There Are No Girls on the Internet - Pay Us What You Owe: Why Black Women in Tech are Tired

Episode Date: February 17, 2021

Ifeoma Ozoma pioneered groundbreaking work to keep dangerous health misinformation off Pinterest, even before we were in a pandemic. But it came at great cost to her own health and safety.Follow Ifeoma: https://twitter.com/IfeomaOzomaListen to the full TANGOTI episode about Ifeoma and Color of Change’s work on Pinterest and slave plantation wedding venues: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dont-have-a-wedding-on-a-plantation/id1520715907?i=1000492172280Questions? Comments? Just wanna say jambo/ hola / hello? [e-mail] Bridget on Instagram at @BridgetMarieinDC and on Twitter @BridgetMarie Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. And nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo, and every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headline. And we're going straight to the source, the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear.

Listen to Sports Slice on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Sliced Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. You're listening to This Informed, a mini-season. A series from there are no girls on the internet. I'm Bridget Todd. I believe black women are the future of the internet. Much of the work to create that future, a safer, more inclusive one, has been built by black women.

But we need to acknowledge the sad reality that that work doesn't always come easy. For the black women trying to build better platforms and push for changes in systems and institutions, that work comes at a huge personal cost. This is something that tech policy expert, Phoma Uzoma knows all too well. My full name is Ephoma Uzoma,

and I'm the founder and principal of the consulting firm. It's called Earthseed, which is actually named after the community that Octavia Butler created in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talent. In Octavia Butler's novel, Parable of the Sower, Earthseed is a community based around the idea that God has changed. It's all about the future and the possibilities of what came. be. And knowing Ifoma, this name is no accident. Before she started her own firm, Ephoma was already an early champion of change, busy architecting the future of the internet.

An early hire on Pinterest public policy team, her work set Pinterest apart and headline after headline applauded Pinterest for taking early action to keep dangerous dis and misinformation off their platform. You'd think this would make her a superstar within the organization, But like so many black women who fight for change, that wasn't the case. As things were going south, I was still doing the work. Misinformation is kind of a trendy thing now, but back in 2018 when Nifoma was hired at Pinterest, people weren't really talking about the need to keep it off platforms. She hit the ground running as soon as she was hired and basically designed an early framework of moderation policies

to keep dangerous dis and misinformation off Pinterest. First, by banning prolific conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and later, health misinformation. My first week on the job, I pushed our GC and our trust and safety team and the content policy team to make the decision that we ended up making on Alex Jones and removing him entirely from the platform at a time. This was in 2018 at a time when he was not really being addressed by any platform. And the argument I made at that point was first that he already violated a lot of the policies that we had, his content.

And two important things. One, that if you're acting on misinformation, at that point, no other platform had a misinformation policy other than like medium. And my point was, well, if we're making decisions because we know content is misinforming, we have a misinformation policy. we need to just write it and be clear and stand in our convictions and post it on the site. A few researchers will pick it up. Others may pick it up. Most people won't, but I do think when you're making decisions, you need to be transparent about what those decisions are and why. And so from there, and the policy that came out of that, then I was able to push for a lot of the health misinformation work that I did, which started with getting a landscape analysis. That's something that I

feel has been missing from a lot of platforms. If you don't know what's on your platform and others don't know, how do you address it properly? If you don't know who it's impacting, because most misinformation is not an equal opportunity harm. It's mostly targeted at people of color and at women. And when you're looking at health misinformation, it's a especially start. And so having that information, I was then able to push for things that I was retaliated against because of, but that's a whole other set of stories. Moderation on a platform like Pinterest is no easy thing, but IFOMA championed moderation policies

that targeted how savvy disinformers actually can be. For instance, there's huge amounts of inaccurate content about abortion targeting the black community. They use rhetoric like black genocide and accused Planned Parenthood of wanting to abort black babies, using imagery of black moms and babies to target black folks. But there's also huge overlap in the anti-choice movement, and the white supremacist movement.

So some of this content is actually produced by white supremacist groups trying to target the black community. Ephoma's ability to build out thoughtful moderation policies around this kind of complex content was bolstering Pinterest's public reputation as a company who stood apart as an early model of what it looked like to build safer

and more ethical platforms. They were championed in the press. But all the while, EFOMA was being mistreated internally by her own colleagues for the very work that allowed Pinterest to be seen as its essential. success story. So few platforms had any kind of public-facing policy around misinformation and

disinformation. And back then, I feel like Pinterest was really able to set themselves apart, at least from someone from the outside looking in. And you were doing so much of that work all the while they were making your life harder for doing it. You know, how do you sit with that? With a lot of peace that karma is real, and it will come back to get them. But also, That was one of the reasons why I had to go public about the retaliation that I faced when I raised pay discrimination concerns about the doxing that I experienced from a white male supremacist who happened to also work at Pinterest after I push for decisions to be made around white supremacist content that had existed on the platform.

There are a lot of intersections, as you know, with misinformation. And so even though Pinterest was most well, known because of the health misinformation work that I did, we took a lot of steps to address other types of misinformation and where those two, I guess, circles and event diagram met was on an anti-choice site that had been posting misinformation around birth control and access to abortion services being targeted specifically at black communities to push a eugenics agenda from the pro-choice movement. And the ways in which the misinformation aligned, I pushed internally that this is, this is why we have to look at misinformation in general. We have to look at the specific ways

in which it harms people. But if you just take a, well, this is an opinion, point of you, then you're missing that this is both health misinformation and it's also political because it's targeted at a group using language and using imagery because they're very good at using images of black mothers and black children on these websites that are run entirely by white supremacists, that you may miss some of the context if you only look at the content and not what their entire website is pushing. Well, especially on a platform like Pinterest that is so visual. You know, you might be on there because you're designing a new nurse or you're planning a wedding. You're not necessarily primed to be hit with content that could be racially charged or politically

charged or be delivering health misinformation. You know, your guard is down. And that's why it was particularly harmful. And that was my, even though the platform had never really done anything public in the policy space, was certainly not known by any of the reporters I ended up working with a policy decisions. One of the reasons why I felt so strongly about this is it's a platform that was going towards IPO at the time that I'd started. So I started pre-IPO. And part of the messaging around that is where a platform with 8 and 10 moms in the U.S. on here, lots of women use the platform around the world, and women are often decision makers when it comes to financial choices for their households. So it's a great platform for advertisers.

but at the same time, that's what made it a prime target for misinformation purveyors because you have a captive audience, folks who are not attuned to looking for miss and disinformation because they're not on Facebook, they're not on Twitter, they're in a place that feels safe to them. And so they're the perfect opportunity to then hawk whatever goods you're selling, a point that I made often because I'd get invited by the WHO, CDC, and others to talk about this health misinformation work that they had not thought about it as much

is the financial incentives that are tied to a lot of misinformation. Whether it's Alex Jones selling his nonsense T-shirts and supplements and whatever else, these people are scam artists. That's their number one job is scamming folks. they use the values that people have, they use the fears that people have to then sell their products. But at the end of the day, these are spammers and scammers. And so you need to also be looking at what it is that they're trying to push on your platform. For almost every single health misinformation site, they were selling supplements.

So if you would address dangerous supplements on the platform as spam, why would you not consider? this at the same level of harm to the platform and ultimately harm to legitimate advertisers. I think that we're so used to thinking about scammers as people, you know, selling fake Gucci on the street. And like, no, it can, it, people can can scam online and they're misleading you in order to get you to buy whatever bullshit product they're hawking. I would actually argue that the person selling the Gucci handbag that's fake, that's not harmful. You got a cheaper bag, if it's made well, it looks pretty good. Like, you get a deal, they get a deal. Gucci doesn't get a deal, but what do they need one for? But that's not harmful in the same way that telling parents,

and especially at the point at which most parents make decisions about vaccines in the last trimester before they have the kid, that they, instead of getting a vaccine for their child, which will save their child's life, they should instead go buy your vitamin K supplement. That is so harmful and dangerous in a way that we need to take it more seriously. It's not a difference of opinion. It's actually costing people's lives. Definitely. And I think to your point about how many moms are on the platform, you know, as we go into talking about, you know, vaccine rollout for COVID and things like that, it is a lot of times moms who are making health decisions for the family. And so if moms are being inundated with really harmful health misinformation on this platform where they think they're going to be safe, it is a real problem that could have a real human cost.

And I think, yeah, the person scamming fake Gucci belt on the street, other than not giving Gucci more money, which frankly I'm not really that mad at, you know, we have to look at the kind of harm that these platforms can really be responsible for pushing on communities who are oftentimes already marginalized or underrepresented. That's exactly right. The day of the insurrection, as pro-Trump mob swarmed the Capitol, one of whom was wearing a shirt reading Camp Auschwitz, Microsoft-owned tech firm GitHub fired a Jewish employee for posting, stay safe, homies, there's Nazis about, in a company Slack channel. The company eventually reversed her decision

and apologized to the employee after an investigation. But even still, it establishes a pretty concerning dynamic when where marginalized employees are punished for correctly identifying white supremacists. Ifoma can relate. You were actually punished for speaking up about white supremacists. Yeah, and not only punished, I was personally targeted. So the story I was referring to earlier, the white supremacist colleague who wasn't someone I worked with closely, but worked on the engineering side of trust and safety, saw a message that I posted in

exactly the right place for me to post it. It wasn't a general conversation area, but I posted that a pretty popular white supremacist was in fact a white supremacist. I linked to the content that violated our policies, that was of concern. And then I put in a note as well that the platform or the folks working on trust and safety should be mindful of these terms. Like here's a set of terms that are dog whistles unless you're a white supremacist or unless you're the target of the white supremacist harm. And these are what we need to look out for because these folks aren't going to title their videos on YouTube as, hey, I'm a white supremacist and this is my view. It's going to say something about population control around white replacement theory, which a lot of folks are not aware of, but is a huge red flag and is a

calling card for many white supremacists. A few months after posting that warning, sharing the context and the content, which was my job as a public policy person who helped inform content safety decisions that we made, I was then doxed. This person doxed me and two other women, another one who's a black woman and a woman that he, a white woman, he assumed to be a lesbian. And we only know that because of the comments that came up on Gateway. pundit and in other places where we had been targeted. And for me, I guess he took a particular disliking to me and so shared my phone number as well and all of the identifying information that you would need to find me. At this point, I had already separate from all of this and

separate from the work I was doing, I had already raised pay discrimination complaints with the appropriate leadership at the company, my manager, managers, manager, HR, etc. and was getting serious pushback from them. And so then when I was doxxed, the lack of response from them to take care of my safety, to address what was going on was so apparently part of the retaliation that I had already been facing on the pay discrimination side, that it was pretty traumatizing. Being at a company where it was clear I was not safe, I was not necessarily safe at home because it's not very difficult to track someone down

once you have enough information, and then was also dealing with everything else at the same time. So I really related to the GitHub story because of the doxing that I experienced and the lack of response. So if FOMA was facing egregious targeted harassment from her own colleagues in retaliation for her work that garnered Pinterest so much positive attention.

But she got other kinds of internal points. back to, let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to 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.

There's that worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard birds, right? That's the name.

The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Huber me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again.

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That's 844-8-4-Ehart. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise,

breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves. Their locker room stories, their reaction, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games,

from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context, and ask the questions everybody wants answered. Sports Slice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to Sports Slice on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Sliced Life 12

in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Kingston grew up in an isolated polygamous sect. We were God's chosen kingdom on earth. He felt destined for greatness. So when a swaggering Armenian businessman catapults Jacob into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back. Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, meeting the president of Turkey. I'm Michelle McPhee, and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracies I've ever come across.

When Jacob met Levin this went to a billion dollar fraud. But with two kings from entirely different worlds, just how long can their empire survive? The largest tax investigation in American history. You need to tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me? Jacob told Levan, you're ruining my life. Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back.

In an earlier episode of There Are No Girls on the Internet, we explored how the racial justice group Color of Change advocated for Pinterest to change their policies around slave plantations that were being advertised as romantic wedding venues on the platform. The company was widely celebrated for this change, which was led by Ephoma. But that didn't keep them from retaliating against her for it. Later on that same year, color of change had come to me because I was the liaison with outside groups, academics and civil society on content safety issues. They had come to me sharing that they were still seeing slave plantations pop up as

wedding venues and suggestions for weddings. If you know Pinterest or you know someone who uses it, the number one use of the platform might be planning a wedding or preparing for some sort of celebration. And I agreed with them. It's completely inappropriate that the platform would be pushing concentration camps, which is what they were and torture sites as a celebration venue. And so I brought it to our content safety team with my recommendation, shared exactly what color of change had shared with me.

And then I got pushback from the head of that team, particularly, the head of content policy who happens to still be there and still speaking on behalf of the company. What I later found out was that she was married on a person, plantation. She never shared that in all of the pushback that I got, but she ended up working with my manager who had already been retaliating against me to ding me on my performance review. So even though Pinterest ended up doing exactly what I recommended, ended up getting praised in 40 plus headlines because of the decision to stop promoting slave plantations and the decisions that I

had pushed to be made, I was dinged on my performance review, which affected my pay. Wow. First of all, the reveal that this woman had her own, I mean, yikes. The levels. I mean, we did an episode about, we spoke to Jade from Color of Change in an earlier episode about Pinterest and the decision to not promote plantation weddings. And just like what you said, right, these companies. companies get to enjoy the positive press that makes them look like a woke company or a company that really cares.

Like I heard so many times people say, oh, Pinterest is a company that has a, you know, like they are a company that prizes like empathy, yada, yada, yada. And then to hear the inner workings of how this happened is so, it's such a disconnect, I feel. It really is, you know, it really illustrates how so many different levels can come together to suppress. and push out and harm a black woman for doing her job, right? Like, this was your job. It's not like you were overstepping bounds. This is what you were hired to do. And I also think this, you know,

and this is the conversation I feel comes up again and again and again, where black women are punished for, like, doing the right thing, for practicing public courage, public morality, for doing their jobs trying to make things safer or better. someone else gets to enjoy the benefits of that work, but that work is at best, you know, unappreciated, underappreciated, at worst, dangerous and risky for your own personal safety, right?

Like you did this work of making Pinterest a safer, better platform at great personal cost and at great risk to your own safety. Yep. And all of those things happened. Not only was I paid unfairly and I had to, pursue legal action because of that, I was then also my life was starting. So yeah, I got all of it while I was there. And people often like to call black women, canaries in the coal mine or whatever term they want to use. But I would like to just do my job, get paid fairly and not be put in

danger for doing the right thing for a company. I mean, something like half. more than half of the articles that were written about Pinterest in the month before the public offering, which happened in April of 2019, referenced my work. So not only did my work have value to the actual users of the platform end up pushing Facebook and others to have to respond about why they weren't addressing health misinformation, particularly around vaccines. And remember, that was during a different health issue, a measles outbreak. Measles outbreaks on the east and west coast. So not only did it have that sort of impact, which is a slam dunk if you're in a policy

space, but it also had material benefit to the company in the form of the IPO. And I still was not treated fairly. Yeah. And the company still hasn't actually acknowledged that anything they did in my case was wrong. You seem like someone who has a lot of peace for how horribly you were treated. I've had a lot of rage as well. You know, I really do believe in karma. And I believe it's not just you. It'll be the next seven generations that are hit with whatever evil you put out into the world. And so I take the long view. I'm like Aria from Game of Thrones. I have a list.

I'm making my way through the list. But you'll get yours eventually. That's my long view. And then also I'm a student of history and political science. None of this is new. What I'm dealing with is not new. It's not unique to my situation. Does it suck?

Yes. Has it been miserable? Yes. I've paid physical consequences for it because my actual health was impaired for the two plus years. I was in a legal fight with them. But, like, I'm good at the end of the day. I'm at peace with every single decision I've made.

I've never lied about what I experienced there. And so when they're out here lying about what they did to me and getting called out on lies, that is enough for me. Ifoma publicly resigned from Pinterest. This past summer when racial justice protests were happening all over the globe and brands were rushing to put out statements in support for Black Lives Matter, she tweeted, I'm an alum of Yale, Google, Facebook, Washington Post Tech, etc.,

and recently decided to leave Pinterest, which just declared solidarity with Black Lives Matter. What a joke. As a black woman, seeing Pinterest's middle of the night Black Employees Matter statement made me scratch my head after I just fought for a full year to be paid and leveled fairly. A year in which I was doxed by a white male colleague, he shared my cell phone number, my photo, and my name

with a violently racist misogynistic part of the internet, followed by a dangerously inadequate response from Pinterest. I continued to serve as the leader and spokesperson for Pinterest's biggest public policy wins, kept all of the above quiet for, quote, professionalism, in the hope that Pinterest would do the right thing. Instead, they doubled down on retaliation. After Ephema left, Pinterest's former C.O., Francois Brouwer, who was white, accused Pinterest of gender discrimination.

In December, Pinterest paid Brower $22.5 million to settle her lawsuit. She says she was encouraged to speak out against the discrimination she faced at Pinterest after Ephema and Erica Shemizu Banks, another black former Pinterest employee, spoke out first. Only, they never got any big payout. If I remember correctly, you didn't even get a year of severance from Pinterest. That's correct. And laid the groundwork. She was not going to speak up publicly. And actually, in the medium post where she didn't reference us when she first went public,

but she herself said that women had come to her over the course of her career and she actually had not been a helpful ally to other women. So I think she said everything. But yeah, no, what was crazy about that situation is people got to see in real time what it means to lead a movement and then be left out of whatever progress comes. I mean, when you think about Me Too, who has Me Too actually benefited, if not white women? Maybe, maybe in a sense, all women, but it is most benefited white women, and yet it was started by Toronto Burke, a black woman. So this is not, it's not new. It's not, I didn't speak up because I expected them to do the right thing. I, from the jump,

expected them not. I expected them to denigrate my name, my experience, which they've done all of that, and then not to pay me what they owe me, but seeing it all happen in front of everyone, I think was a lesson not only for the folks who were watching it and just expecting that the right thing would happen, but then also some of the reporters who worked on the story and were the very first ones to reach out and be like, how is it possible that you, like, I literally remember talking to you and then talking to her several months later, you are the reason why she came forward. You are the reason why she had a strong case. And then this happens. Yeah. For better or for worse, it always seems that black women, we are the ones building, like, we are the ones building and then other

people are the ones who are benefiting. And I think I see that in politics. I see that in, tech. I see that in so many different. It just seems to be, you know, I, at this point, it almost, you know, it is what it is, but like, that seems to be our lot on this, on this earth, like, building things that we then don't get to, to use ourselves, right? Like, I think it was, this writer, Clarissa Brooks, who once wrote, like, I, as a black woman, I don't want my back to be used as a bridge to a world I'll never see, right? It's like, I feel like, I feel like that is our, lot and I see it particularly in tech, but in so many different avenues. Yep. And that's why even though this was painful, personally painful, of course,

to have been the one who experienced all of this and then have someone else benefit from it, it was instructive for everyone to see it and to see the timeline and how quickly and the different way in which they responded to her. And then also I think it was a helpful lesson for people who considered themselves allies to see as well, because there were a lot of people who think of themselves as allies who saw it and were like, wait, what? How is it possible that this is happening? This happens all of the time. You just don't usually see the dollar amount that's attached to the progress that certain people get and others do not. More after a quick break.

Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite on humor. me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk, to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. The worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah.

Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, uh, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open.

Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcast. 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. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's IHeartadvertising.com. Last night, a blown call changed a game.

This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear.

The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context, and ask the questions everybody wants answered. SportsSlice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to SportsSlice on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slices Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Jacob Kingston grew up in an isolated polygamous sect. We were God's chosen kingdom on earth.

He felt destined for greatness. So when a swaggering Armenian businessman catapults Jacob into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back. Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, meeting the president of Turkey. I'm Michelle McPhee, and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracies I've ever come across. When Jacob met Levant this plant to a billion dollar fraud. But with two kings from entirely different worlds, Just how long can their empire survive? The largest tax investigation in American history.

You need to tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me? Jacob told Levan, you're ruining my life. Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. I do have this feeling that there is this underlying assumption that black women, like tech and the internet on all of these domains,

it's like not our rightful domain. So we are not able to expect experiences that are not harmful in these spaces. And I think for me, it's kind of this vicious cycle where that dynamic is mirrored at tech companies. And so black women engineers, black women technologists are pushed out of these companies are not being listened to. And thus these platforms are not able to prioritize our safety. So it's like, I feel like we, in my mind, we'll never address the true harm that platforms have been responsible for if these tech companies cannot figure out a way to really have black women be meaningfully centered and heard. Because it just seems like this like horrible cycle.

I'm not sure if this makes any sense, but. No, it makes complete sense. And it's not a lack of figuring it out. it's a lack of desire. I said to, I think it was Charlie Worsall wrote a column a few months ago about Facebook and it may be being a lost cause. And I said, platforms reflect the people who lead them, that you're only seeing on Facebook, on Twitter, on Pinterest, wherever what the people who lead those platforms want you to see.

And so if they're operating in a white supremacist structure and worldview, and that is where their actual interests align, that's what we're going to see on the platform. So none of this is by accident. None of this is all of a sudden out of control. This is exactly what they designed working in the ways that they want it to work. Yeah, it always seems to come back to that question of, is this an issue of they can't fix this or an issue of they won't fix this. It seems like tech leaders have made some deliberate choices

about what to prioritize. And the example, it makes usually the audiences that I give this or share this analogy with are health focus, public health professionals, experts, etc. And I say, if you want to understand how non-accidental any of this is, think about pornography. How often do you randomly encounter porn on Facebook or Twitter

or YouTube or wherever else. Not that often. Not often. It's unusual. Not often. And yet you see misinformation every other post. You see hate every other post. There's a financial reason for that.

Advertisers have said they don't want pornography next to their content. And so what have platforms done? poured every single resource into making sure that's the case. They've made a choice here and the choice is not on the side of safety. I would argue that if it's legal, consenting, adult pornography, that is way less harmful to randomly encounter on a platform than health misinformation or Nazi content. You have to ask them questions about priorities. You really do. Yep. And the priorities are clear in all of our experiences on these platforms.

I think a lot of black women on the internet have just come to internalize this idea that when it comes to experiences online or on technology or on the internet, we just cannot, expect to have experiences that feel safe. And I want to get us to a place where we can rethink the kinds of experiences that we actually can't expect from the internet and from tech spaces. I agree. And that's the basis of all the work that I have done, the work that I'm doing now through my consulting firm on tech accountability, whether it's in the health misinformation space or whether it's on the organizing side and providing protections for whistleblowers. And I think it's a conversation that it's unfortunate that we have to bear the burden of since we're the people who are harmed by it.

But even just a few days ago, I was part of a conversation on Clubhouse around content moderation and around the decisions that platforms made to de-platform Donald Trump. And before we went into that conversation, I sent a note to everyone on the panel saying, clubhouse is a place that I am not frequenting by choice because black women are often targeted and people use very loud dog whistles, basically just short of using the N-word and using straight-up misogynistic language. But there's a ton of that going on. And I put the onus on everyone on the panel to if that happened in the course of our conversation from anyone from the audience to not. not make it be my responsibility to be the only one to say something. And every single one was great and said, absolutely, of course, but that should be the way that we're setting up conversations. It shouldn't be the responsibility of the person who is most likely to be harmed to say,

like, hey, I hate to be the one to bring the mood down, but this could happen. So can we please watch out for it? God, I have been that person a thousand times. And, And it's kind of like what you were saying. It just sucks. Like you want to, you want to do your job and be paid what you're owed for doing that work. I feel that black women are just not often afforded the ability to just do your work and keep your head down. It's like you have to take on all this often unpaid, might I add, extra labor, extra energy, extra everything just to exist and do your job and put your message out there. Really, it is exhausting. I know exactly that, that feeling of like, oh, God, I'm going to have to be the person that raises this again.

And like, everyone's going to groan. I just know that feeling and it sucks. Yeah, it does. What do you think platforms or policy folks or anybody who has power, decision makers, what should folks be doing to keep dis and misinformation off of platforms? I think it's great that the incoming administration is passing the bar that was on the ground from the Trump administration for diversity and so at least they've cleared that low bar and standard but I am not seeing enough black women in positions of leadership

when it comes to misinformation and tech policy specifically. I was encouraged by the science. I think it's some sort of science focus. department within the administration that was announced recently that Alondra Nelson will be on. That's incredible. But on the tech side, it cannot just be pulling the expertise of people like Eric Schmidt and other white tech executives to then reform the same industry that they've made billions off of. Like, that's just not how it works. That's not how it should work.

And I think it's important to pull academics, but you also. need practitioners who have experienced things on the inside of these platforms to be informing the decisions and any regulation or reform that comes as a result. So much of the infrastructure of what we rely on to make the internet safer and better. So people who are fighting disinformation and misinformation have been for a long time. So much of that infrastructure is black women. What does it like to know that we have such a big role in doing a lot of the work that is making the internet safer and better for everybody? I mean, it's tough because on the one hand, when we, when progress is made that we push for

everyone benefits, and often we benefit the least. And so it is, it's just a role. that many black women have taken on to protect themselves and our communities. On the other hand, I don't blame any black women who are like, you know what, this is not my fight. This is not my battle. I'm tired. I'm just trying to live during a pandemic. I'm trying to feed my kids.

I'm trying to feed myself. I'm trying to take a damn nap. Like, I ascribe wholeheartedly to the nap ministry and the work that the nap ministry has been doing because I think sometimes we have to say, you know what, I told you so. Now I'm going to rest. That's it. I'm done. I'm done.

I'm bound out. And so I allow the space for that at any point while also hoping that when black women say, you know what, this is work that I want to do, that we're uplifted and we're empowered. The flip side of that is making sure that allies or supposed allies are not then saying, oh my gosh, you're so good at this, you need to be the one leading it. No, no. After the fifth and the results in Georgia, when everyone is posting about, and not black women, because black women were not doing this, but when everyone else was posting about what Stacey Abrams needs to be doing, no. If she wants to go to a spa for the next month, for the next decade, that is her decision and that's what she should be empowered to do. And those same people trying to demand labor of her should donate so that she can have her spa time for as long as she wants. Like, that is the kind of allyship that I want to see,

not just finding new work for us to do when we're the only ones paying the price for the work. For EFOMA, the work continues. Just last week, she introduced the Silent No More Act. New legislation she released with California State Senator Connie Leva

that would prevent the use of non-disclosure agreements or NDAs in workplace situations involving discrimination and harassment of any kind. When Eifoma spoke out about what she experienced at Pinterest, she was breaking an NDA. And because the current legislation only protects employees from speaking out against gender discrimination, not race-based discrimination, Pinterest could have sued her for speaking up.

Ifoma is working to change the future. To build one where marginalized people don't have to pay such a huge personal cost for trying to build a better world. If you enjoyed this podcast, please help us grow by subscribing. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say how to. we'd love to hear from you at hello at tangoity.com. Disinformed is brought to you by There Are No Girls on the Internet. It's a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative.

Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our supervising producer and engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. For more great podcasts, 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 Smygel and Friends.

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