Last week, I wrote about Candace Owens, the founder of a would-be anti-bullying startup called Social Autopsy, and her strange descent into GamerGate-style conspiracy-mongering after prime GG target Zoe Quinn contacted her to point out how her startup’s strategy of doxxing alleged bullies could backfire in a big way.
As GamerGaters and assorted other shitlords whisper into her ear on Twitter, Owens seems to have concluded that the real villains in the GamerGate saga were those, like Quinn and anti-harassment activist Randi Harper, who had in fact been the targets of the GamerGate mob.
Owens has so far dropped three long posts on the subject, including one tonight — an attack on Washington Post reporter Caitlin Dewey that I may end up writing about tomorrow.
But much of this drama has played out on Twitter, as Owens has furiously Tweeted out a seemingly never-ending torrent of self-obsessed, self-aggrandizing and frequently delusional thoughts and accusations.
To those supporting or simply flattering her, she shows an almost childlike credulity; towards her “enemies” she displays a level of paranoia so extreme that it would make all but the most dedicated conspiracy theorists blush.
I touched on this, and quoted some of her more paranoid Tweets in my original post.
But her Twitter timeline really needs to be seen to be believed.
So here, in chronological order, are some of the more, er, enlightening of the literally hundreds of Tweets she’s graced us with since this whole mess began, starting with the Tweet where she first started to go seriously off the rails. Be aware that the Tweets here are but the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721195254393790465
(Hint: It is never safe to assume that anything in the Ralph Retort is true.)
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721195801779810305
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721207466168610817
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721209335309803520
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721215403494666240
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721308241947467776
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721317140360491008
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721319090015612928
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721457219267661830
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721457425082105856
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721457721095143424
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721458028273385472
This was an accusation she returned to again and again: anyone who devoted more than a few moments of their time to criticizing her startup’s possibly quite dangerous strategy was suspect, because … I’m not sure. They were being paid? They were part of some vast conspiracy? They were all the same person?
Actually, she made that last accusation more than a few times. Here she accused Twitterer @WithMetta, attacked in the Tweet above, of being Randi Harper. Or vice versa; I’m not sure.
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721459981426507777
And here she accused a longtime anti-harassment activist, who could have been easily Googled, of being another possible member of, well, whatever she thinks he’s a member of.
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721460797268959232
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721518163830116354
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721518353978888192
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721518785363111936
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721518941416353794
I think she means
a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.
I guess that’s more than 140 characters, though. There was no Twitter in the McCarthy era.
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721533356417150976
Here, she cites Kanye West as, I guess, an inspiration? Not musically. As a Twitterer.
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721574245785059329
Here she talks about herself in the third person:
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721577674280419328
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721600063542333442
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721601517636227072
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721728934455316481
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721730057811529728
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721733117673738240
When she learned that Quinn had appeared at the United Nations to talk about online harassment, it didn’t occur to Owens to stop for a moment and consider if perhaps she had gotten the wrong impression about her. Nope. The United Nations had obviously made a HUGE mistake.
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721736300366147585
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721737063603642368
I have to admit that this next one puzzles me a little:
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721759375732391936
PAY ATTENTION TO THE MENTIONS!
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721776420016504832
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721776805720494085
We are THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS HERE, PEOPLE!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXVE01oOTAM
This is BIGGER THAN WATERGATE!
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721787353904386048
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721787818884886529
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721831676976959488
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721836033684467713
This next one is rather comically ironic, as she’s been manipulated by GamerGaters and others of their ilk since the start of this whole embarrassing spectacle.
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/721853079096848384
The next morning she was back to the mentions. The sinister, sinister mentions.
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/722063672642838529
And then, in another deeply ironic Tweet, she suggested that anyone who Tweeted too much about a person was somehow inherently sinister.
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/722064134624436225
She promised a thorough “investigation.”
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/722228142019125248
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/722229357314510848
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/722229462528565248
Not long after this, she declared that she was “going to take a Twitter break for a couple days.” She followed this with innumerable tweets in rapid succession, culminating in this weird burst of melodramatic idealism.
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/722293636885516288
The next day, her 3-day Twitter break evidently forgotten, she returned to posting in a decidedly less idealistic frame of mind.
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/722451043242622976
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/722451161618505728
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/722451645595000834
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/722451758547615746
Zero self-awareness:
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/722453126779965440
https://twitter.com/socialcoroner/status/722453526996258820
This seems an appropriate point to take a break. Stay tuned for part 2, and possibly even part 3.
There’s a massive thread about her over on GG site Kiwifarms:
https://kiwifar.ms/threads/candace-owens.19404/
I’m wondering if there’s any point sending Owens a link so she can read what her new friends are saying about her?
@BreadandCirce,
Agreed. It appears that Ms. Owens is suffering a breakdown of some sort. Not sure why she has become so obsessed with “investigating” Harper and Quinn and making a public spectacle of herself.
Sad.
Unfortunately it’s a very human tendency. If you do something and people say you’re mistaken, or wrong, there’s a really strong instinct to double down. This is especially the case if the reaction is angry or in an unexpected amount. It’s easy to interpret criticism as an attack.
What separates Candace’s response from that of most reasonable people is what you do next. That first “I’m wrong? Screw you, YOU’RE wrong!” reaction is kneejerk and a result of feeling attacked. However, a reasonable person should at that point examine what’s being said and ask “Have I screwed up? Was I wrong?”. Unfortunately this takes some degree of self examination. It’s much much easier to just let the idea that your opponent is wrong ossify and become fixed, incorporating any new evidence that emerges into an edifice that supports this.
Sad, really.
I wonder how much real life bullying might be a result of a similar effect. I.e. a person does something stupid without really thinking about it, is called out for their stupid behavior, and as a way to shield their ego, concludes that anyone not agreeing with them is evil and don’t deserve to be treated nicely.
The more you mistreat someone, the more they push back (or don’t, showing how, deep down, they know they were in the wrong), thus justifying further mistreatment.
Once you’re on the rollercoaster of confirmation bias, it’s hard to get off.
@snork maiden
You could try – but she’d almost certainly spin it into a false flag site set up by her enemies.
Never seen this level of ineptitude, digging down, Dunning-Krugerism and bass-ackwardness since my first long-time job’s leadership.
It creates roughly the same amount of distress, except in this case I feel it on behalf of Quinn and Harper than myself.
Even the gamergators at kiwi seem to agree that Candace is being weird and paranoid.
Are Quinn and Harper space lizard crypto Jews as well!?
http://reactiongifs.me/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/computer-smash-other-guys-Mark-Wahlberg-angry.gif
The internet was a colossal mistake. I’m trying to be a good person about this, but I’m fresh the fuck outta sympathy. Contempt! That’s the word. I contempt her
I need to feel better
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMkC07PmaWA
Gets me every time. RIP headphone users. Cannons, yo!
And in a context where bullying is being discussed, it’s particularly hard to have a rational discussion because the person who’s getting things wrong will instinctively characterise themselves as “the victim” and will assume that anyone not unconditionally taking their side is “one of the bullies”. Even though this often isn’t the case – and sometimes very very obviously so at that.
On another forum I frequent, I was on the receiving end of a wonderfully florid rant from another regular poster about my “personal attacks” on him. What hideous crime had I committed? I’d merely raised eyebrows at a conclusion that he’d drawn from what seemed to me to be very shaky evidence, and I’d made no personal comment whatever. But he was so convinced that I was instigating a witch-hunt against him that he reported me to the moderators – who, thankfully, examined the evidence and concluded that I had no case to answer.
(Not long afterwards, the guy was suspended for a week for making what were unarguably personal attacks on somebody else. Obliviousness to irony is another regular symptom of these tendencies.)
Did Candace Owens just discover the internet?
The Social Autopsy twitter account has just ‘followed’ Mike Cernovich. Yup, seems like she’s getting on the racist gravy train.
No, she’s not. She’s a scammer, just like Cassie Jaye, Owen and Aurini, and she’s overacting to keep herself in the spotlight.
She keeps bringing up that she worked in finance. She compares everything to her experiences working in finance. Do we know if she actually worked in finance? What exactly are her credentials in finance? If she didn’t mention it so frequently, I’d just take her word. Still inclined to take her word, but the way she refers to it constantly is just so bizarre.
I’m super suspicious about why she left finance. Given her current erratic behavior, I bet there’s more to that story.
She believes herself to be a genius. She honestly thinks she is akin to Woodward and Berstein, uncovering a massive conspiracy through her own brilliant deduction – deduction that nobody else has ever managed to piece together – and sheer guts and dedication. She doesn’t realise that she’s that weird-smelling homeless person, shouting about chemtrails on a busy street corner. If she wasn’t so utterly arrogant, I would pity her.
p.s. She actually backed up one of her claims by linking back to Davis Aurini today. Davis fucking Aurini. Davis “women today are the most decadent sluts since the fall of Rome” Aurini. Davis “not the ‘blacks’; the n—-rs” Aurini. Davis “white nationalist on paper” Aurini. A woman of colour, falling back on the support of a man who hates her, squared.
I can’t tell if her finance skills are so sharp she automatically assumes she’s an expert in other areas, or if her finance skills are so dull she needed to find another way to make money. Either way, I’m just not impressed with her discovery and analysis.
Is this lady well? I mean, I don’t think she’s trolling at this point and I’m starting to get worried about her. I really don’t want to sound mean, but she sounds like she could use some therapy. I don’t have a twitter so I’m not sure exactly how the whole thing works, but a rapid succession of paranoid tweets doesn’t exactly seem healthy.
1) Hey it’d be cool if comparisons to homeless people and mentally ill people weren’t made, since they’re kinda against the rules.
2) It is no use to pop over to Twitter and ask her “are you OK”, because when people do that en masse, it is exactly as nasty as sealioning.
3) She’s got problems, no shit, but right now it is the duty of her nearest and dearest to try and deal with it; internet randos do not do any good, if anything, they’ll just reinforce her beliefs.
Next stop: the inevitable garbage documentary.
I still suspect she’s being taken advantage of by some of the people she’s hired.
Like I said before, if you’re a programmer who’s been hired to create a web platform which targets an “obsolete” form of cyberbullying, it’s easier to just say “Well, the customer is always right,” rather than try to explain how harassment on the web has evolved quickly and jeopardize your own paycheck.
So, if this Ms. Owens is the same one as is mentioned in last week’s NYMag, she’s quite young. She has also arguably been traumatized by some pretty vicious racist bullying, which could very well contribute to her…. less rational reactions.
I, for one, will not be revisiting or commenting on any more stories about this young lady. Everyone has painful lessons to learn, and I just cringe at the thought of some of my painful lessons being played out in public.
She makes several mentions of her journalism degree, and yet she’s shocked to have witnessed unheard-of breaches of journalistic ethics including: 1) being nice to a source when you’re trying to get them to talk to you, but then saying less nice things about them when you write your story, and 2) going out for birthday dinners for 3 whole hours when people are trying to get you to call them.
@banned
That’s a plausible explanation for how she could devise such a naive and readily corrupted business model, but everything that has happened since then is all on her. I can’t imagine an unscrupulous web designer is the cause of her making her bed with gamergate, the alt right and the conspiracy theorists.
@Iseult
Whoof. Agree with you on your last point. I’m really glad I didn’t have access to a platform like twitter or facebook while I was growing up. There were some hard lessons I learned back then that are hard enough to live down when the only one who remembers them is myself. If some of those episodes were catalogued on the internet forever…? I shudder to think.
That said, Owens is a grown ass woman who should probably have already learned some of these lessons.
Is this all a way to put GamerGate back into the spotlight?
I can’t believe someone who makes the claims Owens does missed all the hoopla last year. It was everywhere for awhile.
I thought GG was pretty much buried by now.
The scammer accusation seems plausible. I mean, when someone has been recognized publicly as a spokesperson for something (like Zoe Quinn at the UN), it seems like it should give one pause. I know I would be re-evaluating my opinions at that point.
What’s so interesting about this is that even if she is right that it still proves she’s staggeringly ignorant and incompetent.
And her constant ego-stroking about how great a writer she is, and how she knows real journalism because she once majored in it (but it doesn’t seem to have gotten her degree in it…)
Just, I try to avoid picking on people for their writing because it can be super ableist/regionalist/racist, but for Chrissakes, you write like an amateur, it’s impossible to suss out the points, it’s boring, and totally erratic and hard to follow. Who graduated you?