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Candace Owens Shares Her Devastating Story of Digital Activism Turned Eating Disorder and Five Years of Pain
Candace Owens reveals the untold story of her senior year in high school when she became a social media firestorm after receiving death threats from strangers, including a politician's son. What started as a criminal investigation turned into a public spectacle that left her traumatized, friendless, and fighting a five-year battle with severe anorexia. She questions whether digital activism has become rapid-rate opinionism that destroys real people behind the hashtags, and challenges us to consider the human cost of our online outrage.
The Power and Problem of Digital Activism
Candace Owens begins with a confession that might surprise some: she loves social media hashtags. What was once simply known as the digit symbol has transformed into a way to establish universal trends and conversations online. From weekly recurring hashtags like #TBT (Throwback Thursday) to politically charged ones like #ScareHillaryin4Words, these digital markers have created what she calls an era of digital activism.
The power of this phenomenon became evident during the November 13th, 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. Through the speed of the Internet and hashtags like #PrayforParis, people received real-time coverage and were able to send love and support to victims worldwide. The beauty of being able to push a button to demand change, to inspire political climate without leaving our bedrooms, seems undeniable.
Yet Owens raises a critical question: Is that always necessarily a good thing? A colleague once asked her if she'd noticed how issues seem to sweep through social media like hurricanes and then recede almost as quickly as they came. It was absolutely right. Friends who used #PrayforParis for a couple of days quickly moved on to the next social issue requiring their immediate, aggressive attention—whether it was #Deflategate, #OscarsSoWhite, or debating whether Donald Trump was a racist, sexist, victim, hero, the next president, or Hitler.
When the Hashtag Becomes You
In February 2007, when Owens was a senior in high school, she became a social issue while sitting on her couch watching a Will Ferrell movie. Her phone began ringing with private calls that she sent to voicemail. At the movie's conclusion, she discovered four missed voicemails that would horrify her.
Four male voices alternated between screaming, laughing, and even singing as they told her they were going to kill her. They threatened to tar and feather her family, to put a bullet in the back of her head as they had done to Martin Luther King. They told her, in so many words, that she'd better not be home. She was absolutely traumatized.
That night she simply cried, feeling incredibly confused because she couldn't think of even one individual who wanted to see her dead. The next day at school, she confided in her philosophy teacher, who marched her into the principal's office. When the principal heard the voicemails, she had an equally strong reaction and made the quick decision to phone the police.
The Hurricane Sweeps In
This marked the beginning of what would become a very dark period in Owens' life. She was absolutely correct that there were not four individuals she knew who wanted to see her dead. In fact, three of those individuals were complete strangers to her, and by some random stroke of misfortune, one of those strangers happened to be the current governor of Connecticut's son.
The issue very quickly became about politics, and the figurative hurricane swept right in. Her face was slathered across the front page of every newspaper throughout the state of Connecticut. The FBI was called in, due to the unusual strand of high profile, to analyze the voice messages and the voices on them. News stations replayed them over and over again because they wanted to make sure everyone was made privy to what a politician's son was involved in.
NAACP members, whom she had never spoken to prior, waited on the front steps of her high school with cameras in tow to speak out on the horrors of what a black girl was going through. Her parents fought at home. Her sisters got into physical altercations at school, defending her against all the chatter that was drummed up by students and teachers alike. As in any of these types of situations, everyone felt a need to take a side. Maybe Candace made up the voice messages, maybe she called herself—no one had been arrested yet; it was just an investigation.
She made the decision to start homeschooling while the investigation continued. It concluded nearly two months later before all of the boys involved were arrested and before she was able to return back to school and her hashtag was allowed to shift into the societal subconscious. And then, of course, everyone forgot about her story. Everyone except for her.
The Aftermath: Five Years of Anorexia
A few months later, Owens started college and couldn't rid her brain of all those articles she had read online about herself and all the things she had read in the comment sections. She was naturally terrified that incoming freshman students who could potentially be her friend would discover these articles and form presumptive hashtags about her character. She certainly didn't want them to think she was a race baiter, that she was trouble, or anything else. But she couldn't control the Internet.
What she did discover was that she could control her body, and she began manifesting that experience through severe anorexia, a disease that would stick with her for the next five years. A photo taken of her three years later in 2010 showed the devastation, and she went on to lose about ten more pounds after it was taken.
Being completely honest, Owens remembers her anorexia very dearly. She had an affectionate relationship with it; it was very hard for her to let it go because it was her best friend for five years. It gave her control of her life back. She felt, somehow, that with every calorie she avoided, she was also avoiding the problems from her past. And those problems, retrospectively, could have been solved if somebody had just said sorry and taken responsibility for what had happened, which never happened.
Digital Activism as Inhumanity
It's an incredibly interesting afterthought that our digital activism over these perceived acts of inhumanity can itself become the act of inhumanity. As a society we tend to drum up these hurricanes to combat what may initially have just been a storm. That's because the method of activism has morphed completely.
When our parents and grandparents were coming up, that word required a physical presence. They had to march on the front lawns of the White House to put an end to the Vietnam War. They had to risk their livelihoods to put an end to institutions like segregation. Activism meant maybe being arrested, activism meant maybe being killed, so they had to care deeply, beyond the concept of a trending hashtag, to voice their outrage.
But today we have the Internet, and the Internet is fast and amazing, but it doesn't exactly require a physical presence, and it therefore allows us a level of detachment. Which is why when Owens brings herself back into that circumstance and back into high school, she always asks herself: Could any of those children have said any of those words to her face? Better yet, what would have been the outcome had she just picked up the phone?
It is so easy to yell at an object because objects don't have emotions, people do. Had she picked up the phone, they would have heard her voice—a voice of a real human being carrying real emotion—and it would have stopped them in their tracks. It would have tethered them to their own humanity.
Social Lab Rats of the Digital Age
The truth is those children were not monsters, those children were not racist or anything else. Those children, like Owens, were social lab rats. People tend to forget it, but it was millennials that watched the world move from a beeper to a cell phone to text messages and videos sent around the world in what felt like a matter of nanoseconds.
It was millennials that were the schoolchildren of those technological advancements. They were the unwitting participants in a great social experiment. They were first handed AIM, and then it was Facebook and Twitter and hashtags, with no formal guide as to how it might all play out because nobody knew. Nobody thought about it. Nobody considered or contemplated the social implications of all of these changes. Owens doesn't actually think people are contemplating the social implications of all of these changes even now.
We are all existing in a miraculous paradox. As a human race, we have never been more connected or further apart from one another. Those children, just like Owens, were publicly dissected and labeled by a group of adults who saw a sweeping headline instead of an opportunity to learn and to think critically about the approaching era of digital activism, where we write off empathy in favor of proving a point—a point that we are oftentimes making about a human being with real emotions and a beating heart.
The Real Cost of Rapid-Rate Opinionism
Yes, the example Owens presented may seem extreme, but it more usually is not. It's more usually that one-star review we leave on Yelp because the waitress was awful and she was late with our drinks and she maybe forgot our appetizers, so she should be fired, and wait until you see her nose. We type, hit Enter, send, done—for us maybe, but not necessarily for that waitress.
What digital activism feels like on the other side is a lot of pain. It can be half a decade of an eating disorder. It can be suicidal thoughts. It can be just an individual that isn't equipped to deal with our criticisms. The truth is that it's hardly activism at all. It's rapid-rate opinionism.
Owens has noticed that it's that send button on the keyboard, it's the Enter key, that seems to be getting all of the attention from us. So she thought while she had the opportunity on stage, why not present to the world a few alternatives to it, like the Control one or the Delete one. Now that might be a hashtag worth spreading: #ControlDelete.
Video Transcript
[00:00] Transcriber: Peter van de Ven Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
[00:06] So, at risk of sounding like another jaded millennial,
[00:11] I absolutely love social media hashtags.
[00:16] I'm actually very serious.
[00:18] If you guys are not yet in on the trend of hashtags,
[00:21] you have got to get started.
[00:24] Formerly known to us all as the digit symbol thingy,
[00:28] hashtags have become a way to establish universal trends
[00:31] in terms of what everybody is talking about online.
[00:35] There are weekly recurring ones,
[00:37] like #TBT,
[00:40] which stands for Throwback Thursday,
[00:42] where users can literally affix any event from their past from
[00:46] and re-share it with friends,
[00:47] like this user who just happens to be throwing it back to last week in Miami
[00:52] when he was at a concert.
[00:54] There are also politically inspired ones,
[00:57] like you all know,
[00:58] such as #ScareHillaryin4Words -
[01:02] which is amazing.
[01:04] You really can get lost
[01:05] in the comedic abyss that the Internet has become over the years.
[01:11] The point, of course,
[01:12] is that once a hashtag is used enough times by enough people,
[01:16] it is described as trending worldwide.
[01:19] And that really is one of the most amazing things about the Internet today,
[01:23] that we have this means
[01:24] of communicating with people from all over the world.
[01:28] It's spurred an era
[01:29] of what I like to refer to as digital activism.
[01:35] An example of this occurred on November 13th, 2015,
[01:39] when the city of Paris was struck by a series of horrific terrorist events
[01:43] you will all recall.
[01:45] It was actually due to the speed of the Internet and its associated hashtags
[01:49] that we received real-time coverage of those events.
[01:53] And individuals began using that #PrayforParis
[01:56] to send love and support to all of the victims.
[01:59] And the beauty of something like that is pretty hard to ignore, right? -
[02:03] digital activism as a means to spread the love and support throughout the world.
[02:09] It really is amazing that in this day and age,
[02:12] we need but push a button to demand change.
[02:16] We don't even have to leave our bedrooms to inspire the political climate.
[02:20] But you have to wonder,
[02:22] Is that always necessarily a good thing?
[02:28] A colleague of mine presented a very interesting question
[02:31] when she asked me,
[02:32] "Have you ever noticed
[02:33] how issues seem to sweep through social media like hurricanes
[02:37] and then recede almost as quickly as they came?"
[02:41] She was absolutely right, of course.
[02:43] I couldn't think of a single one of my friends
[02:45] who used that #PrayforParis beyond the first couple of days
[02:49] before they were onto the next social issue
[02:51] that required their immediate, aggressive attention -
[02:55] because we need to know,
[02:58] Is Tom Brady guilty of #Deflategate?
[03:03] And, I mean, are the #OscarsSoWhite?
[03:09] And for the love of God, people,
[03:12] is Donald Trump
[03:15] a #RACIST, #SEXIST, #VICTIM, #HERO,
[03:20] the next president of the United States or Hitler?
[03:24] I don't know.
[03:26] Because it's here today and it will be gone tomorrow.
[03:29] Welcome to this generation of activism.
[03:34] I'm an eternal optimist, though,
[03:36] and so I'd like to think
[03:37] that even if the conversation does seem to die down pretty quickly,
[03:40] we're at least being inspired by the conversation and the dialogue
[03:44] that we're having with individuals
[03:45] that we would not have had access to otherwise.
[03:49] We're thereby widening our own range of perception and ideals -
[03:53] I'd like to think.
[03:56] Except I personally know
[03:58] that there is an element of this digital activism that we don't often consider.
[04:02] Because although so many of us
[04:04] are willing to spread and share our opinions and ideas rapidly,
[04:08] how many of us have ever been on the receiving end
[04:12] of those views being rapidly expressed?
[04:17] It always tends to be a little bit more of an exclusive club.
[04:21] But yes, in February of 2007, when I was a senior in high school,
[04:26] I became a social issue
[04:28] while I was sitting on my couch watching a Will Ferrell movie.
[04:32] My phone began ringing that night,
[04:35] and when I saw that the phone calls were private,
[04:38] I sent it to voicemail.
[04:41] At the conclusion of the movie,
[04:43] I noticed that I had four missed voicemails,
[04:45] and when I went to listen to them,
[04:47] I was horrified by what I would discover.
[04:50] I heard four male voices, and they were alternating -
[04:53] they were sometimes screaming, they were sometimes laughing,
[04:57] and they were even at certain points singing -
[05:00] and here are a few excerpts
[05:01] of some of the things that were being said to me.
[05:07] If there is a way to summarize it, in short,
[05:10] they told me that they were going to kill me.
[05:12] They told me things
[05:14] like they were going to tar and feather my family,
[05:16] that they were going to put a bullet in the back of my head
[05:19] as they had done to Martin Luther King.
[05:23] They told me, in so many words, that I'd better not be home.
[05:29] I was absolutely traumatized,
[05:32] and in terms of action, I didn't really do much.
[05:37] I'm going to assume that because we're all human beings,
[05:40] all of you are feeling a certain emotion as you're reading through these messages,
[05:44] but I'm going to ask you to hold on to your hashtags
[05:48] as we get through the story.
[05:52] So, that night I simply cried,
[05:54] and I remember feeling incredibly confused
[05:56] because I couldn't think of four individuals,
[05:59] not even one individual,
[06:00] that wanted to see me dead.
[06:04] The next day at school,
[06:05] I confided what happened to me to my philosophy teacher,
[06:09] and he was adamant.
[06:10] He was like, "You do not let this thing go,"
[06:12] and he marched me into the principal's office.
[06:15] And when she heard the voicemails,
[06:18] she had an equally strong reaction,
[06:21] and she made the quick decision to phone the police.
[06:24] And that was the beginning
[06:25] of what would become a very dark period of my life
[06:30] because I was absolutely correct in my assessment
[06:33] that there were not four individuals that I knew that wanted to see me dead.
[06:38] In fact, it would turn out that three of those individuals
[06:41] were complete strangers to me,
[06:43] and by some random stroke of my own misfortune,
[06:47] one of those strangers happened to be the current governor of Connecticut's son.
[06:54] And so the issue very quickly became #politics,
[06:58] and we all know
[06:59] that the figurative hurricane swept right on in.
[07:04] My face was slathered
[07:06] across the front page of every newspaper throughout the state of Connecticut.
[07:12] The FBI was called in, due to its unusual strand of high profile,
[07:17] to analyze the voice messages and the voices on them.
[07:22] News stations would replay them over and over again
[07:25] because they wanted to make sure everyone was made privy
[07:28] to what a politician's son was involved in.
[07:32] I also had NAACP members, who I had never spoken to prior,
[07:37] waiting on the front steps of my high school,
[07:40] with cameras in tow,
[07:41] to speak out on the horrors of what a black girl was going through.
[07:47] My parents fought at home.
[07:49] My sisters got into physical altercations at school,
[07:52] defending me against all the chatter
[07:54] that was drummed up by students and teachers alike
[07:58] because, as we all know,
[07:59] in any of these types of situations, everyone feels a need to take a side.
[08:05] And maybe Candace made up the voice messages,
[08:09] maybe she called herself -
[08:10] no one had been arrested yet; it was just an investigation.
[08:15] I made the decision then to start homeschooling
[08:18] while the investigation continued,
[08:20] and it concluded nearly two months later.
[08:25] Took two months before all of the boys involved were arrested
[08:28] and before I was able to return back to school
[08:32] and my hashtag was allowed to shift into the societal subconscious.
[08:38] And then, of course, everyone forgot about my story.
[08:43] Everyone except for me
[08:45] because a few months later, I started college
[08:48] and I couldn't rid my brain
[08:49] of all of those articles that I had read online about me
[08:53] and all the things that I had read in the comment sections about myself.
[08:58] I was naturally terrified
[09:00] that incoming freshman students that could potentially be my friend
[09:03] would discover these articles
[09:05] and form presumptive hashtags about my character.
[09:08] And I certainly didn't want them to think that I was a #RaceBaiter,
[09:11] that I was #Trouble or hashtag anything else.
[09:15] But I couldn't control the Internet.
[09:20] What I did, however, discover
[09:21] was that I could control my body,
[09:25] and I began manifesting that experience through severe anorexia,
[09:29] a disease that would stick with me for the next five years.
[09:34] This is a photo that was taken of me three years later, in 2010,
[09:38] and I went on to lose about ten pounds after it was taken.
[09:42] And if I am being completely honest on this stage right now,
[09:47] I remember my anorexia very dearly.
[09:50] I had an affectionate relationship with it;
[09:52] it was very hard for me to let it go
[09:55] because it was my best friend for five years.
[09:58] It gave me control of my life back.
[10:03] I felt, somehow,
[10:05] that with every calorie that I avoided,
[10:07] I was also avoiding the problems from my past.
[10:12] And those problems, retrospectively,
[10:14] could have been solved if somebody had just said sorry
[10:18] and taken responsibility for what had happened,
[10:20] which never happened.
[10:25] It's an incredibly interesting afterthought to have
[10:29] that our digital activism over these perceived acts of inhumanity
[10:34] can itself become the act of inhumanity,
[10:39] that as a society we tend to drum up these hurricanes
[10:42] to combat what may initially have just been a storm.
[10:48] That's because the method of activism has morphed completely.
[10:52] When our parents and our grandparents were coming up,
[10:55] that word required a physical presence.
[10:59] They had to march on the front lawns of the White House
[11:02] to put an end to the Vietnam War.
[11:06] They had to risk their livelihoods
[11:08] to put an end to institutions like segregation.
[11:11] Activism meant maybe being arrested, activism meant maybe being killed,
[11:16] so they had to care deeply,
[11:18] beyond the concept of a trending hashtag,
[11:21] to voice their outrage.
[11:25] But today we have the Internet,
[11:26] and the Internet is fast and the Internet is amazing,
[11:29] but it doesn't exactly require a physical presence,
[11:32] and it therefore allows us a level of detachment.
[11:39] Which is why when I bring myself back into that circumstance
[11:43] and back into high school,
[11:44] I always ask myself,
[11:46] Could any of those children have said any of those words to my face?
[11:54] Better yet,
[11:55] What would have been the outcome, even, had I just picked up the phone?
[12:02] It is so easy to yell at an object because objects don't have emotions,
[12:07] people do.
[12:10] Had I picked up the phone,
[12:12] they would have heard my voice -
[12:13] a voice of a real human being carrying real emotion -
[12:16] and it would have stopped them in their tracks.
[12:19] It would have tethered them to their own humanity.
[12:27] All of those emotions you had when you first read those messages,
[12:31] I'm going to politely ask you to just forget about them.
[12:35] Because the truth is those children were not monsters,
[12:38] those children were not #Racist or anything else,
[12:45] those children, like me, were social lab rats.
[12:49] People tend to forget it,
[12:51] but it was us millennials
[12:52] that watched the world move from a beeper to a cell phone
[12:55] to text messages and videos
[12:56] sent around the world in what felt like a matter of nanoseconds.
[13:02] You see that green line
[13:03] that just starts trending upward right around 2012?
[13:07] That represents the increase in core digital technologies over the years.
[13:13] It was us millennials
[13:15] that were the schoolchildren of those technological advancements.
[13:20] We were the unwitting participants in a great social experiment.
[13:25] We were first handed AIM,
[13:27] and then it was Facebook and Twitter and hashtags,
[13:30] with no formal guide as to how it might all play out
[13:32] because nobody knew.
[13:34] Nobody thought about it.
[13:37] Nobody considered or contemplated
[13:40] the social implications of all of these changes.
[13:45] I still don't actually think people are contemplating
[13:50] the social implications of all of these changes.
[13:58] We are all existing in a miraculous paradox.
[14:05] As a human race, we have never been more connected
[14:08] or further apart from one another.
[14:14] Those children, just like me, were publicly dissected and labeled
[14:18] by a group of adults who saw a sweeping headline
[14:21] instead of an opportunity to learn and to think critically
[14:26] about the approaching era of digital activism,
[14:29] where we write off empathy in favor of proving a point,
[14:32] a point that we are oftentimes making about a human being
[14:35] with real emotions and a beating heart.
[14:38] And yes,
[14:39] the example I presented you today may seem extreme,
[14:42] but it more usually, you should know, is not.
[14:46] It's more usually that one-star review we leave on Yelp
[14:50] because the waitress was #Awful
[14:52] and she was late with our drinks and she maybe forgot our appetizers,
[14:56] so she should be #Fired,
[14:57] and, oh, wait until you see her nose.
[15:02] We type, hit Enter, send, done -
[15:07] for us maybe, but not necessarily for that waitress.
[15:14] What digital activism feels like on the other side
[15:17] is a lot of pain.
[15:20] It can be half a decade of an eating disorder.
[15:23] It can be suicidal thoughts.
[15:25] It can be just an individual
[15:26] that isn't equipped to deal with our criticisms.
[15:33] is that it's hardly activism at all.
[15:36] It's rapid-rate opinionism.
[15:43] I have noticed
[15:44] that it's that send button on the keyboard,
[15:46] it's the Enter key,
[15:48] that seems to be getting all of the attention from us,
[15:50] and so I thought while I have the opportunity to,
[15:52] on this stage,
[15:53] why don't I present to the world a few alternatives to it,
[15:57] like the Control one
[16:00] or the Delete one.
[16:04] And I thought, now that might be a hashtag worth spreading.
[16:08] [#ControlDelete]
[16:09] Thank you guys so much.
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