Bomb threat shuts down SPJ event discussing GamerGate (Update)

A bomb threat in Miami yesterday cleared out and closed down a Society of Professional Journalists panel featuring some of the key figures of the GamerGate movement.

WPLG-TV of Miami reported that Miami-Dade Police responded to the Koubek Center at Miami Dade College around 2:30 p.m., after being tipped off about a bomb threat against the building. The report said someone at the Miami Herald received an email about the bomb threat and sent it to authorities. No explosives were found at the scene.

Polygon has reached out to an official with the Miami-Dade Police Department for more information on the incident and will update this story when it is known.

Michael Koretzky, the director of SPJ Region 3 and host of the "AirPlay" event, said the event began at 10 a.m. and was barraged by bomb threats on social media throughout, all of which no one took seriously because security hired by SPJ had swept the auditorium the night before, locked it, and posted a guard outside until the event began.

Koretzky said the threat that did send police to the Koubek Center came in with about 30 minutes left in the program. Apparently it was specific in the time it said a bomb would explode. Also, Koretzky said, the auditorium had cleared after a morning session and visitors were milling about before the second panel got underway, meaning that room was no longer swept and secured.

Milo Yiannopoulos, a writer for Breitbart.com and one of the principal voices of the year-old movement, tweeted from the scene about the evacuation and its aftermath. Yiannopoulos said "multiple bomb threats were called in to stop this event." A Vine shows him and Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute, another noteworthy voice in GamerGate, leaving the auditorium.

Yiannopoulos later published the remarks he would have made, "only some of which I managed to get on stage" before the evacuation. Yiannopoulos also shared the remarks Sommers planned to give.

Koretzky said the bomb threat didn't interrupt those remarks, he did.

"We only had half an hour left, I don't think they could read everything they wrote in half hour," Koretzky said. "As I told them, while AirPlay is about GamerGate, it's not for GamerGate. It's for journalists and their readers."

The event was broken into two sessions. The first was about gaming media and how its journalists can do a better job. The second was about how mainstream media can and should cover online controversies. Yiannopoulos and Sommers were part of a panel of six.

This is not the first bomb threat against a venue where both were due to appear to discuss GamerGate. In May, a threat against a Washington D.C. restaurant evacuated the first official get-together in the United States for GamerGate supporters.

SPJ Region 3 appeared well aware of the potential for disruption to the event. In this post five days ago, Koretzky detailed AirPlay's plans to ward off threats, harassment or disruption, mentioning that he had enlisted "both online and onsite security experts to keep AirPlay safe." Koretzky noted that when the event was initially publicized, the building's management was emailed with a question asking why it was letting a hate group use their facility.

Koretzky said that despite knowing the controversy the event would create, and the potential for harassment and worse, it was still worthwhile to go forward.

"As a journalist myself, if someone cares enough to do that it must mean something's gonna be said that's going to be interesting," Koretzky said. "No one calls in a bomb threat or sends harassing emails to a boring debate."

GamerGate has been accused, collectively, of online harassment and making similar bomb threats against its critics and their events, charges its supporters vehemently deny.

The movement, which deliberately has no central leadership, is a backlash to what its supporters perceive as unprofessional or agenda-driven behavior in the gaming specialty press. However, figures like Yiannopoulous, Sommers and others have also sharply criticized feminist and other socially progressive criticism of games and their role in pop culture. Opponents of GamerGate call the movement misogynist and innately hostile to women, minorities and other marginalized groups of persons.

This post has been updated throughout with additional information from Michael Koretzky, director of SPJ Region 3.