There Are No Girls on the Internet - Rest in Power Shafiqah Hudson, creator of #YourSlipIsShowing

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

Shafiqah Hudson made the internet better for all of us. In honor of her brilliant life cut tragically short, we’re replaying our conversation from 2020. After Shafiqah Hudson uncovered bad actors pretending to be Black women on Twitter, spreading disinformation and discord, she sounded the alarm to Twitter officials. Unfortunately, they ignored her. So she created the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing to help stamp them out herself.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. There are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and UnBossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd. And this is there are no girls on the internet. I have some sad news to share. Shafika Hudson, whose work basically created the field of study on how to mobilize against bad actors on social media. When she created the hashtag,

Your Slip is Showing in 2014, tragically passed away last week. Now, we talk a lot about how the work of making internet spaces safer for everyone often falls on black women like Shafika, and it's often tough, thankless, ignored, and sometimes even dangerous. Even though Shafika's work changed the way we think about the internet, she did it all unpaid.

She died crowdfunding for health care costs. Shafika wanted people to know the realities of long COVID. Last year, she tweeted, When long COVID effects kill me, sooner than later, I need y'all to recognize and say loudly what it was, adding, this won't be considered a massive crime against humanity until we're all gone. Just tell them I thought and tried.

This very podcast and this work would never exist, if not for Shafika, a funny, fierce cat lady who made the internet just a better place to show up on, who built an entire school of thought out of necessity that made the internet safer and better for all of us. She was one of the very first interviews I ever did for there are no girls on the internet back in 2020 when we first launched. And in honor of her brilliant, beautiful life cut short, let's hear from her again. Shafika, I am so sorry. Okay, so I could tell you this story a hundred times and a hundred different ways. People just don't listen to women, especially black women. And it comes with big consequences. Six years ago, black feminists were experiencing a coordinated pattern of disinformation on Twitter.

They spoke up, but no one listened. That failure to listen to black women had a big impact. It allowed for the weaponization of online harassment tactics against other marginalized people on social media. and presents continued threats to our democracy and safety. Okay, so let's just get this out of the way right now. Twitter is a fucking cess fool. If you spend any time there, you probably already know this. Bad faith commentary, reply guys, trolls, harassment.

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

So why did anyone listen? And what might have happened if they had? Shafika Hudson? Relanter? Cat lady? Sometimes activist. Shafika had been using Twitter regularly since almost this very beginning, where she spent most of her time online connecting with other black feminists.

In 2014, while job searching, she noticed a hashtag that just did not make sense. End Father's Day. The people pushing the End Father's Day hashtag on Twitter, appeared to be black feminists. They talked about how he should abolish Father's Day because too many black men date outside of their race or because black men don't support their children. Stuff that just seemed really out there.

I must have had like 10 different tabs open because I was also like doing a job search and just going about my life. And it one tweet caught my attention because it was so completely off the wall. And I don't know who retweeted it or like, how it even arrived in my timeline. But it wasn't anything that any black feminist anywhere would say it was like,

what was it? Oh gosh. Yeah. In Father's Day, I wish these white women would stop stealing our men. Something just completely off the wall. They had nothing to do with anything. And the avatar was someone who I didn't recognize. Now, the thing about the black feminist community on Twitter, the thing about a lot of communities on Twitter is that you might not necessarily get along with everybody, but you know who everyone is.

And if you haven't met them or seen them out or, you know, done a tweet up, hung out at a party, something, someone you know has. And in this particular instance, I clicked on the person, well, the accounts profile. And I said, okay, who is this? I've never seen this person. And it looks like they just joined like two days ago. And they're just tweeting about this with this hashtag and they have, you know, the photo of a black woman. But it just, nothing adds up. So that drove me to click on the hashtag in Father's Day.

And lo and behold, when I did a Twitter search, there's a bunch of accounts that are saying things that are completely left. like not left like you know politically just kind of left like left like where are you coming from left and i didn't recognize any of them so i at that point i just kind of asked a general question from my timeline to say okay you guys what's going on i keep seeing this hashtag and these accounts that i don't recognize with people who look like they just joined like five seconds ago And someone said, yeah, it looks like this is like some kind of fortune thing. That's when I really started digging. I said, okay, well, this is really awful because they're pretending to be black women who are saying these awful things.

And I'm smart enough to know that nothing here that they're saying is even remotely what a real black feminist. would say. I honestly think the people who they fooled immediately were already probably biased against feminist or black women or some combination of the two. I didn't get the impression that they were fooling. Most of the people I followed is what I mean. But they were getting some reaction. That's when Chepico went from curious to pissed. I got so mad. Like, I remember just being so angry. I could feel my cheeks and my ears heat up. Honestly, like,

you know, in the cartoons where the character, like, starts steaming from their friends. Smelt coming to your ears as to, you hear the tea kettle whistle. I was curious. I was like,

you know, it's not like we don't get enough garbage online, just being black women. You know, with people just randomly showing up and our mentions to argue with something that we said, not because they necessarily disagree, but because that's what people do when you're a black woman online, apparently.

Because we don't deal with enough. Out here in real life and online, we don't deal with enough. We've got this whole silly operation thing happening. So I said, well, let me just go ahead and take a look and see what's really going on and see how bad this is. And as I began to dig, I saw just how bad it was. And I realized that I would not be able to point out all of these accounts alone. You know how in movies, when a character discovers this thing they've been investigating is much, much bigger than they realized?

There is no Pepe Sylvia, and this thing goes all the way to the top? Well, that's how Shafika felt. She knew the Twitter accounts pushing End Father's Day weren't actually black women. They were just impersonating black women, and pretty badly at that. But there were too many of them for the same. to be a one-off thing. It had to be coordinated. And there were also too many for her to tackle alone. She wanted to give other black feminists a tool to sniff out these imposters. So she thought back with a hashtag of her own, Your Slip is Showing. I went ahead with Your Slip is Showing. I might

run another line like, I don't know, your mascara is running, something like that. But your slip is showing just seemed to work. It really just seemed to work. Okay, so if you're not a lady from the South, the phrase your slip is showing might not mean anything to you. Literally, it means when your slip is peeking out from underneath your skirt or dress, a big fashion no-no. But where I come from, that one phrase really highlights a subversiveness of what I'll call auntie speak. Think of it a bit like the phrase, bless your heart. A lady at church might tell you that your slip is peeking out from the bottom of your skirt because they care about you looking your best. Or they could tell you your slip is showing because they don't like you, and they're

pointing out publicly that you aren't looking as good and put together as you think you are. you know, just the sort of thing that one of your aunties might say to you in church when it's, oh, honey, you need to fix your slip. It's showing, except mean because Right. There's a difference between that your slip is showing from one of your aunties and your sleep is showing from somebody who doesn't like you. And that was what I was going with.

of like, yeah, your slip is showing. I'm telling you because I was raised right, not because I particularly care about you being embarrassed. I love that so much. I love how you kind of use this southern, auntie expression that we all sort of know what it means. What's also funny is that I would imagine

the people who are impersonating black women probably, that nuance probably goes right over their head. Yes, yes. That was also one of the things that I also delighted in because, of course, they wouldn't get it. Because you'd have to, I mean, you have to be somewhat embedded within certain communities to pick up on the nuance. And they really weren't. It's fitting that we're talking about getting the nuance. That's certain something you can't really teach.

This would ultimately be the undoing of people impersonating black women online. Their inability to authentically sound like black women. They try to use AAVE or African-American vernacular English, but get the expressions all wrong in ways that might as well be screaming, I am a white person pretending to be a black woman. This is where I should probably say that around the same time in 2014, I noticed someone on Twitter using my photo and tweeting confusing things about black people. I never knew who was behind it or why it was happening.

But if I had to say, I would say it wasn't an actual black woman because the things they were saying were just so out there. Things like, I'm going to be voting for Trump because, Hillary Clinton is whack, y'all. Things that just didn't sound right. Because they're not speakers of AAB. They're approximating. The thing that, like, really, really, really, really seem to, like,

immediately point them out was this consistent inability to understand and properly use the habitual B. They didn't get it. They did not, like, they would use the habitual V, just kind of, like, for the future tense. You know what I mean? Like, it was terrible. And a lot of the time it was just like really obviously racist word salad. Obviously racist word salad.

I love it. My new band name. Ultimately, it seemed like the point of End Father's Day was to see what kind of discord bad actors organizing on message boards like Foshan could sew within feminist online communities, and to make actual feminists in our issues look like petty, stupid man-haters whose issues were so outlandish they could never be taken seriously. It turns out this is actually a pretty common disinformation tactic. Highjacking public conversations about sensitive topics or wedge issues through media manipulation is a way of making people afraid of having an opinion in public and ultimately trying to silence them. I'm Joan Donovan and I'm the research director at the

Shorenstein's center on media politics and public policy. Dr. Donovan says the same way that brands and politicians realize the power of social media, the kind of people who want to harass others did do. It can have a big impact, especially as we're using social media to talk about thorny issues like race, gender, and sexuality, issues that require nuance to discuss thoughtfully. It makes it tough for anyone to have a good faith dialogue online. Over time, just like the politicians learn to use social media. we had white supremacists figure out that you don't actually need to show up in public to have an

impact on people's lives. And so we saw networked and coordinated harassment campaigns. It just continue, even to this day, continue to be useful ways to shut down journalists, to impersonate different groups and to really cause a fracture in public conversation about really important issues that require some level of nuance, some level of understanding, and a lot of compassion to talk about, you know, especially racism in this moment. And people are reticent to talk about it because they're afraid of saying something wrong, especially in the environments online where if you do make a misstep, you could get dragged, you could get canceled, but also some of that might be artificial.

It might be the case that people do sympathize with you. People do want to help you grow and learn. But certain media manipulators see that as an opportunity to swarm in and really drive the wedge as deep as it can go. A few right-wing news outlets picked up the hashtag end Father's Day and amplified it as a legitimate feminist take. This is how Fox News covered it. Like some of these tweets here is from Tasha, she wrote in.

Everyone knows we only need mothers. Why do we even need Father's Day? Fathers are useless. Hashtag and Father's Day. Oh, come on. Just more of this nasty feminist rhetoric that they're not just like interested in ending Father's Day, they're interesting ending men. That's really what they want.

But Shafika says, only the kind of people who are already predisposed to be skeptical of women and feminists, and especially black women fell for it. Well, it was actually, at first I remember, I was incredulous. Like, honestly, I was looking at people like, oh, and Father's Day, feminists take a terrible turn and radical it. And I was like, you've got to be kidding. But then I realized that, no, they were completely serious. And then it dawned on me that these were people who could not possibly understand feminism,

possibly women in general, black people, or too much of anything outside of their little Fox News bubble. Like, that was the impression that I got. Like, basically, if you fell for this, it's because you already had a certain set of bigotries in place to fall for it.

What was happening with black women online is much less widely known than Gamergate where angry men coordinated to harassed progressive voices online, who were mostly women in the months following and Father's Day. Shafika thinks it was ignored because the women who were targeted were black. Not only was she helping to create a tool to stamp out this kind of disinformation online, she also wanted to document that it was happening, so it wouldn't go forgotten or erased just because it was happening to black women.

As you're probably aware, a lot of us are big on what we call receipts. So there are plenty of receipts. We've got the screen caps. You can't even, you know, delete the tweets. We got it. We got the information. But, yeah, I mean, that's been a big part of it for me. And it's frustrating for a lot of us to see essentially a history erased.

It's particularly distressing for me because, you know, I wouldn't consider myself a scholar at this particular point. And my friend So True, who also was absolutely integral with formulating your slippy showing and how it kind of played out and became a useful tool. But back when I was a scholar, I understood that one of the things that people do when they're trying to erase the impact of a movement is they kind of start deleting history. It's a huge feature of erasure. When people talk about your slip is showing, if they talk about it, or if they mention it at all, it's weird.

It kind of gets vaguely mentioned in relation to Gamergate as this weird thing that sort of happened before GamerGate that wasn't really relevant and didn't provide anybody any tools. or, you know, it was, you know, just kind of a blip as opposed to what it was, which was a scary peek into the future. And again, like I said, hindsight being 2020, when you start to look back on all of these 4chan, I'm sorry, I can't say 4chan without making that noise.

You have a special forehand noise I do I do Oh my gosh Someone else pointed out to me It's like do you realize That you just kind of like this disgusted noise What I mean you say? I'm like ugh

I just sorry it's automatic I'm working on it When you try to kind of understand How everything happened You have to take All of it into account. I really think that in Father's Day and, you know, consequently, your slip is showing were a huge part of it. And it's, it can be frustrating to see it left out of the history because it's like,

okay, you're missing a really relevant chunk of understanding how all of this mess happened. Even at a time where we're having a conversation around women's experiences online, why do you think your slip is showing and end Father's Day and the way that women and folks of color have been harassed online pretty much goes overlooked. Why do you think that is? Not necessarily. Yeah. And again, it's frustrating. And my theory remains, it's because the targeted group at the time for the in Father's Day of 14 operation were black women. It's honestly, that's my, that's, I have no other answer at this point. It's been six years. I've watched this just kind of repeatedly happen.

And the only answer, unfortunately, that I have is that, okay, well, this is being largely ignored and raped because of who the targets were. And the targets were of black women, particularly black feminists. We'll be right back after this quick break. Another podcast from some SNL, late night comedy guy, 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, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. To the group. side to the group.

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 IHeart 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 podcasting, think again. More Americans. listen to podcasts, then ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com.

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. 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 Slic Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. People who are traditionally marginalized online like black women are specifically impacted by things like disinformation and harassment on social media. The ultimate goal is to freak them out so much that they'll shut down their social media

and just stop talking. Here's Dr. Donovan again. Yeah, so we have to remember that a lot of the ways in which disinformation is carried through networks are also related to the ways in which people are harassed online. You know, so if you're, there's a concept called gender trolling. It's evolved into trans trolling, race trolling, queer trolling. queer trolling where the characteristics of your identity become the thing that they focus on and there'll be a swarm of folks that have coordinated in some other place,

usually on a message board, and they will target specific public figures or women or trans folks or prominent black activists in order to get them to shut off their social media. And they will use all kinds of horrendous images and threats to try to get you to feel fear and to shut it down. And we don't see that same kind of level of threat making when it comes to trolling male candidates. And that has to do with the characteristics of the harassers themselves, which often see the harassment as a form of activism and as a form of defending themselves

or defending their peace of the culture. And so a lot of these people tend to be misogynist as well as racist and in their smaller online communities where they don't think they're watched, they'll talk openly about that, and they'll talk openly about who they should target and why and what the problem is. And I think at this stage,

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

to the misuse of the platform. You'd think he'd be more concerned, but Shafika says that wasn't the case. She and the other black women targeted were pretty much left on their own to figure it out. So did the powers that be at Twitter or any other social media company or any other official do anything to fix this?

No. the short answer there is no. Now, the longer explanation is that we repeatedly brought this whole thing to the attention of Twitter support to Jack directly. It's not like nobody knew what was happening. It had made the news. So it's not as though he was ignorant. The general impression that I got from Twitter support was that, oh, well, you know, this is, we're so sorry, our hands are tied and blah, blah, blah.

And I started looking into the tech side of everything. And I realized that that wasn't the truth. They absolutely have and had tools on hand to stop this. And they just didn't. They just let it happen. They just let us clean up the mess and defend our communities, ourselves. As much as being left to fend for her own community online sucked, it did teach Shafika that her online community could do a lot with a little.

And while that wasn't cool at all, and hopefully at some point in, you know, at some point down the line, they will be sufficiently shamed for it because it was just really awful. We learned what we could do on the ground with just the very basic tool of like community organization and a hashtag, we were able to do a whole lot to just stop something that could have gotten way out of hand. We outed it early and we ended it early. And if something had been done to make sure that these fake accounts that we were reporting had been taken out of commission, there would have been a lot less for GamerGate.

to work with. They wouldn't have had to, they wouldn't have had the opportunity to just go ahead and access those same tools that they'd already created. So in a kind of way, it sounds like your work with your slip is showing and your work organizing community responses online was kind of this canary in a coal mine. And you all did all that you could to prevent this, to stamp this out. but if only the powers that be at Twitter or elsewhere had done anything, then it might not be the sort of wide-scale situation that it is now. That is exactly correct. And I know that sounds damning, but that's accurate.

They could have stopped it. They could still stop it. But the reason why, unfortunately, and this was absolutely pointed out by people at the time and people later taking a look at the whole suit. situation from like, you know, the whole post-mortem of the whole incident. The reason why they didn't is because of the profit model at the time was based on number of accounts and interaction.

So, you know, then when you're selling your product basically to, we're the product. to advertisers and whatever have you, the more users it looks like you have, the better. So it really wasn't in Twitter's best interest to say, okay, well, we have 20 accounts with one IP address that's suspicious. And we should look into it. And that's why they didn't.

They didn't. Took them a full two and a half years, I think, to even really address it in a serious way And I think that was only after the whole congressional meeting. Like, I'm pretty sure that was after everybody who was like the head of social media got called in front of Congress. Mm-hmm. Like, that's what it took. So that pretty much brings us to today.

Today, Twitter leads all other social media platforms and the spread of misleading information about coronavirus. According to a study by Oxford researchers called types, sources and claims of COVID-19 misinformation. And a study out of Carnegie Mellon found that most of the accounts pushing this misleading content are actually convincing-looking bots, using Twitter to prey on people, soda vision, and increased polarization. This isn't just an online thing either. Kathleen Carly, the director for the Center for Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity, says, increased polarization will have a variety of real-world consequences and play out in things like voting behavior and hostility toward ethnic groups. And this summer,

As Black Lives Matter protests popped up all over the globe, Twitter confirmed that multiple accounts posing as Black Lives Matter activists were calling for violence in white suburbs. But those accounts were actually run by white supremacist groups just posing as activists and, quote, Antifa to cause chaos. Facebook under fire again, a Senate Intelligence Committee report claiming Russian agents. Use social media sites like Facebook to target African Americans in an effort to suppress voter turnout.

We already know that Russia used social media. to interfere with the 2016 election. And in case you needed a Senate report to confirm with black women have been saying all along, a Senate inquiry cited an Oxford University report on Russian interference on social media. They found that campaigns targeted no single group more than African Americans on social media. They posed as black people and ran phony black activist groups to influence black voters to either stay home or vote for Trump on Election Day. The Senate Intelligence Report says the posts were aimed at making Americans suspicious of each other.

Sound familiar? These are the very same kind of tactics that black women like Shafika were complaining about years earlier. Accounts posing as black people and infiltrating our online communities to create chaos and distrust. But because the people with power didn't really do anything or take it seriously, it kind of exposed this massive vulnerability. Think of it as an online disinformation test balloon. It showed that these kinds of attacks could happen and they'd pretty much go on addressed. Instead of identifying and learning the spot tactics used to make our social media communities less safe and less stable, the powers that be just let it happen again and again and again.

I asked Shafika if she thinks that if someone had listened to black women, when they spoke up about being targeted online, things might be different now. It's a tough question for her. This is always going to be a question that kind of hangs in my mind because while I understand that black voters were absolutely targeted, I'm not entirely sure that we were fooled. Do you know what I mean? Right. Like, honestly, because it seems like to me we kind of all got out and voted anyway.

And it also seems like to me Donald Trump may have lost the popular vote by three million votes, but that's neither here nor there, I guess. Not if you ask him, he didn't. But we don't ask him things because we like honest answers. But, yeah, I mean, just the fact. that this happened, like it left us arguably vulnerable. And that even though I'm not sure how ultimately successful it was, just the fact that we had foreign agents targeting voting populations in the United States of America should

have been serious and due cause for alarm. Even if it doesn't work, it's like just, it's just the fact that they tried and that they could. What do you do it? Like, can we get it together? It's because we left a door open. Like this was, that was a failure. That was, I don't want to say it was on me because I feel like it definitely wasn't on me and it definitely wasn't on you. But it was a failure on the side of whatever.

Agents are supposed to be protecting us. And I guess that offers, that opens up a lot for speculations. Like, well, you know, who's looking after us now? But yeah, that was a glaring example of just kind of the general failure to address something that did not have to get as big as it got. More, there are no girls on the internet after this 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 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. There's 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 you're basically. Parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard herds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt Yardt.

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 Smygel 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.

and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting.

Call 844-E-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. 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. 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. SportsClyce brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to SportsClyce on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

And for more, follow Timbo Slic Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. The 2020 presidential election is 112 days away. Digital security experts agree that American elections and vulnerable and not enough as being done about it. During Trump's impeachment hearing, Fiona Hill, the former National Security Council advisor specializing in Russian and European affairs said, Right now, Russia's security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are running out of time to stop them. So what do we do? Dr. Donovan says, as we get closer to the election, we know that all different kinds of tactics are going to get utilized,

including potentially deep fakes or cheap fakes like manipulated video, manipulated audio. We're going to see probably clips of people quoted out of context. We've seen this happen to Joe Biden a few different times. Then, of course, we've seen gas that he's done that are completely within context and a problem. You know, you can't forget that every once in a while you're watching it and you're like, this is, this can't be real and it's totally real. Well, what's crazy to me about it is as a researcher, you're supposed to be attuned to all of this, but I still get fooled here and there.

But the last thing I'll say about the way in which I think platform companies need to better serve our political elections and the integrity of elections is that they need to hire some serious specialists. They need to hire a whole army of librarians to do content curations so that when people are looking for information, they find things that have been fact-checked that are true and correct. I think that we have a right to truth. And part of the problem is the way in which these algorithms are designed is to bring up things that are quote-unquote fresh and relevant. And the problem with fresh and relevant content is that disinformation is usually incredibly popular because there are people trying to push it and there are people trying to dispute it.

And so as a result, it rises generally to the top of search algorithms or trending algorithms very quickly because of that feature. But will Twitter actually do any of that? Shafika isn't super confident that the platform will do anything at all. I haven't even thought about it. And I guess that's sort of a reflection on my general skepticism right now with not their ability, but their willingness to address this. I have a good friend who said one of the smartest things I've ever heard anybody say. And I quote it all the time.

But he said, when things look like they're not working out, you can always trust that they're working out. You can always trust that they're working out for somebody. And that's not going to leave that right there. But it looks like, you know, things aren't working. You start asking questions, and it's a whole rabbit hole. That's the thing about the Internet. There's so much darkness lurking in its corner. It's just waiting to spill out.

But where there's darkness, there's light, too. where there's someone being ugly online, there's someone else reaching out to make a genuine connection. There's real community to be built and laughs to be had, the kind of laughs that can sustain you through difficult times. Being online is a constant tightrope walk of acknowledging that darkness while still being able to see the corners of light peeking through.

And even while waiting through all of that darkness and ugliness, it's the light that has really sustained Shafika. After everything she's been through, she's still grateful for Twitter as a platform and all the good things it's brought to her life. Honestly, it really helps that I have a strong and supportive community, both online and off. I really am super grateful for Twitter for so many reasons, not the least of which is because it's helped me expand my network. and I've met amazing people and connected with people who are like me, people who aren't like me, and gotten to know so much about them and learn about their lived experiences.

And that has saved me because it helps me kind of get out of my own headspace or likewise, you know, connect with people who understand 100% where I'm coming from. and that's in a world where you know we're frequently gaslit about the things

that we see and experience that is absolutely invaluable oh and one more thing that helps it also helps that I'm funny

honestly having a sense of humor and a wit we'll get you through pretty much I don't want to say pretty much anything but how about this? It's got me through pretty much everything

and you've been through some stuff I've been through it there are no girls on the internet was created by me Bridget Hadd. 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 Bridgett For more podcasts from IHeart,

check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much for listening to There Are No Girls on the Internet. If you want to help our podcast grow, rate and review us on Apple 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. Hey, it's Edwin Castro, also known as Castro 1021. And I'm Conky, his best friend and business manager. And we've got a new show called The 1021 Podcast. I'm taking you behind the scenes on how I became one of Twitch's most popular streamers. We also love sports. And with the World Cup right around the corner, we'll be breaking down the biggest storylines ahead of the big tournament here in the USA.

Listen to the 1021 podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Joey Dardano. And on my new podcast, Hope from a Hypocrite, I'll be changing lives, helping people in need with thoughtful solutions. Sike, I'm a comedian. I'm not qualified to give good advice. Join me and my comedian friends as we riff, rant, recommend some of the most legally dubious advice known to me. This is Help from a Hypocrite, the worst advice from the dumbest people you know. Listen to Help from a Hypocrite Wednesdays on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.