Monica Foy, the Victim of a Terrifying Right-Wing Internet-Shaming

San Francisco CA

Description

When a white person — especially a police officer — is killed, people seem much more able to accept the fact that some killings are simply unjustified, full-stop. So Foy tweeted a dry joke about what she saw as the different ways society responds to different deaths: “I can’t believe so many people care about a dead cop and NO ONE has thought to ask what he did to deserve it. He had creepy perv eyes …” 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. Owens 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: