There Are No Girls on the Internet - Elon Musk Hates Lupita Nyong'o; Meta Is Erasing Queer Accounts; AI Is Penalizing Women - NEWS ROUNDUP

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

There Are No Girls on the Internet is a weekly podcast hosted by Bridget Todd. Every week, we break down the tech and internet stories that deserve more attention — especially when they're about AI, power, gender, race, and who actually gets hurt when systems fail. This week: Elon Musk using a Hollywood casting decision to push white nationalist conspiracy theories. The government is surveilling people who oppose data centers as potential terrorists. The DOJ is going after a billionaire who helped fund E. Jean Carroll's lawsuit against Trump. And researchers who study online hate speech being threatened with deportation. If that sounds like your thing — Apple Podcasts | Spotify | and come back every week. HERE’S WHAT WE’RE WATCHING THIS WEEK:  🔗 Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is partnering with Jared Leto — a man with nine sexual abuse allegations — to scan people's eyeballs. Altman's company World has already been banned in multiple countries for exploiting people in impoverished nations for their biometric data. Now it's partnering with Jared Leto — who has nine sexual abuse allegations against him, including behavior toward a minor — to scan fans' irises to buy concert tickets. Altman himself has also faced his own sexual misconduct allegation. 🔗 Lupita Nyong'o was cast as Helen of Troy. Elon Musk is using it to push white nationalist conspiracy theories. Christopher Nolan cast Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy in The Odyssey. Musk spent days melting down about it. Experts say it's the "great replacement" theory — a white nationalist belief that white people are being deliberately replaced by people of color — applied to a casting decision. 🔗 The government is now surveilling people who oppose AI and data centers as potential extremists. Leaked documents show the FBI and Homeland Security have created a new threat category called "anti-tech extremism." A nonprofit called More Perfect Union made a video about the harm data centers cause to communities — nothing illegal, nothing violent. The feds flagged it as a potential terrorist threat. Meanwhile Trump, his sons, and his administration all have direct financial stakes in AI data center expansion. 🔗 The DOJ is trying to unmask anonymous Reddit and X users who criticized ICE. Jeanine Pirro's office has subpoenaed Reddit and X for the names, addresses, and financial data of users who made negative comments about ICE online. No charges have been filed. No one has been notified. 🔗 A federal investigation has been opened into the tech billionaire who funded E. Jean Carroll's lawsuit against Trump. He says it's retaliation. Reid Hoffman donated money to support Carroll's sexual abuse and defamation lawsuits — lawsuits a jury ruled in her favor. Now those donations are under federal criminal investigation. Hoffman says Trump is using the government to silence anyone who supports women who speak up against him. 🔗 Meta keeps deleting LGBTQ+ accounts with no explanation. Now they're getting sued. Queer nightclubs, magazines, and sexual health organizations kept waking up to find their Instagram accounts gone — no warning, no explanation, no real way to appeal. Global nonprofit Repro Uncensored and a coalition of Dutch LGBTQ+ organizations are taking Meta to court for discrimination in the first case to use the EU's Digital Services Act to challenge discriminatory content moderation by a major platform. 🔗 The Trump administration is threatening to deport researchers who study online hate speech. A lawsuit just hit federal court. The government can now deny or revoke visas for foreign nationals who do trust and safety research, fact-checking, and content moderation work — framing it as protecting Americans from "censorship." Researchers have already left the country, stopped publishing, and self-censored. The Coalition for Independent Technology Research just sued to stop it. 🔗 The Department of Labor told employees to report coworkers for DEI activities — going back three years before Trump even took office. Employees could be reported for DEI work that was literally required by their job under the previous administration. One employee called it "pure witch-hunt territory." 🔗 A study found that when men and women use AI for their resumes, women get judged way more harshly — even when the resumes are identical. Researchers created identical resumes for "Emily Clarke" and "James Clarke." Emily was twice as likely to have her competence questioned. Reviewers said James "just needed help." They said Emily "can't even write a CV herself." 🔗 86% of the workers most likely to lose their jobs to AI are women. They're being told to just figure it out. Administrative assistants — one of the most female-dominated fields in the country — are racing to learn AI out of fear, not enthusiasm. If they use it, they get called lazy. If they don't, they risk being automated out of a job. Employers are giving them no plan. 🔗 Software engineering is being transformed by AI and new mothers are being left behind. Women who took maternity leave in 2024 came back to jobs that had been completely transformed by AI. One woman sent out 40 applications and got one interview. She's now considering landscape architecture. 🔗 The White House launched a website comparing immigrants to aliens. It listed over 700 American citizens as people who were arrested. The arrest counter on the homepage is completely fake and runs on a timer. The data listed over 700 American-born citizens as arrestees. The site appears to be using a pirated X-Files theme song. This is a real government website. 🔗 Meta, TikTok, Snap, and YouTube agreed to pay a Kentucky school district $27 million for harming kids. Over 1,300 school districts have sued social media companies for deliberately creating addictive products that cause depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and suicide in young users. They settled for a fraction of what was demanded, made no admission of wrongdoing, and walked away. Bloomberg estimates all the lawsuits combined could cost them $400 billion. 🔗 Most Americans don't want data centers in their communities. Women oppose them the most. A new Gallup poll found more than two thirds of Americans oppose data centers. Women oppose them more intensely than men and are leading the fight in communities across the country — because they bear the most direct environmental and health costs. 🔗 A Google engineer misused confidential internal data to gamble on Polymarket and made $1.2 million. The FBI caught him. He had access to data showing which celebrities would top Google's most searched list before it went public, placed $2.7 million in bets on Polymarket, and won with near-perfect accuracy. 🔗 AI is still getting things wrong — it's just gotten much better at sounding confident while doing it. When people pushed back on wrong answers in one study, the AI responded with flattery instead of corrections. Experts call it a "plausibility engine" not a truth engine. 🔗 People are building their own technology and rejecting the version Silicon Valley is selling. A growing movement of women, queer people, and artists are building custom devices from salvaged parts — and imagining a version of technology that serves communities instead of extracting from them. Want to hear us break these stories down? There Are No Girls on the Internet drops a new episode every Friday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 🎧 Apple Podcasts | Spotify Let us know what you think by emailing [e-mail] or leaving a comment on Spotify. Bridget's forthcoming audiobook with Simon & Schuster, Love At First Prompt, explores AI, sex, and intimate relationships. Pre-order at LoveAtFirstPrompt.ai Follow Bridget: Instagram | TikTok | YouTube | BlueskySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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But now, there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotbi. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting,

and moving on-air chats. Listen to Joy 101 on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby is presented by CVS. There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. Welcome to There Are No Girls on the Internet, a podcast where we cover technology, power, and who gets left out. And this is another installment of our Weekly News Roundup, where we dig into all the stories that you might have missed online this week, so you don't have to.

And it is prom season, so producer Mike, do you know what that means? it means we have a new crop of prom-inspired AI scams just dropped. Every season, you've got to keep up with the hottest new scams. Yeah, so the new prom-AI scam purports to show a girl who is getting dressed up for prom, like it's your typical prom picture of a girl dressed up in a prom dress. But the twist is she is holding a framed photo of her father who is a soldier who is reported to have died in some sort of military conflict or is otherwise not around. And she has made a dress, her prom dress, out of his uniform.

So she's holding a picture of a, you know, impossibly handsome-looking soldier. She herself is impossibly beautiful, but she's sobbing in a way that is like almost uncontrollably sobbing while holding this image while showing herself in this dress that I feel like, if you know much about dresses, you would look at this dress and say, I don't think that this teenager made this dress out of her fallen soldier father's army uniform for prom. Something about the image. To me, I was surprised to see this one take off because I saw,

oh, this one does seem to be one of the pictures that falls apart or gives itself away as AI, the more you look at it. It does, but I have to say this one, they got me for a couple of seconds. I was just so curious about it. Like I didn't read, I don't know that there was much text written about it, but I was just kind of perplexed by it because I thought that it was pretending

to represent that this like military dress was somehow part of like an official uniform or something. I didn't really get it, you know? And it just like kind of sidestepped around my usual defenses of constantly asking, like, is this AI? Is this AI? And I was just like, what is this? And then you're right. You know, after clicking in and looking at it and thinking about it a little bit more deeply, it's AI. It's all AI. Everything is AI. But something about it, I don't know, just like, it tricked me for a couple seconds. I got to admit it. Oh, you know,

you're not alone because it also got Katie Couric in a thread about how this AI scam Slop was everywhere. Katie Couric had initially shared it, and then in a threat about how it's AI, someone tagged her and it was like, it even got Katie Couric. In her defense, Katie Couric replied, guilty will do better. Face Palm emoji, which I feel like is very relatable. If you Google, she had her prom dress made from her late father's military uniform, you will find just post after post after post after post of variations on this story. A lot of them, you, you know, use a young black woman, but there's one that it's probably my favorite where it's a non-black woman. The uniform dress is always the same, but in this picture, the girl who is going to prom is

like ugly crying, like really sobbing with a distorted face. And for some reason, the picture that she's holding, which reports to be her father's official military portrait, what do you know what her father is also ugly crying in the image? I've seen that one. And yeah, they just, they jumped the shark, they went too far, too much sentimentality. I do love that there are still some of those tells that it is AI that like,

why would the man be crying in his official like military portrait? Like sobbing. I feel that it's like a dead giveaway there. Maybe it was just a really tough day at Army and he really didn't want to go. And he just couldn't help himself but to sob while his photo was being taken.

It's like elementary school kids who were crying during their school pictures. Oh, I'm crying in one of mine. Oh, poor sad, Bridget. But they got all these kids queued up. They got to get them through. They got to take all the photos. Maybe it was like that

when this guy was graduating from Basecamp. So I do think this image, I don't know, at least for me, it highlights some, It helps me update my list of AI tells. You know, one, the story is so sentimental that it's almost too sentimental. Two, the dress looks too good. Like if we're being told this was a dress that was made out of a military uniform,

it wouldn't look this impossibly perfect. The girl in the picture is like perfect looking at a hair out of place. All of the versions of the father, you know, the soldier, also. so impossibly handsome. The crying face is so impossibly expressive, just in that way that's so over the top that maybe you might start thinking like, well, would somebody really be ugly crying in their prom photo that their mom or their friend is taking? You know, is that really how somebody would be in their, in their picture with that level of a distorted face? It honestly reminds me of one of my first early favorite AI slop, kind of gendered AI slop, was the image of the woman

and I was purporting to show a woman at her 40th birthday or 50th birthday. She's ugly crying. There's like mascara running down her face. And she's holding a birthday cake. But this is early enough in the AI time where like the words on the cake are kind of garbled. And the message says she never got married and never had kids and had to make her own birthday cake. And I guess posed for a photo holding the cake, sobbing to show the word. how pathetic she is.

Yeah, that's how sad she is that that is her happiest moment. It's true, though. That is like, I think, a good, a particularly good, I don't know, tell or strategy for trying to figure out which of these are AI.

When the photo seems as if it is constructed for the viewer rather than the person who is supposed to be the subject of it. Like, why would this be her prom photo that she's posting on Instagram? Yes, that, that, you've really said that well.

that's kind of what I was trying to get at. The photo, if you take a step back from it, it feels like it was engineered to evoke a certain response in you, the viewer, and the subject of the photo is almost, you know, happenstance. The thing that, you are having such an emotional instant response to it that that seems to be what the piece of content is going for. And it is what it's going for because it's not real.

It's AI. Yeah, right. That is what it's going for, exactly. You know, we got a comment, I think, on Spotify a little bit ago. Somebody was criticizing you for getting taken by the crab video of the crab wearing the GoPro going down into their like crab catacombs. That was one of the only, not to be one of those podcasts that like complains about the comments because I, I love the comments. But that was maybe the only genuinely, I thought, mean comment we've ever got, we're ever gotten for real where I'm like, oh, this person listened to the podcast and, had something kind of rude to say about it.

I left a little bit of a rude reply. I don't know if you saw it. I didn't see your rude reply. But, you know, I appreciated they took the time to write the comment, but their sentiment was like, well, why should I listen to a tech podcaster who gets taken by AI, which I can understand why they might feel that way, but I do fundamentally disagree. Like, I think it's the idea is that one should never get taken by AI. And if you ever get taken by AI, even once, it means that you're, like, dumb or naive.

And I think that we just have to let go of that. It's too good. You know, it's out there. We all got to do the best we can, and some people can do a lot better. But, you know, nobody's going to be perfect. They got Katie Couric on this one. You've made that point perfectly. And that's actually why I intentionally share the times where I almost get taken.

And for the record, the crab video, me getting taken was a millisecond until the video continued. And I said, oh, okay, wait a minute. I know what I'm dealing with here. It's not like I shared it or sent it to my friends or something like that, just in my defense a little bit here. But the reason why I try to be honest and say, like, even though I'm somebody who is a tech journalist who studies this and writes about this and has been immersed in this, I'm not immune to this is because there was a time where you could think about this stuff. really the people who are getting taken being like your auntie or somebody who is not very digitally savvy or digitally literate or whatever, in my opinion, those days have come and gone. It has gotten so good that it could get any one of us and that it's really not about any one individual person. It is about a framework where this has progressed so quickly that it is difficult to tell genuinely for anybody, for people like me, for people like Katie Couric. And so I don't think that it's useful to have a conversation anymore where we're talking about how it's just stupid old boomers or something who are getting, you know, getting tricked by AI. It can and does happen to the best of us. We should talk about that. We should be able to have that

conversation and then say, okay, so what does that mean for our tech landscape that people like me, people like Katie Couric can get taken? You know, I think it was, I think in our episode about TikTok AI scams, that was something that the AI debunker, Jeremy Carrasco, really nailed them that It's really not even really about learning how to spot or debunk AI. It is about a broader set of media literacy tools and conversations. And, you know, having an honest conversation about how our entire digital landscape has so quickly moved. But some of us are still saying like, oh, well, if you get caught by AI, you're just a dumb moron. That's no longer the case, I don't think.

No, not the case. Not a helpful sentiment, even in the before times. All right, Bridget. Well, I have a question for you. Okay. What's Elon done now? So this is usually the kind of Elon Musk story that I would never bring to the pod. But it just sort of bet on my mind lately because it kind of involves a lot of different elements that kind of catch my interest.

So Christopher Nolan, the director, did you know that he's doing this film adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey that's coming out later this summer? I am aware, and I'm actually pretty excited for it. it. As you know, I have a log-standing interest in, you know, ancient civilizations. Well, you know who is not excited for that adaptation? Elon Musk. And he's not excited about it because Helen of Troy has been cast as Lupita Nyango, who of course is a wonderful actor, super talented, super gorgeous, happens to be not just a black woman, but like a darkly-complected black woman. and Elon Musk has been absolutely losing his mind about it. Not just him also.

I've seen a lot of kind of guys in that arena really losing it about this casting choice. And I wanted to sort of talk about it, even though generally this is a kind of thing that, you know, I think that Elon wants people to be talking about his terrible take about this. But I do think there's something else going on here, which is why I want to talk about it. So the whole thing kind of started, when Matt Wash, that conservative commentator, posted on X, that, oh, we're all being told not to object to Helen of Troy being portrayed as a black woman.

But if a white woman was cast as the most beautiful woman in Africa, it would cause riot. Not to mention the fact that this is a completely historical comment. There's all kinds of casting nonsense that goes on in Hollywood, which we can talk about in a minute. Because I have an example that might blow your mind. But Elon Musk replied, absolutely true. such hypocrisy in Hollywood. And then he kept tweeting about it for days. He called Nolan's casting choice a desecration of Homer.

He endorsed posts claiming that The Odyssey is actually part of a left-wing effort to, quote, destroy Western civilization and everything that helped create it. There's also this casting rumor that Elliot Page might be involved in the film in some way. Elon called that the dumbest and most twisted thing I've ever heard. And mind you, this is not,

just a blip. He has been talking about this Helen of Troy casting since January. So it is not just a passing irritation. It is something that he continues to return to. Now, as an appreciator of the classics, Mike, I don't think I need to tell you

Helen of Troy is not a real person. Helen of Troy is a mythological character, right? Yes. That is right. Mythological character it's not even clear that Troy was a real place. You know, there's been some scholarship lately that like trying to locate exactly where it was.

But this is like mythology, right? And it's at the time that Homer wrote the Odyssey, he was repeating a lot of lore from generations before him. Also, listeners just know I can tell in Mike's voice that he is really kind of, pumping the brakes and trying to hold back. If we let him, you could do a whole podcast episode about this.

No research, no notes, top of the dome, right? You could freestyle an entire argument about Homer and the Odyssey if put on the spot. Could you not? I probably could. And what I could talk even more about, what I'm really trying to pump the brakes on is like actual archaeological, historical research from that era of like the- Right, like what was going on of the world of the ancient Greeks

Like what was actually happening In, you know, the beginnings of Western civilization Which is actually quite different from what Elon appears to think it was And is also pretty different from You know, what occurs in the Odyssey, right? Like, I think there has been this real conflagration of, that fictional work with actual history in ways that really undersell how deeply interesting that period actually was.

I'll stop there. We got to get you a spinoff podcast for folks who want to know what was really going on with the ancient Greeks. The truth about what was going on in ancient Greece. Yeah, we'll use like click-paggagity headlines. So suppose to say there is, like, there's just not a historically accurate version of Helen of Troy that Nolan is violating. Even if, like, I don't get down with arguments like that. But just for the sake of argument, if you were like, oh, in history this person had X, Y, Z identity, we need to abide by that.

I don't get down with that. But even if you were, this doesn't work here because there is no historically accurate version of Helen of Troy that is being violated by this. choice. Yes, and I promise I won't keep interrupting. But one other thing that definitely didn't exist back then is our contemporary notions of race. Like, white and black race were just not a thing back then, certainly not the way they are now. Sorry to Elon Musk, but his ideas of historical inaccuracy here are just completely divorced from reality. And that's a good way to put it because I don't actually think that Musk's big objection here is about historical accuracy. He can say, like, that can be the window dressing that he uses to be like, oh, it's not about race.

It's about historical accuracy. But I don't think that's actually true, but I don't think it's actually about film criticism either. And I think if we let him say that that is what's going on here, we're sort of missing what he's actually saying and what's actually going on. Huffington Post spoke to Alvin Tiller, who directs the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, who put it really plainly. He said, when Elon Musk looks at Lupita, you know, this beautiful Oscar-winning actor who is sort of just known for her talent and beauty and dismisses her and just sort of says

that she is implausible in the role of Helen of Troy, that that reaction is actually a window into Elon Musk's racial imagination. He basically said that Musk's framework, which is inherited from and reinforced by, clear white supremacist thinking has a structural inability to locate black beauty as the apex of human aesthetic experience. And so that is like the entire architecture of anti-black racism, you know, which has always depended on degrading black women, black appearance, black beauty, black bodies, black humanity as foundational, right? And so that's really, according to Tillery, what Musk is doing here. he can sort of dress it up as anger about this casting choice or just about this movie,

but this is actually a pattern with him. And it's one that if you look at the other things that he tweets and posts about, go far beyond one movie, one casting choice, one tweet. He warns often and publicly about, you know, white people becoming this rapidly diminishing minority of the global population. He, you know, accused the South African government of being racist against white people. people, and it's always amplifying these unfounded claims of, like, anti-white genocides in South Africa. He's often amplifying claims that white people are going to be slaughtered, that white

solidarity is the only way to survive, all of these incredibly incendiary, you know, manifestations of what's called the Great Replacement Theory, this white nationalist conspiracy theory that says that white populations are deliberately being replaced by non-white immigrants. And if you're to look at his tweets and the kind of political issues that he amplifies, this seems to be a core part of how he understands the world. So when he sees this black woman being cast as Helen of Troy and calls it, you know, the desecration of Western civilization, I think that framing and talking about this particular pop culture thing is really doing the work of continuing to amplify his belief in this unfounded, great replacement conspiracy theory. The piece in Huff Post actually spoke to Kirsten Moana Thompson, who was a film and media professor at Seattle University. Thompson offered, I guess I would call it maybe a slightly more generous interpretation, that some of this criticism also reflects a broader essentialist approach to casting that has become common in certain corners of the internet,

which is basically the idea that only actors whose lived experience matches a characters can authentically portray them. But she said that she also does not doubt that on a personal level that Musk's comments are rooted in his white supremacist leanings and philosophy. So even if you're thinking, well, this is, he is, you know, aligning with this school of thought that says that you have to be able to, you know, embody the identity of the person that you're portraying, even if you think that's what's going on here, which I don't believe that to be the case. Even that interpretation has a ceiling, right? Yes. And also, I just have to say how deeply. skeptical I am in that generous interpretation. You know, the idea that some other white actor, because of her lived experience in 2026, would be better suited to play Helen of Troy, you know, a princess from the mists of Anatolia in the ancient world. The idea that her lived experience

would be more relevant than Lupita's is just, ridiculous. Like, there's nothing in either one of their experiences that really makes them well-suited to even begin to understand what that was like. And certainly, the color of their skin has, like, I can't imagine how that could possibly have any relevance whatsoever. Yeah. I mean, I think for this specific example, when we're talking about Helen of Troy, I completely agree with you. But I think the school of thought that that film professor was talking about. Like, I've seen different iterations of it. Like, I remember there was that wave of white actors who are portraying Asian characters. And it goes back to like, well, you know, it's

already hard enough for Asian actors and actors of color casting a white person as an age, to portray an Asian person stepping back from the specific Elon Musk, Helen of Troy, example, because I think he's just being a racist shithead. I have seen that school of thought around. But again, that, that That's fair, yeah. Yeah. Not to dismiss the whole notion, right? Just its application to this particular example. Totally.

I completely agree. And I also think that Matt Walsh and Elon Musk saying things like, oh, well, if they cast a white person to play a black person, people would riot in the street. And when I was like kind of going back and forth on threads with some film bro about this, which is, which that's my bad, where you've been getting drawn in, even I am not above getting. drawn in sometimes. Someone said, well, it would be like casting Sandra Bullock to play Harriet Tubman. And I got to hit him with my absolute favorite sounds made up, but I swear to you is true, Hollywood anecdote, that in 1994, a studio executive suggested that Julia Roberts should be cast to play legendary abolitionist Harriet Tubman in an upcoming biopic about her life. When I'm not making that up.

That's a true statement. When the screenwriter, Gregory Allen Howard, reminded the executive that Harriet Tubman was black, the executive allegedly replied, quote, that was so long ago, no one's going to know the difference. Am I out of my mind that I actually, I actually like perversely want to see the Harriet Tubman biopic starring Julia Roberts as Harriet Tubman. I want to see what she does with the role, frankly. Sure, yeah, she's a talented actor, so yet it was so long ago, who even remembers. Who's even going to know the difference? Boy, since they took the cocaine out of Hollywood, really,

we're really missing out. I will end with this great post I saw on threads by Badwilf. Maybe Lupita is a good choice for Helen of Troy. All I've seen is men fighting about her. Oh, that's pretty good. Let's take a quick break. From live music under the stars to immersive public art, local food and drink,

and stories that shaped a nation. There's nowhere quite like Face 31. Wander historic hangers, catch world-class concerts, discover exhibitions, patios, and moments you'll remember long after summer ends. History isn't kept behind glass here. It surrounds you.

This season, experience Prince Edward County's hottest cultural destination. Explore what's on now at base 31.ca. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business.

Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. I love the sounds. The buzzing from the stadium, the chanting from the fans, the announcers calling the place soccer, football, at home. Why do I watch the World Cup?

That's like asking me, why do I breed? I inherited that fandom from my mom. I like watching it with my dad. It's a connecting force. From Futuro Studios, I'm Fernando Chavari, and this is American Football, a show about soccer culture in the U.S. and its underdog roots. We go beyond the game to the people and the stories that make it great. A soccer game is a festival. It's not just a game. It's your culture. I took an elbow to my head, which cracked my skull.

It is an American game. The Brazilians don't like hearing that, though. Are they the only ones that don't like that don't like that? Nobody likes that. As we get ready for the Men's World Cup this summer, listen to American Football as part of the My Coutura Podcast Network, available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. Together, we're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people,

like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So I did an episode of the podcast that y are going to hear pretty soon about AI and women and why all of these influencers and famous women and celebrities are really trying to see. sell AI to us women and what that's about. My theory is that this is the new iteration of the girl boss movement is telling women, you know, before it was telling women to lean in and now it's

just use AI, girl, like girl wash your face, girl use AI. So women and AI and the workplace has been top of mind. And one of our listeners actually flagged this very interesting research about women, AI and resumes that you looked into, right, Mike? I did, thanks. Yeah, I think a lot of people probably saw headlines about this study because it made a pretty big splash. It was about women job applicants being judged more harshly for using AI than men applicants. So the experiment was conducted by this organization named Code for Good Now, which was founded

by former meta-employee Zara Chetou it found that hypothetical men and women who were using the exact same resume which differed only in the name at the top of the resume, right? So all the

qualifications, the history was the same, the only thing that differed was the name, a typically male name or typically female name. This was shown to a bunch of participants and for everyone the participants were told that the applicant had used AI to help them create their resume. And when a woman's name was at the top of it,

the participants judged it more harshly. They questioned her competence and ranked her overall as a lower quality candidate for the job than men, even though all of the information was the same. They were able to quantify it and they said that they found that people were 22% more likely to question the female applicant's trustworthiness in particular compared to the male applicants. So that's what the study said. And people talked about that quite a bit on social media. I saw a lot of people talking about it on blue sky. I saw people talking about it on LinkedIn. And so I wanted to look into the study a little bit more deeply. There was an article in Fortune magazine by writer Eleanor Pringle summarizing the study. That's what I had

read and that's what people online were linking to. That article, unfortunately, quotes the author Chetouche, summarizing the results as, when men use AI, we question their effort. When women use AI, we question their integrity. That difference changes the perceived risk of using AI. So I'm so glad that you included that quote and that the author of the study put it that way, because that is exactly what I found to when I was looking at the conversations that a lot of these influencers like Reese Wither Spoon. who's not an influencer, but you know what I'm saying, people who have been advocating for women in AI use. One of the reasons that I find those conversations to be so lacking is that it includes none of this context.

I've said this all over the place. I'm not even necessarily against telling women, you know, if you feel strongly that women should be using AI, you want to do AI skill shares, whatever, fine, got it. But doing so, telling women that they need to be getting involved in AI because if they don't, they could be, quote, left behind their careers could suffer and leaving out this context that when men use AI, folks question their effort. When women use AI, our integrity is questioned. That's a pretty big risk. And so in some ways, I'm almost thinking that these influencers can almost be setting women up to be getting in trouble or having problems. in the workplace because they used AI. They should at least be telling them and speaking honestly about all the perceived risk

that comes with the scrutiny of women using AI in workplaces, just leaving that out of the conversation to me as it responsible. Yeah, totally agree. Like you said, we had this conversation on the podcast a couple weeks ago, and so when I saw people talking about this study, I thought, this is great. It's nice to have some empirical evidence to back up what we were saying. So as our resident PhD who deals in studies all day long, writes studies, I'm glad we put you on this.

What can you tell us about this study? Well, this is where it gets a little interesting and actually unsatisfying. So I wanted to dig into the details of it, learn more about it. Typically, when somebody does a study, it gets published somewhere, and then popular press outfits like Fortune in this case or, you know, wired or 404. these are all outlets that we cite all the time. We'll write up like a summary of it where they translate the research into something that is more accessible

to members of the public who are not experts in psychology or sociology or economics or whatever discipline the researchers who conducted the study are located in. So I tried to find the actual study, but it doesn't seem to be published anywhere. I went to the website of the organization Code for Good Now, and they have a tile that links out to the fortune article about the study.

But as far as I could tell, there was no actual link to the study on their website. And I reached out to them through their like contact us form to ask about it. I haven't gotten a response, but it was less than 24 hours ago. So, you know, I'm not going to expect them to be closely monitoring their inbox, but it, you know, would be nice to be able to see. I also looked at the LinkedIn page of the founder, Zerachatu, and she had made a big post about it, repeating a lot of the main headline points from the Fortune article. And then the comments were filled with a lot of people responding to that. and most of them being very supportive, being like, yes, this is great,

thanks for doing this study. But there were quite a few other people like me asking for where they could find details of the study. And as far as I could tell, those comments were all unanswered, despite this post being up for about two weeks. And Chattu had been in the comments replying to people who were giving accolades.

So she had seen these. There was also an Instagram post that used a keros. And I thought they did a nice job using the carousel format in Instagram to communicate, again, those headline points from the study. Listeners who follow you on Instagram, Bridget, will know that you have been doing an amazing job with Carousel posts, summarizing these news roundups and also adding additional stories that pop up over the weekend. Oh, thanks for my little shout out to my Carousel posts. But I always link back to the original reporting so folks know, you know, where I'm getting,

my information, how frustrating that you're not able to actually find the actual study. What do you think is going on there? I don't really know. And it's, it is frustrating because I don't doubt the intentions of Chitou or this, you know, the study that she's done. And it's not a particularly complicated study. And so based on the limited information that's available, I don't have any reason to doubt that what she's saying about the results is true. But it's weird to not include details. It's just strange. And I also find it kind of concerning that this is becoming normalized or maybe will become normalized.

There are standard practices that scientists go through to ensure, that the results that they share with the public are accurate and can be trusted so that when people are having discussions about policy or about social phenomena, like say the reasons that women are not embracing AI in the workplace to the same extent as men, we can bring data into those conversations and have confidence that the data is accurate. And, you know, if you can't evaluate the methodological details of the study, the statistics that they used. You know, for example, they say that people were 22% more likely to question the female applicant's trustworthiness. Well, how did they measure trustworthiness? What is the confidence

interval around that 22%, right? Is it highly precise or is it somewhere between like 10 and 40 You know, these are questions that responsible researchers should share. And so I guess to me it just highlights this trend that has been happening. And, you know, I'll admit that we've been part of it too of as data becomes harder to access, a lot of the data points that are available to the public come from sources that are not within traditional academic journals or have gone through peer review, right? Like we did an episode a while ago about bot networks

promoting particular narratives about female celebrities. And we talked with people who were not academic researchers, but were employees of digital security companies. And so I do want to be clear that I think there is a lot of value in data like that, but I also think that it is important to not just abandon all pretense of scientific transparency and, you know, push us further into territory where nothing can be trusted and anybody can say anything. I really well put.

It is a deeper frustration. And I know, you know, you and I have talked off mic about, you know, you've, you've done this kind of work. You've done these kinds of studies and surveys and stuff. And when I tell you, there is so little really good research about women and technology in general, AI very much included. Like, I did my deep dive. And so I'm pretty aware of what's out there.

And we got to the point where we were like, well, maybe. be you should be putting together some research just so we have more data. But it is frustrating. And I think it goes to highlight how tough it can be to get access to data and surveys and studies from peer-reviewed, you know, academic sources anymore. That's basically what you're saying. It is. Yeah, that's part of it. And I bring that up as another example of a reason why this sort of full details of a study might not be available, right, because of, like, access and proprietary data. In this case, though, I don't think that those concerns apply here, right? Like, Chitu says that she did this study and, you know, conducted it as a survey.

So as far as I can tell, there's no proprietary data concerns about, like, data sharing that she would be violating by sharing it or that horror organization would be violating by sharing it. So I can only conclude that, you know, either they've got something to hide, which I don't really believe, or they just, like, didn't think it was worth taking the time to actually write a report and put it out there so that other researchers could evaluate them, which is, I don't know, feels weird, you know? And do you weren't the only person asking for the actual study? You said that, like, there were other people asking, where is this report? I would love to see the report.

Can we see the report? Yes, that's right. There were a lot of people in the LinkedIn comments asking about it, and they seem to be going unanswered to. In that Instagram Carousel post on the final slide, it said full details available in bio or something like that. I went to their bio. There's no link there.

And it was posted two weeks ago, so I thought, well, maybe they took the link down because you're only allowed to have one link in your Instagram profile, and they put something else up. But there was no link at all available there. Just sort of weird. That is weird. Well, again, I don't doubt this study and that's not what I think either of us is saying.

I just, you know, when we talk about a study on here, I have the benefit of having a producer who knows about academia and knows about research. And so I'm always like first things first, because we don't need to rely on the write-up in fortune. We can actually look at the primary source itself. And it's just a bummer to not be able to do that to give you all more contact. So it is a bummer. Yeah, this was like an. unexpected direction for this segment to take, right? I was excited to dig into this and just like, just really unpack the study and share the results. One last thing that I'll share,

though, in the LinkedIn comments, a person named Ray Ruzzo, whose LinkedIn profile describes themselves as a professional nerd. You guys have the same job. I'm just doing this mainly as a personal hobby. An unpaid. You're doing a for the love of the game. Yeah, I'm an unpaid nerd enthusiast. But they comment, they had this great comment, quote, the AI is pretty much relevant. We've been studying this for decades, end quote. And so then they provided a link to this seminal research study from 1999 by psychologist Ria Steinprice and colleagues, which used a very similar methodology of creating some hypothetical resumes and then just changing the name at the top.

And they found very similar results. And we'll share a link to that in the show notes in case anybody's interested in looking at it. But I found that very interesting and useful context for understanding a study like this, because these kind of studies have been going on for a long time. And it reminds me of something that you and I talked about when we were first discussing this study, Bridget, which was that, you know, this particular. study looked at women being held to a double standard for their use of AI, which is a very important research question. But I do think it's important to locate that within a larger societal

phenomenon of women just being held to a double standard across the board, right? You know, in this particular case, it was for using AI, but you could imagine it for being, you know, shrill in a meeting versus assertive or overly sharing versus collegial. Yeah. There are so many ways where the same behavior in the workplace is a negative thing for a woman

but gets reframed as a positive thing for a man. And so I just really feel like that context and the body of research there is important to keep in mind when thinking through these very important questions of how women should be thinking about using AI in their own work and especially what kinds of interventions or programs we might want to put in place to help them in whatever way they decide they want to deal with that. More after a quick break. Summer is on at Base 31. The Drill Hall RBC stage is packed with big shows, live music, and electric summer nights, featuring acts like Father John Misty, the beaches and wild rivers.

From Can't Miss concerts to food, drinks, art, history, and places to gather across the B-31 district. There's never been a better time. to visit Base 31 in Prince Edward County. Plan your visit at base31.ca. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster,

Iheart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think Iheart. Streaming, radio,

and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. I love the sounds. The buzzing from the stadium, the chanting from the fans, the announcers calling the place soccer, football, at home.

Why do I watch the World Cup? That's like asking me, why do I breed? I inherited that fandom from my mom. I like watching it with my dad. It's a connecting force. From Futuro Studios, I'm Fernanda Chavarri, and this is American football,

a show about soccer culture in the U.S. and its underdog roots. We go beyond the game to the people and the stories that make it great. A soccer game is a festival. It's not just a game. It's your culture. I took an elbow to my head, which cracked my skull. It is an American game. The Brazilians don't like hearing that, though. Are they the only ones that don't like that?

Nobody likes that. As we get ready for the Men's World Cup this summer, listen to American Football as part of the My Coutura Podcast Network, available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. Together, we're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people, like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges.

I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. Well, speaking of like women and AI and what we know about how it's playing out with women and AI adoption at workplaces, I did see a couple of stories that came across my desk that I don't know, just really kind of got me thinking about what you were talking about about this study. And, you know, one was about new moms who were coming back to tech jobs. And another was about

administrative assistance in workplaces that are largely women. And basically, I can't stop thinking about how when it comes to AI, women are essentially just being asked to absorb a disproportionate share of the costs, whether it's in their career, in their communities, in family planning. And then just getting less of whatever better. might be there. So if there is benefit to be had, like if men are using AI at work and it makes them look cutting edge or dynamic or something, women, it makes them look like lazy, dishonest slavs. And so Wired ran a piece this week about new moms in software development who took maternity leave sometime in the last year or two and then came back to jobs that because of AI,

they barely recognized. They spoke to a woman named Danielle, who was a software developer at a car company in Portland. She left in mid-20204 at the time, barely anybody was using AI to write code. When she came back a year later, not only was everybody doing it, but it had become the expectation in her department. And so this wasn't something where it was like

about her catching up to a new tool. The entire nature of her work had completely shifted. She described that as the skills that she spent years building, the rote development skills, were now something that she was expected to outsource to AI. She told Wired, the kind of work I was doing before, I would like to do again. I think I was good at it. But I recognized that job will never exist again.

And all I kept thinking about this is like, yes, the tech, yes, the AI, yes, the workplace dynamics. But also, I simply cannot imagine how destabilizing and derailing this would be against the backdrop of being a new parent or having a newborn at home to care for. You know, they talked to another engineer who worked at a marketing software company in Minnesota, who described coming back from maternity leave in 2024. When she left, the company had been mostly using AI like a glorified stack overflow, which is basically the internet's go-to forum where programmers can post coding questions and then get answers from other developers.

So basically, it basically was just like a forum where you would post, they were using AI as like a forum to post questions. A year later, she says that all code, code changes were being fed through AI, and that then AI started doing the bulk of her coding work. And the company kept a leaderboard ranking engineers by how much they used AI in their work. She told Wired, instead of being a software engineer, I'm more like a puppet master. I have heard very similar things from my friends who are software engineers, that they feel like the profession has changed so much. And particularly her comment about

feeling like the part of the job that she likes is gone. I've heard that from them as well. Yeah, I really feel for these folks who just experienced such rapid change. I asked a friend of mine who was a software engineer to read that article and what he thought about it. And he also said a lot of it rang true to him, but he was struck by the experience. of these mothers who had taken some time away and how jarring that would be for exactly the reason you said that, you know, for him, he has been continuing to be a software engineer

throughout this transition. And for somebody to like step back and miss out on that transitional period and it must have been such a jarring experience to come back and just find it so different, right? Like he said, quote, they weren't boiled in it slowly, so it's more shocking to them. Yes. Yes.

He also pointed out that he has had a ton of time to experiment and figure out how to make this new world work for him in a context where the expectations on him were, I have to believe, substantially lower than a returning mother coming back to work who is probably expected to just hit the ground running immediately out of the gate. Yes. So that was something that I, one of the reasons I wanted to really talk about this is because exactly as you said, I just think there's a psychological component here of all of this happening when you've been out, particularly when you've been out on parental leave. You know, one of the women that they talked to for the piece talked about how, you know, even when she started to use AI, you know, to do the work as her team was telling or she had to, at that point, she started to think, oh, well, now I'm just kind of automating myself out of existence entirely, a terrible

way to feel when you're like, okay, good thing I have a new mouth to feed. And then I get the sense that there's also a psychological component of maternity leave where it's so wrong and ignorant, but I've heard people say, oh, you're going on maternity leave, enjoy your break, enjoy your vacation. And it's like, I don't really think it's a vacation, you know, it's like there, it's, I think there, I think there is a attitude that when people leave on parental leave, they're taking some sort of relaxing, fun vacation for themselves and that they are doing so at like taxing the rest of their team that might have to pick up the slack while they're gone.

And that is not the case. And I think that when they come back from maternity leave, there's probably this dynamic where they feel more pressure to perform at work, to sort of earn, in quotes, the leave that they took. Like one person talked about how when she was on maternity leave, her manager suggested that she used that leave to brush up on AI. She told Wired, the likelihood of me spending my statutory maternity pay on an AI course is slim to none. That is not something I should be spending my maternity leave doing. But then she becomes scared that falling behind and saying, like, no, I actually am planning on spending my maternity leave.

I don't know. Giving birth and caring for my child as I'm legally allowed to do. and by holding firm to that boundary, it makes it seem like she's falling behind. It makes it tell like she's like not a team player, not thrilled about endorsing AI or adopting AI at work. And that might make her a target for a layoff. So again, it's like an unfair burden

that is being unequally held by women in the workforce. Totally. I think those contextual factors are so important to keep in mind that, yeah, it's an industry where, there are lots of layoffs happening across a bunch of companies. I think many workers in those industries feel very precarious, both in terms of are they going to continue to have their job next week, and also will their profession continue to exist a year from now? It's got to be very nerve-wracking.

And also, it's an industry where you have some people advocating for like 60, 80-hour weeks, right? what is that phenomenon called? I was trying to remember that where you work like 10 hours a day, six days a week or something like that. Hell? I don't know. Yeah, it does sound like hell.

But it, and it's like a bit of a fringe idea, but it is sufficiently mainstream that it has a name that I think if you're like a young tech bro who is like, I'm just going to work 80 hours a week and not have a life, like intentionally not have any sort of work-life balance, that is an idea that also exists in this industry,

which I think doesn't need to be said is pretty incompatible with being a good parent. Yeah, and I think that is the sort of, I mean, don't even get me started about how unfair this shit is, because I bet a lot of the people who advocate for that style of working are men, I bet a good portion of those men have partners,

who might be picking up whatever slack that costs is at home. It's just an impossible standard for, I think, a lot of women in workplaces to be expected to meet, where you would be out on maternity leave, come back from that maternity leave, and then have to basically accept and get on board with the fact that your job has completely changed because of AI. And you show, and you might even be judged more harshly for doing the thing that your workplace is telling you that they want you to do, which is using AI. Like it just sets up such a clear standard for women being treated unfairly.

That's really what it's all about to me. Totally. I looked at up 9-96 work culture. I've never heard of that. Working nine to nine six days a week. I guess I sort of do that, but... That's true. You sort of do. We can, we don't have to unpack what that means.

I mean, I don't have kids. Like, I, you know, I have a totally different lifestyle. And I guess throughout this conversation, I just can't help thinking about the ways that, as I said, I just think that women are being set up to unfairly absorb a lot of the risks and harm here. And I think that women are, we know that. Like, we're speaking up about that. The 19th had this very interesting piece where they published some Gallup polling. They linked right to the polling so I could read it from Gallup.

Their polling found that more than two-thirds of Americans opposed the construction of data centers. And while both men and women oppose them, women, oppose them more intensely. 55% of women said that they strongly oppose data centers compared to 43% of men. The majority of respondents said they would rather have a nuclear power plant in their backyard rather than a data center.

Man, that is a pretty striking either or comparison. It is. And that actually kind of trickles down to who is showing up to fight data centers. Danny Kandahas, who is a campaign specialist for media justice, which is an organization that I've done a lot of work with, they are great, said, quote, I've been organizing for 15 years, and it's always been the case that

women are leading our fights. In communities in Memphis, in Amarillo, that have already been overburdened by oil and gas, the people doing the work on the ground are primarily women. So that sounds great, right? Like, women are out here leading the fight against data centers that nobody wants. Well, reading it in context with this new wired reporting actually kind of threw me, because as great as that sounds, it's not so great if simply being anti-Data Center might get you labeled an anti-tech extremist by the Trump administration and arrested. Oh. Yeah.

Womp-wop-wop. I thought you were going to say that it's not so great because of the extra burden of having to do this organizing to protect the environmental health of their communities and their families is an unfair burden for women to have to take the lead on. Well, that too, but also... Oh, man, it's just a corotopia of unfair labor requirements. Oh, how I love being a woman. So Wires New Reporting is based on over a thousand pages of unpublished documents from the

Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and Fusion Centers obtained by FOIA requests. And these documents show that federal intelligence agencies and domestic law have a new domestic surveillance target people they are calling, quote, anti-technology extremists. Now, I need to be kind of precise about what this means in practice because I look through some of these documents. The documents do include people who seem to be genuinely advocating for violence. There is this group that Wired gets into led by a software developer named Ziz Leota, who WIRE describes as an extreme rationalist who already led a small cult-like group,

three members of which have been charged with murder tied to an obsessive ideology focused on the existential risk posed by AI. Side note, the story of that group of people is just really fascinating and crazy and involved and involves people getting stabbed with swords and people fake and somebody faking their own death. Maybe we'll do a whole episode

about it. But what I'm saying is that there are people who I'm like, okay, it actually is, it makes sense to me that people who are genuinely involved in some type of violence are actually worth monitoring. But the problem or upside maybe, if you're a Trump administration official who wants to suppress activism and speech, is that that category, anti-tech extremists, is so broad that it also includes people who are doing nothing illegal, who are, are just exercising their constitutional rights. Here's the most concrete example that they have in the Wired piece. A private intelligence firm that contracts with federal law enforcement flagged a video

from the progressive media nonprofit, more perfect union. Now, the video was just about the harmful effects of data centers on a community in Georgia. It did not advocate for violence in any capacity. It did not advocate for any kind of illegal behavior whatsoever. it was just, here is what's happening to these people in Georgia where a data center is going up. But that video, despite not involving anything illegal, is now circulating amongst U.S. intelligence and law enforcement as a potential threat vector. And this is not happening in isolation. Fusion centers, y'all might remember, were set up after 9-11 as a way to integrate intelligence

sharing across federal and state agencies. The same fusion centers monitoring alleged extremists are also generating reports about things like demonstrations at a county budget meeting or school board meetings. You know, the places where everyday local residents might show up and make their voices heard if they don't want a data center put in their community. In at least six states already, police have removed or arrested speakers at town halls for criticizing data centers. In one case, the arrest was made before the person was even allowed to speak. And just to be clear about the scope of what's being monitored, the documents also show that fusion centers are tracking the Tesla takedown protests, which are the demonstrations against Musk's role in the federal government as potential threat activity. So we're talking about people who are using their constitutionally protected rights to express themselves and protest Elon Musk as a private citizen having political influence, those people being surveilled as potential extremists by the Trump administration.

And that's just what they're doing on the books. Off the books, we know that Trump family members and associates and friends, as well as many high-ranking officials in his administration, are personally, heavily, financially invested in AI. So you've got an administration that is building this AI infrastructure and profiting from it, also building this massive surveillance apparatus around anybody who objects to it, which is most people. I'd like to think most people would agree that monitoring people,

and labeling them as potential terrorists because they oppose building data centers in their backyards is extreme and concerning. Yeah, Wired spoke to Spencer Reynolds at the NWACP Legal Defense Fund, who said, as people continue to organize for a better future, we're likely to see more surveillance and criminalization of this opposition,

just as we have seen with Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and environmental movements in recent decades. And yeah, I mean, as somebody who makes a tech podcast that I think I'm on the record about my feelings about things like data centers and communities. I mean, I live in the belly of the beast for data centers in the United States. Yeah, it's incredibly concerning, I'll say to say the least. It is. Yeah, just a good reminder to be careful with what you say on the internet.

More after a quick break. From live music under the stars to immersive public art, local food and drink and stories that shaped a nation. There's nowhere quite like Base 31. Wander historic hangers. Catch world-class concerts. Discover exhibitions, patios, and moments you'll remember long after summer ends. History isn't kept behind glass here. It surrounds you.

This season, experience Prince Edward County's hottest cultural destination. Explore what's on now at Base31.com. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business.

Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. I love the sounds. The buzzing from the stadium, the chanting from the fans, the announcers calling the place, soccer, football at home. Why do I watch the World Cup? That's like asking me, why do I breed?

I inherited that fandom from my mom. I like watching it with my dad. It's a connecting force. From Futuro Studios, I'm Fernanda Chavari, and this is American Football. A show about soccer culture in the U.S. and its underdog roots. We go beyond the game to the people and the stories that make it great. A soccer game is a festival. It's not just a game. It's your culture.

I took an elbow to my head, which cracked my skull. It is an American game. The Brazilians don't like hearing that, though. Are they the only ones that don't like that? Nobody likes that. As we get ready for the Men's World Cup this summer, Listen to American Football as part of the My Coutura Podcast Network, available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. Together, we're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Let's get right back into it. Mike, it sure seems like meta is targeting queer and LGBTQ plus organizations on Instagram. Can I tell you about it? Yeah, of course. What is going on, Virgin? So a coalition of Dutch LGBTQ plus organizations and digital. rights advocates sent a formal legal demand letter to Meta over this wave of Instagram account removals that I think pretty plainly are targeting queer venues, queer artists, publications,

and community organizations in the Netherlands. So this letter was sent by a Dutch law firm on behalf of about a dozen organizations, you know, queer magazines, nightlife venues, saunas, art spaces, a sexual health organization, an anti-censorship nonprofit. The argument they're making is that Mehta's removals might violate European Fundamental Rights Law, the EU's Digital Services Act, the GDPR, and Dutch anti-discrimination laws. Now, according to this report that I read in Q News, this might be the first time that the EU's Digital Services Act has been used to challenge allegedly discriminatory content moderation by a major social media platform, which is pretty significant. So what triggered this legal coalition to take this action? So over the last

few months, Instagram accounts belonging to LGBTQ communities and cultural organizations and sets positive spaces of the Netherlands started getting removed. Now, to be clear, they were removed. They were not restricted or shadow banned or flagged. They were just taken down. Martha Dimitratu, the founder of Repro and Censored, which is a great resource to follow on Instagram about all of this. They're one of the nonprofits backing the legal action. Martha described it this way. When platforms like Instagram can make organizations, knowledge and entire communities disappear without explanation or meaningful recourse, it leads to digital ostracization that undermines civic participation and erodes democracy. And I think that's my

biggest thing about this is that there's just this lack of communication from META. So it's not a situation where META has given tons of warnings or explanation or, you know, there's like a clear appeals process or it's clear what the offending post was that got the, you know, got the account banned. You know, this is something that I hear about a lot specifically with meta, that if you don't either know somebody at meta or have a friend that works there, or if you don't have enough of a platform to make a big enough media stink, there basically is no recourse. Now, many of the accounts who were affected did get eventually reinstated after media attention and public pressure, but here's the thing.

They just kept getting removed again and again and again. So it's like removed, media stink, reinstated. Removed, media stink, reinstated. There's no clarity about what rule was being violated or what they need to do or not do to stay in compliance with Instagram's rules. And so that cycle of uncertainty, in my opinion, is also itself a harm separate from whatever harm or impacts were caused

by the actual removal. Yeah, that sounds terrible. I mean, that sounds like a harassment campaign, honestly. Aside from the time that these organizations and individuals need to spend dealing with this, there's also the lost business opportunity, if they're a business, the lost opportunity to reach constituents, if there's some kind of service organization, and also just like the psychological impact of having to go through this. It all sounds terrible, and it's maddening that meta is just seemingly able to do this with impunity,

or at least has been up until now. Is this something that is just happening in the Netherlands? No, it's an increasingly widespread phenomena. Q News, which is an Australian LGBTQ Plus publication, they've been doing a lot of reporting on this. They documented the same kind of account removals happening in Australia for, months. And it's like the same thing that was happening in the Netherlands, the communities that were impacted mostly being LGBTQ plus performers or nightlife collectives or sex workers or bipot creators, poll dancers, sexual health educators, reproductive health organizations.

Like those are like those are the communities who are being impacted in both Australia and the Netherlands. In January, Q News spoke to a Sydney-based performer named Bacilla. After Meda disabled her accounts and event platform using allegations, and this is meta's characterization, of, quote, human exploitation. So I went to look at her account to see for myself, like, what kind of stuff she posted. I couldn't see it because her account is still taken down. But I could see, like, the stuff that she had been tagged in across Instagram. And it's exactly kind of the stuff that you would expect, black and brown women and femmes doing performance, right? Like, sometimes, sensual performance, but it's clothed, so it's not breaking any of any Instagram's rules.

So that phrase human exploitation, I don't know, it just sounded to me like they were applying it to queer and black and brown performers' Instagrams, even though those Instagrams, if what I saw was representative of what was being posted, did not seem to be breaking any of Instagram's stated rules about what is or is not allowed on the platform. And again, these are just performers, like black and brown performers, queer performers, doing consenting performance with no nudity being flagged as, quote, human exploitation. Yeah, that seems really overly aggressive enforcement of their policy, whatever policy they happen to think is relevant, I guess, human exploitation.

It's a real problem. It reminds me of what we were talking about last week with the Take It Down Act and the concern that critics have expressed of companies being heavily incentivized to just take everything down regardless of whether it actually is a violation or not, right? And I think this, a generous interpretation of this is that's what they're doing here, just overly policing in an attempt to, avoid violating any of their rules. I think a less generous interpretation is that it is homophobic and perhaps racially motivated. Yeah, and she also made a very good point

to Q News that there is a disconnect where all manner of influencers can kind of adopt and essentially profit from sex worker aesthetics on Instagram, and be fine. But anybody who is consensually making content that is even like adjacent to sex work is not. She said, we can't post poll videos and bikinis just dancing in our living room or dancing in a studio, but influencers can post bikini picks constantly.

What is the difference? And I think that's also, there's the queerphobic part of it, the, you know, anti-LGBQ part of it, the anti-Black part of it, all of that. but also just the frustration of not having clarity. So if you post something that, to your understanding, does not break any of Instagram's rules, having your entire platform, which you could have been developing over years,

be taken down with no recourse and no clear way to appeal, it's like, what are the rules? You know, I understand the frustration here. And importantly, a lot of the folks, they talked to it for this piece, they weren't just upset at losing followers or losing their big platform. That is community, right? Like people talked about having a backlog of all their performances just gone overnight,

where it's like, oh, I was keeping all of the archives of my performances over the years on this platform, and they just took it down with no recourse, right? Or like, if you're a sexual wellness or reproductive health educator or advocate, think about all the ways that you have built up resources over decades, just gone overnight. Like, that can actually translate to meaningful harm. If folks need services, if folks need resources, if folks need community, of course they're going to go to social media. And so that being so precarious and that it can just be disappeared overnight because

of the whim of Zuckerberg and not even clearly explained why. I understand why this is a big problem. And so back to the Dutch case, it is meaningful because they're using the Digital Services Act in a way that it has not been used before. The Digital Services Act in the EU regulates how platforms moderate content. So it requires some transparency, a meaningful appeals process, and protection against discriminatory enforcement. So if this legal challenge succeeds, it could establish a precedent that platforms cannot selectively just disappear or arbitrary.

or unequally enforce things against marginalized communities without consequence, at least in Europe. And I want to end by saying if you have experienced account suspensions, removals, shadow banning, or content restrictions on meta platforms, particularly if you are part of a queer community or BIPAC or a sex worker or a reproductive health community, Q News is collecting accounts confidentially as part of their ongoing reporting. So we will put that link in the show notes. Well, I don't know about you, but I could use a little bit of a palate cleanser. What do you think? Yeah, definitely. We've covered a bunch of problems and concerns. Is there anything good going on in tech these days, Bridget?

Well, queer folks, women, and femmes are redesigning technology without the Zuckerbergs of the world. The cut just ran this delightful, joyous piece this week about the growing, cohort of queer folks, women and femmes who are building their own technology, literally with their hands from scratch, completely outside of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. And it is so delightful. So I know that you don't have TikTok, but, and I'm not really on TikTok that much these days, but there is this trend called Cyberdeck that is kind of taking off on TikTok. A Cyberdeck is a custom portable mini laptop that you build yourself, ideally from, salvaged parts or scrap. It can be a digital typewriter or an off-grad survival guide or an e-reader,

basically anything that you want it to be. The concept is grounded in science fiction from William Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. Have you ever read that? I'm embarrassed to admit that I haven't. I feel like a negligent nerd. It's okay. I wish I could say, you haven't read that foundational text. But I haven't read it either. All right. Well, maybe we're going to have to, maybe we could make that like a summer reading thing

that we do with listeners or something. Yeah, like a book. We should read that book. It comes up all the time. Yeah. So their version of building cyberdecks is a little less cyberpunk novel and a little more, as the piece puts it, Zoe 101 or Kim Possible.

Updating it for the modern era. Exactly. The person largely credited with sparking this movement is a 22-year-old former model and musician in London named Anna Kitan. So two months ago, she posted her first DIY tech project on TikTok under the title, fuck it, Cunty Cyberdeck. Fuck it, Cunty Cyberdeck. I like it.

So what she built was this incredible vintage clamshell clutch purse that she had worn to her own graduation that was mermaid-themed. and she turned it into this entertainment console with Wikipedia articles, movies, and music downloaded right onto it. Everybody loved it. They flooded her TikTok with questions. So then she built another one, this time a solar-powered one, to show people how to do it.

What I love about this is that she talks about how it's explicitly anti-consumption. She talks about how she was a self-described trend chaser who was always buying the latest fast fashion until she started asking herself, like, what is this all for? She went as far as calling up e-waste yards in London looking for salvageable parts. As she told the cut, since technology is taking over more of our lives, why not make it cute? And crucially, when her followers started DMing her chat GPT-generated cyberdeck designs, she pushed back.

She said that using AI ran counter to the whole spirit of the project. We're trying to build something that feels empowering to you, something you built for your own purposes. So now the comments on her video are full of people who did not think of themselves as tech people, but through building cyberdecks are realizing that they very much are. A 59-year-old self-described elder goth built one. A TikTok mom who said that she thought that raspberry pie was like a dessert, something that you would eat, built her first cyberdeck inside of a Polly Pocket, which I was obsessed with Polly Pocket as a kid, so that's very much up my alley. And like two weeks later, she was 3D printing a screenholder to make an upgraded version. That's pretty badass. It is. These stories of the ways that people who, like, didn't necessarily think of themselves as techie.

And now it's like, no, now I'm 3D printing my own cyberdeck. I just love it. There's also Matania Fentusu, a 29-year-old new media artist in New York, and a former Google employee who kind of soured on working in corporate tech. She started with simple projects like a wearable resin. ring that also worked as a scannable bus pass, and a hair barret that plays Solange Knowles' song, Don't Touch

My Hair, when you press it. And then she worked her way up to making this motorized kinetic sculpture for a gallery show inspired by watching the 2024 solar eclipse and witnessing a bunch of strangers suspended in collective awe.

We actually, you and I, watch that eclipse in 2024. Collective awe is the way to describe. It is. I don't think there's any greater experience of collective awe than watching a total solar eclipse with people. We're running along here so we don't have time to go on a whole solar eclipse digression. But, you know, there's one coming up in Spain in August. I know you've already got plans to be there. Yeah. I'm excited. And I guess I wanted to end with this because so much of a conversation around technology right now is like what's being done to us. Communities being sort of. and platforms disappearing communities and, like, jobs being automated and women being pushed out. And all of that is very real and obviously worth talking about it. But I just love that these people are doing something different. They're, you know, they're not just logging off and they're not just waiting for tech to get better.

They're just building their own thing. And it's just nice to see people using their hands to imagine a different tech landscape. And I love that it's overwhelmingly like artists and queer people and women. and older folks and people who are often told that they are not the ones worth paying attention to when it comes to building tech, and they are doing it anyway. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoody.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangooty.com.

There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our... producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow,

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