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Pummeled online, SXSW announces harassment summit

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

When the organizers of SXSW canceled two panels dealing with harassment and gaming for their March event, they took a ton of criticism. Now they’re reversing themselves by creating a full summit dedicated to the problem of online harassment.

Hugh Forrest, an organizer of the Austin event, said in a post on Monday that SXSW Interactive would cancel two sessions — “SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community” and “Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games” — because of threats of onsite violence. Now they’re adding a day-long summit to examine the topic on Saturday, March 12, with a number of prominent speakers. The speakers include Brianna Wu, head of development at Giant Spacekat, who talked about harassment at our own GamesBeat 2015 event.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.