Patricia Hernandez

Patricia Hernandez is a writer for Kotaku who is infamous for her consistently low quality clickbait articles, which are usually only tangentially related to video games and are often used as a vehicle to discuss and promote her political beliefs. She is also known to have engaged in corruption, giving favorable and disproportionate coverage to her roommate, Anna Anthropy and her friend, Christine Love without disclosing their relationship in any of the articles she wrote.

Anna Anthropy
In the summer of June 2012 Hernandez wrote a blog post detailing her plans to move in with Anna Antrophy. It is assumed she was financially beholden to Anna Antrophy for a few months at the very least. During the span of a year, Hernandez wrote about her landlord and friend Anna Antrophy and her games. These went undisclosed as of August 25 2014, as evidenced by the archive links that date back to then. Needless to say the then, and current editor and chief at Kotaku Stephen Totilo has always held that reporters "who are in any way close to people they might report on should recuse themselves" unless it is absolutely a necessity to report on them, in which case full disclosure is required. The necessity of reporting on Anna Anthropy is never touched up on, nor is the relationship fully disclosed until nearly a full two years after the fact.

Christine Love
On August 22 2013, Patricia Hernandez wrote a favourable article about Hate Plus, a game created by Christine Love. She gave positive coverage and even providing links directed to the steam store page of both the game and the prequel. A number of tweets show Patricia Hernandez being in a romantic relationship with Christine Love, which was not disclosed in the article.

On September 6, a disclosure about her relationship with Christine love was added to the article. Neither Patricia Hernandez nor Stephen Totilo (editor in chief of Kotaku) have talked about this discreet update while addressing the conflict of interests found at Kotaku.

David S Gallant
Patricia's coverage of the game I Get This Call Every Day also appears to be ethically questionable. Hernandez and David S. Gallant, the game's creator, started tweeting at each other on December 15, 2012; already from their first twitter conversation they appear to have been somewhat friendly with each other. On December 21, 2012 Patricia published a positive article on him and his game without disclosing what appears to have been a friendship between the two. Further twitter conversation from December 2012 also indicate a friendship between Gallant and Hernandez, and yet this was not disclosed in Patricia's second article on Gallant from January 29, 2013.

GaymerX
On February 19 2012, Hernandez published an article on Kotaku about GaymerX's Kickstarter funding for its second convention. Numerous tweets show Hernandez to have a close personal relationship with the President of GaymerX, Toni Rocca. No disclosure was included about this conflict of interest until late August, well after the convention was funded.

Read Only Memories
On December 3 2013, Hernandez wrote a favourable article about a GaymerX Kickstarter project for the game Read Only Memories. Around this time, she can be seen having several friendly conversations on Twitter with JJ Signal, the animator for the project and Matt Conn, the creator of GaymerX. She did not include a disclosure until late March 2015.

The project had only gained about $2,300 in the previous three days from roughly 73 new backers at the time this piece was published. Within a day it had gained an additional $1,300 from 81 new backers and another $1,500 from 38 backers in the following day, when her piece was republished by Kotaku Australia. By the end of the week the project had 155 more new backers, contributing another $2,500. In those five days from the first piece in Kotaku to the end of the week, the Kickstarter project gained over 270 new backers contributing roughly $5,400. By the time the Kickstarter concluded, even with a last-minute push and last-minute coverage, it only got $2,300 over its funding goal. It seems reasonable to suggest that Hernandez's piece may have been a decisive factor in getting the project funded.

Zoe Quinn
Patricia Hernandez appears to have been friends with Zoe Quinn since August 2012, as tweets from that month reveal that they were planning to meet up with each other. Despite this, Patricia gave Zoe positive coverage in two articles from December 2013 and May 2014, without initially disclosing her friendship with Zoe in said articles.

Controversies
On May 30 2012, Hernandez wrote an article in which she raised huge controversy over the use of the word "rape" as a euphemism for a "one-sided victory" in online gaming.

Hernandez published a Kotaku article on July 9 2013, in which she claimed that "Fake Geek Girl" stickers were being used to sexually harass women. However, she offered no proof besides an anecdotal report of one incident.

On July 16 2014, Patricia Hernandez wrote an article about Max Temkin and his response to a fake rape accusation, using the click-bait title, "A Different Way To Respond To A Rape Accusation". In the article, she didn't talk about the false accusations Temkin was subject to, but rather how his response "focused too much into defending himself instead of discussing the importance of taking about rape culture and consent." She also mentioned how he didn't "completely apologize".

On July 17 2014 she had to update her article, to say she didn't think Temkin shouldn't have defended himself, but that he should have focused more on rape culture and the definitions of consent.

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