PERSON: Candace Owens

Director of Urban Management

Candace Owens (born 1990) is an American writer, producer, and conservative commentator.
Born to an African American family and raised in Stamford, Connecticut, she is a graduate of Stamford High School. Once in 2007, while a senior in high school, she received some hurtful and threatening phone calls that were traced to a car in which the son of Governor Dannel Malloy was present. Owens’ family sued the Stamford Board of Education in federal court alleging that the city did not protect her rights which resulted in a $37,500 settlement. She graduated with a B.A. in journalism from the University of Rhode Island. After school, she worked for Vogue Magazine. In 2012, she took a job as an administrative assistant for a private equity firm and rose to become vice president of administration. In 2015, she quit her job to found the website Degree180, which creates Internet content targeted at millennials.. In one article she wrote that the antics of the Tea Party Movement were “bat-shit-crazy”.

Having experienced online cruelty first hand, Owens launched SocialAutopsy.com in 2016, a website she said would expose bullies on the Internet The site would have solicited users to take screenshots of offensive posts and send them to the website where they would be categorized by the user’s name. It was being crowdfunded on Kickstarter. The proposal was immediately controversial, drawing criticism and comment from a variety of sources on the propriety of de-anonymizing Internet users, or doxing them. According to The Daily Dot, “People from all sides of the anti-harassment debate were quick to criticize the database, calling it a public-shaming list that would encourage doxing and retaliatory harassment.” Zoe Quinn, founder of the Crash Override Network and online bullying victim (see Gamergate controversy), called her to request that she stop her project. Randi Lee Harper of the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative also requested that she desist suggesting that she did not fully understand cyber-bullying (due to Owens having referred to Quinn as a leader of Gamergate). Owens responded 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. Kickstarter suspended her funding campaign and the website was never created despite having created profiles on over 22,000 individuals (per their assertion). The site has since been closed.

In 2017, Owens launched Red Pill Black, a website and Youtube channel that promotes conservatism to a black American audience.

On November 21, 2017, at the MAGA Rally and Expo in Rockford, Illinois, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk announced her appointment as their director of urban engagement.

— Wikipedia