Perhaps the most shocking thing about Milo Yiannopoulos is that he is utterly charming.

Online, the 31-year-old conservative Breitbart columnist is the sort of frustrating troll who, for instance, might declare his birthday World Patriarchy Day, suggest Donald Trump is “blacker” than Barack Obama, or, although he is gay himself, assert that gay rights have “made us dumber.”

He was recently booted from a demonstration against sexual violence in Los Angeles after showing up with a sign that read “‘Rape culture’ and Harry Potter. Both fantasy.” A dedicated contrarian, Yiannopoulos seems to delight in making enemies.

But in real life — in spite of all this, or, perhaps, because of it — Yiannopoulos is disarmingly likeable. After all, you don’t amass 85,000 Twitter followers, become the conservative torch-bearer in a gaming industry civil war, attract a cult following among young, Internet-savvy men, and become a figurehead of the Men’s Rights movement without knowing a little something about exploiting the human psyche.

When I meet him in San Francisco, a few days after the aforementioned demonstration, he greets me as if we’re old friends.

“Hello darling, how are you!” he exclaims, offering a hug. Yiannopoulos, who lives in London, was once described as a cross between a “pitbull and Oscar Wilde.” It’s barely noon on a Monday, and he and a friend are drinking in a dark bar in the Lower Haight, already onto their second glass of rosé. He had ordered me a glass. Wearing his signature aviators indoors, leisure shorts, white plastic flip-flops and a t-shirt reading #REPUBLICAN in gold foil lettering, Yiannopoulos looks slightly hung over.

We discuss his favorite American president (Calvin Coolidge, for his wit), George W. Bush (“incredibly sexy in person”), his belief that there are fewer transgender men than women (“women don’t care to become men”) and his searing hatred of third-wave feminism, which Yiannopoulos characterizes, generally, as a mob of bitter man-haters railing against institutional injustices like the wage gap that no longer actually exist.

“I would be a second wave feminist,” he says. “I believe in equal opportunities for women, but if they don’t choose to work as hard, they don’t get rewarded.”

“I don’t think you know what feminism means,” responds his drinking companion, a liberal lawyer, who tells me that she blocked Yiannopoulos on Facebook because she sometimes finds his columns so infuriating. This, it turns out, is common sentiment among many of his friends.

“I just can’t believe you’re anti-feminist!” she tells him.

“I would never describe myself that way,” he responds, launching into a much-rehearsed soliloquy. “There is a specific brand of feminism that is destructive and I think it is driving men and women apart. I hate it. It makes everybody miserable.”

Their friendship survives, she explains, because they generally agree not to discuss topics like politics.

“People have this idea that I’m a misogynistic monster,” Yiannopoulos tells me, “But as soon as they meet me they say, ‘Oh, you’re so nice in person!”

*

Milo Yiannopoulos has been a divisive figure in the London media scene for years, but with the emergence of the Gamergate movement last year, he became an unlikely mouthpiece for the U.S. conservative movement.

It’s been just over a year since an online rant by the disgruntled ex-boyfriend of female video game developer Zoe Quinn set off a brutish culture war in the gaming industry. On one side was a diverse set of gamers who didn’t identify with the stereotypical nerdy white guy that games seemed to be designed for with their heavily-muscled protagonists and scantily-clad female set pieces. On the other were mostly male gamers who rallied around the hashtag Gamergate, alleging that collusion among feminists, progressives and journalists was changing gaming culture for the worse.

In most media outlets, stories about Gamergate focused on the harassment campaigns the movement launched against Quinn and other prominent women in the gaming industry. Yiannopoulos, though, took up the Gamergate cause, publishing a story headlined, “Feminist bullies are tearing the videogame industry apart.”

“An army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners, abetted by achingly politically correct American tech bloggers, are terrorising the entire community – lying, bullying and manipulating their way around the internet for profit and attention,” he wrote, in what would become the first of many pro-Gamergate pieces.

For Yiannopoulos, the consummate cultural libertarian, GamerGate had it all. Angry feminists! PC police! Ideological left-wing journalists! Drama!

“I always thought journalism was about sticking up for the many against the powerful few,” Yiannopoulos told me. “There aren’t many people who would stick up for an odd guy with no money who lives in Wisconsin, hates his wife, plays video games to escape from his miserable life and is suddenly told that just because he likes playing Grand Theft Auto he is a sexist misogynist pig. I feel for that guy.”

Yiannopoulos lent Gamergate’s weird corner of the Internet an air of mainstream legitimacy.

“He’s been the only journalist so far to give Gamergate any sort of credibility,” said Alex Baldwin, a 23-year-old former moderator of the Gamergate subreddit KotakuInAction. “Without Milo, it probably would have just fizzled out, in all honesty.”

One anti-Gamergate activist who wished not to be named told me that his effect in amplifying the movement was “inestimable.”

“He is its only legitimate face,” she said. “He gave the movement a platform.”

In turn, Gamergate elevated the influence of Yiannopoulos. He immediately became a cult hero, the subject of hundreds of obsessive tweets and fan art, and even a character in a video game, Postal 2.

With snarky headlines, theatrics and sarcasm, Yiannopoulos had figured out how to make conservatism go viral. A video posted to Breitbart of Yiannopoulos getting thrown out of that L.A. demonstration attracted nearly 2,000 Facebook shares and as many comments. Another recent story titled “Sexbots: why women should panic,” was shared on Facebook 15,000 times. For context, the median number of Facebook likes and shares for The New York Times’ most-shared columnist, Nicholas Kristof, is about 2,400.

Yiannopoulos’ editor, Alex Marlow, told me that the Gamergate coverage has infused Breitbart’s demographics with a new, younger audience. This fall, Breitbart is planning to unveil a new section focused on tech and gaming, with Yiannopoulos at the center.

“Milo has an ability to resonate with younger people that is uncommon in the conservative movement at this time,” Marlow told me. “Conservatives have made a mistake in ignoring youth culture.”

*

At 6’2, punctuated by a tall poof of bleached hair, Yiannopoulos’ real life presence feels as big as his online one. In person, his friends will tell you, he is always “on,” whether he’s railing against the matriarchy, bragging about his own fabulousness or discussing his love of “black dick.” He is a fearsome conversational opponent, quick to dispense the same sharp-tongued, irony-tinged wit that he does in writing whether the topic is Mariah Carey, of who he is a devoted fan, or feminism. Often you find yourself in a sparring match with Yiannopoulos without ever meaning to engage in one. For Yiannopoulos, any interaction is the opportunity for an audience.

“My natural disposition is a satirist and a comic,” he said, by way of explanation. “I like to entertain and to please people.”

Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump is one of Yiannopoulos’ idols and it’s not a hard guess why: Trump has perfected the art of the political as the performative, of somehow channeling impolite chaos into charm. In Yiannopoulos, it seems impossible to separate the man from the mythology, and really it’s not clear whether there is much separation anymore. Years ago, he tells me, he used to keep part of himself hidden away from public view, worried about whether others would like him.

“I didn’t like me very much and so I created this comedy character,” he says. “And now they’ve converged.”

Yiannopoulos makes no attempt to disguise his love of his burgeoning celebrity.

“I could spend all day, everyday reading stuff people post about me on the Internet,” he says.

His social media presence is dizzy with selfies, fan art and bubbling champagne. When his lawyer friend wants to send a photo of their drinking damage to her boyfriend, Yiannopoulos rearranges the table, propping up his pack of Newport menthols and making sure all six of the empty glasses made it into the shot.

“I’m experienced at this,” he winked.

Frequently, critics aim to insult Yiannopoulos by calling him a troll, but troll is a role he is perfectly comfortable inhabiting. He views the roles of satirist and journalist as interchangeable (and often in his work it can be hard to tell which he is playing). Whether his extreme convictions are actually “real” is besides the point — though he will tell you that, most of the time, they are. His Twitter stream is full of retweets of nice things his fans say about him. But he retweets the mean things, too. His main goal is just to get under your skin.

“The only proper response to outrage culture is to be outrageous,” he told me, reciting a frequent Yiannopoulosism.

He grew up in a small town in Kent, living a middle class existence with his mother, architect stepfather, “horses, two cars and a pool” until eventually tense relationships with his parents moved him to go live with his grandmother as a teen. Like many a good conservative, he identifies as Catholic (although his mother is technically Jewish). His grandmother, whose weekly e-mails he turned into a Tumblr page, was an outsized presence in his life and the most accepting when he eventually came out as gay. He dropped out of university twice and never finished, a fact of which he claims to be extremely proud.

His first big writing break was at The Telegraph. Even back in 2009 his stories — with headlines like “Men perform better in many technology jobs. Must we apologise for that?” — relied on much of the same rhetoric typical of Yiannopoulos today.

Yiannopoulos had wanted to be a theater critic, but said he became drawn to tech after writing about the lack of women in the industry.

“Women have huge competitive advantage when they go into tech because there aren’t many other women. They get coverage when they don’t deserve it, when they enter a room, people pay attention to them. Privately successful women will tell you this,” he said. “It struck me as garbage. So I stayed in tech.”

The modern women’s movement is by far his greatest agitation and a source of constant preoccupation.

“Women’s rights is one of the great successes of our society. But it seemed like we were taking a retrograde step,” he told me. “We were going backwards. We were giving people like feminists podiums to bully people. A lot of what I have done since is purposely ridiculing that, getting under the skin of people I have decided are bigots.”

After parting ways with The Telegraph, Yiannopoulos co-founded the tech news and gossip website the Kernel, at age 28. In a profile of him at the time, The Guardian described him as “a man who collects enemies like carrier bags” for the incredible number of public spats he picked. To wit: in response to Twitter criticism from an English blogger calling Yiannopoulos a “sexist, misogynistic prick,” he replied: “We write about how tech is changing the world around us. You write about how many cocks you’ve sucked this week. Back off.”

When former contributors pursued legal action against the Kernel for failing to pay them, The Guardian published threatening e-mails Yiannopoulos had sent to his unpaid former writers. In one, he threatened to unleash embarrassing photographs online. In another, he wrote: “You’ve already made yourself permanently unemployable in London with your hysterical, brainless tweeting, by behaving like a common prostitute and after starting a war with me, as perhaps you are now discovering.” (The Kernel eventually folded, but was then relaunched after Yiannopoulos settled debts personally and later sold to The Daily Dot.)

Few of Yiannopoulos’ critics would speak to me about him on the record and more than one warned me of the personal perils I might face in writing about him, a detail I’d wager he might find more flattering than anything else. Most described him as somewhat volatile, a man who can completely charm you and then turn on you just as easily.

“He has a spreadsheet of all of his friends and how much he likes them,” one friend and former employee, James Cook at Business Insider in London, told me. “If you’re on the top of the list, great; if not it’s terrifying.”

(Yiannopoulos has actually written about the list: “The spreadsheet is simply the best tool I’ve developed so far for managing an ever-increasing contact list of interesting people I am anxious to introduce to one another, or with whom I want to spend more time.”)

Another insult often lobbed at Yiannopoulos is that he is simply an opportunist, especially in relation to Gamergate, before which he had openly mocked video game culture. In one piece written in 2013, he derided gamers as “unemployed saddos living in their parents’ basements.”

Yiannopoulos addressed this criticism with a single tweet:

https://twitter.com/Nero/status/524302853846757379

But the funny thing is that Yiannopoulos actually still describes gamers that way. His fans just love him anyway.

“What I think they like about me is that I don’t pander to them,” he says.

Alongside man-hating third-wave feminists, pandering is among the things that Yiannopoulos hates most.

“My style is take no prisoners,” he said. “There’s nowhere I won’t go.”

*

When I first wrote to Yiannopoulos, it was because I wanted to understand what made him tick. As an openly feminist journalist covering technology, I had written a lot about systemic biases against women plaguing Silicon Valley and the tech industry’s fratty male culture. I was fascinated by the way Yiannopoulos would unpack those arguments, proposing, for example, that there are fewer women in the tech industry because they just aren’t all that interested in tech.

“Here’s something you probably don’t know,” he’d argue, “in countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh, the gender split in science courses at university can be as high as 50-50. But, when you look at more equal, enlightened societies such as Norway and Sweden, the number of women doing STEM subjects plummets and goes down every year relative to admissions.”

Often his articles would send me into a tailspin, questioning whether what I knew was merely what I thought I knew. My reporting relied on studies that showed that women were dropping out of the tech industry in droves citing harassment, something I had personally experienced. But I also know that data lies. I wondered whether it was me or Yiannopoulos that was guilty of cherry-picking data points that proved what we believed to be true. Or maybe it was neither of us. Or both.

I also often found in his work surprising nuance, like the suggestion that women returning from time off to raise kids should get a salary bump to make up for raise opportunities they missed while at home.

Then I would get to the next paragraph, which might start something like this, and find myself enraged all over again: “women’s brain’s aren’t as suited to programming as men’s.”

It’s true that some studies have shown that male and female brains are wired differently, but still others have claimed that any difference is marginal. And regardless, we know far too little about the brain at this point to know definitively what makes someone good at programming.

I told Yiannopoulos about an experience early in my career, when a male editor asked me if I was crying because I was a girl and would therefore never make it as a journalist when in fact my eye was just watering because something was in it. As a young woman, this was an experience that opened my eyes to the sexism that persists in modern work environments. I remember being completely shocked.

“But women do cry!” he responded. “They cry more often than not. It’s not an unreasonable assumption. Journalism is very male and very aggressive and it can be difficult for women to survive.”

And it’s true, science suggests that women do cry more, though for reasons that are far more complex than just overcharged emotions.

“These days we credit feeling over fact,” Yiannopoulos told me. “We have elevated discomfort to the level of serious injury. We seem to think that somebody feeling slighted is a great crime.”

Despite the fact that I am exactly the sort of feminist Yiannopoulos frequently rails against online, I found myself transfixed by him. After four hours and a move to a gay bar with a patio, I’d divulged the embarrassing details of my first kiss and he had somehow persuaded me to rethink a decades-long hatred of Mariah Carey. I remembered something Cook had told me, about how Yiannopoulos would often convince him of an argument during conversation, and only upon leaving he would snap out of it, and realize it was absurd.

“Everyone who knows Milo has been absolutely shocked by his rise,” Cook, told me. “I think we’re all scared that one day he’s going to go a bit too far. It concerns me how easily people believe him.”

To enter Yiannopoulos’ world is to enter a world of topsy-turvy logic, after which you are never truly sure again of which way is up.

“I don’t share the preoccupations of the right that animate Milo’s anger,” said Jason Pontin, publisher of the MIT Technology Review, and an unlikely Yiannopoulos defender. “But for me, Milo pushes all the right buttons. He’s charming and witty and charismatic. A world where Milo writes the pieces he writes and flounces around with his fabulous hair is a better world for me. More speech is good.”

Another friend, Alicia Navarro, founder of Skimlinks, told me that while she doesn’t always like it, Yiannopoulos “does put forward arguments that make us think.”

And it’s true. Yiannopoulos does make you think. Reading his work is a rush of questioning self-doubt, the kind I like to think that makes us all better, more rigorous thinkers. And because Yiannopoulos is an expert in the packaging, reading him is a bit like vinegar with coated honey, each acerbic bite encased in a flurry of “hello darlings” and champagne.

But it’s a thought-experiment with potentially terrifying consequence.

Yiannopoulos is successful in part because he has tapped into very real cultural anxieties. He likes to say that he is the voice for a voiceless majority. Over and over, in letters and phone calls, his fans espoused their gratitude to him. “For giving people like me who feel like they have been irreparably damaged and abandoned by the majority of society a voice,” said one. Or that he made them feel like “someone actually cared about them and understood their frustrations.”

At Breitbart, his tens of thousands of disciples are only growing.

“I’m a Milo fan because I agree with everything he writes!” one female fan told me.

But not even Yiannopoulos agrees entirely with everything he writes.

“I don’t write anything I don’t believe,” he told me via e-mail one day, “but I won’t pretend I don’t provoke on purpose, because of course I do!”

Yiannopoulos exists at the center of the kind of question Yiannopoulos himself would jump to answer. Is all free speech good speech, no matter the cost? Undoubtedly, he would answer, “Yes, darling.”

Mary Beard, silver-haired and red-shod, was seated in front of a packed house at Lincoln Center one recent Thursday morning, addressing an annual conference called the Women in the World Summit.

Ms. Beard, a professor at the University of Cambridge and the author of more than 10 books on the classics and classical era, is an authority on ancient Roman culture, but the line that got the biggest response struck a modern (though by no means exclusively modern) note.

Ms. Beard was recounting her response to a criticism once lobbed at her in print: not of her scholarship, but of her appearance. A few years ago, in response to one of the television documentaries for which she is well known in England, the (male) critic A. A. Gill wrote in The Sunday Times, in London, that she was less fit for a history program than for “The Undateables,” a British reality show for the lovelorn disabled or disfigured.

Rather than mutely accept such barbs, Ms. Beard, with good cheer and a professorial drive to correct error wherever it may cross her path, responded in the pages of The Daily Mail with an essay headlined, “Too Ugly for TV? No, I’m Too Brainy for Men Who Fear Clever Women.” 

Time has not mellowed her take.

“When you look at me on the telly, and say she should be on ‘The Undateables,’” she explained, in retelling, to the crowd, “you are looking at a 59-year-old woman. That is what 59-year-old women who have not had work done look like. Get it?” (In fact, Ms. Beard was 57 at the time, but the point stands.)

This, said Tina Brown, the founder of the Women in the World conference (in which The New York Times is an investor), amounted to a “battle cry,” a vindication of one of the rights of woman: to look, even in her 50s, like her unvarnished self.

The crowd — mostly women, for the record — roared. Whoever else may not have gotten it, they did. As Ms. Beard made her way out of the auditorium and out into the morning, attendees stopped her to thank her. “You just brought this great spirit,” one woman said.

That spirit is currently applied to a dual purpose. Ms. Beard, now 61, is a classicist of decades-long standing and a “troll slayer” (as an admiring profile in The New Yorker called her in 2014) of a few years.

Image

She is the author of several books on ancient Rome, including the most recent, “SPQR,” a doorstopper history that was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; the classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement (where she writes a chatty blog); and a regular contributor to both The London and The New York Review of Books.

She maintains her professorship at Cambridge and, in April, was awarded the Bodley Medal, the highest honor given by the Bodleian Libraries of Oxford University. In 2013, she was named to the Order of the British Empire for her services to classical scholarship.

But when she began making more-regular TV appearances, on popular documentaries on ancient themes and talking-head political programs, she encountered the response that awaits many women with the temerity to venture into the public arena: “trolling” or online abuse.

As she did with Mr. Gill’s review, she responded, battling back her antagonists and becoming something of a folk hero in the process. Now her engagements often combine her two pursuits, as her talk at Women in the World did: tracing the history of misogyny from the ancient world to today.

“The gloomiest way of describing the ancient world is it is misogyny from A to Z, really,” she said. But even in the present, she added, “we have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women’s silence.”

The Internet can seem like an echo chamber made to amplify that desire, and in the years since Ms. Beard began taking on her trolls, instances of online harassment against women have continued. (Ms. Beard, now famous for her fight, has largely seen her attackers drop off. But for others on social media, trolling continues, with marquee examples like Gamergate, as well as lower-key, everyday unpleasantness.)

“There’s an awful lot about social media which people feel very frustrated about,” she said. “It claims to be a democratic online world out there, and yet it isn’t.” Misogyny, in her view, is an accessible rhetoric to vent this spleen: “An available means of being nasty,” she said, “of expressing your discontent.”

Ms. Beard is unusually good-humored about many of her adversaries. In one much-publicized instance, she not only commandeered an apology, but has kept in touch with her reformed troll, for whom she now writes letters of reference. (“Oh, Oliver!” she said with apparent affection as his tweets were projected behind her at her conference chat.) She did not, she said, set out to be a hunter of trolls, though she is now often asked to speak on the subject. “I’m making the best of it,” she said.

Much of the criticism of Ms. Beard has focused, as Mr. Gill’s did, on her appearance, and her unusual willingness to be age-appropriate. In fact, and in what may come as a surprise to her detractors, she takes a lively interest in style.

“Barring some sociopaths, probably, there is nobody who doesn’t care about their appearance,” she said. She has no qualms about letting her long hair go naturally gray — nor about tackling the sexist underpinnings of anti-gray bias, recording a radio program, “Glad to be Grey,” for England’s Radio 4 in March.

But she also counts the footwear designer Manolo Blahnik as a friend. She contributed an interview about ancient footwear to his 2015 book, “Fleeting Gestures and Obsessions.” He in return has kept her in the red ribbon-laced flats she wore to the summit.

“She has become somebody who I adore,” Mr. Blahnik said. “She’s one of my favorite people in England. And she’s such a ’60s girl! She’s still faithful to the hairstyle. It’s like Jean Shrimpton, and those girls in the King’s Road. But the Cambridge version.”

She complemented her red shoes for the panel with a canary-yellow coat in a vaguely ’60s style — hardly the “old frump” of an earlier era of British academia, though she had no idea who had designed it. (A peek at the label revealed it was by Bitte Kai Rand, a Danish designer.) On modern fashion, she is more an appreciator than an authority, but she is just as comfortable discoursing on pre-Christian shoes as on trolls.

“One Roman emperor, Heliogabalus, never wore the same pair of shoes twice,” she said, sipping cappuccino at a cafe near Lincoln Center. “That is just the Imelda Marcos story, isn’t it? Then Caligula had slippers with pearls, we imagine, on the soles. He’s literally smashing pearls as he walks. Whether any of this true, God only knows, but those are the tabloid versions.”

Around this time, two women approached Ms. Beard mid-interview to introduce themselves. They were gun violence prevention activists: Sandy Phillips of Jessi’s Message, whose daughter was killed in the Aurora, Colo., theater shooting in 2012, and Donna Dees-Thomases, the founder of the Million Mom March.

“We’ve been excessively trolled with our work,” said Ms. Phillips, who had spoken at the conference the night before as part of panel called Mothers Against Gun Violence. “The same thing that gets said to you gets said to us.”

“I only came to see your presentation today,” Ms. Dees-Thomases said. “I’ve changed my Twitter name many times, and I have a fake Twitter name, too. I tell the trolls to go over there and bother me.”

Ms. Beard has found herself an inspiration to such women, and at a time when trolling seems more widespread, and at ever-higher levels — all the way to the presidential race. Ms. Brown said this year’s Women in the World Summit came after “such a year of misogyny,” and called out Donald J. Trump in particular. “The injection of pure derogatory comments about women throughout has been so ugly,” she said, “and the fact that he seems to have liberated the voices of others to agree.”

Mr. Trump’s name was aired during in Ms. Beard’s presentation, and she agreed afterward that there are similarities between Mr. Trump’s unfettered commentary and trolling. “You could make a powerful argument that the kind of tropes in Trump’s discourse overlap with the discourse you see in trolling: about women shutting up, about menstruation,” Ms. Beard said.

The issues are serious, and yet her approach remains studied but ever smiling.

“This is exactly what we need more of in American feminism: wry humor,” Ms. Brown said. “The outrage meter is getting out of control.”

“It’s about talking about it,” Ms. Beard said. “It’s not being fazed. It’s about having a laugh about it. A bit of outrage is good, but having your only rhetorical register as outrage is always going to be unsuccessful. You’ve got to vary it. Sometimes, some of the things that sexist men do just deserve to be laughed at.”

She chuckled and issued a directive at any of her more laughable antagonists.

“Go back home to mummy,” she said. “She’ll smack your bottom.”

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.