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.
Her background is finance. She knows nothing about cybersecurity or harassment beyond what one might glean from reading a few shallow NY Times articles. My guess is she read a few such articles and started getting dollar signs in her eyes. Nothing that she’s said indicates she’s got into this game out of sympathy for the victims. Nothing she’s said indicates she even understands the problem. She thought she could just hop on the bandwagon and ride it to success.
So I’ll spin a conspiracy theory of my own. She’s an opportunist. All the actual experts in this space have criticized her project. Doing the hard work required isn’t going to be glamorous or profitable. But the Gamergate attention looks like an easier bandwagon to hop aboard now. She’s on her way to a community where members don’t actually need to help anyone or solve any problems or face criticism. All you have to do is be angry on the Internet.
There’s a reason she’s reaching out to Milo instead of computer security and anti-harassment experts. They’re in the same industry now.
How big a thing is the Gamergate movement? Admittedly this is an unscientific survey, but whenever I’ve mentioned the word to friends who actually play computer games I’ve just been met with blank looks.
Is it just a case of a relatively small number of people making a disproportionate amount of noise?
@Kale, in AFAB or DFAB or similar terms, “female” is an adjective. What folks (myself included) don’t like is the use of female as a noun, eg “men are awesome, but females are teh worst!” Many people, again including myself, find that language dehumanizing.
@ kale and viscaria
Ooh, what do all those acronyms mean?
(As for the use of ‘male/female’ as nouns, they do sound really odd in everyday conversation. To me it’s a little bit stilted, like how a movie alien trying to pass as human might speak. We do use them as nouns in legal circles (eg ‘a 17 year old IC1 female’) but that’s a pretty dehumanising situation anyway.)
@ Alan
I suspect you’re right about the number of people involved in Gamergate and the amount of noise they make, and lord-a-mercy, they do think highly of themselves.
hmm well f it bothers people it doesnt rlly matter whether it makes sense to me or I agree, I should respect your wishes. but I would like to get this clear… this is more or less news to me in the context described and we use female on forms, its used in formal writing, ie studies, textbooks, etc. it doesnt make a lot of sense to me to constantly say stuff like “women and girls and infants who will grow up to be girls” when I could say, “females are discriminated against” when you also say “AFABs are discriminated against” would be fine? Im NOT sayin you are wrong just that *I* am *confused* and want to understand!! Is “female people” or “AfAB ppl” OK? Hope this isnt annoying or offensive to ask! hoping to NOT offend anyone in future “- language matters. <3
AFAB is trans Binary & NonBinary (nether identifying as male or female or both) inclusive – *assigned* female at birth, meaning prob born w external female gentalia (vulva &/ vag) OR intersex but mutilated to appear “female” or raised as such. AMAB you can work out Im sure 😉
most/all trans men are AFAb
@ kale
He, I think you overestimate my capabilities 🙂 Still can’t figure out the first one!
ETA: Got it!!!!!
Alan: Assigned/designated Female at Birth.
Kale: Although it’s not personally a thing for me, I understand that the issue is using the adjective versus the noun. Like, you wouldn’t refer to someone as “a Chinese”. You might say “a Chinese person” though. “Person” is assumed when *you* say “female” (and in the context of “a female person/child/adult” etc. it’s okay) but that’s not the case for everyone and every dialect and every context.
I’m bad at typing on my phone. Hope this made sense.
lol
It’s far from normal to assume that a harassment victim is actually the head of a giant conspiracy and is spending day and night harassing herself with a giant sock puppet army.
That is not a remotely rational conclusion.
when I was young & learning what my whole gender thing was about I got verbally abused as a transphobe for making mistakes. I get the anger and Im sure I came off as an ass but I rlly just needed some guidance. & prob to do my own research b4 speaking and all that too. but I maintain that its shitty to name call and bully like that in those situations.
@DS yes that helps.
& I generally defer to the ppl who ARE bothered. like just cuz a smoker doesnt mind me smoking by them I woundnt ignore an asthmatics request, even if I didnt understand asthma.
I say generally bc if youre offended by for example seeing a woman breast feed, too damn bad for you.
Fascinating.
Before I begin, I apologize for not reading everyone’s posts above. I’m sitting in the Springfield, Mo airport waiting for my plane to take me home from an interview, so I don’t have time now, but I swear, I’ll read all the posts tonight or this weekend.
Second, this post is going to be long.
That said, I find this story an interesting case study demonstrating two points: first, how easy it is to fall into gamer-gaterism when you’re not familiar with the territory, and second, just how unknown most of this debate is.
To begin with, Ms Owens understanding of why cyber-bullying is possible is quite sound. Her basic premise is that people online feel comfortable saying horrible things online because they know that they are anonymous, and that they will never suffer any consequences for what they post. This premise is correct, as far as it goes. Some may argue that the true root cause of Internet harassment is that people feel comfortable with that sort of bile within them in the first place, but it is true that the anonymity of the Internet removes the social constraints that would prevent such people from spilling that bile.
Her solution, however, is the sort of naive, idealistic solution one would expect from an undergraduate student with minimal experience with the Internet. Not only would selectively removing that anonymity from people labeled as ‘cyberbullies’ be used to facilitate cyber bullying, as Ms. Quinn pointed out, but that same anonymity protects critics of repressive regimes worldwide, and those same regimes would love to have a tool for exposing their critics.
However, I feel that Ms. Owens deserves the benefit of the doubt in her initial assumptions. We cannot assume that a person victimized by cyber-bullying would be at all internet savvy. In fact, it would be more reasonable to assume the opposite, that whatever experience Ms. Owens has had with the Internet has been a negative one, and a person with such experience would not have any incentive to further explore it. Furthermore, I can personally attest that, until I ran across this blog (courtesy of an interview with Mr Futrelle I ran across in an idle moment on YouTube), I had never heard of gamer gate, Zoe Quinn, or doxing. I was familiar with Anita Sarkeesian from her YouTube videos, but the rest of this is a new language for me. I had assumed that because I am a 30 year old white male, that my own privilege had blinded me to the whole subject. However, I can well understand how someone would be familiar enough with the Internet for regular work and never hear of such toxic garbage as gamergate and doxing.
So, the tl:dr: Ms Owens is neither a moron or particularly lazy, just uninformed about a sub-culture of the Internet she was not even aware existed. She then reacted to criticism of her project in a way that is not uncommon for marginalized populations: by assuming bad faith and shooting back. Many, I am sure, will argue that she should have found some way to educate herself before jumping into this culture, but I can understand how she would not have done so. I just think it’s a pity that the gamergate hit squad was successful in turning her against Quinn and Harper. With some education, she may have become an effective ally, instead of a bumbling opponent.
It’s an understandable premise, but given the amount of bile people seem quite happy to spew on Facebook even under their real names, and the fact that most of them are still there, anonymity is not a prerequisite at all. People know they will never suffer any consequences because they’ve seen lots of other people spread the same bile around and not suffer any consequences, so obviously it’s safe to do so.
For an example, just take a look at some anti-vax groups who have been quite happily using the Facebook reporting algorithms to get any dissenting accounts suspended with all the aplomb of the elementary school bully who keeps winding his target up until the target finally fights back just as the teacher walks around the corner:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/04/01/an-antivaccine-activists-explains-how-she-uses-facebook-reporting-algorithms-to-harass-and-silence-pro-science-bloggers/
Which, of course, is part of why in those rare cases when consequences ever do happen (such as Milo’s checkmark) they scream about how unfair it was.
I got reported & a loong ban on FB for saying (paraphrased):
“black people are not somehow an inherently violent ‘race’ compared to whites. In fact, the majority of mass killers as well as the biggest genociders in history were white”
meanwhile calling me the T word or posting images advocating raping and killing women “does not violate FB standards”.
but nipples does tho.
They do seem to be improving lately to be fair.
This doesn’t sound too “tinfoil hat” to me. Chan-ops are all about “tinfoil hat” tactics, anyway. The fact that she’s an actor is especially suspicious… good find.
To me, another suspicious thing is the dialogue of their kickstarter video. “Tee hee, we’re girls, we’re gonna spend all your startup money on MAKEUP hee hee girls hee”. It sounded like something someone would write if they’ve only heard of women via rough description and 90s cartoons. It really does sound like it was written by someone who does not know or respect women, who is writing an ironic video to subtly mock them.
Honestly, it could go either way. There could be a person THAT clueless and arrogant and ridiculous. But they are SO ridiculous that they come off as parody, which is why it seems so much like a chan op. If they hadn’t had a video with a real woman on it, and had said all of these things via text, there wouldn’t be a doubt in anyone’s mind that this was a fake person. All they needed was a real human face to make it seem plausible.
@Joekster
It’s fine (and blissful) for average internet users to be unaware of gamergate. It’s even fine for people who work against cyberbullying in a limited way to be unaware of it. People who run heavily policed online services aimed at children, for example.
However, GG is referred to on the Wikipedia page on cyberbullying. Owens is launching a very general anti-cyberbullying initiative, asking for money on the grounds that she has the expertise to make a difference. She has not even read the Wikipedia page on the topic, let alone researched it in depth.
@KtoryX if her open letter is true, that should be verifiable.
@kale
AFAB is an adjectival phrase, not a noun. “That person was assigned female at birth” is valid grammar. “That person was an assigned female at birth” is not. The article sounds bizarre, and that’s your clue that the phrase is not functioning well as a noun. I personally would never refer to someone who was AFAB as “an AFAB.” It not only sounds weird if you articulate the words instead of the letters, it reduces a person to a condition, and for that matter a condition the person did not choose for themselves.
“Female” as a noun is dehumanizing because that’s how we refer to animals. If you’re talking about rats in a lab experiment, “we used eight females and seven males” is appropriate. It’s not appropriate to refer to humans that way in most contexts. It’s still used in some fields (law enforcement, the military, and demography are the ones I run into the most frequently) and I do my small part to try to change that every time I encounter it.
Language matters. Consider: why is the word “strength,” when unmodified, generally understood to refer to physical strength? And, more specifically, when unmodified, upper-body physical strength? The fact that we have this understanding of “strength” that really only means a particular, very narrow kind of strength, and that other kinds of strength will be indicated with modifiers as if they are out-of-the-ordinary kinds of strength, influences our thought patterns. How often have you heard that men are stronger than women? That only holds if you count “stronger” as only meaning “having greater upper-body strength” with no other type of strength counting in that comparison. It’s not actually an accident that the one type of strength at which men in aggregate can reliably outperform women in aggregate has been linguistically defined as the only “real” type of strength.
“the tl:dr: Ms Owens is neither a moron or particularly lazy, just uninformed about a sub-culture of the Internet she was not even aware existed”
Bull. Shit. If you’re moving into an industry whose purpose is keeping people SAFE and you’re asking for MONEY, you better do due diligence! At least a damn Google search or two. She’s been absolutely negligent. The second she started making claims about protecting victims is the second she lost all benefit of the doubt.
This is like an anti-vaccinationist starting a Kickstarter to expose kids measles. They might be ignorant, but that’s no defense.
Kale-
Speaking just for myself, what tends to be annoying for me about “females” is not only its weirdness, but it’s casual transphobia. It’s a deliberate usage of language of assigned at birth sex terminology and as such, every time I hear it, mentally, I presume that I’m being excluded from the category of women because I’m trans (even though my documents now finally say female). So it tends to feel super exclusionary and when I see male and female being used a lot in a space, I can usually safely presume that the space will be hostile to trans individuals.
This is my general beef, too. It’s a very biological term and it suggests that you’re thinking and talking about people in a biological way, like “females are attracted to the male who can do the most push-ups.” (Wait…that’s fence lizards.)
I feel like there’s a hint of disempowerment, too. You use those biological terms to describe animals who use instinct instead of rational decision making. So “females do this” or “males do that” carries for me a hint of treating people as if they’re not really in control of their actions.
I hadn’t actually heard of gamer gate or doxxing until I stumbled across this site a couple of weeks ago after a comment in an article on Cracked pointed the way here (love it here, such intelligent and funny posters and as someone who is under the paw of the Furrinati herself I have loved all the kitty pics and videos as well). But I live in such a bubble I didn’t really know MRA’s were a thing either, and you’d think as a middle aged lesbian woman who is obssessed with her Xbox Achievements (and comics) I’d have stumbled across such toxic male views.
I put it down to the fact the gaming website I am a former writer and still a mod for skews older than most as does the comic website I frequent. However that said, if I was going to create something involving cyber-bullying I’d damn well have done my research and not doubled down when told I was wrong. This would almost be funny if it wasn’t for the fact innocent women are being harrassed all over again.
:O YAY! I’m so happy for you!