Looks like gaming’s toxic bullying culture has once again reared its ugly head: A group of trolls in the gamer community has sadly taken it upon themselves to relentlessly harass an utterly defenseless Chinese leader, all for the crime of speaking his mind. Not a good look, gamers.
This kind of hateful cyberbullying is exactly what gives our community a bad name.
The poor 66-year-old man, who goes by the name General Secretary Xi Jinping, has clearly done nothing remotely deserving of the outpouring of hate on Twitch, Facebook and social media. He’s only a simple civil servant doing his best to maintain a shaky authoritarian state. Yet, for some reason, esports champions and streamers are suddenly filling the web with hateful screeds calling him a “dictator” and a “tyrannical asshole,” mocking his weight, and posting humiliating photoshops of him as Winnie the Pooh.
Without a doubt, seeing himself and his colleagues in the Politburo Standing Committee attacked thousands of times a day on Twitter is taking a real psychological toll on Xi Jinping. He’s already been forced to block over a billion users from using the internet just to tamp down on this unwarranted criticism of him and his government. This isn’t even beginning to mention the way his frustrations with these trolls made him arrest over a million ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang territory.
Clearly, the people lobbing these insults need to remember that there is a real Chinese Communist leader on the other end of their hurtful remarks about his “dumb moony face” and “violent crackdowns on freedom.” And, yes, it has been heartening to see allies like Blizzard reaching out to help Jinping by banning trolls like Blitzchung from Hearthstone. Sadly, though, it seems that until everyone stands up against this online epidemic of harassment, Xi Jinping will never be able to enjoy his repressive regime in peace.
Today, the editorial board at OGN is taking that stand.
Here and now, we resolve ourselves to condemn cyberbullying in all its forms, whether it’s against the General Secretary of the Communist Party or the brave police officers who are simply trying to maintain law and order in Hong Kong. Only then, when the gaming world joins us to end the horrible scourge of trolling in our community—once and for all—can we stop this horrifying cycle of abuse towards unsuspecting world leaders.
