So this Social Autopsy debacle is one of the saddest, most surreal spectacles I’ve seen in a long time.
Social Autopsy is, as you may have heard, a spectacularly wrongheaded attempt to fight cyberbullying by posting the personal information of alleged bullies online — that is, in internet lingo, by doxxing them, thus exposing them to the sort of vigilante “justice” that the Internet handles so very, very badly. Social Autopsy planned to assemble a database of 150,000 alleged bullies; how they were to be selected wasn’t altogether clear.
After Social Autopsy launched its Kickstarter campaign last week, it aroused opposition not just from GamerGater types who saw it as a Social Justice Warrior plot to destroy their free speech, but also from some of the main targets of Gamergate-style harassment, who knew all too well how such a platform could be abused by bullies, thus exacerbating the bullying that Social Autopsy is intended to stamp out.
Thankfully, Kickstarter suspended Social Autopsy’s campaign, presumably for violating the fundraising platform’s rules against projects that are “invasive of another person’s privacy.”
But that was not the end of it. No, this was, rather, where things started to get weird — and when Social Autopsy’s founder Candace Owens started spewing bizarrely GamerGatesque conspiracy theories about Zoe Quinn.
Before Kickstarter pulled the plug on the campaign. you see, GamerGate-target-turned-anti-harassment-activist Quinn approached Owens in an attempt to convey just what a bad idea her plan was and talk her out of it.
It turned out that Owens, despite herself being a past victim of cyberbullying, knew shockingly little about the problem her startup was ostensibly founded to solve. Not only had she not heard of Quinn; she hadn’t even heard of Gamergate, which is a bit like being an astronomer who hasn’t heard of the moon.
Instead of listening to Quinn, Owens declared war on her, spewing forth dozens of angry and accusatory tweets, charging that Quinn and fellow anti-harassment activist Randi Harper (who had posted a scathing, and not terribly polite, critique of Owens and her plan) were somehow the puppetmasters behind a barrage of abusive, threatening, and often blatantly racist anonymous messages that Owens (who is black) started getting not long after news of Owens’ plans hit Reddit and 4chan.
Owens quickly began to sound like every other internet crackpot who sees conspiracies in every Twitter mention.
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721732175368851456
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721457425082105856
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721540094713282560
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721534893390487552
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721542060415827968
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721739057911336960
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721739160898240513
So the online harassment expert who had never heard of GamerGate is apparently also an expert on the publishing industry who’s never heard of Amazon.com — which is already taking preorders for Quinn’s upcoming book, which (incidentally) will be published by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
Owens also gave an interview to The Ralph Retort, a sleazy anti-“SJW” internet tabloid, rin which she threatened to release alleged information on Quinn and Harper that would cost them “everything.” She made similarly threatening allusions on Twitter, suggesting she was on the verge of launching what she called a #gamergatesequel against the two.
The first shot in GamerGate 2: The Sequeling took the the form of a sprawling blog post in which Owens, bizarrely, accused Quinn of being in cahoots with GamerGate. That’s right. She accused Quinn of working hand in glove with the movement that literally began with an ex-boyfriend’s attempt to smear her.
“I felt I was under attack by [GamerGate], and knew Zoe had tipped them off,” Owens wrote.
I was trying desperately to get people to understand that my company wasn’t bad, these people were; Zoe for intiating it, and Gamergate for fighting the battle for her with full force.
Later on, when the nasty emails stopped, Owens blamed this on Quinn as well.
One of the “proofs” Owens cited to back up her preposterous claims: Some of those who were sending her nasty messages used the term “dox,” a term that Owens had never heard of before she spoke to Quinn.
Oh, did I forget to mention this earlier? Owens, the alleged expert on online harassment, had never heard of doxxing. And so she concluded that everyone using the term was either a sockpuppet of Quinn and Harper, or in cahoots with them.
At one point in her post, after posting a screenshot of a threatening message she’d gotten from someone calling themselves dontdoxmexd, Owens added,
Interesting account name, no? Because there was that word that we had never heard before again: “dox”. And we began seeing it over and over again, rapidly.
Yeah, that’s kind of what happens when you try to start a doxxing site. People start using the word “dox” in their messages to you.
Even after learning of the existence of GamerGate, Owens professed to be shocked that pretty much all of the attacks on her seemed to be connected to the gaming community:
Less than 48 hours on Kickstarter, and for certain, we had somehow managed to go viral—but this was an odd instance of viral. We had gone viral within the very niche community of gaming, to which, we had no prior interest or connection to. That isn’t how viral works.
No, but that’s how GamerGate works — as Quinn had tried to explain to her.
Later in the post. Owens wondered, rhetorically,
Why did our kicksktarter campaign get so viciously attacked after 12 hours? Why had it gone viral within just one community? Why were we on reddit, blogs, 4chan, being tweeted every 3 seconds, receiving hate mail, threats, and spam from every direction? Why had someone taken the time to photoshop my face beside a swatsika?
Because that’s the sort of crap that GamerGate pulls all the time?
No, Owens insisted, this was all evidence that Quinn and Harper, working together, had launched what she called, somewhat peculiarly,
an effort of cyber-terrorism. When I began suspecting as much, I created a list of all of the twitter names we had seen tweeting at us aggressively from the start. They were all anonymous and they were all retweeting one another, to make it appear as though they had all agreed and that the conclusion was unanimous about Social Autopsy; they were trying to appear bigger than they actually were.
Yeah, that’s pretty much standard GamerGate procedure.
Later, Owens mused,
It’s interesting, and really something I had never considered. Just how much power you could yield if you devoted yourself to creating a cyber unit. Even if it was just you and 20 other people involved, each with multiple fake accounts.
Well, it was more than 20 people, but again Owens has described GamerGate to a T.
You could feign friends, feign your own support, and exaggerate your own presence and significance. Yes, if you were willing to spend full time dedicated to the web, you could begin to distort reality by presenting an assumed majority.
A false, assumed majority, that goes back and fourth on a 4chan thread. A false, assumed majority, that hits the internet writing as many awful things about Candace Owens and her technically not-yet-founded company SocialAutopsy, before they even get an opportunity to launch.
Replace “Candace Owens and her technically not-yet-founded company SocialAutopsy” with “Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu and Randi Harper and …” and once again, Owens has provided us with a perfect description of GamerGate.
Adding to the surrealiity, large chunks of Owens’ posts were devoted to fictionalized “imaginings” of Quinn’s reaction to the Kickstarter.
Maybe she was twirling her hair, maybe she was drinking a coffee—maybe she was sitting a top her bed in sweatpants; the relevant point here of course if that she was logged onto the Internet.
Perhaps she saw it right there on twitter, with the hashtag #cyberbullying affixed to it. Perhaps one of her of her 73.2k followers messaged it to her, or perhaps it landed right on her feed, having been circulated by the very anti-bullying organizations that she followed. The relevant point here of course, is that she saw it. …
Maybe she sit spit out her coffee, perhaps she froze with a strand of hair still wrapped around her finger; the point here of course is that whatever she was doing, she had now stopped to pay full attention.
Owens imagined an even more ludicrous scene taking place at Quinn’s after their awkward phone call came to an end:
I imagine she had collapsed onto the floor of her bedroom in hysterics, maybe even punching a pillow in frustration on the way down
These were not the only fictional sections in Owens’ post. Owens also repeated, as if true, some of the malicious fictions that GamerGate has spread about Quinn. “I read the multiple stories about how Randi and Zoe had made their money off of abuse from men,” she wrote, as if either woman had somehow brought all this abuse down on themselves in a convoluted plot to make big bucks.
I had read specific examples regarding other women they had harassed and taken down, and about how they themselves had been accused of doxxing. Former victims contacted me (with their real names), and provided me with examples of their DNA: racism, misogyny, gamergate, troll accounts: a cocktail for success.
Later on she repeated the standard GamerGate claim that
trolling and harassment is not only an unfortunate societal issue, but that it is a business that affects the bottomline of many people. That there are .orgs established because of it, that books deal are stricken regarding it, and that individuals are being propelled to fame as spokespersons on the exact same issue that they would never want to see nipped in the bud. Because they feed it.
It is, ironically, true that internet abuse is a business. Not to Quinn or Sarkeesian, who never asked for any of the abuse they’ve gotten, but for those who’ve made a sometimes handsome living targeting people like Quinn and Sarkeesian — ranging from YouTube blabbers like Thunderf00t and Sargon of Akkad to the odd (and now broken up) couple behind The Sarkeesian Effect to, well, Ethan Ralph of the Ralph Retort, who built his site by pandering to the GamerGate troll army.
While not a GamerGater herself, Owens has indeed “descended into Gamergate Trutherism,” as New York magazine’s Jesse Singal so aptly put it.
Owens ended her post promising to further investigate what she calls the “cyber-industry” of, I guess, getting trolled and harassed by armies of dickheads, which she posits must be “a business that has profit margins that would ripple our economy if it came crashing down.” She pledged to start her investigations with “Ms. Zoe Quinn and Randi Lee Harper.”
Doxxing is a terrible way to fight harassment, but even if it were a noble endeavor, Owens is one of the last people on planet earth who should ever be put in charge of defining just who is and who isn’t a bully.
CORRECTIONS: In the original post I described Ethan Ralph of the Ralph report as a former Gamergater who described himself as a “proud neo-troll.” Despite declaring “I’m Done With GamerGate Politics” last November, he still considers himself part of Gamergate. The “neo-Troll” label belongs to another Ralph Retort contributor, not Ralph himself. I regret the errors, and I’ve corrected the post.
@WWTH
I don’t know if she’s MRA proper, but she certainly seems to hold the same opinions as the feMRAs. Which would go a long way towards explaining her current behavior towards Quinn and Harper, but really does make it more confusing that she’s (ostensibly) trying to start an anti-harassment organization.
Though reading more of her open letter, it sounds as if minors were meant to be the primary targets of Social Autopsy–to “teach them a lesson” while they’re young so they won’t become bullies when they’re older. Because nothing deters bullying like…bullying.
I’m torn. She’s either just an all-around crummy person or so misguided it hurts.
Oh dear. She’s now asking how she can get ahold of someone at Breitbart.
This is going to get worse before it gets better.
I kind of feel like she’s that guy who drives the speed limit in the fast lane, and no one should have anything to say about it if he’s in the way because it’s the LAW.
It’s just surreal. I mentioned in another thread that just as soon as I convince myself she must be a troll, she says something so almost sweetly naive (and yet still maddeningly entitled and clueless) that I swing back to thinking she’s just… well, as my grandmother used to say, she’s so far behind, she thinks she’s first.
That sounds like she’s just using that as an excuse for her own flaws as thinking that every woman acts like her means she’s not at fault for her own actions and stuff, it’s just a thing women do.
@ David
That’s who I was trying to think of – Cassie Jaye.
I shall now return to my boggling over the idea that Candace Owen thinks her boyfriend is an expert on “top-level management at high corporations” – whatever that phrase is supposed to mean; these days “C-suite” is the term I hear most often at work when referring to anyone with a C-acronym (CEO, CFO, CIO). I sincerely doubt he’s met many C-suite types, or he’d know that “thinking rationally” isn’t always common in that crowd. 😉
@David F – speaking Cassie Jaye, where is she up to with that totally objective and not at all biased movie of hers?
EDIT: Never mind, I just found her twitter feed…The handle is still cranking. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3686998/
Long time reader, first time commenter. (Eeek!) Watching Candace attack Ms. Singal made me physically ill. She truly does not seem to understand that she cannot control the narrative of a story published about her in the MSM.
As others have said, a simple Google search of “what was the biggest online bullying case 2015” turns up GaperGoat right away.
The fact that she worships the CEO of Whole Foods, whose past and current mentor is Marc Gafni – that really disturbs me. Marc Gafni is a child rapist:
Candace Owens’ arrogance and insularity is staggering. Reading how GG has completely convinced her that she’s a victim – I will not offer an armchair diagnosis, but it is skating uncomfortably close to paranoia.
I really can’t settle on a theory, though it does seem likely she’s real…. If that’s true then I have small amounts of pity for her because I’m not certain she is being intentionally malicious. However, it’s small because she is clearly guilty of research negligence and jumping to hasty conclusions (which has caused more hurt to someone already being attacked). So mostly it’s just a tired sort of disgust at someone so careless with another’s wellbeing
If she’s not real, then the chan trolls are learning how to not-be-transparent and that is not a good thing, so I’m hoping she’s just a actual-live, but shitty kind of person
Judging by the views expressed on her website, she at least supports some FemRA/Alt-Right bullshit.
The “journalistic” sources she either cites (Heatstreet), or gives interviews to (Ethan Ralph) seem to support this.
Are we really still surprised by the antics of people like Owens or Jaye?
Merely being stupid/arrogant/incompetent doesn’t mitigate the fact that they’re pushing a neo-fascist agenda.
Of course they could redeem themselves by leaving and denouncing the movement publicly, which they won’t do.
I get that they’re riding a tiger and can’t let go of the beast now, but honestly: I hope they will fall off and get devoured. Adults have to face the consequences of their actions and choices.
“I didn’t know these people were evil!” is no excuse.
@whatalineup
I agree with you. This does sound like a chan op, starting with the name.
Then there’s the matter of Candace Owens turning away any and all warnings–from two actual experts on the subject of online harassment, Zoe Quinn and Randi Harper–about her project.
ZQ: Look out! There’s a bear behind you!
CO: No, that growl is you throwing your voice. Cut it out!
RH: Can’t you feel the bear’s hot breath on your neck?!
CO: Nah, that’s just a warm breeze. Stop harassing me!
Candace Owens does have agency. That said, if I’ve learned anything from domestic violence counseling, it’s that victims are not responsible for their own victimization. So if Candace Owens’s right-wing boyfriend thinks it would be lots of lulz to have Owens harass Zoe Quinn and Randi Harper, he might set Owens up to do just that. Abuse can take many forms, and it’s hard for the victim to see the abuse if her abuser is telling her he loves her.
Alternatively, Candace Owens and her boyfriend might be in on a plot together.
Whatever is going on, Owens doesn’t sound as though she’s truly making decisions in the moment as the situation reveals itself.
That leaves two options: 1) She’s relying on what Mr. Right Wing says; or 2) She and Mr. Right Wing have cooked up a plot.
Actually, there’s a third option: 3) Some unholy mash-up of numbers 1 and 2.
I think its pretty clear she doesnt have the support or skill to make it happen, so she isnt a real threat.
God help me, I tried to point her to RationalWiki for the truth and cautioned her about the Gamergaters who are currently hoisting her on their shoulders (she’s a Legendary Pokémon to them, a black type, a woman type and a bullying victim type), only to be drowned out by gaters and for my comments to be deleted. I feel bad for her, but she’s hell-bent on making that bed.
This is absolutely terrifying, incompetent, naive skullduggery, and a cautionary tale on why you can no longer assume the internet is in the periphery of a professional life–you get taken in by fast answers, easy plots, and your own brain when the fire comes. She’s exactly the sort GG has wanted to snap up, and she didn’t even make an effort to take this well.
May the great Mammoth in the sky have mercy on us all.
I used to think that Donald Trump was the most perfect embodiment of the Dunning-Krueger Effect. Well, move over, Donnie; Candace has you beaten.
Like others have said above, it’s one thing to have never heard of Gamergate, Quinn, Harper, Sarkeesian, Gjoni, Baldwin, and the rest. It’s something else entirely to portray oneself as a community leader in the field of digital bullying and harassment and to never have heard of them, and to be unfamiliar with terms like “doxxing”.
Honestly, a supposed cyberbullying expert not knowing the word “doxx” is like a particle physicist never having heard the word “electron”. It isn’t a lapse. It is a glaring klaxon alarm, screeching “This person is utterly incapable of performing the task she has set for herself.”
She thinks she’s an expert on bullying because she was once bullied, in an event that became public and attracted media attention and notoriety. If this is the case, then I’m an automotive engineer because I was once hit by a car.
…and also, this: “although to it, I owe the person that I am today”
As a professional writer (though I prefer the title “word wrangler”) this shit offends me. English never did anything to hurt her, and here she is subjecting our beautiful language to arch depravity and humiliation.
Candance, do what you feel you must, but leave the English language alone. It doesn’t deserve what you do to it.
Candace Owens has no dog in the GG fight.
She had a strange unprofessional encounter with Zoe. She isn’t the first nor will she be the last.
She has every right to be suspicious of the way things went down. Any normal person would.
To say otherwise is to be willfully ignorant and part of holding up a destructive narrative.
…any normal person completely ignorant of a field that she considers herself to be an expert in, you mean? Eron Gjoni started GamerGate. Adam Baldwin named it. These are clear, unambiguous facts. To claim that Zoe starter the whole thing to profit it from it is laughable, and two minutes on Google would demonstrate that. I mean, here we have someone who considers herself to be such a cyberbullying expert that she is asking for thousands of dollars to start up a business in that field, and yet she has never, ever heard the term “doxxing”, and seems to honestly think that Zoe Quinn coined it.
No, dude. No normal person would think ANY of the shit she is obsessively espousing on her blog and her twitter feed is reasonable. She has slipped into full-on paranoid delusion, presumably fed by a combination of her own runaway Dunning-Krueger effect and being egged on by the very bullies she claims to be fighting.
She may be many things, but normal she ain’t.
YEIG it sounds like youre blaming Zoe for trying to HELP the woman? Your Username Is Trolly.
Looks like I missed some really good discussion, dangitall!
I, too, am looking forward to more information about this very, very strange circumstance.
on “females”; I use it only when Im talking about girls AND women.
I certainly understand the sketchiness of implying that her boyfriend is the big mastermind, but she does seem to credulously accept anything someone she’s dating says, if ryeash’s post is anything to go by.
Kale,
Why not just say “women and girls”?
katz-
Pretty much that.
Honestly, the whole thing is bizarre and sadly between this and the whole Allison Rapp situation, the hashtag of fuckwittery have got some major victories to use to sustain them as they harass. I mean, they successfully got someone who’s not transparently a misogynist and a racist to sign on to their pet conspiracy theories about Zoe Quinn and they got a woman and her boyfriend fired from their jobs and tarred their names for future legal employment.
They’ve got fresh scalps, credibility, and companies being scared of them again, and a lot of harassment victims have been quietly dropping out of the industry which was their goal the whole time.
This shit’s going to get a lot worse before it ever gets better and I think we’ll see a continued escalation.
For Owens, she’ll be devoured if she ever stops buying their garbage wholesale, so all my pity for her, but none of my pity for her for how much worse she has made the landscape of harassment for every other woman and POC in social media.
@Lea space. esp on Twitter. why is saying females wrong? Its a literal scientific term that shouldnt bw seen as derogatory. I say Males the exact same way. Or AFAB or AMAB. I dont say AWoGAB. I dont see why it is offensive in proper context as a AFAB myself.