Shanley
Recently, Shanley Kane wrote a series of Twitter posts which explain what's going on at Wikipedia and why it matters. For ease of reading, I've reformatted into conventional paragraphs and lightly edited, and I’ve moved this from my Wikipedia user page because the Gamergate crew armies of Mordor complained of it.
They have been testing and perfecting a terrorism formula to ruin target's lives, attempt to get them murdered or drive them to kill themselves.
The first step is doxxing and death threats, which immediately destabilizes the target's most fundamental sense of safety and security. This often forces target to leave their home & immediately stop any career/family/social/community work as they work to re-establish safety. It creates the isolation needed for longer-term campaigns (100s of threatening, abusive, harassing messages per hour) to have max. impact. Under these conditions, the target's mental health will rapidly decline and suicide ideation, self-harm, anxiety and panic sets in. This causes lasting trauma that will not only temporarily silence but forever change the target's sense of safety and support in speaking.
They then start digging in detail through your past to "find"/"invent" things to justify harassing you and get more ammo. This has the nice bonus effect of "proving" to your "community" that you deserve harassment and aren't worth supporting = more isolation. In white-male dominated, misogynist environments, it is incredibly easy to signal to a target's community that they don't deserve support. Thus, abandonment by their community is easily secured as the target suffers from the campaign to dig up their past.
That campaign signals to any stalkers, past partners, etc. that now is the time to GET THEM. This often means cyber sexual assault & DV. As well as outing of gender identity, sexuality, etc. which threaten any career and family support system that may exist If ''anyone'' is defending you at this point, the same techniques are applied to supporters to make sure that stops. The message is clear: This target ''will'' be left completely isolated as we torture, terrorize and abuse them with impunity... or else.
This is a formula, it is known and documented, it has been tested and refined, and it is becoming more effective and scalable. So please, wake the fuck up and realize what we are dealing with here because for the 100th time: this is just the beginning. There are three ultimate goals: incite someone to murder the target, manipulate the cops to do it, or drive the target to suicide. Period.