Game Shut Down After Democrat Katherine Clark Complains of ‘Harassment’

Clarkd
House.gov
Allum Bokhari

They say Democrats do better with young people, but one congresswoman is bucking the trend. Katherine Clark recently outraged teenage Twitter users by using her political heft to shut down Stolen, a Twitter app that had attracted a large and devoted teenage following.

Stolen was a whimsical online game that mixed the dynamics of baseball trading cards with Twitter. Players used a virtual currency to “collect” online collectable cards of popular Twitter accounts. The more popular or desirable the account, the greater the cost. Once purchased, cards could be traded with other players.

You can see the appeal for teenagers. Collect Justin Bieber! Trade him for Taylor Swift! It’s exactly the sort of app that would cause schoolteachers across the country to start confiscating phones. But other than distracting teenagers from schoolwork, it’s hard to see what harm the game could really do.

Katherine Clark, who has fuelled the online “harassment” panic over the past year, thought otherwise. Along with a host of social justice warriors, including disgraced video games journalist Leigh Alexander, Clark argued that the app “encouraged harassment” by allowing users to share pictures of other peoples’ profiles without their consent. Apparently unaware of the screenshot button, Clark sent sternly-worded letters to Twitter and the Apple Store, urging them to block the app.

Instead of reminding the Congresswoman that taking screenshots of peoples’ Twitter profile pictures would always be possible, the team behind Stolen decided to cave in, pulling their app offline before it was banned. In a post on their Twitter feed, they announced that they were shutting down.

Unless they’re seriously geeky, teenagers tend to be politically apathetic. I would expect the ones who download apps like Stolen are even more likely to eschew politics. But Katherine Clark may just have switched on the political lightbulbs of a wave of young people, who may well remember the nanny-statist who took their games away when they reach voting age.

In the space of 24 hours, Clark has become a pariah to devotees of the app on Twitter, who have been bombarding her feed with angry complaints. I wonder how many will be eligible to vote in her district in a few years?

https://twitter.com/Oahks/status/687886216935522304

https://twitter.com/Wonder_Bubbles/status/687879802880045057

Independent game designer Jennifer Dawe succinctly summed up Clark’s problem:

It’s not entirely surprising that Clark would be the one to cause Stolen to shut down. She has spent the past year aligning herself with the feminist culture warriors of tech and gaming, who constantly spread alarm about online harassment and so-called “cyberviolence,” which usually boils down to little more than mean words on the internet. At their behest, Clark has urged the FBI to do something about GamerGate, the consumer movement that is now one of the most reliable sources of resistance to censorious pearl-clutchers who push for greater control over online speech and creative expression.

The FBI, of course, ignored her request. Perhaps the creators of Stolen could learn something from that response.

Follow Allum Bokhari @LibertarianBlue on Twitter, and download Milo Alert! for Android to be kept up to date on his latest articles.

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