A NBC News segment called “How Discord Became The Alt-Right’s Favorite Organizing Platform: How Gamers Are Facilitating The Rise Of The Alt-Right” was aired through NBC’s Think vertical. The piece misrepresents and misreports on #GamerGate after the editors of the piece took tweets completely unrelated to #GamerGate and edited them to include the hashtag.

The piece was published recently on the NBC News website, and attempts to conflate #GamerGate with the Alt-Right, white supremacy and Nazism.

During the three minute segment, NBC took some old tweets that were sent to Anita Sarkeesian back in 2014 from an anonymous Twitter user who used the handle “Kevin Dobson”. During the segment NBC posted up the following images, claiming that #GamerGate was a harassment campaign, scrubbing the name of the tweet sender and the date in which the tweets were sent.

The reality of the situation is that NBC doesn’t list who sent those tweets nor the dates. This is because the original tweets that were sent to Anita Sarkeesian had no association whatsoever with #GamerGate.

In fact, Anita Sarkeesian shared the tweet on August 27th, 2014, which contained the original Twitter chain of death and rape threats from a fresh account that was created with the handle “Kevin Dobson”. The account was deleted shortly after the threats were made.

I usually don’t share the really scary stuff. But it’s important for folks to know how bad it gets [TRIGGER WARNING] pic.twitter.com/u6b3i0fysI

— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) August 27, 2014

As you can see, the tweets have no association with #GamerGate. Sarkeesian’s tweet has no association with #GamerGate. No where in Dobson’s chain was #GamerGate mentioned, in fact nothing about video games was even mentioned, which led some on Kotaku in Action to question if perhaps Dobson was an angry Twilight fan lashing out after Sarkeesian negatively critiqued the series, especially since he makes references to vampires and drinking her blood.

There has never been any actual documented evidence of #GamerGate being a harassment campaign. The FBI closed their case back in 2015 because they could not find any actionable evidence indicating that #GamerGate was a harassment campaign. A peer reviewed report from WAM!, also couldn’t find evidence indicating that #GamerGate was a harassment campaign.

In this case, it appears since NBC News couldn’t find the evidence they needed for the story they fabricated their own.