Brianna Wu Plans to Run for Congress

Photo via AP

Brianna Wu, the Massachusetts game designer who was among the prominent targets and critics of Gamergate, has announced she plans to run for Congress in 2018.

She hasn’t formally announced her candidacy, nor has she said who she would run against, but has been telling media it won’t be against Katherine Clark, the congresswoman and a fellow Democrat, with whom she has worked to push legislation to curb online abuse.

Gamergate, whose supporters waged a campaign of harassment and intimidation against women in the video game industry, took particular interest in Wu, 39, who co-founded a gaming company called Giant Spacekat.

The harassment captured the public imagination because of its scale and its tactics: those targeted by the online activists, like Wu, saw frequent threats of violence that often mentioned family members by name and included their home addresses. Wu says she was forced to flee her home outside Boston in 2014 after receiving such threats. Ever since, Wu has been among the best-known voices calling on police to take online threats more seriously, to bring those involved in harassment to justice, and to pass legislation offering new protections.

In a series of tweets describing her motivation for getting into politics, she expressed frustration about a lack of action in Washington on those issues.

3/ We’re getting diminishing returns on writing and speaking out about harassment. I think next step is running for office and passing laws.

— Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) December 21, 2016

In an interview with the Globe, she identified other areas she would focus on in a campaign, among them retaining tech workers in Massachusetts, strengthening unions, and advocating for women’s rights more generally.

She’s now assembling a team of advisors, she wrote on Twitter. She announced her intentions to run on Facebook with a post with this inscription: “She fought the alt-right and won. Now she’s fighting for all of us.”