There Are No Girls on the Internet - LIVE FROM NYC: Sydette Harry on why tech keeps failing Black women at UNFINISHED LIVE

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

GET TICKETS FOR UNFINISHED LIVE 2022, SEPT 21-24: https://live.unfinished.com/   Sydette Harry gets really real on who has the power in technology and online. Follow Sydette: https://twitter.com/Blackamazon   Join our newsletter: Tangoti.com/newsletter Want to support the show? (thank you!) Subscribe, tell a friend, leave a review, or buy some merch at There Are No Girls on the Internet’s store: TANGOTI.COM/STORE Say hello at [e-mail] See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I actually drop better when I'm high. It heightens my senses. It calms me down. If anything, I'm more careful. Honestly, it just helps me focus. That's probably what the driver who killed a four-year-old told himself. And now he's in prison. You see, no matter what you tell yourself, if you feel different, you drive different.

So if you're high, just don't drive. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. 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. If you don't know Sudet Harry, she is one of my heroes and a piece that she wrote for Wired Magazine, interrogating the way that technology sees black women, is actually one of the biggest inspirations for this podcast. Sedet is constantly speaking truths to power and technology, and I was lucky enough to sit down with her for a live taping of their No Girls on the Internet in New York City during unfinished live, a festival celebrating technology, culture, and the arts, where Sedet got really real about power and technology.

And if you want to hear Sudet again, you are in luck. She'll be back at Unfinished Live 2022, September 21st through the 24th, both IRL from New York City and streaming online. She'll be joined by some of the most interesting people in technology and culture, like Dr. Sophia Noble, Denise Duncan, Bartende Thurston,

and the founding member of Pussy Riot. You might even see me there. So if you do, be sure to come say hi. Go to live.unfinished.com for tickets, and please enjoy this live episode of their, No Girls on the Internet from Unfinished Live last year. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for being here.

How's everybody feeling? Yeah. My name is Bridget Todd. I am the creator and host of the podcast There Are No Girls on the Internet. This is my first ever live show. So thank you so much for being here. It means so much to me. I'm so thrilled to be here with my guest, the brilliant Sedet Harry.

Give it up for Sedet. Hello. So a little bit about my podcast for folks who don't know. It's called There Are No Girls on the Internet. And one of the first questions I often get is, what's with that name? What do you mean there are no girls on the Internet? Well, there's an old saying that everybody on the Internet is a guy. And if they say they're a woman, they're just pretending.

They're not actually a woman. Or if they are a woman online, that identity doesn't actually matter. You know, we're all the same on the Internet. Exactly. Exactly. So that identity and all of the issues that come along with that identity, there's this misconception that we just leave it at the door. And I actually truly believed both of these things for a very long time.

I believe that black queer women like me were outliers in technology and the internet. And I believe if we did show up in these places, our identities and all of the issues connected with those identities, well, just didn't matter. You know, we left them on the door when we logged in. But that is not true. Women, black folks, people of color, queer folks, people who have all been traditionally marginalized, we've been showing up online to make it better, safer, more fun, more inclusive,

and we've been there from the very beginning. I mean, think about it. What would the internet be like without black folks, queer folks, trans folks? It would be so boring, y'all. It would just be journalists making boring jokes and having boring opinions about baseball, right? And nightmare. We couldn't even have that.

without black people because a lot of journalists boring jokes are stolen from black interactions. Thank you. Thank you. What would they report about if it wasn't watching us? Exactly. Exactly. It would be a nightmare without us. But because people from traditionally marginalized backgrounds, we've always been there since the very beginning. And we often are the ones doing the unpaid, difficult, sometimes dangerous and personal, personally costly work of making Internet spaces safer, better, more inclusive and better. And when we do this work, it's not just for us,

marginalized people, this work makes spaces better and safer for everyone. And so I want to give you a little pop quiz to sort of illustrate what I mean. So which of the following, and I know that you know the answers, which of the following is something that we know about the internet? Ahead of the 2016 election, an army of fake social media accounts targeted black voters in an attempt to destabilize our election process. Two, Facebook's moderation practices disproportionately removed posts from black people talking about our experiences with racism.

Lastly, on TikTok, white supremacist groups create extremist content using TikTok's own features not just to avoid detection, but to even have their content surface on users' for you page. So which one of those three things is the thing that we know about the internet? Raise your hand if you think it's one. Raise your hand if you think it's two. How about three?

Okay, so if you said all of the above, good job, you get a name. Here's another question. Of all of those things I just said, which of those things are things that black organizers, black social media users, black cultural critics have been vocally raising the alarm about for a very long time? Any guesses?

All of the above. You guys are all getting it perfectly. If you said all of the above, you would be right. In a piece for Wired called listening to black women, the innovation that tech can't quite figure out, my guest today, the brilliant cultural critic and all around tech troublemaker Sedet, argues that when black women speak up about the abuses and harms that we face online,

people with power just don't listen. That is, until that harm is experienced by other users. She writes, harmful behavior toward black women isn't enough to inspire change until others are harmed. But the original harms are often lost by journalists, tasked with covering tech. The power and rhetoric that went unchecked becomes common, and tactics used against black women for lulls become weapons used in conspiracies destabilizing the very nature of truth. From the swarming of victims to posing as black women to destabilize communities or even countries, defining the systemic abuse becomes a frustrating exercise of describing an empty space that no one believes is there. If we can follow, surveil, and automate everyone, how could we miss anything important?

And if it is important, it is only important for how it changes the mythical standard user, no matter how many people were hurt before. So, Siddette, when I heard those words, I have to tell you, it was the impetus for me creating my podcast at all in general, because it made me feel so seen as a black woman showing up online. I think people often miss our issues, and you spoke to it so beautifully in that piece. And so I'm so excited to talk to you today about that harm, what accountability looks like for folks who have ignored that harm, enabled that harm, and in some cases profited from that harm. and how we move forward to an internet that meaningfully listens to black women. Oh my gosh, you never told me that before. It's true.

First and foremost, I want to do the thing where we name the fact that this is my second kind of public thing without a face mask. That doesn't involve family members, so I'm fidgety. These are all things. And it's like, let's be honest about the place we are in and the level of comfort we are feeling. because part of the work is just, we like high-tech solutions. We like the things that are shiny and sexy, but we are ultimately all using the web for our lives. We need to use the web to connect to each other.

We need to use the webs at this point to get groceries, get vaccines to do our jobs. And the issue with what I've seen and what I've experienced with specifically that piece that led to the writing of that piece is that there's no way around when you have certain marginalizations or even in the current world for you not to be online. There's no way for you not to bring your whole self to the work you do online, the way you are online.

What usually happens is that you package it so that whoever you're dealing with at the time feels comfortable, but you're still your whole self, you're still having all of these issues. And with some of the things that we talked about, I wrote that in January. I've never told the story about that. that article, and it's kind of indicative to the way I've been online most of my life.

But what happened was it was Breonna Taylor, rest in peace, rest in power, the protest started for Breonna Taylor and there was a uproar of how could we have known and what is going on and we're, how do we do this? And a lot of this was also in post-George Floyd. But one of the things that happened is people were just like, how do we really describe this? Where's this thing? And I had written an article for Model View culture about people posing as black women in to kind of drive a web wed within feminism in 2014. It had been an phenomenon we had been exposing in 2013. And if we're talking about last year, 2020, So 2013 minus 2020.

How many years ago is that? How many years passed? Seven. Now, we work in tech. We are in social media. You certainly become sexy and hot. Usually it moves within minutes or months. The Metaverse, NFTs, those blow up and go in months.

But suddenly to talk to black women take seven months. And the editor of Wire at the time said something, and I was like, pay me to write this. I just said, maybe if you just paid me. to write this, and a lot of things went back and forth, and then pandemic was happening. I said that in June of 2020. The article got published in January of 2021. So that still took an additional seven months. And that is a common theme for things that have to do with women, I think often in general,

well, specifically women of color. And once I finished writing the article, Facebook, whatever, what have you, what has dropped within the past couple of weeks. We are getting, which is a really great piece of journalism, the Facebook reports, but they're in Wall Street Journal. They've been the Facebook podcast. And one of the reports, and this was really done in depth for the MIT Technology Review,

points out that something like five of the top ten revenue slash groups for centered on black people and like three of the ten for indigenous people are fake and are known to be fake,

pretending to be black people. I wrote this, I wrote my article in Model View Culture in 2014. I wrote an article for Wired in 2020. There was a report that went to the Senate from Oxford. So this is not a small independent report. It was in Oxford. And we also have Shereen Mitchell in the audience who wrote a who wrote a report about this in, I think, 2014 and also 2017. And at various points. So we had all of this. But suddenly it becomes a thing when Wall Street general rights about it.

It becomes a thing. Like, even Oxford couldn't get these people off. It was in the Senate hearing. Like, one of the things that I say is, like, bam, this was also in the Amnesty International report. And that was an interesting thing because I was interviewed for that report and I made some very specific comments on race

and got told in the way that women who are multiply marginalized are often told, it's divisive what you said, so we're pulling it out. And what I said was the first targets of these, these, issues are usually black women. We don't pay attention.

And in fact, we incentivize not paying attention because it makes great leaders. And people get very good at talking about misinformation or harm online by making those people usually singly marginalized white women. But it was divisive. And I think four of those Facebook groups have been mentioned in the study by Oxford, which

was still done after the studies and the observations of black women. And once they were mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, article and the reports, how long do you think it took them to take it off the internet? Not seven years. Twenty-four hours? Ooh, y'all are so,

y'all are so hopeful. Twelve. Twelve, by the time, one of, and some of them are just so openly offensive. Like, the number one was, my baby daddy ain't shit, because that's how they think black people talk

online. So they thought that that was a real group, that was a real group, when it made it wasn't. And that came down in 12 hours as long as the person reporting it wasn't black. And that has been a common theme in so many things that I've found for multiple marginalized people, but specifically for how black women are interacting with online. Now, usually for things like this, we are asked when we had these discussions.

The issue and part of what I wrote the article for and hearing about your podcast is I really like being black. I like being black. And it's not an, and I like doing tech work and I like analyzing things. And I don't feel that I should have to answer everything through a lens of how do I make it diverse and inclusive? Or how do we answer our problems with the lack of representation? Because it's not an hour problem. That's a you problem.

I am this person everywhere I go. Also, when I'm thinking about tech issues and why I wrote that article was I like to think about tech issues. I like to think about things like QA. I like to think about things about, so what does the GitHub repo? Why is GitHub design like that?

My primary thing right now is community and comms. So if you've actually worked in product design, you know if you do anything that involves community, comms, copy. Everybody's working in GitHub. You are usually porting tickets. But we don't talk about those things, and we often don't ask people who do work to talk about things. There is a separation between the social and the technical. And the problem and the thing that I want, I constantly am trying to push, is that those divisions are built into the Internet.

So the first, even the start of the World Wide Web, Unfinished Live is about decentralized protocols. And you will look at these things, and you'll see that the original meetings with Tim Bernersley, and all of these people were divided, like, this is the technical protocol, this is the social protocol. That's a big problem, and that is a huge problem that we have carried through the web since its inception of separating those things, except they influence each other. If you don't have social representation, you don't design well.

If you don't have a good analysis of technical work, you don't make good choices for what happens in social. And it's an artificial separation, and it's also socially influenced by where people think you are. Because the other part about the 2020 thing of like, let's listen to black women is that when I get pulled into things or sometimes we're things, like people want you to be, oh, we want to hear what you have to say. Can you talk about that?

And they really want me to sing the ballad of how terrible it is to be black and why. They should be nice to me. And when you want to sing the song of joy of I love being black, but your product design is bad. and the fact that me being black means your product doesn't work is a you problem. I need you to get better on that co-boo. They suddenly don't want to have the conversation. People love to have diversity conversations, but I'm like, okay, please do me a favor,

someone who works in product who looks at these tickets. Publish all your diversity numbers. Don't tell me you're going to do better. I want to see all of those numbers in an easily accessible place that I can pull up every single time. My background is the libraries. So you don't have to take it. tell me anything. You don't, I don't need to, and part of the joy of being black is I don't have to be the singular black person. I don't want to be a spokesperson. I like librarians.

I like library stuff. I like thinking and reading. I like creating and coding and all of that. I don't need to be the singular black person. There are people who are often much better served than this. But I want my work to be done well. I want it to be well compensated for the things I do. I want you to credit me and I want you to credit mine and I want you to have good practices. I happen to be black while asking for these things, but that doesn't make it a social justice request. It makes it a request for good systems. And the problem with these things is that people will treat this like,

oh, you want to do diversity because you're talking about how the neuralinguistic programming penalizes black people more than it penalizes people who pretend to be black. So you're talking about diversity. I'm like, oh, I'm talking about your machine learning set doesn't work. and then when it stops and then when it hits somebody actually care about it's like what is our problem with AI

there might be a math problem so it's not a math problem when it's penalizing me or picking me out or penalizing black people but it's a math problem when it stops white people are we using two different kinds of math which if we are is fine but let's lean into that

reality and the danger becomes it's like you will listen to me bemoan being black you will not You will not listen to me and have effectual steps for us to do this work better. And that is an issue that keeps coming up, and we're going to see more of it with the idea of the now content creator economy, where everybody's response when a black person has a problem, it's like, are you a content creator?

Because we really want to boost your profile. I don't want you to boost my profile. I want you to fix this. I don't need, I like making podcasts. I love your podcast. But I don't need to make a podcast. to get you to fix the AI that would make both of us gorillas. And I especially don't need to make a podcast for this three or four times every single goddamn year

when somebody pointed it out in 2013 and you can't provide me a change log for what actual interventions and reports and white papers you published and synthesize to make it stop happening. I don't need a podcast. I need a paper trail. But they don't believe that we should have those things or it's right for us to ask for those things. And that I think is what is really, especially as we are, and then times it's really getting stressful because we are asking for changes and responses to these Herculean, one sin of lifetime, one sin of millennia occurrences. But the thing about change in innovation is that you don't just innovate a product.

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

Why aren't we talking about it be a fundamental part of the reason we're here? I do not like models that constantly ask me to be supplicant to deal with racism when you've already set it up in such a racist way that I'm constantly requesting things. And there are times when I feel you have more of a problem with the fact that when I tell you no or this is wrong and it sticks and you can't shut us down or get us out that we're at that place in some ways, then you have a problem with the fact that the thing don't work. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman helped make you funnier.

This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again.

More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-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. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. Hi, everyone. I'm Cheryl Stray, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. I'm excited to share that I have a new podcast called Mind Over Mountain. In each episode, I interview athletes, adventurers, and adrenaline seekers to discuss the inner landscapes and life

experiences that informed and inspired their extraordinary feats. I also bring a bit of advice into the mix so we too can better understand how to face our own seemingly insurmountable challenges. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to pull out what you already have inside. We're coming into this world fighting for our lives. All I'm going to do is pull out what you already got inside. We're there to support and celebrate each other. And that's not like your story versus my story. You're going to walk up and over that dang mountain. You're not just going to put your mind over it.

Yep, yep, exactly. And if I can't walk up and over it, I'm going to go through it. Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast Point Game is about defining the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win, no matter,

what? He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before. And he knows, without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs. I think Joker's going to be exhausted

this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reed. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night to night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too.

Steve Nash would get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He running up the court, licking his fingers why he got the ball. Like, you go through a training camp with that, I said. You figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball.

So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. At our back. You said earlier how we are often having to scream at the top of our life. for someone to hear us to fix things, right? And that everybody wants to say, oh, listen to Black women, amplify Black women, we support Black women

until we're pointing out these problems that cause us harm. And if we're not singing this sad song about how hard it is, and we're actually saying, no, your product, your platform is creating this harm. You shouted out one of my kind of tech hero, Shereen Mitchell. I don't want to put you on the spot, but founder of Stop Online Valiance Against Women, who really did a lot of the reporting early on

about the way that Black women experience harm online. So one of my questions for you is like, what if you're someone who just wants to use social media to talk about real housewives or do your job? And you didn't really sign up to be this unpaid sort of person who is always flagging these issues to make these products function the way they should. Like what, like, how do we exist online if we want to not have this extra unpaid burden that we really shouldn't have just to show up? Well, for me, it's not a what-if. I got started online because I'm a sci-fi geek. But that's

where a lot of these problems happened. Fandom, nerddom, recently Twitch was having hate raids where they basically were flooding the thing, flooding people's streams because of this. And the response

is there is a, for me there's a two-pronged response. The response that I would give you as someone who cares about your mental energy and your like curate your feed list, do this, do that, etc. You have to kind of approach it because that's the only way you will be able to operate cleanly online. The other part about it is in the way that I feel as a person who makes these things,

someone who looks at the features and such of that, it's that it's not your responsibility. This is no longer a question to me, and that might be a response. I'm annoyed and tired of the pandemic. and how we haven't addressed racism, sexism, and everything, to the point we are now worried about going outside because of what's happening. It is the point, it is the need and the necessity of the people to fix it. I don't want to have another unpaid conversation.

Can you do free QA research? Can you do free design research and free user interviews? Because you don't believe me when I say I have a different experience, so I've got to cut and paste and do a whole report, but you're paying somebody within your organization who's usually not black and doesn't use the platform, six figures to do it. At this point, get that person to do their job

or respect the or design it so that I can report for free because the other side of this is as someone who looks at community, as someone who looks at user feedback. Most of the time when we are experiencing things like that, we want to tell someone because we wanted to stop. So we'll intrinsically go, hey, and some of it is carcule telling a hall monitor, but we'll turn to somebody and be like, hi, I'm experiencing these things. I think one of the things that is most enraging to me about the content creator distinction specifically

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

and you are quick and good about it because how quickly does TikTok respond when somebody publishes and goes, hey, you're surfacing unnatural material which means that these, and I say young kids, to me I'm right now, anybody under 25? I don't mean to infantilize, but anyone who's under 25.

So these are people who, if they had gone to school for this, would not be finished with the PhD. But they are already quick at recognizing these patterns, recognizing the tech reporting it. They are doing that work already. And they're working as scientists. They're working as observers. They're working as researchers.

They're working as organizers. Not making dances. And we're saying to them, all you're doing is contact creation. But the honest truth is they have to run a small think tank for every single account to respond to curate because we have done so poorly in actually building the product and building the processes for harm reduction and harm mitigation or just moderating our content. That's that I, one of the things that I'm starting to find with the frame and it's often confrontational, I'll be confrontational a little bit, is I'm no longer accepting the framing

of, so let's hear more about my problem. Okay, if we're going to start there, tell me how you got to 2021 and didn't know this was a problem. Tell me how you got to 2021 and you didn't know that marginalized people have a harder time online. Tell me how you are in a think tank, in a nonprofit, in a job. If you don't know this, when I can pull reports now from Harvard, Oxford, Yale, at one point, Clemson University, Amnesty International, myself, all of this is open publication. These are the publications you mix. So why are you talking to me like I don't know what's going on?

And number two, don't tell me about my tone of the fact that I'm angry. We've seen what these people do unchecked. I have been getting death threats since I was 22. I'm going to let people, I don't know a secret. I'm 37. I've been getting death threats for 15 smooth straight years. I'm not here to babysit you. I'm not here to make you feel good about the dereliction of your duty.

I'm here to fix this problem, and if I can't fix it for me, I'm here to fix it for the people behind me. Now, we can do that with some social things, but we also can do that by you just doing your job. Don't automatically turn on contents. Don't use an AI that recognizes me as a gorilla. Don't do it. We don't have to have a discussion. You don't have to hear my thoughts. I'm not a small child.

Just fix it. start making products that help people tell you what they need. And then when they tell you them, don't try and finesse it so you do something different because you're not comfortable. You've been told what is needed. Either do it or be honest about the fact of why you're not doing it. And also allow and start allowing us to have those discussions where we just get to do our jobs. We're coders and creators and thinkers and writers. And we want to go in and write a good bit of code.

We want to write some good copy. We want to build these communities. Make it so I can do that. Part of my job district should be, how do I help you solve racism? No. We're going to do it together. Great.

But I would just really like to build the code that I'm building. I'm working on a product now with Mozilla Raleigh. So we are specifically trying to build ways of tracking data. tracking everything from doom scrolling, which was coined by a woman of color, Karen Huff, about how you are online to how ads are targeted to you without having to go through platforms. It's built through web extension. And it's great because right after that, what is it, Facebook shut down, Facebook Observer.

We found out that all the data everybody was getting wasn't true. What? That is, it takes everything in me that to start with. So I told you so and everything in me is not good enough. So I told you so that there is, there are so many people who told these people this. One of the jokes I have is that there are people who have formed a coalition of, oh my God, don't do that when it comes to social media, who don't agree on anything else. Don't agree on anything else.

But you found it from sex workers, ex-religious conservatives, abortion rights activists, black women, tech people, all of us have come together and be like, I need you to think about this. Why would you trust Facebook? Why would you organize anything to make you trust Facebook as a tactical decision? Not as a whatever decision. And that comes not from our notice, because we're not on the inside. We've been the people these attacks.

I need to know why you don't trust them and I need you to build in better parts. And there's a like, no, no, no, you don't understand how we work in Silicon Valley. We're friends, blah, blah, blah. Now you get this that most of this data is not good. How many people's PhDs just got screwed because that data isn't viable. But nobody wanted to even think in terms of teaching, let's be prepared for the, if we're hostile. You and I and other marginalized people have no other option but to think what happens if this goes left. And that is a reality in the world.

And they have been watching it for years. So why aren't they prepared? And if you feel uncomfortable about giving me an answer, that feels like a thing you need to work out. Right? When you have a jailbreak or something like that, you fix that immediately. What is it about our issues? What is it about the issues of people represented that you can take so long?

And I think the point that we really need to move from now if we want to get better is that we're not going to get past this until we've been. do that. Why are certain people's issues? Why are certain responses always secondary? That's not if we keep dancing around this and we're going to keep up coming up with funny terms we're more concerned with, but we're not getting past that until we answer it. And it's super uncomfortable. And I am a human, so I understand why you don't want to. But we're now in a pandemic that is going into its second, possibly third year because we don't have, we can't understand basic kind of empathetic social reactions.

There was a run-up on the capital of racists who were trying to kill people. You don't hang a noose on the front of the Capitol just as a symbolic gesture in the United States of America. Do not tell that black lie to my black face. I know what my people have been through. You put a news somewhere. You're trying to hang some people. They did that on the Capitol. They still haven't had a real full hearing.

We've had all of this happen, and we're still just listening. Why aren't we acting? And until we get to this point, we're going to keep having spares up and flurs up and goes up and goes down until we answer that question of why aren't we moving. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite.

Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes.

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podcasting can help your business. Think IHart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHart Podcast presents Soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend, Janet. And we have been joined at the hip since high school. Absolutely. Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. Wider. This is a podcast we're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey.

With all the snacks and drink. Sidebar. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? They had a bogo. Well, then you got it. Do you want a white cloth or something here? Just take it. What are y'all doing? Microphones? Are you making a rap album? I would. Come on.

Could you imagine? I would buy it. Cut through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake. That sounds delicious. Oh, you're lucky I'm not a drug addict. You're lucky I'm not an alcoholic. You're lucky I'm not a killer. I love this team and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on.

Oh. Listen to soccer moms on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone. I'm Cheryl Stray, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. I'm excited to share that I have a new podcast called Mind Over Mountain. In each episode, I interview athletes, adventurers, and adrenaline seekers to discuss the inner landscapes and life experiences that informed and inspired their extraordinary feats. I also bring a bit of advice into the mix so we, too, can better understand how to face our

own seemingly insurmountable challenges. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to pull out what you already have inside. We're coming into this world, fighting for our lives. All I'm going to do is pull out what you already got inside. We're there to support and celebrate. each other. And that's not like your story versus my story. You're going to walk up and over that dang mountain. You're not just going to put your mind over it. Yep, yep, exactly. And if I can't walk

up and over it, I'm going to go through it. Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. One of the things that I feel so frustrated about as someone who has worked in the disinformation and the online extremism space for a while is this idea that we have to have a had to combat for so long that it's just jokes and people make these comments online, it's not serious. It didn't take a rocket scientist to see that online commentary doesn't just stay online and that what we saw on January 6th is directly related.

But talk about lying to my face, how often I would be in meetings with tech leadership and they would say, oh, well, it's about speech, you know, this is not about like, we're not trying to, you know, this is not going to be related to, like, in real life actions. We know things that start online don't stay online. And so what we, I mean, I live in D.C., what I saw on my own backyard on January 6th, I saw it as a direct reaction to the inaction that you just described, to all of these different little cutesy names for what we could all plainly see. It's like extremism. How spicy woman get? Get spicy.

I have a hard time believing that spaces and confederations that are whiterates than the racist and the proud boys are well-versed in protecting me. If you do a misinformation panel and everybody's white, I've stopped listening. At this point, if you can't grab somebody to be hate, let's talk. Just stand there and talk. That's a base level of work that you're not willing to do. that I now know that I can't trust anything else, I'll really come up because there is, you've had time. And the reason it's a joke is because it's a joke to them. It is jokes in speech to them.

And I'm actually, before this, I worked with the Choral Project. So I was the community research leads for the choral project. And that was about comment moderation. So we worked on building things to moderate comments. And there are times, depending. and like there's a whole separate thing, he's like, you have to set what you'll accept, et cetera, et cetera. There are times where I would moderate something or look at something,

and this is something that I would punch someone in the face for if they were standing right in front of me. But as a content moderator, based on what we had defined our parameters were, I had to let it go. I might not like it, but I would let it go. The thing that is very, that is often grounded in a lot of these decisions is that often we are not asking them to do anything they have not set out in their own rules or bylines

or anything like that. We are asking them to merely enforce them for marginalized people the way they enforce them for people who might matter. That's literally the only thing I'm asking you to do. I actually had an experience with Twitter last year. I think it was last year. Time means nothing right now.

But there is a congressperson. where who said something so violently anti-Asian and xenophobic. I don't want to repeat it, but it was Congresswoman

that speech warning, I just went you racist, raggedy bitch. This is not something my mom's going to be proud of. That's not necessarily proud of at that moment because it was just such a gut reaction of what?

and there was and I knew I was in the company because that was not, I wasn't the only person who said that. It was me, it was a reporter from I think the South China Post. I think there was a white mom in Texas who was like, oh my God, you racist bitch! I was the only person who was blocked. I'm a verified account for whatever that means,

but I was blocked. They were a whole bunch of things and there was no way for me to appeal that. I actually had to contact someone. one separately. And that for, for a moderation, as a person who has moderation experience, that's a really bad model. If you're worried about things like that, and especially for a targeted congresswoman, you actually should be more concerned about that language because she's a congresswoman. So I actually was not against the fact that I was blocked because you actually

have to worry about that because, again, one of the most targeted people online for racism and has been for about 10 years is Diane Abbott, the MP in London, the most targeted person in the Anglophone world, is a black MP for Labor in London. That's almost never mentioned. She's targeted more than anyone you could think of. I think at certain points she was targeted more than Michelle Obama.

But we don't talk about that because of her specific status. But when the problem came, the hammer came down, on me. The hammer did not come down on other folks and there was no way to aggregate these decisions and I had another friend who had become friendly with

who experienced a similar thing and had someone say well we're not sure that happens to black women and you're lying or you're bad at your job

but also how How much do you want us to do? How do you get us through? If you're going to gaslight us at every turn, if it always is something you kick down the road, we'll get to what we'll get to it. And what we're getting to is that black women are leaving these platforms. Then Twitter just had to pay $800 million to somebody, I think it's on board, because engagement numbers were fudged. And I have a slightly more than hunch that some of it has to do with how badly they've moderated these racist and bots accounts. versus the actual content those people create. And you've got to be, you've got to be willing to get better at the work. And what I think is often the issue for some things is that some people do not want to change. They don't want to change. It is not to them, even with the Nazis in the streets, the fascists running up and down,

the planet on fire and are still in the middle of a pandemic. it's not serious enough for them yet to change the way they do things. And that is a hard thing to say and it's a hard thing to hear. But until there's an actual change, I don't know that we can say anything different. And if I was going back to the loop-de-loop I started with, but if I'm going to be a talk to a black woman I care about online, the first thing I would tell you is they have yet to be. make steps that are clear for your protection.

That's a them problem. That's not you problem, but I want to make sure that you are aware of that. And that would be the thing, because my first concern is going to be how you are doing, not how the tech is doing. In terms of what I see before, one of the things I really like about my job right now, and the project we're doing with Mozilla Raleigh is it's starting

to address what I think is always the fundamental problem with these things, is How do you start getting information that people can independently corroborate? How do you start getting that kind of raw data that these platforms have been siloing and keeping to themselves? How do you get people who honestly want to have a good experience and will then tell you that to be able to get some real context? So when you tell me, because of some of these studies we're working with, we're working with Princeton, we're working with Stanford, and we are going to be working with the markup, and I'm very excited about that because they do great work. but couple the data with talking to people and asking,

hey, how did you feel? What was going on when you saw this? And it's going to be done with respect. It's going to be done with transparency. And it's going to be done in ways that are not directly under the people who have taken so long to do right by you and still fail. And I think that is what I am hoping more works through is that we stop making the idea of people and thinking,

secondary artwork and we start moving into the no, it is important to us that we think about how people experience things. Yeah. You know, I love all of this. One of the reasons why I'm so interested in these conversations about how these online spaces are moderated is because, you know, you talk about women who are essentially pushed out of these spaces because of this kind of harassment that just you don't see it ever ending. And I was one of those women.

There was a time in my life where I was a very, very, very. avid Reddter. I would like wake up and I was unpaid, moderating all of these different spaces. And, you know, it was a big part of who I was. It was a big part of like what made me me. And if you've ever been on Reddit, you know sometimes it's a place where you are going to be harassed. Not just people... The Black Lady Subreddit was one of the most targeted Reddits online up until like 2018. Exactly. And, you know, I remember thinking, so when it was harassment that wasn't just like they're saying mean things to me. It was like, I know where you live,

and it sounds like this person maybe does know where I live. I remember thinking, like, I've given so much of my time and my energy and myself to this platform. Certainly someone is going to hear me. Certainly when I speak up, I will be listened to, I will be heard. And when I realized that there was no one to hear

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

And so I always think about all the women what it feels like to go through this, what it feels like to be on the other side of it. And what it feels like to finally be like, enough is enough. So I'm so happy that you talk about the actual emotional experience of going through. not just like as a user, but as a person who experiences things. So I'm going to tell you something that I want to tell everybody. And this is something that I have not learned, but therapy helps. It is not your responsibility to set yourself on fire so other people have warmth and heat. You didn't just let it go.

I don't like that. You were exposed to a level of abused, non-response, and trauma because the things we are called and said to us online are traumatic that ended up not being worth the effort you put in. I don't know why there becomes, like I feel like there's often a belief that hard work must be terrorizing that I do not like because sometimes hard work sucks. You just got to do the thing. You got to do the rep. You got to do the rep. You got to do the project. But you shouldn't have to be haze to talk about your hair. You shouldn't have to be haze to talk about yourself in a movie. And if you are, and it's against their guidelines,

there is someone's job for this to be done. And it's also the thing to talk about moderation is that even when moderation is done, most content moderation farms are farmed off to usually women in the Philippines. So we are hurting women of color coming and going because not only are They're reading our trauma. They're also seeing the things we never see, which are assault videos. Soria Chimale wrote about this, I think, for Verge, again, five years ago. But we're getting all of that, and it's just like, tapping out for what doesn't serve you is a completely a normal human response, and you're a human.

And I remember specifically around Reddit, because, like I get sometimes spicy, but Alexis O'Hanian is like, I don't understand what this house is happening. Why are people getting like this online? Sir, you were the president and CEO of Reddit. I'm going to need you to give me more than a tweet. I'm going to need to give you more than a wonderfully edit podcast with the rising music.

If you really want to know how we got here, you're going to sit down with some people and they're not going to just be content creators. They're going to be black designers. They're going to be black PhDs. They're going to be black users. And they're going to be queer users. And they're going to be Asian users.

And they're going to be Latinan users. And we're going to sit down and actually go back and we're going to make some hard lines in the sand. And if we're not going to back it up, what you're actually telling me is you don't want to do this. And honestly, my shocking opinion, it is fine that you don't want to do this. But every moment you play in my face,

every moment you make a big decoration, every moment you don't follow through, every moment, we really want to meet with you and do dodge that call, or you say that you're doing a fellowship, but it's $30,000 less than you pay the lowest paid person who gets a job. Every single time you do that, you sap energy from people, you sap energy from movements, you sap people's, you sap the energy for people to have good communities online. and you don't have to do it to me personal, even though it's been done to me personal, for it to matter to me.

And if you don't want to change, that's fine, but do not be surprised when your connection numbers go down. Don't be surprised when people find new ways to do this. And don't be shocked when as people who are against you, the thing that I cannot abide by is for all of these people who are listening and pretending and caring, but do not actually do the work. At the end of the day,

your user, those people want you to have a good experience because they want to have a safe place to be. The people who are, the racist, the Nazis, all of them, they fundamentally don't want your platform to work. They don't want your product to work. They don't want people to be able to use it. They want you to fail.

Why are you focused on the people who want you to fail more than you are focused on the people who want you to win? And what social cues and what social biases do you have that make this something that you keep doing? And again, we're not going to get past if you don't answer that question.

So I have a final question for you. This is the question I usually end every interview with. So we've said all of this, all of this said, are you hopeful about the state of the internet and technology? When you look at where we are, are you hopeful for what's on the horizon? Do you think it's better than where we are now or worse? I think it's different. And I'm built to be hopeful.

No, my mother, my mother, sometimes says about me is that I'm very, very brilliant, but not sometimes very smart. I've got more hope than sense. But I am hopeful about technology, because I'm hopeful about people. That's part of the reason why I'm drawn to the work I do. I'm hopeful about people. Again, I say the analysis and the things I see the young folks on TikTok to you.

Oh my God, I can't imagine not being hopeful. when you see someone reviving an ancient indigenous practice of throat singing with their mother, how can you not be hopeful when you see young queer kids be able to get help? How can you not be hopeful when someone teaches you how to magically get curry stains out of a Tupperware part? I'm Guyanese. I actually have it on my hat. But I'm Guyanese and you know that that's a mystical magical thing. and you see that someone can do that, you are,

I'm inexplicably hopeful, that you can see that in the streets. But I also think that hope is not enough. I don't think that I'm not excited by faraway things. I'm excited by the work that's being done, and so many people are showing up to do that work. But I am also very, very frightened because sense that is common with something that was given to me,

is how much longer people will have the energy and the resources to do that work is what scares me and how committed people are to actually redistributing or revolutionizing so that they can do their work. That's what scares me. But when it comes down to, do I feel hope at all? Of course. I get up and I have something to do

and somebody is saying that they are thinking about a thing or they've noticed a thing and they're still committed to making a piece of art or making a piece of media or even a tweet that says, this is important to me and I want the world to be slightly better. God, I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful every day. Siddette Harry. We are just about out of time. I have to thank each and every one of you for being here. You have no idea how much this means to me. Thank you so much for leaning into this conversation. Thank you again, Siddette, for being here. If you want to hear more conversations like this, please tune into my podcast. There are no girls on the internet. We would love to have you.

Yeah, thank you so much for coming. Thank you. Terrapard! You're so good! Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoati.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoity.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeartRadio 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, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy,

not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform?

We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano. It's our favorite time of the year on our podcast point game, the playoffs. We're digging into the biggest surprises of the season. And I'm looking back on some of my greatest playoff moments. If we didn't talk ever again, I was funny. You just understood.

That's how personal it got. Wow. Then after that game seven, Marquis keep coming to you. He's like, you know I love you, dog. You know, it's all love. This was just playoffs. This was just basketball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And here's Heather with the weather. Well, it's beautiful out there, sunny and 75, almost a little chilly in the shade.

Now let's get a read on the inside of your car. It is hot. You've only been parked a short time, and it's already 99 degrees in there. Let's not leave children in the back seat while running errands. It only takes a few minutes for their body temperatures to rise. and that could be fatal. Cars get hot, fast, and can be deadly. Never leave a child in a car.

A message from Nitsa and the Ad Council. Therapy is fantastic, but once again, it does not have a monopoly on healing. That's why I create the resources and that's why I create the community because I really just want you to have more access. On the podcast, cultivating her space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where black women can show up fully and be heard. It's tough because we're suppressing our emotions and so many of us are like high-achieving individuals. Listen to cultivating her space on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.