Summary

Anita Sarkeesian begins her speech, “Online Harassment and Cyber Mobs” by telling the audience about her feminist perspective and about the way in which she uses it to show how women are objectified in pop culture, particularly in video games. After she started a campaign to raise funds for creating a series of videos for this purpose, Sarkeesian has become the target of a massive online harassment campaign by male gamers.

As a consequence, Sarkeesian’s online accounts have become filled with death threats, hateful messages, violence, and pornography. Furthermore, Sarkeesian’s private life was in danger, as her harassers tried to release her personal contact details and data to the public. Once a game was created in which users were invited to beat her up, Sarkeesian realized the strange association between her life and a video game.

In her speech, she explains how the mob of abusers viewed themselves as heroes whose purpose was to destroy Sarkeesian, the villain. Sarkeesian further exp...