' The latest proposal is an improvement, said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University. 'I do question whether what may be a slight improvement in clarity is a distraction from the real issue: solving for the fact that California students are not mastering core subjects.' The four achievement labels used by NAEP will not mean exactly the same thing if they are adopted in California. In general, the NAEP labels represent a more rigorously evaluated exam. Advanced or Proficient are harder to achieve on NAEP than on California tests based on research that compared state tests to the national NAEP exams. In addition, the discussion at the state board meeting in November included the concept that students who are one level below Proficient should still be viewed by the public as working at grade level — even if they might require extra support to achieve grade-level standards. This direction alarmed advocates who said they want families to get a clear message when their child is not proficient. Overall, the state tests offer a more precise check than NAEP on what students in California are supposed to be learning. The NAEP test, in contrast, tests a small sample of students to allow for state-to-state comparisons and does not send student scores to families. It's what happens with the information that's ultimately important, said Thomas Kane, professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. If teachers explain to parents what a low score means, 'parents are more likely to listen to their child's teacher than to take to heart a government form letter that arrives in the mail. But it's a difficult conversation to have and many teachers avoid it. It would benefit teachers, parents and students to provide an excuse (i.e. requirement) to have that conversation.'
