(Stamford Advocate, The (Stamford, CT) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Mar. 26--STAMFORD -- Surrounded by a phalanx of family members and NAACP officials, the victim of an alleged hate crime returned to Stamford High School Monday to confront school officials and resume classes.

It was the first day Candace Owens, 17, had attended Stamford High since early February, when several teenage boys left her several racist and threatening voice mail messages.

The messages were left by boys sitting in a car late Feb. 3.

One of the boys in the car was the 14-year-old son of Mayor Dannel Malloy, but it is unclear if his voice was one of four that can be heard in the messages.

At least one of the boys is a Stamford High student who may be in a class with Owens, NAACP officials said. Two security guards will trail Owens in school, and one will attend classes with her, officials said.

Owens, who was the victim of an alleged hate crime in 2005, said she was thankful for "the support system" and ready to return to school.

"This is her senior year," said her father, Robert Owens, "one of the biggest moments of your life."

NAACP officials yesterday called for police to arrest all four teens that can be heard on the tape.

Police have said they expect to arrest at least one of the boys this week. School officials have said they will not discipline any students until police finish their investigation -- a stance the NAACP criticized again Monday.

"Here we have these racist, misogynist, classist messages, and there is no investigation" by the school," said Dawne Westbrook, an attorney for the state NAACP.

She accused school officials of "shifting the blame" by delaying any action until the police make an arrest. "Students have been suspended for less," Westbrook said.

Joshua Starr, the city's superintendent of schools, has said any arrested students would likely be expelled.

He said schools would only discipline students linked to an incident off school grounds without an arrest in a case "that significantly impedes the educational process."

Police Sgt. Joseph Kennedy, who is heading the investigation, backed the school's decision to stand back until an arrest is made

"We can't have two entities investigating this crime," Kennedy said.

Starr called the messages "horrendous" after hearing the recordings for the first time Monday.

Police have not commented on the details of the investigation, but several sources familiar with the case have confirmed investigators interviewed Malloy's son.

In a statement released last week, the mayor said his son cooperated with police and reported "all facts known or witnessed by him regarding the incident."

Malloy said his son has no prior relationship with Candace Owens or the Stamford High student reportedly at the center of the investigation.

Owens and that student, a former friend, got into a dispute at Stamford High after Owens heard the boy making fun of her family's financial situation, according to a letter Owens wrote to the NAACP.

The two argued in class, and school officials suspended the student from school Feb. 2, the letter states.

Owens received three racist voice mail messages the next night. The callers use a racial epithet to describe Owens and threaten to kill her.

Four distinct voices can be heard on the tape. All four use the same racial epithet.

Owens played the tape for school administrators Feb. 5, and they turned the matter over to police, Starr said Monday.

Starr would not say whether Owens is in a class with any of the suspects.

Three teenage girls are currently facing hate crime charges for assaulting and taunting Candace Owens in the parking lot of a video store on High Ridge Road in 2005, attorneys have said.

The alleged ringleader of the group, Emily Buckwalter, then a 17-year-old Trinity Catholic High School student, attacked Owens because she was rumored to be involved with Buckwalter's boyfriend, police have said.

Two of Buckwalter's friends, Samira Chagares and Mary Bigelow, both Stamford High students in 2005, face hate crime charges for allegedly calling Owens a racial epithet and kicking her during the attack, police records show. Their cases are pending at state Superior Court in Stamford.

Degree180 launched a full-scale investigation into the bat-shit-crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party and the results are not-so-shocking to say the least: 

Yes, we can officially confirm that our beloved Republican Tea Party is being led by the Mad Hatter and us millennials have been thrust into their wonderland. 

The good news is, they will eventually die off (peacefully in their sleep, we hope), and then we can get right on with the OBVIOUS social change that needs to happen, IMMEDIATELY. 

So what are the three things we can expect to happen when that last tea-party coffin is sealed?

1.THE GAY-TRANSGENDERED-BI-STRAIGHT-ANYTHING-ELSE CONVERSATION WILL BE INSTANTLY OVER, DELETED, DONE.

Because us millennials literally never even gave a shit about this. I actually remember being in 3rd grade and piecing together in my head that one of my guy friends was homosexual. I didn’t give a shit then, I don’t give a shit now, and the fact that he actually had to give a shit until this year about being himself is the most ridiculously pathetic and stupid thing that our government has inflicted upon a group of people for being themselves, since slavery. IT IS NOT MY BUSINESS WHO SOMEBODY ELSE WANTS TO HAVE SEX WITH OR LOVE. NOT YOURS EITHER, TEA-PARTY PEEPS. I ACTUALLY FIND IT CREEPY THAT YOU HAVE CARED SO MUCH AND FOR SO LONG ABOUT SOMEBODY ELSE’S SEX LIFE.

2. PEOPLE WILL INSTANTLY ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THE PRESIDENT’S PENIS SHOULD NEVER BE A TOPIC OF DISCUSSION. LIKE, EVER.

Or any other political office-holder for that matter. Frankly, me and my millennial peers did not exactly understand why it was such a big deal that Bill Clinton got a blow job in his office. I don’t care who my doctor, banker, grocery-bagger, or any other person that I may come across in my daily life is having sex with– AS LONG AS THEY DO THEIR FUCKING JOBS. All of that talk about “but his morals” gets you nothing but a mandatory STFU from me. Unless you are Hilary Clinton, it was not and will never be your business, and if a person I worked for ever asked me about my sex life, I’d probably LIE to them too. When he does something ILLEGAL (See definition: contrary to, or forbidden by law), then please, give us a call. In the meantime– let’s talk about REAL issues. Ones that affect the world, not one man’s marriage. I can think of about a thousand we can choose from. 

3. WOMEN’S REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS AND ISSUES WILL NO LONGER BE A TOPIC OF PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE.

Call me weird but personally, when it comes to my ovaries, I prefer to speak to my gynecologist. I don’t think the LEADERS OF THE FREE WORLD, should have to be an expert on the issue, nor should they ever publicly voice their opinions. Yes, I understand that it was recently confirmed that the republicans are actually stuck in the 1950’s, and the leading scientists of the world are doing everything in their power to correct the time warp, but like, COME ON!! Also, when I consider the hot button topic of abortion, I’d like to do so with, I don’t know– maybe my fucking partner–the one who impregnates me? Maybe even my best friend? My mother? Certainly NOT my god damn president so STOP asking that redundant, inappropriate question during presidential debates. 

CLEARLY the Mad Hatter has been aggressively pushing an agenda of genitals over the last few decades, for which, we salute you tea-partiers for fighting the good fight, but really... we are DONE with this, and demanding an end to this ridiculousness, NOW. 

Dear Connecticut,

Do you remember me?

Nine years ago I was a senior at Stamford High School on the brink of a life-altering event.

One night as I sat watching a movie, a group of anonymous boys called my cell phone and left me a series of voicemails. Their words, to this very day, represent the most horrific that I have ever heard uttered against another human being.

They started off by telling me that they were going to kill me "just because" I was black. They warned me that if they found me at home, they were going to unload a bullet into the back of my head. They cited other "niggers" who had died before me, like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. They threatened to “tar and feather” my family.

I remember feeling shocked and scared— because I could think of not a single person, much less a group of them, who wanted to watch me die.

I was reluctant to report it, but the next day a teacher insisted I tell the school principal.

“We were children. I wasn’t the only victim.”  ( see https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/local/article/We-were-children-I-wasn-t-the-only-6872580.php ) 

And then nothing was ever the same.

By some random stroke of misfortune one those involved was Gov. Dannel Malloy’s son — a boy I had never even laid eyes upon. Malloy was mayor of Stamford at the time and, for obvious reasons, the mixture of politics and race proved irresistible to journalists. Soon my face was plastered on the front page of every newspaper across Connecticut and everyone from the NAACP, to Dr. Phil wanted in on the story.

Do you vaguely recall me now?

The connection meant that arrests would not immediately be made. The local police told me they needed to treat the case with special diligence, and they called in the FBI to help determine whether the four boys, three of whom were perfect strangers to me, had committed a “hate crime.”

The boy I believed had orchestrated the voicemails (the only one out of the group whom I had ever seen or spoken to) denied the allegations vehemently, perhaps rolling the dice that his chance political association would protect him in the end.

I stayed out of school for six weeks before formal charges were filed, and in that time the gossip escalated. It wasn’t limited to the students. Parents, teachers and you, the general public, felt inclined to state your opinions about me online.

I perused those words quietly, a stranger to the girl that the unsympathetic portion of you were depicting.

I was a liar.

I just wanted money.

I was ugly.

I was desperate for attention, another black girl taking advantage of a situation.

I was a lot of bad things all at once.

No one seemed to see me as a 17-year old girl going through a traumatic experience.

Those words destroyed me. I held my head high at school, but I went home and I cried every single night.

Without my consent or involvement, political forces took sides. The NAACP held press conferences outside my high school, which I relucantly attended. Malloy’s political enemies seized the opportunity to criticize him. Within my own family, lines were drawn. My father wanted to press charges. My mother just wanted to keep quiet so I could return to normal life.

And all I wanted was an apology. I wanted someone to be accountable, admit they had made a mistake and just say “Sorry.”

But, to this day, no one has.

Not even our governor, who at the time had “no comment,” other than that his son had been fully cooperative with the police.

And so what was my takeaway?

I hated Stamford. I hated Connecticut, but above all else, I hated myself. I hated that my name would come up in a Google search for “hate crime.”

I developed a severe eating disorder, to help me combat it. The skin against my bones for five years helped me to feel as though I had at least one aspect of my existence under control.

After college, I moved to New York City and disappeared into its masses. The city was much too fast-paced for anybody to stop and take notice of me, much too distracted by its own idiosyncrasies.

I felt lonely and, my god, it was magnificent.

For the first time, I was given an opportunity to grow up. To remember who I was, absent the inked impressions of a judgmental community.

In the city I emerged as a woman with a deep love and appreciation for children and a raw understanding of how fragile they are.

And I looked back upon my high school experience with just that realization: We were children.

I say “we” because I wasn’t the only victim. I wasn’t the only child who had to read your words. The four boys who left me those messages were labeled racists. They were labeled “no good.” Those are words that no child deserves to hear.

Suddenly I found myself wondering, with a sympathetic heart, what happened to them. Had they maybe developed eating disorders as well? Or did they instead turn to drugs to numb the pain? Did they, too, feel paralyzed with anxiety by the idea of a simple Google search? Had they also tried to kill themselves a year later in their college dorms?

Connecticut, do you remember any of us?

I do, and I’ll be the first to say I am sorry.

To all of them, for having to endure that experience; a group of children dissected and labeled.

Were they wrong? Categorically. Should they have been held accountable for their actions? Undeniably. Did they deserve to be branded by a society?

No.

Because I’ll tell you something that you may not have realized about not only them, but all of us children from Generation Y.

We are a generation of lab rats, a generation that participated as the world speeded up. We laughed at our ability to shoot messages through thin air in a matter of nanoseconds, never stopping to consider the implications. We were the white mice at the turn of a century in which technological advances made us infinitely more capable, and definitively less human.

We no longer have to look someone in the eye to say something hurtful. We no longer have to watch their faces flush with hurt, or their eyes flood with tears.

We just push send.

For the last year, I have worked on creating a website, SocialAutospy.com, that will stop online bullying by outing the bullies. I created a searchable database of people who spew hate online. I hope it will make people think twice before they exercise their First Amendment rights online as a means to hurt others.

And this wouldn't be fun without a public challenge to Gov. Malloy to contact me. To look me in the eye for the first time and stand with me as a leader in the fight against online bullying.

I am once again so happy to be a part of Connecticut, my home state, and one that I believe will be a part of a real solution. Not just another perpetuator of divisive arguments.

Sincerely,

Candace Owens

Update: Go here for some updated information.

In the last day, there's been a lot of Twitter buzz - none of it good - about a new Kickstarter project, SocialAutopsy.com, which promises a revolutionary solution to Internet trolling and bullying. Some of that buzz comes from me: yesterday, after reading the project's description and watching the promotional video, I tweeted asking if this was essentially a doxing service under the pretext of exposing (alleged) harassers and bullies. (I have since deleted the tweet, since the new information led me to think it was somewhat inaccurate and I didn't want to contribute to a panic.) 

Last night, I heard from Social Autopsy's founder, Candace Owens, who saw my tweet and told me that she wanted to talk to explain her project and address the concerns expressed by me and others.

In the meantime, a lot of people in #gamergate and the cultural libertarian community on Twitter began to express concern that Social Autopsy, which claims to have a database of 22,000 people who have engaged in online abuse and intends to expand it to 150,000, is a blacklist for the politically incorrect. Some thought it was targeting GamerGate. Ironically, however, anti-GamerGate "social justice" activists including Zoe Quinn, Randi Lee Harperand Izzy Galvez were also extremely critical of the project; Galvez also charged that socialcoroner, the Twitter account associated with Social Autopsy, was a GamerGate troll account, but later admitted error.

Candace Owens is definitely a real person. She was the victim of what looks like a genuinely bad harassment/bullying incident in high school involving voice mail death threat; according to the Connecticut Post, a former friend of hers was arrested and charged in the incident, but the case was later dismissed. (There is a Twitlonger post claiming that Owens has a "long history" of making harassment claims for attention, but there seems to be no evidence to back up such a charge.)

In our telephone conversation, Owens assured me that Social Autopsy was not meant to be a doxing platform and that no one making abusive posts anonymously would be "outed" by name or place of employment. The purpose of the database, she said, was only to preserve evidence of a person's abusive social media posts and match it to publicly available information that they themselves included in their online profiles. A prospective employer (or date) would be able to search the database for the person's name and see if they had made any harassing or abusive comments online. In response to criticism about the inclusion of minors, Owens also noted the site would be a useful tool for parents who want to monitor their teenagers' online activity.

Owens said that right now she is primarily focused on Facebook and that Twitter is "more complicated" because it allows users to remain anonymous. She strongly denied that Social Autopsy would match anonymous accounts on Twitter or other sites to their personal records - at least for now. (More on that later.)

Owens also assured me that abusive posts submitted via screenshots would be verified before the poster was added to the database, and that the criteria for abuse would not be political but would primarily involve threatening language.

I told Owens that last night, a Twitter user who had concerns about Social Autopsy told me in a direct message exchange that he was easily able to get into the site's database and then find personal information on the people listed in it by googling them. Owens replied that the real Social Autopsy database had not been uploaded yet and that my contact must have accessed "an old link from a dummy test site" where none of the profiles were of real people.

After talking to Owens, I tested some of the links my Twitter contact gave me to pages in the database. The pages have only names, photos, and hashtags stating the issues to which the person's abusive messages were related (no screenshots of the messages themselves). At least one name in the database does appear fake; it's a distinctive name that has no other presence on Google besides Social Autopsy. However, a search for another name, listed with hashtags indicating that the person had harassed a former partner and a minor child online, quickly led me to a Facebook page with the same name and photo and with other identifying information. A Google search for one of the hashtags also quickly leads to the Social Autopsy page. This is not reassuring, to say the least.

So, what can we conclude based on current information about Social Autopsy?

(1)  As currently outlined by Owens, if and when it launches, it will not be a doxing platform. However, rather ironically, this fact undercuts Social Autopsy's more ambitious claims to revolutionize the Internet. The project's video asserts that one reason abuse and bullying thrive on the Internet is that so much of the interaction takes place anonymously and that people would think twice about saying things like "I hope you get gang-raped by Mexicans" if they had to say it under their real name. But now it turns out that Social Autopsy doesn't actually do anything about anonymity; it just increases the odds that the nasty stuff you say online under your own name, or using accounts publicly linked to your name, will be seen by people you don't want it to be seen by (including prospective employers). If so, the project's slogan - "Wave good-bye to cyberbullies and trolls!" - is seriously misleading, since anonymous trolls and bullies aren't affected at all.

For now.

Here's what Owens said in a follow-up email exchange:

• We do not, at this stage, have the ability to out (nor was that our initial intention) anonymous accounts. That requires certain technology and a thorough understanding of legal ramifications. Of course we will explore this possibility as we grow and build, but let's remember--we are on Kickstarter. Much too soon to have that conversation, and never our initial intent.

Actually, if Social Autopsy could eventually grow into a project that could destroy Internet anonymity (and lend a potential tool to stalkers), I think the time for that conversation should be sooner rather than later.

So: The criticism directed at Social Autopsy as a doxing platform was warranted based on the statements in the Kickstarter promotional video. Either Social Autopsy is a doxing platform, or its video is false advertising.

(2) I don't think this is a "social justice warrior" project. It doesn't use the lingo of "privilege" and "marginalized people," instead focusing on more old-fashioned concepts like bullying. Owens was very emphatic that she does not think Social Autopsy should be used to police "wrongthink," including anti-feminist or anti-gay opinions, as long as there is no threatening language. 

Incidentally, Owens told me that she had never heard of GamerGate or of Zoe Quinn (with whom she had also spoken on the phone earlier) until her Kickstarter project got their attention. I believe her. Most people outside hardcore geekdom and the "social justice" movement probably haven't heard of GamerGate. Interestingly, she also spoke quite negatively of Quinn, saying that during their conversation she got the strong impression that Quinn herself is a social media bully. 

(3) Some things about this project strike me as rather unprofessional. For instance:

• While Owens stresses that the database will not be outing anonymous trolls and cyberbullies, much of the language in its promotional materials implies that it will.

• The supposedly fake database from the "dummy test site" contains at least some names and photos of real people and links them to allegations of cyber-abuse.

• The promotional video at one point uses a screenshot of a fake newspaper article about the suicide of a YouTube vlogger and trolling target who is actually alive. It also uses a screenshot of "Jane Doe" profiles in a context that could arguably imply the owners of the accounts are trolls. At least one of the "Jane Does," who says she is a survivor of domestic violence and stalking, has asked Owens to have the screenshot of her profile removed from the video; in an email to me, Owens said that "she is turning absolutely nothing into something."

For what it's worth, I think Owens is well-intentioned. But this is one well-intentioned project that could go off the rails in more ways than I can think of.

Fighting real cyberbullying and cyberharassment, as opposed to mean words and offensive opinions on the Internet, is a worthy goal. I would actually love to see some people who are not part of the far-left social justice cult undertake this mission. But before I could get on board any project of Owens's, it would have to be a lot more specific about its goals, methods, limitations, and safeguards against abuse.

A new search engine and database says it aims to expose the purveyors of anonymous online ‘hate speech’ to employers, friends, and families.

“Social Autopsy” is a new tech project seeking $75,000 in start-up funds on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform. Its stated goal is to build a database of social media accounts that engage in “online hate speech” and “cyber-bullying,” linking their online profiles to their places of employment. The project, founded by developer Candace Owens, promises to allow the public to access the “digital footprint” of individuals and companies.

So far, the team behind Social Autopsy claims to have built profiles on over 22,000 individuals, based on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram posts: “These individuals are your teachers, doctors, neighbours and business owners. And for the first time ever, you’ll be given the chance to run a real background check on them to see what these people represent behind closed doors.”

“There are literally thousands of instances of hate speech being circulated online,” warns Social Autopsy in their introduction video. “We are fostering a society of online bullying, social tormenting, and irresponsible sharing. With the ability to privatize social profiles and use pseudonyms in place of real names, it has been a free-for-all — until now.”

When the project launches, Social Autopsy will encourage ordinary web users to snitch on any friends, co-workers, or web acquaintances: “Have someone that you’d like to add to our morgue? Submit them! Our database is continuously grown by anonymous submissions from individuals like you.”

The introduction video proudly boasts that commenting is banned on the site. “We exist as a clean archive of an individual’s words only, from which employers, friends, and universities alike may draw their own conclusions.”

“Simply put, Social Autopsy is your digital footprint. So be mindful of the words that you share,” they warn.

Encouraging the “outing” of anonymous individuals on the internet, or revealing their private information, is known as “doxing” and is commonly portrayed as a form of online abuse. If Social Autopsy wants to expose anonymous online abusers, it may run afoul of Kickstarter’s terms of use, which expressly forbid abusing other people’s personal information.

However, in an interview with Reason columnist Cathy Young, project founder Candace Owens denied that Social Autopsy was a doxing service.

“Owens assured me that Social Autopsy was not meant to be a doxing platform and that no one making abusive posts anonymously would be ‘outed’ by name or place of employment,” writes Young [ See https://www.allthink.com/1170154 , or archived here :  [HW00EU][GDrive] ]  . “The purpose of the database, she said, was only to preserve evidence of a person’s abusive social media posts and match it to publicly available information that they themselves included in their online profiles.”

However, in an email follow-up with Young, Owens said that the project would “explore the possibility” of outing online abusers as it grows:

• We do not, at this stage, have the ability to out (nor was that our initial intention) anonymous accounts. That requires certain technology and a thorough understanding of legal ramifications. Of course we will explore this possibility as we grow and build, but let’s remember–we are on Kickstarter. Much too soon to have that conversation, and never our initial intent.

In other words, while the project is raising funds on Kickstarter — which prohibits doxing — Social Autopsy is explicitly not a doxing service. Afterwards — who knows?

• You can follow Allum Bokhari on Twitter, add him on Facebook, and download Milo Alert! for Android to be kept up to date on his latest articles.

If you stumbled upon the Twitter account @socialcoroner over the weekend, you might have immediately assumed it was being run by a type that’s become sadly familiar online: the hard-line Gamergater. If you spend enough time on Twitter or Reddit, you run into these folks occasionally: sitting at the far end of the obsessiveness bell curve, these are the dudes (and they’re mostly dudes) convinced that a cabal of feminist “social-justice warriors,” or SJWs, are controlling everything from behind the scenes, viciously targeting their enemies and punishing them for not toeing an imagined wacko-progressive line.

Two common targets of this sort of obsession — and, broadly speaking, two of Gamergate’s biggest bête noires — are the anti-harassment advocates Zoe Quinn and Randi Lee Harper. And, indeed, they were exactly who @socialcoroner went after.

For a large chunk of the weekend, the account came hard at both women, implying they were part of a conspiracy that was about to be unmasked. At times, the account sounded like it was tweeting from a besieged bunker, with the armies of Quinn and Harper closing in: “Randi & Zoe: stop sending your clowns to try and scare us with ‘legal hell’ threats. If you’re going to serve us, do it already!” It could be, unsurprisingly, hard to follow. But @socialcoroner repeatedly asserted its superiority over its alleged tormentors. “I consider the constructs of our society thoroughly, and often. I think analytically. Randi and Zoe really banked on my being dumb,” it tweeted at one point. “Keep sending the troops Randi & Zo. xx,” at another. Throughout, the conspiracy-talk was thick. Responding to another user, @socialcoroner wrote that “It’s literally a puzzle. The picture is obvious but fitting the pieces will take time.” Over the course of two tweets (separated by one in between): “Everyone PAY ATTENTION to the mentions… They are literally exposing themselves in the mentions. We can trace this all back to the origins.”

On the one hand: yawn. Sadly, these sorts of claims are dime a dozen on Twitter. On the other hand: @socialcoroner is the official Twitter account of Social Autopsy, an anti-bullying start-up that launched its Kickstarter last week, and the rant against Quinn and Harper garnered it hundreds of new followers. Quinn and Harper are very strange targets for an organization like this: Generally speaking, there is almost zero overlap between the sorts of people who publicly and repeatedly denounce those two particular women and the sorts of people concerned with ending online harassment. What the hell is going on here?

It’s a strange, slightly complicated story — but it’s also a useful cautionary tale about what can happen when newcomers wander into the weirder, angrier corners of the internet without first reading a tour guide or two.

***

Social Autopsy launched its Kickstarter campaign on April 12, billing itself as a way to catalogue the abuses of trolls and cyberbullies. Its founder is [Candace Amber Owens (born 1989)], a 26-year-old woman with a background in finance who has painful firsthand experience with bullying — when she was in high school in Stamford, Connecticut, a classmate and former friend left racist death threats on her phone, sparking a local scandal that came to ensnare the mayor and his son, the latter of whom was in a car with the perpetrator at the time he threatened Owens.

It’s clear these events had an effect on Owens. “The age of technology and social media has slowly disintegrated individual accountability, the consequences of which are devastating,” she says in Social Autopsy’s promotional video, which then rolls news coverage of a series of suicides that may have been caused, at least in part, by cyberbullying. She then explains what Social Autopsy will do: “We attach [people’s] words to their places of employment, and anybody in the entire world can search for them. What we are doing is figuratively lifting the masks up so nobody can hide behind, you know, Twitter handles or privatized profiles. It’s all real, and it’s all researchable. You can still say whatever you want to say on social media, but you have to be willing to stand by your words.” According to the Kickstarter, the company is seeking $75,000 in funding and hopes to launch with 150,000 profiles.

The pitch, to anyone steeped in the world of social media in 2016, is odd, if not ominous. [Candace Amber Owens (born 1989)] is unclear how she plans to do any of the things she says she will, and listening to her description of a site that “lifts masks” and connects people’s names to their employers, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that Social Autopsy’s goals include de-anonymizing people online and making it easier to dox trolls and harassers. And that’s exactly how the Kickstarter pitch was interpreted by most of the people who saw it. The freak-out was both immediate and predictable — a site that allows users to “report” people for entry in a database that will portray them as a troll or a cyberbully has obvious potential for all kinds of abuse.

In the days that followed, a rare degree of unity was achieved between various opposing factions in the endless internet culture wars: Gamergater and anti-Gamergate advocate alike agreed that this was a very bad idea, and that the Kickstarter’s lack of details — when it launched, there was little sign the company had given any thoughts to potential privacy concerns, nor to countermeasures against the inevitability of reports leveled against innocent people — suggested it was a half-baked, potentially dangerous service that no one really wanted.

The response to Social Autopsy seemed, in short, like a clear instance of the internet — that is, the market for the service itself — rearing up and issuing forth a guttural, earsplitting No thanks! But that’s not how Owens sees things. Instead, she’s convinced the current online shaming she’s experiencing — including death threats and violently racist language delivered into her company’s inbox — are the result of a conspiracy, possibly a far-reaching one, spearheaded by Quinn and Harper. She thinks they, and particularly Quinn, are the ones sending her nasty email, or that they started the hysteria which led to the inundation, at least. She also thinks they’re operating a network of sock-puppet social-media accounts trying to take down Social Autopsy — all because they’re afraid of what the nascent company will reveal about them once it’s up and running.

There is no actual evidence any of this is true, and yet Owens, thrust into an internet culture war she knew nothing about coming in, has misinterpreted, in a particularly cringeworthy way, various bits of mundane “evidence” as implicating Quinn and Harper. She has accidentally become a true believer in a common variety of Gamergate conspiracy — all without even really knowing what Gamergate is. And she’s convinced she’s about to break the whole thing open in a big blog post she plans to publish on her website, degree180.com, later today.

It all started with an email from Zoe Quinn to Owens the evening of the Kickstarter launch. For the uninitiated, Quinn is the original victim of Gamergate. Her ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni effectively launched the entire online movement with a lengthy, vindictive blog post he published about her, in August of 2014, leading to a cascade of harassment and death threats that has never fully abated since.

She had expressed concerns about Social Autopsy on Twitter, and soon an Autopsy intern gave her Owens’s personal work email address. (Quinn is a co-founder of Crash Override Network, a “crisis helpline, advocacy group and resource center for people who are experiencing online abuse.” With the exception of a few instances in which she responded to individual claims below, Quinn said in a DM statement she didn’t want to comment on the particulars of her interactions with Owens. “It’s unfortunate that the public conversation that could have been about the project and the underlying merits of different tactics of fighting against online abuse has been largely hijacked by people acting in bad faith hoping to cause a spectacle,” the statement read in part, “and I have no interest in allowing myself to be used for that.”)

Shortly after Quinn initiated email contact, the two women were on the phone. It didn’t go well. [Candace Amber Owens (born 1989)] said she found Quinn “pompous” and that she didn’t think Quinn’s concerns, which varied from the potential of children getting doxxed by Social Autopsy to the threat she thought Gamergate posed to Owens herself, were well-founded. Quinn, Owens also told me, said she was calling on behalf of a group of anti-bullying organizations, but wouldn’t say which ones. Things got increasingly heated, and then Quinn broke into tears and said something like “I don’t think you understand — this is going to ruin everything!” Owens said she found it odd and suspicious that Quinn started crying, especially given that she was calling as a representative of various  organizations. After they got off the phone, the two had a brief email correspondence which culminated, Owens said, in Quinn asking her not to contact her again. (In a DM conversation, Quinn acknowledged she had teared up, but denied saying anything that Owens could have interpreted as “This is going to ruin everything!” She also denied having claimed to be speaking for anyone other than herself.)

About 45 minutes after Quinn sent her final email, Owens said she started receiving racist hate mail at the main Kickstarter contact email for Social Autopsy, and at her own personal email — the first email she received simply said “NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER” (Owens is African-American). It soon became a deluge of harassment, some of it violent, with many of the fake email addresses the harassers used containing words like “gaming” or a variation thereof. “I spent an entire night being harassed — I couldn’t even answer the real questions from people that were coming from our Kickstarter campaign,” said Owens. Here are some of the messages she received, which are quite graphic:

By the time I spoke with her on Saturday night, [Candace Amber Owens (born 1989)] had convinced herself that it was Quinn sending her at least some of those harassing notes. For one thing, she found the fake handles suspicious. Gaming was “an industry and a community that I had, prior to talking to Zoe Quinn, no idea about — they were not on our radar.” It also seemed a little too pat that Quinn had warned her there would be a wave of harassment and then, voilà, there was a wave of harassment, especially given that the Kickstarter had been operating for the better part of a day with nary a critique from haters. I pressed Owens on this: she really thought Quinn sent her the “NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER” note, and the other over-the-top hateful ones? “She sent or knew who sent them,” she responded. “100 percent undeniable.” The belief seems to hinge almost entirely on the facts that the abusive emails came in after she spoke with Quinn, and that both Quinn and some of the notes mentioned gamers.

Owens said she woke up furious the next day, and saw she had received an email in the personal work account that Quinn had been given, “which to me said ‘red flag, this is Zoe Quinn’” (it should be pointed out that Owens’s work account is not hard to figure out). The email linked to a thread on 4chan’s /pol/ board, which is notorious for its reactionary politics and offensive trollery, in which users teed off on Social Autopsy and what a bad idea it was. “So don’t say no one warned you,” the author of that email wrote, “but seriously you need to take the time to read the whole thread do not dismiss this, it will only hurt you in the future if you do.” Soon after that, Owens noticed someone had posted about Social Autopsy on Reddit as well, and soon after that that someone had created a fake social-media account on Twitter — “sociaIautopsy” with a capital I instead of an L, to trick people. Owens attributed just about all of this to Quinn and her allies.

Another big piece of evidence Owens highlights as proof of a conspiracy to take down her company is the “Open Letter to Social Autopsy” [2016, April 15][See https://medium.com/@randileeharper/an-open-letter-to-social-autopsy-ae64fccdcfe ]  posted to Medium by a well-known Gamergate critic named Randi Lee Harper. In the letter, Harper, a frequent Gamergate target and anti-harassment advocate herself, tore into Owens for wandering into a situation she didn’t fully understand (Harper noted that at one point Owens referred to Quinn as a Gamergate leader — this is kind of like referring to Obama as a big tea-party activist). Harper didn’t hold back. “I’m telling you my credentials so you can understand where I’m coming from when I tell you, unequivocally, you are a goddamn trainwreck,” she wrote at one point. Later: “You are a fucking idiot.” Then, referring to the fact that Kickstarter suspended funding for Social Autopsy: “You blamed your Kickstarter getting shut down on trolls. You’re wrong. That was us. As long as you’re willfully harming other people by creating shitty uninformed products while kicking the shit out of anyone that tries to help you, we’re going to keep getting you shut down.”

To Owens, this level of anger just didn’t make sense — there had to be something else going on. “I started piecing it together, and I was like, Oh my God, this is actually who these people are — this is crazy,” she said. To find out more, she started researching Quinn’s and Harper’s names. Quickly she collided headfirst with a key point of Gamergate orthodoxy: Many online harassment victims — particularly “professional victims” like Quinn and Harper — are making up or exaggerating the harassment against them. Hardcore Gamergaters even think Quinn, Harper, or both run elaborate ruses to try to convince the world they are under online attack when in fact they aren’t. (Part of what makes these theories so hard to believe is that if you Google either name, you can see that a disturbing number of people have been utterly obsessed with both women — particularly Quinn — since Gamergate broke. Given the sheer heat that has been blasted at them for so long, it would be bizarre if they hadn’t been hit by wave after wave of abuse and threats.) In a DM statement, Harper said, in part, “This isn’t the first project that was likely well intentioned but lacked research into both technology as well as the psychology of harassment … Without that collective knowledge base and support [of the preexisting members of the online anti-harassment community], anyone entering this new tech sector is going to have a difficult time.”

This is a striking example of how successfully Gamergate has tarred two of its targets. Owens, new to the controversy and just trying to understand more about the women who had criticized her, quickly became convinced that Quinn and Harper were some sort of internet supervillains. Lacking the full context of the Gamergate story, and reading a trove of information which all seemed to confirm her suspicions, Owens fell in deeper. She felt her instincts about Quinn had been confirmed. “I started reading obviously more into it, [about how] people had suspected this for a while, that [Quinn] is actually making money,” she said. “And that Randi doxxes people … they had a tweet saved of her calling for somebody’s address and telephone number [this refers to an instance in which Harper released personal information about a debt collector]. These two are like cohorts, they’re going back and forth, and they plan, and each of them has their own network — they both have a big following —  I still do not know, admittedly, why Randi Lee Harper is, I do not know why I got an open letter from her. All I know is that she crafted the entire thing for me. Their network runs deep. So who knows? I don’t know how deep this goes.”

This happened over and over. Owens kept mentioning pieces of “evidence” that were just … well, the way things work online. But to her, they could only be a sign of a campaign by Quinn and Harper against her. Owens repeatedly circled back to the sheer volume of anti-Social Autopsy content she’d witnessed, and the timing of it — a firestorm of vitriol that followed the pattern of every Twitter and Reddit pile-on of the last several years, where someone says or does something, there is a brief pause while news of it spreads, and then there’s a sudden explosion. Owens found it suspicious that there had been a lag time between the Kickstarter going up and the harassment wave, and that so many people seemed profoundly upset with her project. “I’m thinking, even if I disagreed with something that was on Kickstarter, the amount of time people are investing should have been an immediate red flag to me,” she said. “No matter what you disagree with, you do not text and post for 24 hours regarding it unless you have a personal investment in it the matter. You don’t — especially if it doesn’t even exist yet. We’re in Kickstarter.” Owens also found it incredibly suspicious that people were tweeting complaints at the FBI and other authorities — which, again, is a common tactic during just about every internet outrage. But to Owens: Why would anyone do that unless they had a very personal interest in stopping Social Autopsy? At another point, she noted that one critic hailed all the way from the U.K.“What blogger has an interest in this all the way in the United Kingdom, talking trash about us? It makes no sense.”

During our DM chats following our phone conversation, she also kept getting hung up on anonymity — she found it highly suspicious, and indicative of a possible conspiracy, that so many people were bashing her anonymously. “If you don’t use your real name on Twitter why do you have SO many followers?” she asked me at one point. At another, Owens said she was pretty sure one particular account was in on the conspiracy because when she tweeted at them asking them to reveal their real name (only to her), they refused to do so.

Eventually, Owens came to believe that a group of the Twitter accounts tweeting at her were all either controlled by Harper and Quinn directly, or were colluding with them to attack Social Autopsy. I asked her to show me some of the accounts she thought were in on it and she mentioned @iglvzx, or Izzy Galvez — a well-known-within-the-community anti-Gamergate figure who had been tweeted repeatedly about Social Autopsy over the Kickstarter launch. He is only “controlled by” Harper and Quinn in the sense that he tweets a lot about online harassment. This is exactly the sort of thing he’d have a strong opinion about. If you possess some background about Gamergate, Izzy Galvez tweeting about a company like Social Autopsy is as surprising and suspicious as Bernie Sanders saying something negative about big banks.

Pulling all her suspicions together, Owens laid out her full theory. She is convinced, based on a series of escalating misconceptions about how social media works, mixed with a dose of exposure to the Gamergate literature (and some helpful input from the Gamergate supporters who have been following her tweetstorms), that Quinn and Harper are making a lot of money by faking harassment against themselves to boost concern about the issue, and that they were worried Social Autopsy would blow their cover. The funny thing, Owens told me, is that her company’s initial plan was to draw on data from public profiles anyway — so Quinn’s sock puppets would have been safe (again, the Kickstarter’s “mask-lifting” language rendered this point rather fuzzy). But now, she said, she has different plans: She wants Social Autopsy to get more technologically ambitious, and to use it to tear down the entire Quinn/Harper ring of sock-puppet accounts and fake harassment.

Owens seems to have trouble accepting that her idea simply wasn’t well-received by, well, anyone. Only a conspiracy can explain what’s going on. “Everything happened all at once,” she said. “Things don’t go viral like that, okay? It wasn’t viral. It was contained. It was contained within one community — the gaming community. That’s not how viral works. Viral’s viral.”

***

Owens’s Twitter rants lasted a big chunk of the weekend. Sometimes, she called out Quinn and Harper directly. Other times she retweeted questions and comments from the Gamergaters who were eying her cautiously, wondering if she could be a useful ally (so many different threads about her were started at KotakuInAction, Gamergate’s Reddit headquarters, that mods there created a stickied “Candace Owens/SocialAutopsy Megathread”). She gave an audio interview to the Ralph Retort, a far-right blog that has joined in on dogpiles against Gamergate targets in the past. A couple times, she tweeted out a “#Gamergatesequel” hashtag, not understanding how that might look to the people who have been involved in that controversy for a year and a half and who naturally get angry or excited at anything GG-related. (“#Gamergatesequel. Coming to a theatre near you, Monday April 18th,” she wrote, referring to her upcoming big blog post exposé). Naturally, Quinn and Harper’s enemies relished the fact that the anti-harassment movement seemed to be eating itself, and that, in their eyes, a newcomer to this endless fight had “exposed” Gamergate’s enemies for who they are.

As a result of her accidental slide into internet obsession, at a time when she could be figuring out how to address the numerous valid concerns the public has raised about her company, Owens is instead focusing, laser-like, on unraveling a conspiracy that exists only in the eyes of fevered Gamergaters and men’ rights activists. “It makes no sense,” she said of the outcry against Social Autopsy. “I’m telling you — there is a whole network that I’m pretty convinced … it really is Gamergate, but it’s bigger than Gamergate. Because the implications of it are so much heavier. How many organizations do this? How many organizations stand up on a stage … and make sure this problem never fucking dies [by faking harassment]?” She’s going to get to the bottom of this — she wants to position Social Autopsy in the vanguard of the fight against Quinn, Harper, and their nefarious allies.

So overall, Social Autopsy’s Kickstarter rollout has not been without its hiccups.

I imagine it may have gone something like this:

Zoe Quinn sat down at her computer. She was scrolling through hashtags and retweets pertaining to the one issue upon which her notoriety and personal brand hinged to: Cyber-bullying.

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.

A 2 1/2 minute video, of what she perceived to be an unintelligible group of young women talking excitedly about how they were going to “break the internet”. Literally. A video, followed by a brief, Buzzfeed-like description laced with much-too obvious jokes and small jabs regarding women working in the field of technology.

The video had come from Kickstarter.Com—a crowdfunding platform, which by nomenclature suggests an early stage for any company. And yet it was enough to strike a nerve within Zoe.

A real one.

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.

The facts of the matter are that Zoe Quinn then unleashed a twitter assault, an early, aggressive move against a company in which she really knew nothing about. To be precise, she released 22 back-to-back tweets aimed at the project, presenting her self as a former victim who knew that such a solution to end cyber-bullying could not work.

“Spreading people’s abuse is quite often not at all what they want. Anything that is public facing at all has to be treated with privacy and onsent as the two biggest ethos or else it’s crap”, she wrote among many other things.

She received instant support and favoriting by the dozens.

But that wasn’t what she wanted.

It wasn’t what she wanted at all.

The day was just beginning to wind down. I hadn’t slept the night prior, as the nerves of my very first Crowdfunding effort had begun taking a real toll. We were up about $2700.00 (not bad for our first 13 hours of fundraising), and our friends and family were promising to push even hardest for us the next day.

We had pulled together the campaign seamlessly. We were networked with other anti-bullying organizations beforehand and were happy to see that the Tyler Clementi Foundation was among the first to re-tweet our Kickstarter effort that morning. I had been emailing back and forth with them, as we wanted to make sure our campaign would simultaneously provide support to their Day1 organization— myself, a huge fan of their mission.

I was wearing the lack of sleep on my face, and had been hitting the refresh button on our campaign page every few minutes to watch the dollar amount rise.

Had we done enough? Could we do more? Ever the perfectionist, doubt had begun to rear it’s ugly head.

Because we had switched the verbiage on our campaign last second, a decision I had made personally, to make it more digestible. I read an article entitled “Mistakes people make on kickstarter”, the night prior and it had listed “not knowing the kickstarter community” as one of them. It described the kickstarter community as “fun” and advised using humor which made me second guess the direction of ours. I felt the subject matter of the video was a bit heavy (we were talking about children commiting suicide for god’s sake), and it was therefore unnecessary to hold the description beneath the video in the same  regard.

Plus, we had strategized and had suspected we could raise the amount ($75,000) amongst our large circle of friends and family. Our focus was to extend our reach through them, and hit our goal through the networks that they existed in. We were extremely organized, and we had mapped out a day-by-day blueprint. Here is an excerpt from the e-mail I circulated to a group of individuals and potential investors who had been involved in our project from day 1:

By all accounts that evening, our plan had worked. My co-worker called me around 7:30pm to inform me that we had been contacted via the Degree180 twitter handle. She said someone was asking how she could reach out to us to discuss the project:

I should have investigated further but I didn’t. I considered this twitter request to be no different than any of the individuals that were reaching out to us via kickstarter directly, asking us to clarify certain aspects of our campaign.

Someone wanted to know more about our company? No problem.

“Give her my direct e-mail” I replied.

When Zoe Quinn e-mailed me at 8:33pm, she began with her credentials. She described herself as the:

“co-founder of Crash Override Network, one of the only online abuse helplines and victims advocacy groups. I’m also patient zero of GamerGate, which I will assume you’re familiar with given your line of work.”

Bad assumption.

I had never heard her name in my entire life, and hadn’t the slightest inclination as to who, or what Gamergate was.

Call me old fashioned, but I live outside of the virtual world and have had to make a living outside of my television set. I had spent the prior 4 years of my life working on Wall street and can lay slaughter to the myth that the city never sleeps;  It does—it’s just people in it that don’t. In 2015 I had pivoted to the idea of starting my own company, to help be a part of the change that I feel our world needs to make.

I am a conscious capitalist. This was a term pegged by John Mackey (my idol) the founder of Whole Foods, and perpetuated by his old college roommate (Jeff Tindell) who just so happens to own the Container Store. Simply put it is the reimagination of capitalism as “a new system for doing business grounded in a more evolved ethical consciousness”. It’s an understanding that “making money” and “doing good”, need’nt exist as exclusives of one another. It is something I was ripe to partake in, most especially after having witnessed firsthand the innerworkings of the world of finance, (although to it, I owe the person that I am today). 

[NOTE - Possible that there is a mistake in the blog ... "Kip Tindell" is currently Chairman & CEO of The Container Store., not a "Jeff Tindell" . See https://www.consciouscapitalism.org/people/kip-tindell  ] 

My idea was big and little at the same time. I wanted to put an end to the era of internet thugging. It is something I’ve genuinely never understood— how people so recklessly utilize the web to invoke terror upon others. I had examined the correlation between the rising rate of suicides in teenagers over the years, and knew that, (even it was never going to be explicitly stated) the age of social media had contributed significantly to its dark rise.

I had experienced it myself when I was in high school 10 years earlier. All we had was Facebook, but the writing was on the wall even then. I was involved in an incident that was labeled a “hate crime”, and exposed as a victim to just how awful the cyber world could be, for both the victims and the accused.

So when Zoe introduced herself to me that night,  I was somewhat embarrassed that I had missed a scandal which she so pompously assumed I must know, given my campaign.

I did what any person does in such a pressed circumstance; I raced to Wikipedia, pulled up the story and did my best to play catch up.

I didn’t think I had to dig deeper then the first couple of sentences, really. I gathered she was a victim of severe cyber-bullying due to a crappy boyfriend and national press, and I immediately looked upon her sympathetically.

She continued:

“I came across your Kickstarter today and I would very much like to speak to you about it. Or rather, I would like to talk you out of it based on what I know from over a year and a half of being a leading voice in the discussion around solving online abuse. I’m assuming you’re coming from a place of good faith with trying to fix the issue of online abuse, and I’d like to ask you to assume I am as well given my expertise in the subject”

I thought this portion was weird. Because of all of the anti-bullying communities that we had networked with and reached out to, none had approached us with such an attitude. Questions initially? Sure. But stating an intention to “talk us out” of our company? That takes a certain amount of ego.

Nonetheless, I agreed to speak with her over the phone. I was anticipating a very short discussion between two people that were in the same camp. I expected to address her concerns, and answer them in ways that would lessen her anxiety. I also thought I would expand SocialAutopsy’s network of anti-bullying supporters.

I normally keep the grass cut low. The business of finance had properly exposed to me to the idea of snakes, and I had taken away from it the ability to spot one out from a mile away. But Zoe was a victim, and managed to slide past my defenses easily. My guard was fully down when she phoned me at 9:50pm, from a Hawaii number.

At best, the conversation I had with her was weird. At worst, it was unstable.

She began normally by again stating her credentials and telling me that I was making a huge mistake. She informed me she spoke on behalf of all of the agencies and organizations that she worked with and told me that they had contacted her because they were concerned.

They were concerned that minors would be doxxed.

Interesting. That was first time we had heard that term in our campaign: “doxxed”.

 And I’m not referring to the kickstarter campaign that we were currently 12 hours into. We had actually shared our company story and intention with the world when it graced the front pages of all Connecticut newspapers six weeks earlier. It had been six weeks since the two articles had been published, and we had been e-mailed and facebooked with questions many times over. In fact, we had decided to put together a short FAQ video as a result, which we threw on our splash page at the time to tackle some of the more immediate concerns. While the question pertaining to “minors” had come up during that earlier time. The “doxxing”  word (a slang term) had not.

 Not once, ever, in the six weeks of initial feedback from many communities and organizations, had we heard the word “dox”.

 That aside, I was happy to answer her question because I was ready for it.

I told her that we never publish the addresses or telephone numbers of any individual, only the information that they have already published onto their linked-in pages or public profiles. (Schools they attended, Jobs, etc). I told her that regarding minors, it was something that I felt strongly we had to include them in—but that she needn’t worry because we had not a single minor in our database to date.

To clarify, I built this database with minors in mind. They are the ones I care about most deeply as any person who knows me will confirm. I did not come from a rich family. I had to take out loans to go to college, and work almost full-time throughout school to support myself. I chose to do that through nannying. So for 4 years of college and a year after college in NY, I made a career working with children.

It is the best job I’ve ever had, and I consider every single child that I have cared for over the years to be family members to me. I have learned from children that everyone is born good and incredibly certain of who they are;  it is the world that strips that sense of self away over time.

It is incredibly difficult being a child, much less with the added saga of bullying that platforms like twitter, facebook, and instagram provide. I remember myself as a child that was way too thin, with fried hair, and having been made fun of for having no boobs (still don’t). I was lucky I didn’t have to go home and read the same criticisms of myself that I already harbored within my own mind. I can’t imagine feeling the echo of such words existing within the perpetuity of the internet.

Prior to launching our Kickstarter, I had met with high schools, teachers and parents throughout the state of Connecticut who had seen my article and wanted to get involved. People from all over the spectrum; even those involved in the aftermath of the horrific Newtown shootings, who were now devoting their lives in support of children. They all agreed that cyber-bullying is one of the biggest issues they face today, and coming up with solutions to combat it had proven difficult over the years.

The working idea was that we might be able to infiltrate their consciousness at a young age to understand the weight of the internet (hey kids! what you say can actually last forever).  By holding their words on our database for a few (weeks? months?—we hadn’t decided anything yet)— then this sordid fact would register at a young age, and they wouldn’t make the same mistakes as an adult. Our mission was to stop the cycle, and you can only do that by affecting a young generation.

Children think about short term goals (scholarships, making sports team, etc) right? We had imagined that if organizations could sign up for SocialAutopsy and tell these young adults that they did “social background checks” on all of their students, students might think twice before hitting the enter button.

Our network LOVED the idea.

We weren’t so quick to assume that everyone in the world would though, so we knew that we first had to launch and actually EXIST first. As a database dedicated to adults, so that parents would see it and get an understanding for how effective it might be for children.

So to Zoe, I explained that the question of minors was a non-issue. It was something that didn’t even need to be discussed as it was a way-down-the-line consideration.

 Zoe then pivoted her argument and told me that she was concerned that the bullies would wind up being harassed by self-proclaimed vigilantes.

Had heard that one 4 times that day alone,  via backers on our kickstarter page and had answered it without any push back.

 I explained to her in depth our database. I explained to her that since it was pictorial-driven, you couldn’t search by keyword (#Britney Spears) and expect all of the people to come up who had said something against her. I explained to her that you could only search by a real first and last name, so if a person wanted to discover who “John Doe” was on twitter, our database would be useless to them. Because the screenshot would say John Doe, but that image would be registered under the real user’s name. In essence, you’d have to know who you were looking for, and if you already knew their first and last name, you could head to their social media pages regardless of us.

I felt confident in my answer because we had realized that potential flaw early on. When we first hatched the idea, I had an off-site web developer who had helped us to build Degree180.com, draw up a mock of how the website might function. He did it quickly—in about 10 days if I recall—before sending me a link that would allow us to go in and add profiles of people so that we could see all of the potential flaws in our design. We added about 100 or so profiles and sent around the not-live link to a close group of friends and relevant parties for feedback.

I explained this to Zoe.

Her next point was about legalities.

I didn’t even understand her point about legal concerns, because what we do is common-sense legal. If a person has on their public linked-in  and Facebook accounts that they work at Trader Joe’s, why the hell would they be upset that a third party site knew that they worked at Trader Joe’s?

Even more: why on earth would a “doxxer” come to our database to find that information when it’s in plain site on the person’s other profiles? I genuinely wasn’t clear on her concern, but stressed to her that we had already asked lawyers (of course) regarding what falls under public use: the answer is, mostly anything you can find on the internet published by the users themselves.

Turns out the internet is public.

Also, we had contacted Facebook’s legal team to garner a better understanding of their privacy guidelines, before we sank thousands of dollars into building the real database. Plus, on our kickstarter campaign we had explained that we would be in need of more legal support, so wasn’t it much too early for this line of questioning regarding an un-launched database?

Zoe was growing frustrated with my failure to understand what she was failing to understand.

I thought I could earn her support by explaining to her that we were focused on threats–the kind of people that threaten to put a bullet in the back of someone’s head and rape their children because they disagree with their political opinions. In my estimation, such words belong to a parasitic community, a group that I do not at all fret when people ask “how could you create something that could potentially destroy their livelihood”?

Because how exactly do those people think such words don’t destroy the livelihood of the person those words are launched against? Have you ever been threatened to be killed or raped repeatedly, by an unknown harasser?

Zoe disagreed with me, and here is where it got weird.

She told me that she KNEW those people were not bad people. That she herself had been a part of the online group Anonymous, and that it was really just “something they did”. She explained that she would never want the people that harassed her listed anywhere, and that she knew the first and last name of some of them, and yet had never reported them.

What?

I grew silent. I didn’t know what to say to someone telling me that they thought such internet aggression was light fun.I told her I appreciated the feedback and that she had given us an idea. That maybe we should let celebrities and victims opt out somehow if they knew their attackers. It felt like a good way to end the conversation positively.

She reiterated to me her credentials, and said I ought to listen to her because of them and that she didn’t want to go back to the anti-bullying organizations that had reached out to her with concerns with the current answers I was giving her.

I asked her to name which organizations, and she did not. I offered to have her put me in touch with them directly, and she declined.

This is about the point when my red flags started waving back and forth, wildly. I had been in the weeds with anti-bullying organizations and I knew it was highly unlikely that they would send a third party person to speak with us on their behalf.

We are all a part of the same initiative and want to help one another get there. There is absolutely no need to hide behind a third party spokesperson if you have any legitimate concerns.

She switched her tactic, once again, telling me that I did not know who I was messing with. She warned me that Gamergate (the community) would come after me and that they would be ruthless. She warned me that they would try to end my Kickstarter campaign, put me through cyber-hell, and that it wasn’t an experience I wanted to live through as she had.

It is very important to note that Zoe Quinn told me that Gamergate would try to end my Kickstarter campaign.

Again, I had no idea who or what Gamergate was, but I assured her I was ready to embrace their backlash. Of course, one cannot expect to end cyber-bullying without some sort of cyber-revolt against us, and I was confident we would be ready when the time came.

She then grew hysterical, claiming that it wasn’t enough. That she wanted me to put a stake in the project altogether, never bringing it to launch.

This part was practically insane to me; the fact that she thought that with a simple phone call, I would drop something that I had sank thousands of dollars of personal investment and hard work into, just because Zoe Quinn said so. Her suggestion was ego-manaical.

I told her firmly and with as much respect that I could muster at that point that we were going to have to agree to disagree; that I was not dropping the project nor was I clear on what it was exactly that had her so riled up, emotionally.

We had reached a point of no return here. She was beyond emotional, and I was (aside from confused), aware that she and I would never see eye to eye. I told her that I hoped that when we launched, she would see the value in the technology. At which point she broke into tears and exclaimed;

“By then it will be too late, it’ll ruin everything”.

With that, and after 43 minutes of erratic conversation, she hung up the phone on me.

========================================================================

I imagine that Zoe Quinn was devastated.

I imagine she had collapsed onto the floor of her bedroom in hysterics, maybe even punching a pillow in frustration on the way down; the point here of course, is that her plan to effectively shut down SocialAutopsy.com with flexed credentials and a pompous attitude had done nothing to shake it’s founder.

And so something had to be done.

========================================================================

Mentally, I couldn’t establish what had just transpired. A person who I thought was an obvious ally, had flown into a raging fit against me.

I called a close friend and recounted the situation. I told him;

“either she is severely stockholmed, or she herself is a troll. No questions about it”.

I didn’t expect to do anything with those suspicions of course because we were still in the early midst of our campaign; a campaign that I had spent a month prepping for.

I instead waited (about an hour or so), and then resolved to send her a nice follow up e-mail, so that I could completely reshift my focus:

You will note that my e-mail went out to her at around 12:53am that night, or technically, morning. I did not receive any response from her, and I myself didn’t wind up making it to bed until around 4am.

That’s not because I couldn’t sleep, but because suddenly, my project took a nose dive.

A mere 45 minutes after I had sent that e-mail out to Zoe, it began, with a message from “John Joe” via our Kickstarter page:

And the onslaught continued nearly every 10 minutes straight into the morning after that:

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. [Only one shown below... other examples are included in original article... ] 

Suddenly, our campaign had shifted from a positive one with plenty of support and feedback, to an ugly one with menacing threats. We were shocked by the anger being expressed in all of the messages:

The messages poured in with words that floated between misogyny and racism– and all came from, you guessed it: men. On our website, we were also being hit with feigned e-mail subscriptions with entries that were misogynistic and racist at the exact same time, like this one:

I want all of my readers to understand that we had not received a single item of spam to our kickstarter folder before these messages appeared, and now they were flooding in, one after the other: to our campaign page, to our degree180 accounts, and yup, you guessed it– via twitter. I could no longer answer any legitimate concerns to our backers because we were being spammed in every which direction.

To clarify, we had received exactly 8 legitimate messages to our kickstarter account from backers before I spoke to Zoe Quinn. After I spoke to her, we had received about 52 of veiled threats, before we had even gotten up for breakfast the next day.

I did not think this was a coincidence.

Men, Misogyny, and Gaming. Retrospectively, that was the one thing that was apparent in every single message I received, even down to the e-mail addresses used:

Is it a coincidence? That everything Zoe feared for us happened within hours of her warning me it might? Is it also a coincidence that after 5 weeks of campaining and promotion that the fear that was suddenly being expressed was that minors would be “doxxed”?

My initial suspicion was that Zoe perhaps tipped the gaming community off and they were now coming down on us: hard.

However I exited that suspicion when I received this anonymous e-mail  that morning, alerting me of a 4chan.org planned attack to debunk our kickstarter efforts:

It was another male. He was tipping me off, and simultaneously threatening me against continuing our campaign. He said he “wasn’t doing it to warn [me]”, and yet clearly, “he” was. But that wasn’t what stood out to me.

What stood out to me was the fact that this e-mail came in to my personal e-mail address. It was not directed to us via kickstarter (which is the most sensible way to contact us if you have real concerns), nor did it come in to us through many of the other highly publicized Degree180 and SocialAutopsy contact accounts. This came in through to my e-mail, the address of which I had only given to Zoe Quinn when she reached out to me via twitter.

My personal e-mail was then signed up for two porn sites, again odd, considering guessing my e-mail address would be an unnatural route for any person to take given the publicity of our campaign.

This was not a coincidence at all in my estimation: She had slipped up.

Zoe e-mailed me a response to my follow up e-mail shortly thereafter at 1:09pm.  She was writing to warn me that my earlier site had been googled and alluded to the fact that this was evidence that our site was not developped in an expert way. She wrote:

There it was. The months earlier mock site which we had used as a rough draft to internally assess our design flaws. I was confused, because we never brought that site live, but I understood the implications; she was going to push this out, and people were going to say they had uncovered our actual site, as evidence that what we built was technologically flawed.

And within minutes, we saw it being circulated on twitter.

I hit back, HARD in my e-mail back to her. I suddenly understood that she was at the center of trying to smear our reputation but I didn’t understand why:

Her response?:

Don’t hold your breath, bitch.

I had directed a twitter rant earlier that day to the #Gamergate community, using the appropriate hashtag. I felt I was under attack by them, and knew Zoe had tipped them off. 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.

Our twitter account was exploding still, now being mentioned about every 3 seconds. The rumor was that we were creating a site that would “dox” minors. They were tweeting at parenting organizations, at the FBI, at anyone who would listen to the fact that SocialAutopsy was committing a crime. They were retweeting and sharing facts as though they had been spoken from God himself.

And everything they were saying was a lie.

Since Zoe had alerted me to both the reddit (and presumedly the 4chan) feeds, I was now given a front row seat to the plan that was being devised to take us down. They had announced that we were, again “doxxing minors” and that if they all e-mailed Kickstarter they could have our campaign taken down.

And they did so, successfully.

I had alerted kickstarter to their plan and the e-mail chain, and they responded in kind which was reassuring, but hours later, we had learned that they had caved.

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. In fact, we were viral only within the gamer community. It had somehow been contained, and the lies were growing more and more aggressive with personal shots taken at my character.

I was labeled a femi-nazi, which really? Had no one read my articles regarding how I hated feminism for the sake of feminism, and lambasting the #freekesha campaign?

I was photoshopped to appear anti-Semitic, although I had written once about the Jewish man I once dated, quite favorably [Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20160422202847/http://degree180.com/im-so-over-dating/ ... Note that there is no reference to  Jewish man in this blog post from January 2, 2016... ].    I was labeled a pedophile-supporter, an idiot, you name-it. It was vicious.

I knew of course that I was at the center of an effective smear campaign—against a database that hadn’t even launched.

========================================================================

The smoking gun.

Confession: I have no idea who Randi Lee Harper is. I saw that she was in my twitter mentions, but didn’t think to take the time to examine why a group of trolls kept wanting to shove her down my throat, in a positive light.

Double confession: I have no interest in discovering who Randi Lee Harper is, and still have no intention of looking her up or speaking with her, ever.

My boyfriend caught wind of a post from The Ralph Retort, that he labeled “fair”, which was a breath of fresh air from the vermin-like journalistic endeavors that we had seen being exercised thus far. Ralph’s post included excerpts from an open letter written by Harper, which can only be described as a diatribe against Candace Owens and socialautopsy.com.

She of course began with her resume, which similar to her cohort Ms. Quinn, read like something from someone who thought they were on the fast track to become Oprah. The only difference is, she explained why she was listing her exhaustive qualifications:

“I’m telling you my credentials so you can understand where I’m coming from when I tell you, unequivocally, you are a goddamn trainwreck”

She continued her elementary style of writing, and teenaged like inflammatory language with a brave “You are a fucking idiot. So, gloves off. I’m going to tell you now why your idea is shit.”

No, really. That’s a direct quote, and not from any of the children under the age of ten that I once babysat. Yes, it is ironic that within this writing capacity she somehow felt empowered enough to take swipes at my professionalism and intelligence. And yes it is ironic that she proclaims she is a feminist.

It is both ironic, and borderline delusional. Indicative of someone who has begun to believe in her own infallibility.

Her crappy writing isn’t what warranted my attention, though (I was an English/Journalism major in college, and have therefore seen many examples of such writing; teetering frequently between poor grammar, and childishness).

What caught my attention was this line,

“You blamed your Kickstarter getting shut down on trolls. You’re wrong. That was [Zoe and I].”

It was that one little sentence, that one little line that locked everything into place for me, instantly.

Because Randi Lee Harper was making an appeal to the Gamergate community with it. She was, in one little sentence playing the martyr. She wanted them to believe that she and Zoe didn’t understand my twitter outrage against them, and that they were happy to admit that it was actually them.

Her and Zoe had coordinated poorly there. Because Zoe had called me warning me against Gamergate and telling me they were going to try to end our campaign. Zoe was the one dropping breadcrumbs for me to see exactly what “Gamergate’s”  plans were to do so. It became very apparent to me, that they were playing both sides.

I suddenly began to wonder why.

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 swastika? Why had someone opened a counterfeit Twitter account pretending to be me? Why had they started a change.org petition? Why had they inundated kickstarter with e-mails, and why was Randi Harper now penning a piece that was 2,567 words long?

It was a lot for 24 hours. It was too much, in fact.

One of our twitter followers may have said it best when he offered that “effort takes so much… effort”.

It was our campaigns first 24 hours, and yet all of this had transpired. These people (all anonymous I should mention) were not just voicing their opinions, they were spending hours and hours of dedicated time ensuring that the public knew how awful I was and that I had to be stopped by any means. It was not only cyber harassment, it was a form of terrorism.

========================================================================

The Why:

Randi Harper and Zoe Quinn had discussed my project with one another. Regarding that, there can be no question.

They thought they could get me to pull the project down by beefing up their respective resumes, and with one phone call from “patient zero” of Gamergate.

When that didn’t work, the two of them launched 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 regarding Social Autopsy; they were trying to appear bigger than they actually were.

And these initial accounts were connected by one thing and one thing only; effort. Early effort. And a lot of it. One account @withmetta, even took it upon herself to write a blog piece regarding socialautopsy on Hubpages. It was the first blog that anonymous user had ever written on Hubpages.

Other affiliated accounts tried to point out to me (a bit too conspicuously) that they hated certain other accounts, but hey “even [they] agree that your idea is terrible because it would doxx minors”.

I bet they did agree.

So I launched a plan to test my theory, because I knew that anything that had happened before  would be considered “coincidental”.

Our kickstarter had been shut down and yet we were still receiving e-mailed threats about our database, since we hadn’t backed down from launching it. This time the threats were going to bloggers of Degree180.com and to our respective contact accounts. Here is one such e-mail that was written on Friday April 15th, 8:45pm:

From Jack, of course. Another guy. By then I read the multiple stories about how Randi and Zoe had made their money off of abuse from men. 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.

Back to my plan:

Shortly after receiving this e-mail from “Jack” I announced on Twitter that I would be releasing all of the e-mails; that I would be going on the Ralph Retort webcast with my suspicions that Zoe Quinn was behind the cyber attacks. I ranted that I thought she was behind all of the e-mail attacks we had received and that this time, to quote her cohort, “the gloves were off”. I announced that I had e-mails and evidence and that I would be speaking out. I focused purposely on the fact that I had e-mails.

My plan worked: the emails magically stopped. They stopped cold turkey. As I sit wring this today, we have gone an entire weekend without receiving so much as one e-mailed threat.

Still think that’s a coincidence?  A total inundation and then a total sudden stop?

No, that is the sloppy work of Zoe Quinn.

========================================================================

The why:

It’s interesting, and really something I had never considered. Just how much power you could wield 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.

If a blog piece was written about you, you could all inundate beneath it and write criticisms shifting the landscape of the other people’s thoughts. (Just watch what happens beneath this one).

If a company was coming out, and said in their crowdfunding video “what we are doing is figuratively lifting the masks off of trolls” you could inundate Kickstarter with e-mail complaints about minors and make them believe they were in involved in something dirty.

What you could do is control people’s perception. What is the valuation of that?

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. An effort to deter investors, supporters, and the general public; an effort to control what lives and dies.

A false, assumed majority, that upvotes or downvotes whenever and whatever they see fit. They could contact the media via twitter for instance, via a simple method of false inundation. Because who isn’t going to jump when their Twitter mentions go from a sluggish, every 15 minutes, down to every 5 seconds all pertaining to the same issue? Who isn’t going read the common opinion, manipulated perhaps by what an assumed majority is saying about an issue?

“Oh this is terrible, I feel so bad” [Insert whatever link here]

You could create different personnas, thereby infiltrating certain communities. And if a company like SocialAutopsy developed a technology to unmask you?

…It would ruin everything. Literally.

The implications here are as vast as they are ugly. In fact, they make me sick.

========================================================================

I want to be clear here that I am not supporting Gamergate or making a point regarding whether or not every single member of that community is an upstanding citizen that is deserving of retribution.

I am sharing my story. As a woman who had no prior knowledge of this situation, or plans to reach out regarding it. I am sharing my story, as an entrepreneur who made a sincere attempt to take out an issue of cyber-bullying, and unintentionally happened upon what may be one of the darkest implications of the net we’ve seen to date.

That it is a business; 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.

I cannot immediately assume how thick this cyber-industry runs. What I can tell you though is that if an idea—a mere 2 1/2 minute video that was on Kickstarter and being looked at by no one— incited a cyber war within 18 hours, then it is a business that has profit margins that would ripple through our economy if it came crashing down.

Indeed, we are looking at what may be the tip of an iceberg. and one that I am now for the first time, focused on exploring.

Beginning with Ms. Zoe Quinn and Randi Lee Harper.

Stay tuned…

DANBURY — From dealing with cyberbullying to losing those most dear, a panel of noted advocates including Madonna Badger showed this week how women can not only overcome adversity, but be empowered by it.

“I don’t think I would have been so fearless as a single mother taking care of a family, but now I’m fearless,” said Badger, who lost her three daughters and her parents during a Christmas Day house fire in Stamford five years ago. “Everything has already been taken away. It was just recently, very recently, that I wanted to be alive again.”

Badger joined other panelists including Candace Owens, a Stamford woman who formed the anti-bullying web site SocialAutopsy.com, and Valerie Jensen, founder of the Prospector Theater in Ridgefield, Thursday for the Women’s Business Council’s annual Conversations with Extraordinary Women held at the Matrix Corporate Center.

“The causes they stand behind, and the circumstances that inspired them are vastly different,” said JoAnn Cueva, director of the council, which is affiliated with the Danbury Chamber of Commerce, “but their goals are the same, to have an impact.”

For Owens, adversity came as a senior in high school, when she was the subject of racial threats and cyberbullying by classmates who were in the presence of the 14-year-old son of then-mayor, now Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. The story spread quickly and Owens’ face appeared in papers across the state.

“It was vicious,” said Owens. “From being told I should be tafred and feathered to messages about how they should put a bullet in the back of my head like Martin Luther King Jr. My face was in every paper, and everyone had an opinion about me. It caused a lot of trauma for my family and it broke me down for five years.”

Recently Owens launched SocialAutospsy.com, a new search engine and database that says it aims to expose the purveyors of anonymous online “hate speech” to employers, friends, and families. The move didn’t come without a price, however, in recent weeks Owens said she has been the subject of a massive cyber attack including hundreds of death threats and fake blogs posting misinformation about her online.

“It’s scary,” she said. “There were so many threats I wasn’t even allowed to publish that I would be at this talk today. But it also shows why work like this needs to continue.”

Badger said it took about two years after the death of her family to return to her New York City advertising agency. But before long, she began to understand the impact that objectification of women in her industry has on society. Less than a month before the fourth anniversary of the fire, she launched the hashtag campaign #WomenNotObjects and an accompanying video that has gone viral across the globe.

“After the horror of everything I found a purpose, a purpose that hopefully will help children in the way I know how,” she said. “This is something I can do.”

Jensen said she knew she needed to do something when she realized the impact unemployment had on her friends with disabilities. Growing up with a sister who has Down syndrome, Jensen’s family didn’t have the skills and strategies to deal with the disability at the time.

“Our local school system didn’t have any special education services and she had to be bused to a different school, so it became a real burden on the family,” Jensen said. “It was very difficult for me, and I didn’t think of a disability as anything other than a burden.”

That changed, however, when she attended a Special Olympics event with her sister. Jensen became more involved with the disabled community and formed the Prospector Theater in Ridgefield last year. More than 70 percent of the theater’s staff is disabled.

“I wanted to provide jobs for the disabled, but not just regular jobs,” she said, “I wanted awesome jobs! Life might not be the trip you thought you were going on, but it’s still a magical trip.”