  Over the past few years, online aggression and abusive behaviors have
occurred in many different forms and on a variety of platforms. In extreme
cases, these incidents have evolved into hate, discrimination, and bullying,
and even materialized into real-world threats and attacks against individuals
or groups. In this paper, we study the Gamergate controversy. Started in August
2014 in the online gaming world, it quickly spread across various social
networking platforms, ultimately leading to many incidents of cyberbullying and
cyberaggression. We focus on Twitter, presenting a measurement study of a
dataset of 340k unique users and 1.6M tweets to study the properties of these
users, the content they post, and how they differ from random Twitter users. We
find that users involved in this "Twitter war" tend to have more friends and
followers, are generally more engaged and post tweets with negative sentiment,
less joy, and more hate than random users. We also perform preliminary
measurements on how the Twitter suspension mechanism deals with such abusive
behaviors. While we focus on Gamergate, our methodology to collect and analyze
tweets related to aggressive and bullying activities is of independent
interest.
