Nintendo Fires Woman Who Became Online Target

A female Nintendo employee has been fired after months of harassment from gamers who blamed her for censorship—but the company says her firing has nothing to do with her being targeted by the "GamerGate" campaign, the Verge reports. "I am no longer a good, safe representative of Nintendo, and my employment has been terminated," Seattle-based worker Alison Rapp tweeted on Wednesday, adding that the last few months have been a "whirlwind" of controversy and harassment. Nintendo says Rapp was fired for moonlighting, which is against company policy, not because of an anti-Rapp campaign led by 4chan and Reddit posters, VentureBeat reports.

Rapp had been harassed by gamers who blamed her for the censorship of sexual content in Japanese games adapted for the US market, Kotaku reported earlier this month. Her foes dug through her past and online presence—even looking at things like her Amazon wish list—and tried to portray her as a "pedophile enthusiast" after uncovering a 2011 term paper in which she argued against strengthening Japan's censorship laws. After the firing, Rapp tweeted that moonlighting—which was apparently reported by one of her foes—is usually accepted at Nintendo and the "obsessive privacy digging" would not have happened if she hadn't become an online target. (Even before this, one columnist argued that it's time for women to ditch Silicon Valley.)