yeah but "failing as an SJW" is not nearly as funny as how it came back to bite her in the ass
she made a site expressly for doxxing people, then when people started using the her own advised technique against her she had a breakdown and played the race card insisting people who were following her advice were the "real" racists
rather than own her bad idea, she tried to blame use of the idea on other people to garner personal popularity

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By 2015, Owens was living and working in New York, paying off debt and looking for her next move when she and a co-worker founded Degree180, a marketing agency that offered consultation, production and planning services. The site included a blog that featured writing from Owens on a variety of topics including anorexia, acne, breakups and dating — and occasionally politics. In one post, she wrote about the “bat-shit-crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party,” adding, “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.”

In the spring of 2016, the women of Degree180, led by Owens, launched a $75,000 Kickstarter campaign for a new website called Social Autopsy. The idea, according to the promotional video, was to create “the first-ever search database that compiles and allows the public to easily access the digital footprint of individuals and companies.”

“Wave goodbye to cyberbullies and trolls,” it announced.

The project soon ran into problems. In the pitch, Owens claimed her team had already amassed profiles on thousands of individuals, using real Twitter, Facebook and Instagram posts. Privacy is one of the few topics that can unite the internet’s warring factions, however, and Social Autopsy, to a lot of people, felt like an online destination for “doxing,” the malicious practice of posting a person’s identifying details on the internet, usually with the implied invitation to harass the person in real life. These days, Owens acknowledges that the endeavor was “well intended but totally naïve.”

In response, people began to dox Owens, posting her address, family members, workplace, contact information and social media profiles. Owens received threatening emails and texts, many of them racist.

That led her to stumble into one of the internet events that helped fuel the so-called alt-right: Gamergate, which pitted progressive video game developers and their supporters against gamers who revolted against the move to make video games more inclusive.

With scant evidence, Owens blamed the progressive side of Gamergate for her doxxing and the ultimate failure of Social Autopsy’s Kickstarter project, leading her to unexpected allies: the Gamergate faction whose anti-feminist, traditionalist positions often overlapped with politically conservative ones thanks to prominent Trump supporters Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich, known for spreading conspiracy theories and far-right ideology.

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The pitch, to anyone steeped in the world of social media in 2016, is odd, if not ominous. Owens 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.

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Part of what has made this train wreck so depressing to watch is that almost all of it flows directly out of Owens’s lack of understanding of this particular slice of the internet. She may have worked with various anti-bullying organizations like the Tyler Clementi Foundation in the run-up to her Kickstarter launch, but it was clear from our conversation that she just hadn’t been exposed to the kind of aggressive swarming mobs that define online harassment in 2016. When we were talking about Social Autopsy, her primary examples of the behavior she was hoping to catalogue were people who left threatening Facebook comments about celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner. She thought it was important to discover, for example, the names of teachers who left viciously cruel comments against Jenner.

Yes, people leave mean comments on Facebook, and, yes, there is plenty of “old-school” cyberbullying that should be addressed, but online harassment these days is much more complicated than that — much more complicated even than the brutal, scary version Owens experienced growing up. Understanding it requires understanding a lot about anonymity, about troll culture, about who is likely to be a target in a first place. And it doesn’t appear Owens or her colleagues at Social Autopsy came in with any of this background. As if the internet were trying to hammer that point home, Owens and her organization are now experiencing exactly the sort of harassment her organization didn’t seem to fully take into account — the snowballing shaming which can come when an unpopular idea is put under a searing spotlight and the internet decides that the most important thing in the world to do, at least for the next day or so — or until some other, even more deserving victim comes along — is to mock and threaten and dehumanize whoever is responsible for that idea.

Owens’s somewhat naive understanding of what constitutes online harassment ended up backfiring on her in some pretty brutal ways. For instance, she got fixated on the word dox, mentioning that Quinn had used it in their tense phone call. “Within a few hours of having spoken to Zoe Quinn and upset her, a board has been started on us on 4chan.org, an anonymous thread, and they are now telling the gamers that we are going to be doxxing them, doxxing minors,” she told me. “The word dox is being thrown around — (I) had never heard it, people had seen our campaign, we worked on it for two months, people gave us feedback, we had a whole article written in the Connecticut Post on the front page” — and yet, she said, not a single person had used the word dox in the run-up to the Kickstarter launch. “Now we’re seeing the word dox in this chain and immediately in my head I go, Interesting word. Heard that first from Zoe.” So because Quinn had mentioned doxxing and then a bunch of other people had brought it up as well — in the context of a Kickstarter campaign that at the very least strongly hinted that it would be doxxing people by unmasking people and revealing where they work — Owens became convinced that Quinn was behind all the complaints.

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