LIVE FROM NYC: Sydette Harry on why tech keeps failing Black women at UNFINISHED LIVE

actually one of the biggest inspirations for this podcast. Sadet is constantly speaking truth to power and technology, and I was lucky enough to sit down with her for a live taping of There Are No Girls on the Internet in New York City during Unfinished Live, a festival celebrating technology, culture and the arts, where Sadek got really real about power and technology. And if you want to hear Sudet again,

you are in luck. She'll be back at Unfinished Live September one, both I r L from New York City and streaming online. She'll be joined by some of the most interesting people in technology and culture like Dr Sophia Noble, Denis Duncan, Bartender Thurston, and the founding member of Pussy Riot. You might even see me there, so if you do, be sure to come say hi. Go to Live dot Unfinished dot com for tickets, and please enjoy this live episode of There Are No Girls on the Internet from

Unfinished Live last year. Hello everyone, Thank you so much for being here. How's everybody feeling? Yeah? Uh, my name is Bridget Todd. I am the creator and host of the podcast There Are No Girls on the Internet. Um, this is my first ever live show, So thank you so much for being here. It means so much to me. I'm so thrilled to be here with my guest, the brilliant Sidette Harry give it up for Todette. Hello. So a little bit about my podcast For folks who don't know,

it's called There Are No Girls on the Internet. And one of the first questions I often get is what's with that name? What do you mean there are no girls on the Internet. Well, there's an old saying that everybody on the Internet is a guy, and if they say they're a woman, they're just pretending they're not actually a woman. Or if they are a woman online, that

identity doesn't actually matter. You know, we're all the same on the internet, and so that exactly so that identity and all of the issues that come along with that identity, there's this misconception that we just leave it at the door, And I actually truly believed both of these things for

a very long time. I believe that black queer women like me were outliers and technology and the internet, and I believe if we did show up in these places, our identities and all of the issues connected with those identities well just didn't matter. You know, we left them on the door when we've logged in. But that is not true. Women, black folks, people of color, queer folks,

people who have all been traditionally marginalized. We've been showing up online to make it better, safer, more fun, more inclusive. And we've been there from the very beginning. I mean, think about it. What would the internet be like without black folks, queer folks, trans folks. It would be so boring, y'all. It would just be journalists making boring jokes and having

boring opinions about baseball. Right. We couldn't even have that without black people because a lot of journalists boring jokes are stolen from black interactions, thank you, thank you. What would they report about if it wasn't watching us exactly exactly. It would be a nightmare without us. But because people

from traditionally marginalized backgrounds. We've always been there since the very beginning, and we often are the ones doing the unpaid, difficult, sometimes dangerous, and personal personally costly work of making Internet spaces safer, better, more inclusive, and better. And when we do this work, it's not just for us as marginalized people. This work makes spaces better and safer for everyone. Um, and so I want to give you a little pop

quiz to sort of illustrate what I mean. So, which of the following and I know that you know answers? Which of the following is something that we know about the Internet. Ahead of the election, an army of fake social media accounts targeted black voters in an attempt to destabilize our election process. Two, Facebook's moderation practices disproportionately removed

posts from black people talking about our experiences with racism. Lastly, on TikTok, white supremacist groups create extremist content using TikTok's own features, not just to avoid detection, but to even have their content surface on users for you page. So, which one of those three things is the thing that we know about the internet? Raisor hand you think it's one raisor hand you think it's too how about three? Okay, so if you said all of the above, good job,

you get a name. Here's another question. Of all of those things I just said, which of those things are things that black organizers, black social media users, black cultural critics have been vocally raising the alarm about for a very long time? And he guesses all of the above, you guys are all getting it perfectly. She said, all of the above, you would be right. And a piece for Wired called listening to Black Women the innovation that

tech can't quite figure out. My guest today, the brilliant cultural critic and all around tech troublemaker Sedet argues that when black women speak up about the abuses and harms that we face online, people with power just don't listen. That is, until that harm is experienced by other users. She writes, harmful behavior towards black women isn't enough to inspire change until others are harmed. But the original harms

are often lost by journalists task with covering tech. The power and rhetoric that went unchecked becomes common, and tactics used to gets black women for lulls become weapons used in conspiracies destabilizing the very nature of truth, from the swarming of victims to posing as black women to destabilize communities or even countries. Defining the systemic abuse becomes a frustrating exercise of describing an empty space that no one

believes is there. If we can fall, surveil, and automate everyone, how could we miss anything important? And if that and if and if it isn't important, it is only important for how it changes the mythical standard user, no matter how many people were hurt before. So so that when I heard those words, I have to tell you it was the impetus for me creating my podcast at all in general, because it made me feel so sane as

a black woman showing up online. I think people often miss our issues, and you spoke to it so beautifully in that piece. And so I'm so excited to talk to you today about that harm, what accountability looks like for folks who have ignored that harm, enabled that harm, and in some cases profited from that harm, And how we move forward to an Internet that meaningfully listens to black women. Oh my gosh, you never told me that before.

It's true. First and foremost, I want to do the thing where we name the fact that this is my second kind of public thing without a face mask. Then that doesn't involve like family members, so im fidgety um. These are all things, and it's like, let's be honest about the place we are in and the level of comfort we are feeling, because part of the work is just we like high tech solutions, we like the things that are shining and sexy, but we are ultimately all

using the web for our lives. We need to use the web to connect to each other. We need to use the web at this point to get groceries, get vaccines, to do our jobs. And the issue with what I've seen and what I've experienced with specifically that piece that led to the writing of that piece, is that there's no way around when you have certain marginalizations or even in the current world, for you not to be online.

There's no way for you not to bring your whole self to the work you do online the way you are online. What usually happen is that you package it so that whoever you're dealing with at the time feels comfortable, but you're still your whole self. You're still having all of these issues and with some of the things that we talked about. I wrote that in January. I've never told the story about that article, but I am. And it's kind of indicative to the way I've been online

most of my life. But what happened was it was Brianna Taylor, Rest in Peace, Rest and power. The protests started for Brianna Taylor, and there was a uproar of how could we have known? And what is going on? And we're well, how do we do this? And a lot of this was also in post George Floyd. But one of the things that happened is people were just like, how do we really describe this? Where is this thing?

And I had written the art and article for Model View Culture about people posing as black women in in two um kind of dry the web wed ridden feminism in twenty fourteen. It had been a and phenomenon we had been explosing in twenty thirteen. And if we're talking about last year, so how many years ago is that? How many years passed? Seven? Now we work in tech, we are in social media. You certainly become sexy and hot.

Usually it moves within minutes or months the metaverse and f t s those blow up and go in months, but suddenly to talk to black women take seven months. And the editor of Wire at the time said something, and I was like, pay me to write this. I just said, maybe if you just paid me to write this, and a lot of things went back and forth, and then pandemic was happening. I said that in June. The article got published in January, so that still took an

additional seven months. And that is a common theme for things that have to do with women, I think often in general, specifically women of color. And once I finished writing the article, Facebook whatever, what have you? What has dropped within the past couple of weeks we are getting which is a really great piece of journalism, the Facebook reports,

but they're in Wall Street Journal. They've been the Facebook podcast and one of the reports and this was really done in depth for the m I T Technology Review points out that something like five of the top ten revenue slash groups may for centered on black people, and like three of the ten for indigenous people are fake and are known to be fake pretending to be black people. I wrote this. I wrote my article in Model View

Culture in twenty fourteen. I wrote an article for Wired in twenty twenty there was a report that went to the Senate from Oxford. So this is not a small independent report. It was an Oxford And we also have Sherne Mitchell and the Audience who wrote who wrote a report about this in I think also seventeen and at various points. So we had all of this, but suddenly it becomes a thing when Wall Street General writes about it. It It becomes a thing like even Oxford couldn't get

these people off. It wasn't the Senate hearing. Like one of the things that I say is like bam. This was also in the Amnesty International report, and that was an interesting thing because I was interviewed for that report and I've made some very specific comments on race and got told in the way that women who are multiply marginalized are often told, it's divisive what you said, so we're pulling it out. And what I said was the

first targets of these issues are usually black women. We don't pay attention, and in fact, we incentivize not paying attention because it makes great leaders and people get very good at talking about misinformation or harm online by making

those people usually singly marginalized white women. But it was divisive and that I think four of those Facebook groups have been mentioned in the study by Oxford after which was still done after the studies and the observations of black women, and once they were mentored in the Wall Street Journal article and the reports, how long do you think it took them to take it off the internet?

Not seven years, twenty four hours? Oh, y'all are so y'all are so helpful, twelve twelve by the time one of and some of them are just so openly offensive, like the one the number one was my Baby Daddy Ain't Ship because that's how they think black people took online. So they thought that that was a real article, that was a real group when it made it wasn't And that came down in twelve hours as long as the

person reporting it wasn't black. And that has been a common theme in so many things that I've found for multiply marginalized people, but specifically for how black women are interacted with them line now, usually for things like this, we are asked when we had these discussions the issue and part of what I wrote the article for and hearing about your podcast is I really like being black?

I like being what and it's not in and I like doing tech work and I like analyzing things, and I don't feel that I should have to answer everything through a lens of how do I make it diverse and inclusive or how do we answer our problems with the lack of representation, because it's not an our problem, that's a you problem. I am this person everywhere I go. Also, when I'm thinking about tech issues, and why I wrote that article was I like to think about tech issues.

I like to think about things like q A. I like to think about things about I like to think about So what does the gith hub repo is? Why does get hub design like that? My primary thing right now is community and calms. So if you've actually worked in product design, you know if you do anything that involves community, comms copy everybody's working in get hub, you are usually reporting tickets. But we don't talk about those things, and we often don't ask people who do work to

talk about things. There is a separation between the social and the technical and the problem. And the thing that I want constantly trying to push is that those divisions are built into the Internet. So the first even the start of the World Wide Web, Unfinished Live is about decentralized protocols, and you will look at these things and you'll see that the original meetings with tim Berners, Lee and all of these people were divided like this is

a technical protocol, this is a social protocol. That's a big problem. And that is a huge problem that we have carried through the web since its inception of separating those things, except they influence each other. If you don't have social represent asation, you don't design well. If you don't have a good analysis of technical work, you don't make good choices for what happens in social And it's an artificial separation, and it's also socially influenced by where

people think you are. Because the other part about the thing of like let's listen to black women is that when I get pulled into things or sometimes where things like people want you to be Oh, we want to we want to hear what you have to say, can you can you talk about that? And they really want me to sing the ballad of how terrible it is to be black and why they should be nice to me?

And when you want to sing the song of joy of I love being black, but your your product design is bad and the fact that me being black means your product doesn't work? Is you problem? I need you to get better on that. COOBU. They suddenly don't want to have the conversation. People love to have diversity conversations, but I'm like, okay, public, please do me a favor of someone who works in products, who looks at these tickets. Publish all your diversity numbers. Don't tell me you're gonna

do better. I want to see all of those numbers in an easily accessible place that I can pull up everything time. My backgrounds are libraries, so don't don't. You don't have to tell me anything you don't I don't need to part and part of the joy of being black is I don't have to be the singular black person. I don't want to be a spokesperson. I like librarians. I like library stuff, like thinking and reading. I like creating and coding and all of that. I don't need

to be the singular black person. There are people who are often much better served than this. But I want my work to be done well. I wanted to be well compensated for the things I do. I want you to credit me, and I want you to credit mine, and I want you to have good practices. I happen to be black while asking for these things, but that doesn't make it a social justice request. It makes it

a request for good systems. And the problem with these things is that people will treat this like, oh, you want to do diversity because you're talking about how the link the neural linguistic program pro programming penalizes black people more than it penalizes people who pretend to be black.

So you're talking about diversitly. I'm like, I'm talking about your your your machine learning set doesn't work, and then when it stops, and then when it hits somebody actually care about, It's like, what is our problem with AI? There might be a math problem. So it's not a math problem when it's penalizing me or picking me out or penalizing black people, but it's a math problem when it stops white people. Are we using two different kinds

of math? Which if we are, it's fine, but let's lean into that reality and the danger becomes it's like,

you will listen to me, Bemoan. Being black, you will not list You will not listen to me and have effectual steps for us to do this work better and that is an issue that keeps coming up, and we're going to see more of it with the idea of the now content creator economy, where everybody's response when a black person has a problem, it's like, are you a content creator because we really want to boost your profile. I don't want you to boost my profile. I want

you to fix this. I don't need I like making podcasts. I love your podcast, but I don't need to make a podcast to get you to fix the AI that would make both of us guerrillas. And I especially don't need to make a podcast for this three or four times every single gut damn year when somebody pointed out in and you can't provide me a change log for what actual interventions and reports and white papers you published and synthesize to make it stop happening. I don't need

a podcast, I need a paper trail. But they don't believe that we should have those things or it's right for us to ask for those things, And that I think is what is really especially as we are and then times it's really is getting stressful because we are asking for changes and responses to these herculeans. One sin a lifetime, one sin of millennia occurrences. But the thing about change and innovation is that you don't just innovate a product. You don't just change the technical things. You've

got to change society. And what is very I think it's most uncomfortable for a lot of the people who don't want to listen or things like that, and sometimes even for me, is that I have to change myself. So I when you tell me how do we deal with diversity? First of all, who But the second question is why why are we talking about diversity? Why are we talking about it being a fundamental part of what's not functioning? Well? Why aren't we talking about it be

a fundamental part of the reason we're here. I do not like models that constantly asked me to be supplicant to deal with racism when you've already set it up in such a racist way that I'm constantly requesting things. And there are times when I feel you have more of a problem with the fact that when I tell you no or this is wrong and it sticks and you can't shut us down or you have us out that we're at that place in some ways, then you have a problem with the fact that the thing don't

work let's take a quick break at our back. You said earlier how we are often having to to scream at the top of our lungs for someone to hear us to fix things right, and that everybody wants to say, oh, listen to black women, amplify black women, We support black women until we're pointing out these problems that cause us harm. And if we're not singing this sad song about how hard it is and we're actually saying no, your product, your platform is creating this harm. Um you shouted out.

One of my kind of tech hero Sharene mitchell I. Don't want to put you on the spot, but founder of Stop Online Valance against Women, who really did a lot of the reporting early on about the way that

black women experience harm online. So one of my questions for you is, like, what if you're someone who just wants to use social media to talk about real housewives or do your job, and you didn't really sign up to be this unpaid sort of person who is always flagging these issues to make these products function the way they should, Like, what like, how do we exist online if we want to not have this extra unpaid burden

that we really shouldn't have. Just to show up. Well, for me, it's not a one if I got started online because I'm a sci fi geek, like but that's where a lot of these problems happen. Fandom nerd them. Recently, Twitch had was having hate raids where they basically, we're flooding the thing, flooding people's Uh. They were flooding people streams because of this, and the response is there is

as there for me, there's a two pronged response. The response that I would give you, as someone who cares about your mental energy and your face, is like, curate your fee list, do this, do that, etcetera. You have to kind of approach it because that's the only way you will be able to operate cleanly online. The other part about it is in the way that I feel, as a person who makes these things, someone who looks at the features and such, that it's that it's not

your response stability. This is no longer a question to me. And that might be a responsively annoyed and tide of the pandemic and how we haven't addressed racism and sexism and everything to the point we are now worried about going outside because of what's happening. It is the point. It is the It is the need and the necessity of the people to fix it. I I don't I don't want to have another unpaid conversation. Can you do freak q A research? Can you do free design research

and free you user interviews? Because you don't believe me when I say I have a different experience. So I've got to cut and paste and do a whole report. But you're paying somebody within your organization who's usually not black and doesn't use the platform six figures to do it. At this point, get that person to do their job, or respect the or design it so that I can report for free. Because the other side of this is as someone who looks at community, as someone who looks

at use your feedback. Most of the time, when we are experiencing things like that, we want to tell someone because we wanted to stop. So we'll intrinsically go hey, And some of it is cars telling a home model, but we'll turn to somebody and be like, Hi, I'm experiencing these things. I think one of the things that is most enraging to me about the content creator distinction

specifically is watching TikTok users and watching TikTok creators. There is, yes, the power black storytelling, the power black art and culture. But if you are a young person of color, but specifically black, I am in all of you. You are learning high level video editing and algorithmic justice and machine learning, and you are putting it into a medium on the medium that is that is marginalizing you, and you are

quick and good about it. Because how quickly does TikTok respond when somebody publishes and goes, hey, you're surfacing unnatural material, which means these and I say, young kids to me, I'm right now, anybody under twenty five. I don't mean, I don't mean to infantilize, but anyone who's under two five. So these are people who, if they had gone to school for this, would not be finished with the pH d. But they are already quick and recognizing these patterns, recognizing

the tech, reporting it. They are doing that work already, and they're working as scientists, they're working as observers, they're working as researchers, they're working as organizers making no, not

making dances. And we're saying to them, all you're doing is content creation being But the honest truth is they have to run a small think tank for every single account to respond to to curate because we have done so poorly in actually building the product and building the processes for harm reduction and harm read mitigation, or just moderating our content. That's that I I one of the things that I'm starting to find with the frame and

it's often confrontational. I'll be confrontation a little bit. Is I'm no longer accepting the framing of So let's hear more about my problem. Okay, where we are, We're gonna start there. Tell me how you got to two thousand and twenty one and didn't know this was a problem. Tell me how you got to two thousand and twenty one and you didn't know that marginalized people have a

hard time online. Tell me how you are in a sink tank, in a nonprofit, in a job when you didn't If you don't know this, when I can pull reports now from Harvard, Oxford, Yale, at one point, Clemson University, Amnesty International, myself. All of this is open publication. These are the publications you mix. So why are you talking to me like I don't know what's going on? And number two, don't tell me about my tone. If the fact, then I'm angry. We've seen what these people do unchecked.

I have been getting death threats since I was twenty two. I'm gonna let people don't a secret. I'm thirty seven. I've been getting death threats for fifteen smooth straight years. I'm not I'm not here to babysit you. I'm not here to make you feel good about the dereliction of your duty. I'm here to fix this problem, and if I can't fix it for me, I'm here to fix it for the people behind me. Now, we can do that with some social things, but we also can do

that by you just doing your job. Don't automatically turn on contents. Don't use an AI that recognizes me as a gorilla. Don't do it. We don't have to have a discussion. You don't have to hear my thoughts. I'm not a small child. Just fix it. Start making products that help people tell you what they need, and then when they tell you them, don't try and finance it so you do something different because you're not comfortable you've

been told what is needed. Either do it or be honest about the fact of why you're not doing it and also allows and start allowing us to have those discussions where we just get to do our job, coders and creators and thinkers and writers, and we want to go in and write a good bit of code. We want to write some good copy. We want to build these communities, make it so I can do that. I My part of my job to district shouldn't be how

do I help you solve racism? No, We're gonna do it together Grey, But I would just really like to build the code that I'm building. I'm working on a product now m with Mozilla Rally, so we are specifically trying to build ways of tracking data tracking everything from doom scrolling so how which was coined by a woman of color, Karen Huff about how you are online to how ads are targeted to you without having to go

through platforms. It's built through web extension. So and it's great because right after that was it Facebook shut that Facebook observer. We found out that all the data everybody was getting wasn't true. And that is it takes everything in me not to start with so I told you so, and everything in me is not good enough. So I told you so that there is there are so many

people who told these people this. One of the jokes I have is that there are people who have formed a coalition of oh my god, don't do that when it comes to social media who don't agree on anything else. I don't agree on anything else, but you've found it from sex workers x X, religious conservatives, abortion rights activists, black women, tech people, all of us have come together and be like, I need you to think about this.

Why would you trust Facebook? Why would you organize anything to make you trust Facebook as a tactical decision, not as a whatever decision. And that comes not from our notice because we're not on the inside. We've been the people these attacks. I don't mean, I need to know why you don't trust them, and I need you to build in better arts. And if there's like no, no, no, you don't understand how we work in Silicon Valley. We're friends, blah blah blah. Now you get this that most of

this data is not good. How many people's PhDs just got screwed because that data isn'tviable. But nobody wanted to even think in terms of teaching, Let's be prepared for the if we're hostile, You and I and other marginalized people have no other option but to think what happens if this goes left? And that is a reality in the world, and they have been watching it for years,

so why aren't they prepared? And it's and if you if you feel uncomfortable about giving me an answer that feels like a thing you need to work out, right when you have a jail break or something like that, you fix that immediately. What is it about our issues? What is it about the issues of people represented that you can take so long? And I think the point that we really need to move from now if we want to get better, is that we're not going to get past this until we do that. Why are certain

people's issues, Why are certain responses always secondary? That's not We keep dancing around this, and we're gonna keep up coming up with funny terms we're more concerned with. But we're not getting past that. Unto will we answer it? And it's super uncomfortable And I am a human, so I understand why you don't want to. But we're now in a pandemic that is going into its second, possibly third year because we don't have we can't understand basic

kind of empathetics social reactions. There was a run up on the capital of racists who were trying to kill people. You don't hang a noose on the front of the capital justice symbolical jester in the United States of America. Do not tell that black lie to my black face. I know what my people have been through. You put a noose on a you put a new somewhere. You're trying to hang some people. They did that on the Capitol. They still haven't had a real full hearing. We've had

all of this happened, and we're still just listening. Why aren't we acting? And until we get to this point, we're gonna keep having spurs up and flirts up and goes up and goes down until we answer that question of why aren't we moving more. After a quick break,

let's get right back into it. One of the things that I feel so frustrated about, as someone who has worked in the disinformation and online extremism space for a while, is this idea that we had to combat for so long that it's just jokes and people will make these comments online it's not serious. It didn't take a rocket scientist to see that online commentary doesn't just stay online and that what we saw on January six is directly related.

But talk about like lying to my face. How often I would be in meetings with tech leadership and they would say, oh, well, it's about speech. You know, this is not about like we're not trying to you know, this is not going to be related to like in

real life actions. We know things that start online don't stay online, and so what we I mean, I live in d C. What I saw in my own backyard in January six, I saw it as a direct reaction to the inaction that you just described to all of these different little cutesy names for what we can all plainly see. It's like extremism, house, boxy, woman, get get spicy. I have a hard time believing that spaces and confederations that are wider than the racists and the Proud Boys

are well versed in protecting me. If you do a misinformation panel and everybody's white, I've stopped listening at this point. If you can't grab somebody to be hey, let's talk, just stand there and talk. That's a baxt level of work that you're not willing to do that. I now know that I can't trust anything else. I'll really, I'll really come up because there is you've had time. And the reason it's a joking is because it's a to them.

It is jokes in speech to them. And I'm actually before this, I worked with the Choral Project, So I was the community research leads for the Choral Project and that it was about comment moderation. So we worked on building things to moderate comments. And there are times depending and like there's a whole type of things like you

have to set what you'll except, etcetera, etcetera. There are times where I would moderate something or look at something and this is something that I would punch someone in the faith for if they were standing right in front of me. But as a content moderate moderator, based on what we had defined our parameters were, I had to let it go. I might not like it, but I

would let let it go. The thing that is very that is often grounded in a lot of these decisions is that often we are not asking them to do anything they have not set out in their own rules or bylines or anything like that. We are asking them to merely infor worced them for marginalized people the way they bled they enforced them for people who might matter. That's literally the only thing I'm asking you to do. I actually had an experience with Twitter last year. I

think it was last year. Time means nothing right now, but there is a congress person where um who said something so violently anti Asian and sinophobic. I don't want to repeat it, but it was congresswoman that a little that speech warning, I just went, you racist, raggedy bitch. This is not something my mom's gonna be proud of.

That's not necessarily I'm necessarily proud of at that moment, because it was just such a gut reaction of what and there was and I knew I was in good company because that was not I wasn't the only person who said that. It was me. It was a reporter from I think the South Chida Poe was it was I think there was a white mom in Texas who was like, oh my god, you were racist, Stitch. I was the only person who was blocked. I'm a verified

account for whatever that means, but I was blocked. They were a whole bunch of things, and there was no way for me to appeal that. I actually had to contact someone separately, and that for for moderation. As a person who has moderation experience. That's a really bad model if you're worried about things like that, and especially for targeted congresswoman, you actually should be more concerned about that

language because she's a congresswoman. So I actually was not against the fact that I was blocked, because you actually have to worry about that because again, the one of the most targeted people online for racism and has been for about ten years is Diane Abbott, the MP in London. The most targeted person in the anglophil in world is a black woman, black MP for labor in London. That's almost never mentioned. She's targeted more than anyone you could

think of. I think at a certain point she was targeted more than Michelle Obama, but we don't talk about that because of her specific status. But when the problem came, the hammer came down on me. The hammer did not come down on other folks. And there is no way

to aggregate these these decisions. And I had a another friend who had become friendly with who experienced a similar a similar thing, and had someone say, well, we're not sure that happens to black women, and you're lying or you're bad at your job, But also how much do you want us to do? How do you get us through if you're going to gaslight us at every turn, if it always is something you kicked down the road

will get to what we'll get to it. And what we're getting to is that black women are leaving these platforms. Didn't Twitter. Twitter just had to pay eight hundred million dollars to somebody, I think its own board because engagement numbers were fludged, And I have a slightly more than hunch that some of that has to do with how badly they've moderated these racists and bots accounts versus the

actual content those people create. And you've gotta be you've got to be willing to get better at the work. And what I think is often the issue for some things is that some people do not want to change. They don't want to change. It is not to them. Even with the Nazis in the streets, the fascist running up and down, the planet on fire and a's still in the middle of a pandemic, it's not serious enough for them yet to change the way they do things. And that is a hard thing to say, and it's

a hard thing to hear. But until there's an actual change, I don't know that we can say anything different. And for someone who if I was going back to the loop de loop, I started with, but if I am going to be a talk to a black woman I care about online, the first thing I would tell you is they have yet to make steps that are clear for your protection. That's them problem, that's not you problem. But I want to make sure that you are aware

of that. And that would be the thing, because my first concern is going to be how you are doing, not how the tech is doing in terms of like what do I see before? One of the things I really like about my job right now and the project we're doing with Mozilla rally is it's starting to address what I think is always the fundamental problem with these things is how do you start getting information that people

can independently uh corroborate. How do you start getting that kind of raw data that these platforms have been siloing and keeping to themselves. How do you get people who honestly want to have a good experience and will then tell you that to be able to get some real contexts?

So when you tell me when you because some of these studies we're working with we're working with Princeton, We're working with Stanford, and we are going to be working with the Markup and I'm very excited about that because they do great work. But couple the data with talking to people and asking, hey, how did you feel what

was going on when you saw this? And it's going to be done with respect, It's going to be done with transparency, and it's going to be done in ways that are not directly under the people who have taken so long to do right by you and still fail. And I think that is what I am hoping more works through, is that that we stopped making the idea of people and things secondary at work, and we start moving into the no. It is important to us that we think about how people experience things. You know, I

love all of this. I one of the reasons why I'm so interested in these conversations about how these online spaces are moderated is because, you know, you talk about women who are essentially pushed out of these spaces because of this kind of harassment that just you don't see it ever ending. And I was one of those women. There was time in my life where I was a

very very avid redditor. I would like wake up, and I was unpaid moderating all of these different spaces, and you know, it was a big part of who I was. It was a big part of like what made me me. And if you've ever been on Reddit, you know sometimes it's a place where you are going to be harassed. Not just the black Ladies Subpreddit was one of the most targeted reddits online up until like two thousand eighteen exactly. And you know, I don't remember thinking so when it

was harassment. That wasn't just like they're saying I mean things to me. It was like, I know where you live, and it sounds like this person maybe doesn't know where I live. I remember thinking, like, I've given so much of my time and my energy and myself to this platform. Certainly someone is going to hear me. Certainly when I speak up, I will be listened to. I will be heard.

And when I realized that there was no one to hear what I had to say, there was nowhere to turn to, I realized it just wasn't worth it, and so I checked out. I just I just logged off. And so I think back to like how much that how much those communities meant to me, How much those spaces meant to me, and I just let them go because every time I raised what I was experiencing that some of this stuff was really scary, no one listened.

It was like I was shouting and to avoid. And so I always think about all the women what it feels like to go through this, what it feels like to be on the other side of it, and what it feels like to finally be like enough, this enough. So I'm so happy that you talk about the actual emotional experience of going through it, not just like as

a user, but as a person who experiences things. So I'm gonna tell you something that I want to tell everybody, and this is something that I have not learned, but there would be helps. It is not your responsibility to set yourself on fire so other people have warmth and heat. You didn't just let it go, and don't like that you were exposed to a level of abused, non response and trauma because the things we are called and said to us online are traumatic that ended up not being

worth the effort you put in. There is I don't know why there there becomes like they feel like there's often a belief that hard work must be terrorizing that do not like because sometimes hard work starts. You just gotta do the thing. You gotta do the rep, you gotta do the you gotta do the project. But you shouldn't have to be hazed to talk about your hair. You shouldn't have to be hazed to talk about yourself

in a movie. And if you are, and it's against their guidelines, there's someone's job for this to be done. And it's also that the things to talk about moderation is that even when moderation is done, most constant moderation farms are formed off to usually women in the Philippines.

So we are hurting women of color coming and going because not only are they reading our trauma, they're also seeing the things we never see, which are assault videos and um sorry, Chmale wrote about this, I think for Vergin again five years ago, but we're getting all of that and it's just like tapping out for what doesn't serve you is a completely a normal human response, and you're a human. And I remember specifically around Reddit because like a gat sometimes spicy, but Alexis Ohani is like,

I don't understand what's this house is happening? Why are people getting like this online. Sir, you were the president and CEO of Reddit. Sir, I'm gonna need you to give me more than a tweet. I'm going to need to give you more me more than a wonderfully edit podcast with the Rising Music. If you really want to know how we got here, you're going to sit there. You're going to sit down with some people and they're not going to just be content creators. They're going to

be black designers. They're going to be black PhDs. They're going to be black users, and they're going to be queer users, and they're gonna be Asian users, and they're gonna be Latin name users. And we're going to sit down and actually go back, and we're going to make some hard lines in the sand, and if we're not going to back it up, what you're actually telling me

is you don't want to do this. And honestly, my shocking opinion, it is fine that you don't want to do this, But every moment you play in my face, every moment you make a big decoration, every moment you don't follow through, every moment we really want to meet with you and dodge that call or you say that you're doing a fellowship and it's thirty dollars less than you pay the lowest paid person and who gets a job. Every single time you do that, you sap energy from people.

You sap energy from movements, you sap people's and you sap the energy for people to have good communities online. And you don't have to do it to me personal, even though it's been done to me personal for it to matter to me, And if you don't want to change, that's fine. But do not be surprised when you're connection numbers go down. Don't be surprised when people find new ways to do this, and don't be shocked when as

people who are against you. The thing that I cannot buy buy is for all of these people who are listening and pretending and caring but do not actually do the work. At the end of the day, your user. Those people want to have you to have a good experience because they want to have a safe place to be. The people who are the racist, the nazis, all of them. They fundamentally don't want your platform to work. They don't want your product to work, They don't want people to

be able to use it. They want you to fail. Why are you focus on the people who want you to fail more than you are focused on the people who want you to win. And what social cues and what social biases do you have that make this something that you keep doing? Are you if you're and again, we're not going to get past if you don't answer that question. So I have a final question for you. This is the question I usually end every interview with.

So we said all of this all of a sudden, are you hopeful about the state of the internet and technology when you look at where we are? Are you hopeful for what's on the horizon? Do you think it's better than where we are now or worse? I think it's different, and I am I'm built to be hopeful. No, my my mother, my mother used to sometimes says about me, and I'm very very brilliant. I not sometimes very smart. I've got more hope than sense. But I am hopeful

about technology because I'm hopeful of about people. That's part of the reason why I'm drawn to the work I do. I'm hopeful about people. Again, I say the analysis and the things I see the young folks on TikTok to you, Oh my god, I can't imagine I'm being hopeful when you see someone reviving an ancient indigenous practice of throat singing with their mother. How can you not be hopeful when you see young queer kids be able to get help?

How how can you not be How can you not be hopeful when someone teaches you how to magically get curry stains out of a type of ware part. I'm Guyanese. Actually I'm a hat, but I'm Guyanese. And you know that that that's a mystical, magical thing. And you see that someone can do that, you are I'm inexplicably hopeful that you can see that in the streets. But I also think that hope is not enough. I don't think

that there's I'm not excited by far away things. I'm excited by the work that's being on and so many people are showing up to do that work. But I am also very very frightened because since that is common with something that was given to me. Is how much longer people will have the energy and the resources to do that work is what scares me. And how committed people are to actually redistributing, redistributing or revolutionizing so that

they can do the work, That's what scares me. But what it comes down to, do I feel hope at all? Of course, I get up and I got if. I get up and I have something to do, and somebody is saying that they are thinking about a thing, or they've noticed a thing, and they still committed to making a piece of art or making a piece of media, or even a tweet that says this is important to me. And I want the world to be slightly better. God, I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful every day so that, Harry, we

are just about out of time. I have to thank each and every one of you for being here. You have no idea how much this means to me. Thank you so much for leaning into this conversation. Thank you again to Debt for being here. If you want to hear more conversations like this, please tune into my podcast. There are no girls on the internet. We would love to have you. Um yes, thank you so much for coming.

Thank you so you're so good. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi. You can have me us at hello at tangdi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangdi dot com. There are no Girls on the Internet was created by me bridget Todd. It's a production of I heart Radio and Unboss creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Ary Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michaelmato is

our contributing producer. I'm your host, bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. H m hm