When will Twitter listen to Black women? BEST OF TANGOTI

warnings were basically ignored. Now, there was a time under former CEO Jack Dorsey when Twitter higher ups did kind of seem to be working to curb at least some of the harassment and hate speech on the platform, with the hiring of folks like Jaya God, Twitter's policy and trust lead, whose job it is to curb things like hate speech and harassment. Unfortunately, Elon Musk, who may be buying Twitter for four billion dollars, spent the week publicly

attacking her leadership. Basia is a woman of color, and we already know that women of color disproportionately face harassment on Twitter, So when using the platform to attack his would be employee for just doing her job trying to make Twitter safer, a wave of his supporters flooded her ventions with hate, and it isn't hard to see this as a signaled how Musk would handle or not handle harassment on the platform, and it seems like the ultimate move grounded in our refusal to listen to the users

who make the platform what it is. We've been here before and it has big consequences. So let's revisit one of my favorite episodes about what happens when Twitter fails to listen to women when we speak up about our experiences on the platform. Okay, so I could tell you this story a hundred times and a hundred different ways. People just don't listen to women, especially Black women, and it comes with big consequences. Six years ago, black feminists

were experiencing a coordinated pattern of disinformation on Twitter. They spoke up, but no one listened. That failure to listen to black women had a big impact. It allowed for the weaponization of online harassment tactics against other marginalizes people on social media and presents continued threats to our democracy and safety. Okay, so let's just get this out of the way right now. Twitter is a fucking cesspool. If you spent any time there, you probably already knowe this

bad faith commentary reply guys, trolls, harassment. It can really dispute unpleasant place. In May, Twitter announced they would start labeling tweets that spread misleading information. But this comes years after black feminists raised the alarm about it and were ignored. These women weren't just being attacked. They were learning about the tactics that bad actors used to infiltrate online communities. They spoke up about what they were experiencing online. So

why did anyone listen? And what might have happened if they had? Shatika Hudson, freelancer tat Lady Sometimes activists. Shafika had been using Twitter regularly since almost its very beginning, where she spent most of our time online connecting with other black feminists. In twenty fourteen, while job searching, she noticed the hashtag that just did not makes sense end Father's Day. The people pushing the end Father's Day hashtag

on Twitter appeared to be black feminists. They talked about how we should have polished Father's Day because too many black men date outside of their race, or because black men don't support their children. Stuff that just seemed really out there unless they had like ten different ads open.

Because I was also like doing a job search and just going about my life, and it someone tweet caught my attention because it was so completely off the wall and I don't know who retweeted it or like how it even arrived in my timeline, but it wasn't anything that any black feminist anywhere would say. It was like, what was it? Oh gosh, yeah, in Father's day. I wish these white women would stop stealing our men some some something just completely off the wall. They had nothing

to do with end neat thing. And the avatar was someone who I didn't recognize. Now, the thing about the black feminist community on Twitter, the thing about a lot of communities on Twitter is that you might not necessarily get along with everybody, but you know who everyone is like, and if you haven't met them or seeing them out or you know, done a tweet up, hung out at a party, something someone you know has And and this particular instance, I'm clicked on the person well the accounts profile.

I said, Okay, who is this. I've never seen this person and it looks like they just joined like two days ago, and they're just tweeting about this with this hashtag and they have, you know, the photo of a black woman, but it just nothing adds up. So that drove me to click on the hashtag and father's jay and lo and behold. When I did a Twitter search, there's a bunch of accounts that are saying thing that are completely left, like not left like you know, politically,

just kind of left, like left, where are you coming from? Left? And I didn't recognize any of them, so I at that point I just kind of asked the general question from my timeline, just say, Okay, you guys, what's going on? I keep seeing this hashtag and these accounts that I don't recognize with people who look like they just joined like five seconds ago. And someone said, yeah, it looks like this is like some kind of fortune thing that

That's when I really started digging. I said, Okay, well, this is really awful because they're pretending to be black women who were saying these awful things, and I'm smart enough to know that nothing here that they're saying is even remotely what a real black feminist would say. I honestly think the people who they fooled immediately we're already probably biased against feminist or black women, or some combination

of the two. I didn't get the impression that they were fully most of the people I followed, is what is what I mean? But um, they were getting some reaction. That's when Shaffica went from curious to pist. I got so mad, Like I remember just being so angry. I could feel my cheeks and my ears heat up, like honestly, like you know in the in the cartoons where the character like starts seeming from the coming for your ears as you hear the tea kettle whistle. I was earious.

I was like, you know, it's not like we don't get enough garbage online just being black women, you know, but with people just randomly showing up in our our mentions to argue with something that we said, not because they necessarily disagree, but because that's what people do when you're a black woman online. Apparently, because we don't deal with enough out here in real life and online, we don't deal with enough. We've got this whole silly operation

thing happening. So I said, well, let me just go ahead and take a look and see what's really going on and see how bad this is. And as I began to dig, I saw just how bad it was, and I realized that I would not be able to point out all of these accounts alone. You know how in movies when a character discovers this thing they've been investigating as much, much bigger than they realized. There is no pepe silvia, and this thing goes all the way

to the top. Well, that's how Shapika felt. She knew the Twitter accounts Pushing and Father's Day weren't actually black women. They were just impersonating black women, and pretty badly at that. But there were too many of them for this to be a one off thing. It had to be coordinated, and there were also too many for her to tackle alone. She wanted to give other black feminists a tool to sniff out these impostors, so she fought back with a hashtag of her own, your slip is showing. I went

ahead with your slip is showing. I got to run another line like, I don't know your messcare is running something like that, but You're slip is showing just seemed to work. It really just seemed to work. Okay, So, if you're not a lady from the South, the phrase your slip is showing might not mean anything to you. Literally, it means when your slip isn't peeking out from underneath your skirt address a big fashion, no no, but where I come from, that one phrase really highlights a subversiveness

of what I'll call auntie speak. Think of it a bit like the phrase bless your heart. A lady at church might tell you that your slip is peeking out from the bottom of your skirt because they care about you look at your best. Or they could tell you your slip is showing because they don't like you and they're pointing out publicly that you aren't looking as good

and put together as you think you are. You know, just the sort of thing that one of your aunties might say to you and church and oh, honey, you need to you need to fix your slip is showing? Have mean because right, there's a there's a difference between a your slip is showing from one of your aunties and your slip is showing from somebody who doesn't like you. And that was what I was going with it, like, yeah,

your slip is showing. I'm telling you because I was raised right, not because I particularly care about you being embarrassed. I love that so much. I love how you kind of use this southern auntie expression that we all sort of know what it means. What's also funny is that I would imagine the people who are in personading black women probably that probably that that nuance probably goes right over their head. Yes, that was that also, um one of the things that I also delighted in, because of

course I wouldn't get it because you'd have to. I mean, you have to be somewhat embedded within certain communities to pick up on the nuance, and they really weren't. It's fitting that we're talking about getting the nuance. That's certain something you can't really teach. This would ultimately be the undoing of people in persiating black women online, their inability

to authentically sound like black women. They try to use a v or African American and venacular English, but get the expressions all wrong in ways that might as well be screaming I am a white person pretending to be a Black woman. This is where I should probably say that. Around the same time, I noticed someone on Twitter using

my photo and tweeting confusing things about black people. I never knew who was behind it or why it was happening, but if I had to say, I would say it wasn't an actual black woman because the things they were saying we're just so out there, things like I'm gonna be voting for Trump because Hillary Clinton is whack y'all, things that just didn't sound right because they're not speakers

of a d um they're approximating. The thing that like really really really seemed to like immediately point them out was this consistent and ability to understand and properly use the habitual be. They didn't get it. They did not like they would use the habitual be just kind of like for the future tens, you know what I mean, Like it was terrible, and a lot of the time it was just like really obviously racist word salad. Obviously

racist word salad. I love it my new band name. Ultimately, it seemed like the point of End Father's Day was to see what kind of discord bad actors organizing on message boards like Forshan could sell within feminist online communities and to make actual feminists and our issues look like petty, stupid man haters whose issues were so outlandish they could

never be taken seriously. It turns out this is actually a pretty common disinformation tactic, hijacking public conversations about s set of topics or wedge issues through medium manipulation is a way of making people afraid of having an opinion in public and ultimately trying to silence them. I'm Joan Donovan and I'm the research director at the Shorenstein Center

on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Dr Donovan says, the same way that brands and politicians realized the power of social media, the kind of people who want to harass others did do it can have a big impact, especially as we're using social media to talk about thorny issues like race, gender, and sexuality, issues that require nuance to discuss thoughtfully. It makes it tough for anyone to have

a good faith dialogue online. Over time, just like the politicians learned to use social media, we had white supremacists figure out that you don't actually need to show up in public to have an impact on people's lives, and

so we saw networked and coordinated harassment campaigns. Uh it just continue even to this day, continue to be useful ways to shut down journalists, to impersonate different groups, and to really cause uh a fracture in public conversation about really important issues that require some level of nuance, some level of understanding, and and a lot of compassion to talk about, you know, especially racism in this moment, and people are reticent to talk about it because they're afraid

of saying something wrong, especially in the environments online where if you do make a misstep, you could get dragged, you could get canceled. But also some of that might be artificial. It might be the case that people do sympathize with you, people do want to help you grow and learn, but certain medium manipulators see that as an opportunity to swarm in and really uh drive the wedge is deep as it can go. A few right wing news outlets picked up the hashtag and Father's Day and

amplified it as a legitimate feminist take. This is how Fox News covered it, Like some of these tweets, heres from Tasha. She wrote, and everyone knows we only need mothers. Why do we even need Father's Day? Fathers are useless? Hashtag? Come on, oh, come on? Just more? Is this nasty feminist rhetoric that they're not just like interested in ending Father's Day the interesting ending men? That's really what they want.

But Shafika says, only the kind of people who were already predisposed to be skeptical of women and feminists and especially black women fell for it. Well, it was actually At first, I remember I was incredulous, Like honestly, I was looking at people like, oh, and Father's Day feminists take a terrible turn and radical, and I was like, You've got to be kidding. But then I realized that no,

they were completely serious. And then it's on on me that these are people who could not possibly understand feminism, possibly women in general, Black people her too much of anything outside of their little Fox News bubble like that. That was the impression that I got, Like, basically, if you fell for this, it's because you already had a certain set of bigotries in place too fall for it. What was happening with black women online is much less

widely known than gamer Gate. Were angry men coordinated to harass progressive voices online who were mostly women in the months following and Father's Day. Shafika thinks it was ignored

because the women who were targeted were black. Not only was she helping to create a tool to stamp out this kind of disinformation online, she also wanted to document that it was happening so it wouldn't go forgotten or erased just because it was happening to black women as um, you're probably aware of a lot of us are big on what we call receipts, So there are plenty of receipts. We've got the screen cabs. You can't even you know, delete the tweets because we got it, we got the information.

But yeah, I mean, that's that's been a big part of it for me, and it's frustrating for a lot of us to see essentially a history erased. It's particularly distressing for me because you know, I'm not I wouldn't consider myself a scholar at this particular point. And my friend so True who also was absolutely integral with formulating you're slipping showing and how it kind of played out

and became a useful tool. But back when I was a scholar, I understood that one of the things that people do when they're trying to erase the impact of a movement is the kind of start the leading history. It's a huge, huge feature of a racier when people talk about You're slip of showing. If they talk about it or if they mentioned it at all, it's it's weird.

It kind of gets vaguely mentioned in relation to gamer Gate as this weird thing that sort of happened before gamer Gate that wasn't really relevant and didn't provide anybody any tools or you know, it was, you know, just kind of a blip as opposed to what it was, which was a scary peek into the future. And again, like I said, hindsight being twenty once, when you start to look back on all of these four chan offer I'm sorry, I can't say four chan without making that noise.

You have a specialise, I do. I Oh my gosh. Someone else pointed out to me. It's like, do you realize that you just kind of just disgusted noise? What I mean you say fortunate, I'm just I'm sorry, it's automatic. I'm working on it. When you try to kind of understand how everything happened, you have to take all of

it into account. I really think that in Father's day and um, you know, consequently you're you're slip is showing we're a huge part of it, and it's it can be frustrating to see it left out of the history because it's like, Okay, you're missing a really relevant chunk of understanding how all of this mess happened. Even at a time where we're having a conversations around women's experiences online. Why do you think your slip is showing and and Father's Day and the way that women in folks of

color have been harassed online pretty much goes overlooked. Why do you think that is not? Yeah? That and again it's frustrating. And my theory remains it's because the targeted group at the time for the end Father's Day of four chan operation were black women. It's honestly, that's that's my That's I have no other answer at this point. Is the six years I've watched this just kind of

repeatedly happened. And the only answer, unfortunately, that I have is that, Okay, well, this is being largely ignored and rap because of who the targets were, and the targets were of black women, but particularly black feminist. We'll be right back after this quick break. People who are traditionally marginalized online, like black women, are specifically impacted by things like disinformation and harassment on social media. It the ultimate goal is to freak them out so much that they'll

shut down their social media and just stop talking. Here's Dr Donovan again. Yeah, so we have to remember that a lot of the ways in which disinformation is carried through networks are also related to the ways in which

people are harassed online. You know, So if you're there's a concept called gender trolling, it's evolved into trans trolling, race trolling, um, queer trolling, where the characteristics of your identity become the thing that they focus on, and they'll, you know, they'll be a swarm of folks that have coordinated in some other place, usually on a message board, uh, and they will target specific public figures or women or transfolks or prom in it uh black activists in order

to get them to shut off their social media. And they will use all kinds of horrendous images and threats to try to get you to feel fear and to shut it down. And we don't see that same kind of level of threat making when it comes to trolling male candidates. And that has to do with the characteristics of the harassers themselves, which often see the harassment as a form of activism and as a form of defending

themselves or defending their piece of the culture. And so a lot of these people tend to be misogynists as well as racists, and in their smaller online communities where they don't think they're wat they'll talk openly about that, and they'll talk opening about who they should target, it is,

why and what the problem is. And I think at this stage we've been through this enough to know it's a serious problem, but it still happens every day, and especially at this moment, we're seeing an incredible amount of trolling around, you know, anti black racism. And the responsibility though, for dealing with this lies with the platform companies first and foremost. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey hasn't always been the

most responsive to the misuse of the platform. You'd think you'd be more concerned, but Shafica says that wasn't the case. She and the other black women targeted were pretty much left on their own to figure it out. So did the powers that be at Twitter or any other social media company or any other official do anything to fix this? No, UM that that the short answer, there is no now. The longer at explanation is that we repeatedly brought this whole thing to the attention of Twitter support um to

Jack directly. It's not like nobody knew what was happening. It had made the news like so it's not. It's not as though um he was ignorant. The general impression that I got from Twitter support was that, oh, well, you know this is We're so sorry, are our hands are tied and blah blah blah, And I started looking into the tech side of everything, and I realized that that wasn't the truth. They absolutely have and had tools

on hand to stop this, and they just didn't. They just let it happen, and they just let us clean up the mess and defend our communities ourselves. As much as being left defend for her own community online stocked, it did teach Topika that her online community could do a lot with a little And while that wasn't cool at all, and hopefully at some point in and you know, at some point down the line, they will be sufficiently

shamed for it because it was just really awful. We learned what we could do on the ground with just the very basic tool of like community organization and a hashtag, we were able to do a whole lot to just stop something that could have gotten way out of hand. We outed it early, and we ended it early, and if something had been done to make sure that these fake accounts that we were reporting had been taken out a commission, there would have been a lot less for

game or game to work with. They wouldn't have had to they wouldn't have had the opportunity to just go ahead and access those same tools that they'd already created. So in a kind of way, it sounds like your work with your slippers showing and your work organizing community responses online was kind of this canary in a coal mine, and you all did all that you could to prevent this,

to stamp this out. But if only the powers that be at Twitter or elsewhere have done anything, then it might not be the sort of wide scale situation that it is now. That is exactly correct, and that I know that sounds damning, but that's accurate. They could have

stopped it. They could still stop it. But the reason why, unfortunately, and this was absolutely pointed out by people at the time, um and people later taking the whole situation from like, you know, the whole post mortem of the whole incident, the reason why they didn't is because of the profit model at the time was based on number of accounts and interaction. So you know that when you're selling your product basically too, we're the products to advertisers and whatever

have you. The more users it looks like you have, the better. So it really wasn't in Twitter's best interest to say, okay, well we have twenty accounts with one I P address that's suspicious and we should look into it. And that's why they didn't. They didn't took them a full two and a half years, I think, to even really address it in a serious way. And I think

that was only after the whole congressional meeting. Like I'm I'm pretty sure that was after everybody who was like the head of social media get called in front of Congress. Mm hmm, Like that's what it took. So that pretty

much brings us to today. Today, Twitter leads all other social media platforms and the spread of misleading information about coronavirus, according to a study by Oxford researchers called Types, Sources and Claims of COVID nineteen misinformation, and a study out of Carnegie Mellon found that most of the accounts pushing this misleading content are actually convincing looking bots using Twitter to prey on people. So division and increased polarization. This

isn't just an online saying either. Kathleen Carly, the director for the Center for Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity, says increased polarization will have a variety of real world consequences and play at and things like voting behavior and hostility

towards ethnic groups. And this summer, as Black Lives Matter protests popped up all over the globe, Twitter confirmed that multiple accounts posing as Black Lives Matter activists were calling for violence and white suburbs, but the as accounts were actually run by white supremacist groups just posing as activists

and quote Antifa to cause chaos. Facebook underfire again a Senate Intelligence Committee report claiming Russian agents use social media sites like Facebook to target African Americans in an effort to suppress voter turnout. We already know that Russia use social media to interfere with the election, and in case you needed a Senate report to confirm with black women have been saying, oh along. A Senate Inquiries cited an

Oxford University report on Russian interference on social media. They found that campaigns targeted no single group more than African Americans on social media. They posed as black people and ran bony black activist groups to influence Black voters. To either stay home or vote for Trump on election Day. The Senate Intelligence report says the posts were aimed at

making Americans suspicious of each other. Sound familiar. These are the very same kind of tactics that black women like Shafika were complaining about years earlier, accounts posing as black people and infortrateing our online communities to create chaos and distrust. But because the people with power didn't really do anything or take it seriously, it kind of exposed this massive vulnerability.

Think of it as an online disinformation test balloon. It showed that these kinds of attacks could happen, and they'd pretty much go on addressed. Instead of identifying and learning a spot tactics used to make our social media communities less safe and less stable, the powers that be just let it happen again and again and again. I asked Shafika if she thinks that if someone had listened to black women when they spoke up about being targeted online,

things might be different. Now it's a tough question, for this is always going to be a question that kind of hangs in my mind because, um, while I understand that black voters were absolutely targeted, I'm not entirely sure that we were fooled, do you know what I mean? Right, like honestly, because it seems like to me we kind of all got out and voted anyway. And it also seems like to me, Donald Trump may have lost the popular vote by three million votes, but that's neither here

nor there. I get not if you ask himmy didn't he But we don't ask him things because we like

honest answers. But um, yeah, I mean, just the fact that this happened, like it left us arguably vulnerable, and that even even though I'm not sure how how ultimately success successful, it was just the fact that we had foreign agents targeting voting populations in the United States of America should have been serious and do cause for alarm, because even if it doesn't work, it's like just it's just the fact that they tried and that they could. What do you do it? Like, can we get it together?

It's because we left we left the door open like this This was that was a failure. That was I don't want to say it was on me because I feel like it definitely wasn't on me and it definitely wasn't on you, but it was it was a failure um on the side of whatever agents are supposed to be protecting us, And I guess that offers that opens up a lot for speculations like well, you know who's

who's looking after us now? But um, yeah, that that was a glaring example of just kind of the general failure to address something that did not have to get as big as a guy more. There are no girls on the internet after this quick break. Presidential election is a hundred twelve days away. Digital security experts agree that American elections are vulnerable and not enough it's being done

about it. During Trump's and peachment hearing, Fiona Hill, the former National Security Council advisor specializing in Russia and European affairs, said, right now Russia's security services on their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the election. We're running out of time to stop them. So what do we do? Dr Donovan says, As we get closer to the election, we know that all different kinds of tactics are going to get utilized, including potentially deep figs or cheap figs

like manipulated video, manipulated audio. We're gonna see uh probably uh clips of people quoted out of context. We've seen this happened to Joe Biden a few different times. Then, of course we've seen gas that these donements are completely within con text and a problem. Um, you know, you can't you can't forget that. Every once in a while you're watching it and you're like, this is this can't

be real and it's totally real. Well, what's crazy to me about it is as a researcher, you're supposed to be attuned to all of this, but I still get fooled here and there. But the last thing I'll say about the way in which I think platform companies need to better serve our political elections and the integrity of elections is that they need to hire some serious specialists.

They need to hire a whole army of librarians to do content curations so that when people are looking for information, they find things that have been fact checked, that are true and correct. I think that we have a right to treat and part of the problem is the way in which these algorithms are designed is to bring up

things that are quote unquote fresh and relevant. And the problem with fresh and relevant content is that disinformation is you usually incredibly popular because there are people trying to push it and there are people trying to dispute it, and so as a result, it rises generally to the top of search algorithms or trending algorithms very quickly because of that, uh that feature. But well, Twitter actually do any of that. Shafika isn't super confident that the platform

was anything at all. I haven't even thought about it, And I guess that's sort of a reflection on my general skepticism right now with not their ability but their willingness to adjust this. I I I have a good friend who said one of the smartest things I've ever heard anybody say, and I quote it all the time, but he said, when things look like they're not working out, you can always trust that they're working out for somebody. M hmm. And that's I'm going to leave that right there.

But it looks like you know things aren't working, you started asking questions and as a whole rabbit hole. That's the thing about the Internet. There's so much darkness lurking in its corners, just waiting to spill out. But or there's darkness, there's light to where there's someone being ugly online, there's someone else reaching out to make a genuine connection. There's real community to be built and laughs to be had, the kind of laughs that can sustain you through difficult times.

Being online is a constant tight rope walk of acknowledging that darkness while still being able to see the corners of light peeking through, and even while waiting through all of that darkness and ugliness. It's the light that has really sustained Shafika after everything she's been through, She's still grateful for Twitter as a platform and all the good things that's brought to her life. Honestly, it really helps that I have a strong and supportive community on both

online and off. I've really and super grateful for Twitter for so many reasons, not the least of which is because it's helped me expand my network and I've met amazing people and connected people who are like me people who aren't like me, and gotten gotten to know so much about them and learn about their lived experiences. And that has saved me because it helps me kind of get out of my own headspace or likewise, you know, connect with people who understand what d percent where I'm

coming from. And that's in a world where where you know, we're frequently gas lit about the things that we see and experience. That is absolutely invaluable. Oh and one more thing that helps. It also helps that I'm funny, honestly, um, having a sense of humor and a wit of we'll get you through pretty much. I don't want to say pretty much anything, but how about this. It's gotten me through pretty much everything, and you've been through some stuff. I've been through it. There Are No Girls on the

Internet was created by me bridget Tad. It's a production of I Heart Radio and Unboss Creative Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tara Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, bridget Tad. For more podcasts for my Heart, check out the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much for listening to their No Girls on

the Internet. If you want to help our podcast grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.