#bullyhunters

Bully Hunters organizers shut down campaign after disastrous first stream

This is quite literally the most glorious dumpster fire I’ve ever seen.

If any of you have been watching the internet really closely over the past few days, you may have noticed a thing that came up.

A very deceptive thing.

A thing that became utterly HILARIOUSLY tragic.

The BullyHunters.

A group of so-called “elite girl gamers” whose objective was apparently to target people perpetrating so-called harassment.

It began with a mere teaser before their event, which was supposed to happen at 7 PM EST on 4/12/2018. Nobody knew what to expect... unless you managed to reach out to the one leading the front for the BullyHunters, Nati Casanova a.k.a. TheZombiUnicorn. A streamer who had her 15 minutes of fame on tv and had been decently getting by.

She’d tell you to go to the official website for the group (cached for reason I’ll explain later). You’d find out nothing except incompetently-gathered statistics meant to represent gross harassment of women in gaming. You’d then get insulted and (frequently) blocked for wanting more concrete proof.

And then the event happened.

And oh dear lord.

WHAT AN EVENT.

A broadcast that was supposed to be a live 1-hour stream quickly got derailed HARD.

People couldn’t take anything that was shown seriously at all, and started digging while they let the noise play in the background. It became quickly evident that almost everything was staged.

The display was following a script. The demonstration had multiple people with multiple accounts representing both victim and harasser. The so-called BullyHunters weren’t even actually playing the round of CSGO they were called to invade.

And then it all came out.

Halfway through the hour, it was being quickly spread around that the only reason #BullyHunters existed was to sell glorified headphones on behalf of SteelSeries, and when this was exposed they tried to brush it off saying all the proceeds would be going towards Hollywood charities (given how insincere Hollywood charities have been recently, you can imagine that didn’t boil over well at all).

The people doing the broadcast made the mistake of checking Twitch chat, littered with exposure and derailing memes... and 35 minutes in the stream was cut off.

What’s been happening since then is a rapid-fire shitstorm. Gamers immensely angry at their culture being misrepresented as a whole, all to hawk some overpriced tech. Nati liberally engaging in the type of abusive behavior she was supposed to be standing against as the representative of this group. All of the organizations who were sponsoring this group jumping right the fuck off the ship. SteelSeries quickly becoming pissed off.

And then it turned out that everything laid square on the shoulders of a hopelessly out-of-touch marketing firm, FCB Chicago. They purposefully misrepresented what this campaign was supposed to mean to everyone involved, and when that became rapidly apparent, everyone bailed.

Now the website has been taken down (told you I’d get around to it), SteelSeries seems to be pursuing legal action against the incompetent FCB Chicago, and we all now have what could possibly be THE meme of 2018.

“If you are being called names by people a video game...”

“TURN THE FUCKIN’ GAME OFF!!”