This article argues that GamerGate, a critical hashtag event in the history of digital harassment, is key to understanding contemporary identity verification systems and digital labour. We build our argument from a comparative analysis of two case studies: (1) digital journalistic responses to GamerGate and (2) Twitter’s account verification ‘checkmark’ system from 2021 to 2022. These phenomena showcase the linkages between the gendered and raced policing of journalists and users during GamerGate and the rise of ‘authenticity’ as a key resource for journalists and other platformed creators in the present. We draw on digital games, journalism and critical media studies to analyse the work of ‘authenticity’. We argue that platform affordances such as identity verification badges are fundamentally implicated in the work of users to appear ‘real’, even as the visibility requisite for realness brings uneven risks for marginalised cultural workers.

Sexual violence reporting is a site where issues of visibility, publicity, privacy, algorithms, and intelligibility all converge, and where the language of digital “space” is married to metaphors of “going public.” Using Google search results of Emma Sulkowicz and Chanel Miller’s stories of sexual violence as a springboard, this theoretical paper explores how all of these metaphors—public spaces, going public, being seen—are both prevalent and entirely inadequate for describing the realities of being covered by journalists in today’s contemporary technoculture. Stories of sexual violence in the media operate within a capitalist system of visibility in which they are repackaged, distributed, and made profitable for both news outlets and digital platforms. Rather than a neutral “public space,” stories of sexual violence and survivorship travel in what I call a public stage, or the eternal, infinite, and (often) intensely misogynist space of the internet. I conclude that the visibility economy of digital space, in which everything is treated as public and visible forever, has only intensified rather than abated the skepticism with which survivors are treated.

Machines have gone by many names, both in and outside of media theories. They have been called tools, prosthetics, auxiliary organs, and more. This paper explores what happens when we think of media as orientating devices. Sara Ahmed (2006) attends to the way orientations — sexual orientations, but also orientations as ways of being in the world more generally — come to be, and come to be felt on the body. Though Ahmed does not speak of media specifically, her queer phenomenology offers new ways of thinking about media. Media can be thought of as devices that orient, and that turn the body in one direction and away from another. Indeed, a media phenomenology is particularly useful in grounding both the body in media and the media’s felt effects on the body. As scholars increasingly stress, the language used to describe media often obfuscates their materiality, with words like ”virtual“ or even ”Web” concealing the material realities of digital networks. Beyond the materiality of media themselves, however, a phenomenology of media attends to the relationship between media and the bodies that turn to — and are turned — by them.

James Carey famously repositioned the spotlight on the techniques of journalism itself as a practice devoted to the task of defining “what is to be considered real: what can be written about and how it can be understood.” This article looks at shorthand, the tape recorder, and the cameraphone as material objects that shape journalism as a practice even as they, in turn, are discursively constructed by and situated in journalists’ quest to establish their authority to define, in Carey’s words, what is real. A historical study of recording technologies ultimately demonstrates both a continuing desire to escape the “imperfect medium” of the human body in favour of one that is able to better select, process, and store information (Kittler, F. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Edited by G. Winthrop-Young. Stanford University Press), and the ultimate futility of that desire. If they fail, it is at least partly because those tools are already embedded with certain values of who is human, who is trustworthy, and who is or can be objective.

Drawing on feminist scholarship and social media studies, I discuss the fraught role authenticity plays in cases of sexual assault, in which survivors are expected to perform transparency to massive public audiences in order to be believed.