There Are No Girls on the Internet - What Elon Musk Could Learn from the #EndFathersDay Hoax

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

We’re joined by Joelle Monique to revisit the 4chan hoax #EndFathersDay and what it says about impersonation as a destabilization tactic on Twitter.  Mikki Kendall's Guardian piece about starting #SolidarityIsforWhiteWomen: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/14/solidarityisforwhitewomen-hashtag-feminismSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Call 844-844-I-Hart. The story I've told myself can then shape my behavior, and that can lead me to sabotage the possibility of connection. This mental Health Awareness Month, tune into the podcast deeply well with Debbie Brown if you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole. This podcast is for you to hear more. Listen to deeply well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to Internet Hate Machine. I'm Bridget, and I'm joined with my producer Sophie. And we are also so thrilled to have our very first guest in the studio with us. I am joined by the lovely Joelle Monique.

Joelle, thank you so much for being here. Hi, Bridget. What's up? Thank you for having me. So, Joelle, I have to start by saying, like, you're a pretty prolific Twitter user. What is that been like for you as a black woman with a pretty visible public profile on Twitter? I really liked Twitter up until recently. Now it's causing me headaches because of it.

I have to leave it and I realized that what I really like about it was the fact that it's just words. I have to be thinking about my image. I'm not trying to tell you where I've been. Like, I could just be like, I really love this TV show or this song rocks or sucks or whatever. You can just so easily just share an opinion and it can live there. People can respond or not respond. And it's been great. And I mean, yes, there have always been assholes on Twitter, but my black fingers are strong.

I'm not, you know, I know Megan was like, let him talk. And I'm like, I can't. I'm not as strong as you. My knees nor my emotions. apparently. I can't deal with people being mean. And so I just blocked heavy and it's been a pretty smooth journey. And now

man, I'm on not mammoth. I know it's mastodon. Mastodon. There it is. I got me one of those. Don't know how to use it yet. I pursued my TikTok name ages ago. I have never posted anything. So now I'm just

lurking in there. Like do I want to come to this space? I don't like you on camera all that much that frequently. You know, and so I just don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do when the trolls take over, but I do, like, if I'm looking for silver linings, Elon Musk's downfall on this, he spent so much money. And people are, I can tell because my follower account drops every day by like way too many. And I haven't posted anything controversial or like no strong opinions as of late. And so I can tell people are like, and it's done.

The worst part, though, is I have a black lady professional group chat on there that has been life saving, got me a lot of jobs, got me through a lot of crap, like, has really helped solidify my career. And that checkmark, you know, when I first got it, I was freelance. And it really boosted my profile and gave me a lot of access that I didn't have previously. And I do worry about what's going to happen. You know, we're trying to, as a group, we're trying to figure out, like, where do we go next? And we're just not quite sure what's going to have that same kind of connection. So it's been a wild ride on Twitter.

That's such a good point that you make about the access, particularly for folks in industries that are traditionally marginalized, it's different for us to build up a platform. And it just has, the stakes are different. And, you know, I'm also verified on Twitter. And I do think that it's gotten me into spaces and gotten me access that I don't think I would have otherwise. And so, like, if you're an editor when I tweet something, I've gotten the DM that's like,

oh, do you want to turn this into a piece for us? And I would be lying if I said that I wasn't going to miss that. But you're right. Like, who wants to be on a platform that is run by someone who has made it clear that they don't really care about the safety of the folks who are showing up on a platform like Twitter? I knew it was over when he was like, I'm going to charge for verification. I was like, well, then that defeats the point of verification. Like, the checkmark was there solely.

I know a lot of people think he was like, for clout, that came with it. But the initial thing was like, this famous person that you think you're talking to, that's actually them. if they have the checkmark. No checkmark, you don't know who you're talking to. And I wonder, like, if I set up an account that's called, like, The Rock, can I verify it? And then people think they're talking to Dwayne the Rock Johnson. Like, there's what value is there in that checkmark except that, and the clout that came

with it before, now that you can purchase it, I don't think companies or celebrities or anybody who was following you because you had that checkmark is going to continue that behavior. I don't think people are going to get booked jobs because they have the checkmark once you can pay for it. When the, when the actual, like, transition happens and it's, and you are paying for it, I can't wait to find out who actually is paying for it. That will also be interesting. That will, because, again, unless, if I was still freelance, I might, because without the profile I have now, I think I would still consider it because it did, like I said, it got me so many jobs when I first got it. And so I do feel bad for those people who

were like sort of on the cusp of having like a well-known career, that checkmark really sort of verifies a lot for you. But yeah, as of now, like it would be weird. Again, unless people really feel the need to try to verify like, yes, you're talking to me. You know, I saw some actor the other day was posting about how they don't like social media, but when it first started, they got concerned messages from parents saying, why are you talking to my 15-year-old child? And they were like, I'm not.

And so that caused like a whole downward spiral for them. And it's like, yeah. To your point, you know, Bridget, I just don't think they care about safety. That's clearly not an issue. And there's so much danger online. We've been known. We grew up in the early odds. I remember early internet safety danger lessons and news reports.

And so it's weird to me that that's suddenly not a concern. So I, the thread that you're talking about is actor Robert Kaczynski talking about, you know, what verification has meant for him in his career as an actor. And I'm so glad that you bring all of this up because it really dovetails exactly into what I want to talk about today, which is the sort of dirty, messy business of people being able to impersonate others on Twitter and the incredibly high stakes that it comes with. Your experiences of maybe wanting to leave the platform really set us up nicely into that conversation because we know that Twitter has not always been the most secure platform,

has not always delivered a very secure experience for its users. And now with Elon Musk at the helm, I think it's poised to only get worse. And FYI, we're recording this on a Friday. My understanding is Twitter is planning on rolling out this new pay-to-be-verified system on Monday. So in just a couple days, the same day or like just days before firing half their staff. And a day before a fucking election. So I'm very concerned. and I think that my concerns have real historical precedent,

which I want to get into right now. So a classic bad actor tactic is pretending to be somebody that you're not on social media specifically to create confusion and destabilize online spaces, right? Like, this is probably not a surprise to you, Joelle. This is like something we all sort of innately know, right? Yes, 100%. And I think something that really just burns me up about this

is that it's very much a known tactic, right? the leadership at social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have been made well aware that this is a tactic that bad actors use to threaten the security of their platforms. But they have really done fuck all to prevent it from happening. And in the case of Twitter, are maybe making it easier to happen, which is a real head scratcher. So another classic bad actor tactic is inflaming existing tensions around groups of people who are traditionally marginalized, right? And so that is a common thing. Yeah. Who would have guessed it?

that that would be a common tactic to destabilize communities. So what happened around End Father's Day, around 2013-2014, what I want to talk about today, that's like one of the reasons why I think it's so important, because it utilized both of those tactics to hijack and exploit conversations around feminism, race, and gender online. And it's really concerning because, you know, it's concerning that our social media platforms are so easily gamified in this way. and that social media platforms aren't really doing anything to prevent it.

So let's talk about End Father's Day. To really understand what the fuck was going on with End Father's Day, you really need to understand what 4chan was calling Operation Lollipop. And essentially, Operation Lollipop was this campaign to create fake activist causes on social media. Basically, people on 4chan, trolls, bad actors, whatever you want to call them, would pose as feminists of color, so like black feminists, brown feminists, et cetera, and essentially try to get people to agree with these bogus campaigns they would start and just generally try to cede conflict with one another.

The whole point is to create confusion, inflamed tensions, generally to make feminists look like a bunch of, you know, crazy man-haters whose causes have no merit and who can't even agree with one another. This is so wild when you see it happen just organically on your timeline where you'll be like, so here is a picture of, you know, sometimes a black woman, sometimes a black man, using way too much like currently popular in the Zite guy's black lingo where you're like, they're like, yeah, no cap. You're like, I don't know if the situation necessarily calls for a no cap.

And yeah, and then you go on their page and they follow a bunch of people, but maybe only have like a handful of followers. Most of their tweets are retweets. They become easier to spot the more you come across them organically. But it's very strange to be like, this is this like internet blackface. And it's annoying and upsetting. And again, ruining these spaces that have, you know, I know some people don't agree with the idea that there is community on these spaces.

But I just think that for somebody who has found a great group of friends, that I meet with regularly, IRL, who, you know, again, uses space and platforms for job opportunities. Like, it does feel communal to me, and it does feel almost, well, it's just invasive. It's invasive to have people come into those communities and try to wreck them in that way. The reason why these bad actors pretending to be black women were exposed is exactly what you just picked up on. When they use language where you're like, I don't know if a black person would actually say, no cap in this situation. I don't know that a black person would actually say, you know, as a black, I think Trump is

lit. Just that little things where you're like, oh, my spidey sense is tingling. I don't know if you're a black woman like you say you are Twitter user like 5569987. And I think this is one of the reasons why I am always kind of screaming from the rooftops that this kind of disinformation and media manipulation is a clear racial and gender justice issue because bad actors and trolls know that exploiting and inflaming these legitimate, like, tensions and trigger points, particularly between marginalized groups, can really work because it does tap into these like legitimate traumas and baggage and anxieties that we do have.

You know, the experience of being a black woman or a queer person or a trans person or really any kind of marginalized identity in the United States is often. often marked with these very real historical traumas and baggage. And so people who are interested in using the internet to spread chaos, target marginalized people, and they do it by tapping into these existing traumas. And, you know, a good example is like, as we approach the midterm elections, the kind of disinformation that we're seeing around the election is really meant to dissuade people of color from voting.

You know, they tend to do this via things like bogus images purporting to show ICE, making arrests of undocumented people at polling places or, you know, images warning that, oh, you know, when you go to vote, they're going to be checking if you have outstanding warrants when you do try to vote, right? These lies that are clearly meant to tap into very real fears and anxieties that black and brown folks have around being criminalized in the United States. So it plays on these like real traumas that we have in ways that exploit these things, these like tensions that we carry around just by virtue of being a marginalized person in the United States. Yeah, it's sinister when you essentially try to brainwash someone into acting in their own disinterest, right, particularly when we're talking about voting,

this idea of if you exercise, you're right, there's a threat there and you should avoid that threat at all costs. It's really cruel. And the craziest thing is like when we see a lot of like who is participating in these acts. Like it's either very young kids who've been indoctrinated over many years, YouTube fix your system, or like old people who, again, have been indoctrinated mostly by Fox News slash Fox News affiliates. And that sort of gets really under my skin, too, this idea of either people who should know better or people who never had a chance to learn better doing so much damage, you know.

I'm really glad that you framed it that way. It's sometimes difficult for me, but I always try to remember that it's not necessarily the individual. It's like systems and institutions that are getting rich and profiting off of, you know, misleading individuals in this way. It can be hard to remember that when I'm like, why can't you just not fall for this? But yeah, you're exactly right. The fascism is a very effective tool that is being wielded expertly right now. it's hard because you do your instinct is to just get angry about it. You know, I am angry about it.

But at the same time, I know my anger can't resolve the issue. And so my hope is that more white mothers, if we're just being very honest about it, are figuring out ways to talk to their young sons about how to better navigate the internet, are making sure they're putting up roadblocks and interventions where necessary. You know, I think that's the only way we can. hope to really get ahead of this because it seems to be a wave that isn't stopping anytime soon. Unfortunately, I think that you are correct. So when we look at End Father's Day and the kind of tensions and traumas historically that that campaign really tapped into, it's this clear wedge

between black women and white women. And on the one hand, I kind of get it. You know, for a very long time, black feminists have not always felt meaningfully represented or centered by white feminists. If you look at the early suffragette movement, for instance, they left black women's voting rights out of their advocacy altogether as a strategic tactic. It's not your turn. It's not your turn. They said we are not for women. We are for white women. Exactly, right? And so when you look a little further in time, you know, white feminists writing about things like being stuck at home with domestic duties, they weren't really talking to black women. They were not centering our lived experience in their advocacy in that way. this reminds me of the help when if for listeners if you don't know anything about the help or how it was crafted a guy a white man from the south was essentially writing from the perspective of his childhood maids and when you go into a larger cinematic history and you understand a birth of a nation and how a lot of that was sort of you know the guy who crafted that was so proud of it he invited again a childhood maid who taken care of him who's not taking care of his son.

And she left service after that. She said you were a racist and this is ridiculous and I'm going to bounce. But yeah, this idea that there's so much space available and so much, I don't know if I want to say bad blood, but definitely

400 years of oppression and discord that we have to navigate. It's an easy place to spark a fire. Exactly that, right? And so these tensions are very much still with us today. In 2013, author Mickey Kendall, who wrote an excellent book called Hood Feminism, which you should definitely get if you've not read it. I love it. It's one of my

favorite books. Basically, her book is all about the ways that white feminism have left the most marginalized women behind in their causes. Here's Mickey Kendall speaking to now this news about her work with Hood Feminism. Hood Feminism is about survival, because for those who are facing all of these issues from gun violence to housing, their first concern has to be staying alive long enough to fight for their rights. The movement has to do a better job of addressing displacement and hunger if it expects support for reproductive justice marches or for electing a first woman to be president of the United States.

It's hard to believe that women will be better leaders when the feminist women you see gaining power not only don't help you, but are likely to actively participate in harming you. Okay, I think that gives a good sense of it. Bet, Mickey, yes. So Mickey Kendall started the hashtag, hashtag solidarity is for white women to really have a real conversation about the ways that feminists, white feminists, namely, had really failed black women. And a great example of this is that ostensibly feminist organizations and outlets continue to have a relationship with a white male writer named Hugo Schweiser.

If you don't know who that is, Hugo Schweizer is a Pasadena City College professor of history and gender studies, a blogger, and a self-described male feminist who wrote about feminism. I know, like, is there anything more of a warning than someone who was a self-proclaimed male feminist, right? And he really, like, he had a, at this time, he did have a, like, pretty big footprint on online feminist spaces. He wrote about feminism for places like the Atlantic and Jezbel and some other, like, feminist sites in the sort of ecosystem of online feminism back in the 2013-2014 era. Here's a little taste of Hugo speaking at a slut walk in LA in 2011. For too long, there's been division in the feminist community over the issues of sexuality and sex work, and that's one of the things we are here to end today.

So I wrote a little speech, and I can't read a speech. I have to say it is very difficult to stand up here as a man after the stories that you've just heard and that I've heard as well. The fact is that we've heard a series of very personal, very powerful, very painful accounts of sexual violence. And in every one of those cases, the violence was committed by men against women. And while it is true that men can also be the victims of sexual violence, and while it is true that in a few cases, women can be the perpetrators of sexual violence. There is no question that the vast majority of sexual violence is men assaulting women. And part of the reason why we allow that to continue,

and part of the reason why the word slut continues to have its enormous power in our lives, is because of a myth we believe in and a myth we need to march against today. It's a myth I call the myth of male weakness. All right, I think you get the idea there. So, you know, something to know about Hugo Schweitzer is that he, his thing was kind of being this sort of reformed bad boy. like bad boy turned feminist. He wrote on his...

Really? Yeah, so that was like what, like that was his like thing that I would say allowed him to kind of grow in his public profile. He wrote very openly about how when he was struggling with addiction issues, he tried to murder his girlfriend by turning on the gas stove in their apartment. And he also wrote about having sexual flings with his female students when he was a professor. So it's interesting that he would get up on a stage at a slow. walk and talk about like man the mis of male weakness blah blah blah blah here's the other thing if you are coming to a marginalized community and you are not actively a member of that marginalized community and then you speak on behalf of that

marginalized community you have not fully done your work or your research like there's that time should have been given to an actual woman like any woman with any kind of sense could have taken that spot and done what you did and much, much better. That is foolish and ridiculous. Yes, absolutely. And you know who didn't let any of that shit slide? Black women, they were...

No, black women had been calling this guy out for a very long time. And he was really able to use this behavior to amass power and a public profile in online feminist spaces for a long time. When black women would speak up against him, he would, like, attack them pretty horribly on social media. And despite all this, he was able to really remain this kind of feminist darling, writing for, you know, ostensibly feminist outlets like Jezbel that had this large white woman readership and ridership.

He ended up having this public meltdown on Twitter in which he all but admitted all of this behavior. He talked about how he didn't really have the educational credentials to be teaching a class on feminism at the college level. And yet he did it anyway. He talked about how he had been trashing black women and he kind of apologized for it and all of that. So all of these things that black women had been accusing him of this whole time and basically had been going ignored, he admitted in a meltdown on Twitter.

But it seems like when he admitted all this in his meltdown, but the white feminists and the websites who were frequented by those white feminists, they didn't really take ownership of what they had been. done to allow him to build such a platform in these online feminist spaces. You know, they weren't really denouncing him like you might have expected them to. And they certainly were not, you know, seeking solidarity or trying to make amends with the women that he pretty clearly, the black women that he pretty clearly harmed. I think there was just this general sense of no accountability.

And to really move forward, they kind of have accountability. And so Mickey Kendall spelled it out really well in a piece that she wrote for the guardian. Folks should really read the whole thing because it's a great piece, but here's a little snippet. She writes, it appeared that these feminists were once again dismissing women of color in favor of a brand of solidarity that centers on the safety and comfort of white women. For it to be at the expense of people who were doing the same work was exceptionally aggravating. Admittedly, this is not a new problem. White feminism has argued that gender should trump race since its inception. That rhetoric not only erases the experiences of women of color, but also alienates many from a movement

that claims to want equality for all. This is especially clear when posts and articles about racism from five years ago involve some of the very same players. When I launched the hashtag Solidarity is for White Women, I thought it would largely be a discussion between people impacted by the latest bout of problematic behavior from mainstream white feminists. It was intended to be a Twitter shorthand for how often feminists of color are told that the racism they experience isn't a feminist issue. The first few tweets reflect the deeply personal impact of such a long-running structural issue. And damn, that that bit really speaks to me because I totally get at this tension in this fracture that she is naming and exposing here. Yeah. And this is what you used to sit at

intersectionality, right? It's weird because sometimes as black women will, or, you know, as a queer black woman, I'll get the same question from black men. Like, you're going to put your gender or your queerness ahead of your race, which is a ridiculous question, no matter who it's asked by, because we don't get to choose any of it. None of it is a decision. None of it can come one before the other or like it's all equal. It's always present.

And it's infuriating to have to sometimes link up with people who are not understanding that intersectionality in an effort to make things better for, you know, a community that you're a part of. It's a lot of work. It's why we're all tired. I would also say if you're a white feminist in any of this is, you know, ringing out for you to borrow a quote from a show that's had some of its own feminist issues. But, you know, desire to be free and not make a window in the wall of your own prison, okay? It's really weird to me anyway to rely on a man to speak up for your woman community. That's, it's how did he get on stage? It's very confusing to me. It is confusing.

And honestly, I mean, like, I got to give like major, major props and shouts to Mickey Kendall because she was doing the work of exposing. these fair with the same kinds of very real deep fractures between black feminists and white feminists that you were just talking about. And I need to be like super clear here. Mickey Kendall was doing this like important necessary work of bringing these tough conversations to the forefront. And it is a shame that Twitter as a platform failed Kendall and all of these other women who really needed to have this conversation failed them all by failing to provide a safe, secure platform to have this conversation about these very real fractures and how they show up in our communities, right?

I also think that white feminists really should have done a better job of digging into this conversation and taking accountability. And it might, have they done that, it might not have been left this, like, open wound for bad actors to swoop in and exploit. But that is a common tactic of bad actors, trolls, extremists, whoever, when conversations require a little bit of thoughtfulness or nuance or are just tough conversations to have so folks don't really have them,

you can bet that these trolls will step in and hijack that conversation and exploit it for their own means. In this case, their means we're making feminists all look bad. And this is the backdrop against which Fortune starts their end Father's Day campaign. 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, S&L'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.

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iHeartadvertising.com. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships.

I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So basically, trolls on Bortchan decide they want to pose as black feminists. and start the hashtag, End Father's Day, to make it seem like black feminists and feminists more generally are actually calling to an end to the holiday Father's Day. The hashtag Solidarity is for White Women

exposed all of these rightly raw feelings and tensions between black and white feminists, which we know are the perfect conditions for bad actors to swoop in and inflame those very real pre-existing tensions within a community. Their goal is to undermine solidarity, so that when those tensions are exposed, like they were what solidarity is for white women, bad actors want to deepen and exploit those tensions because what they really want is chaos. They want people being distrustful of one another.

People not being able to reach common ground or move forward on any of those big issues that cause those tensions. That's the goal. You know, if black women are appearing to get on board with a hashtag as silly and stupid as end father's day, maybe some of the white women looking on are like, well, that's ridiculous. And maybe they start thinking that some of the issues that these black feminists are raising are also kind of ridiculous. And maybe they start thinking that these black women are not worth taking seriously and are not worth meaningfully centering in their movement and in their activism. So you can really see how bad actors can destabilize a whole community or a whole movement through these tensions.

So trolls on Fortune decide that they're going to pose. as black feminists and try to start the end Father's Day hashtag to make it look as though black feminists are actually genuinely calling for an end to the holiday Father's Day. On June 12th, 2014, a 4chan user posts this to 4chan. Almost all cases of domestic violence, domestic rape, child abuse, adultery, and discontent in the home are caused by men, i.e. fathers. A holiday that celebrates this is another symptom in the disease known as patriarchy, and it has no place in a progressive society. This is a holiday celebrating misogyny, demanding appreciation and gifts for doing what a father should be doing anyway, especially when in almost all cases domestic abuse stem from the father.

Fathers all over the country are refusing to pay alimony or child support, which should not be celebrated and rewarded, but it should be shamed. Fathers, they should not be about celebrating the role of fathers and the family, but about correcting it. It should not be celebrated in its present form. We are calling on all feminists and social justice warriors to join us in a campaign to redefine. this disgustingly misogynistic holiday and Father's Day in its present form, if not entirely. We will be descending on Twitter and Tumblr to get this message out that the patriarchal holiday has no place in our society. So that's all bullshit, right? Like, this was them, this was them trying to cede their fake campaign, right? Like, that is definitely not, I mean, and you could

probably almost tell from the way that they've written it. It's not, it's not commentary written in seriousness. They're trying to mess. with feminists and disrupt online feminist spaces. I mean, there's zero logic in it at all. The idea that because there is domestic abuse, then there are no good fathers, is such a wild incongruent leap that it's wild that it took off at all, even within this own, like, group.

Like, I don't know. You'd think they'd want to think these things out a little bit more and make them stick. You would think, but I do think, like, you're onto something. I think the reason why these fake campaigns can kind of like have a little bit of stickiness, even when they're so ridiculous on their face, is because they tend to follow this like very specific cycle. You have these accounts using avi images of black women purporting to be black women,

tweeting about this campaign, and then real social media users start reacting to the hashtag, giving it more reach and more visibility in helping it grow. Side note, this is a great reason not to engage with hashtags that you see popping up. up on Twitter that might look a little bit suss. Another good example would be the Twitter trend hashtag cut for Amber that was a top trend earlier this year that was purporting to call for Amber Heard supporters to self-harm in the aftermath of the verdict in the defamation trial that she had against Johnny Depp or that I guess Johnny Depp had against her.

Happening. Oh, my God. So these trends can be like harmful. And what sometimes happens is that people who. who either are skeptical of them or know that they're fake, will tweet using the hashtag, calling it out, or being like, can you believe this? And they might think that they're actually, you know, shedding light on it,

but by engaging with it, they're actually just helping it grow. So whenever you see one of those hashtags that you're like, this seems sus, do not engage with it because nine times out of ten, you're just helping it get more visibility and helping it spread to more people. So the next part of that cycle is that it gets picked up in the pressed. In this case, first it was smaller right-wing blogs like The Daily Caller who wrote about it, and then it actually made its way to Fox News, and they had this to say about it. Well, it started out as a joke, but the hashtag end Father's Day is picking up steam with feminists online and with others in social media.

Tweet's like End Father's Day because it's a celebration of patriarchy and oppression have been popping up all over the place. Wow. Well, let's bring in Susan Patton, aka the Princeton Mom. She gained notoriety for imploring young women to lock down their few. husband while still in college. Remember this? We talked about this. Good morning.

Thank you for being with day. What pleasure to be here on Father's Day. 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. It's absurd for them to say that Father's Day is a creation of male oppression. It's ridiculous. But why is it good for women? I mean, there's a reason that there are more women living in poverty now that at any time in my lifetime is because there are few married women. I mean, when you crush men, you hurt women.

Without a doubt. And we're obviously not talking about celebrating the deadbeat dads or celebrating the men who abandon their families. We're talking about men who love their children, who provide for their families. All right. I think you get the idea. Hate these people. I have so many thoughts.

Like, first of all, both of the tweets they pulled had egg avi. which people get a life. One of them, I don't remember the name, but it definitely started Nenay something. I felt like somebody pulling a joke, which is nuts. And the other thing, it's like, I want to be like, gosh, I wish Bell Hooks were alive and willing to go on these shows. So you could be like, that's actually true.

When you crush men, you do hurt women. But not for the reasons you're thinking. It's not about providing financially for people that we're emotionally hurting and we could be doing better as a community, as a society. Ridiculous. And Joelle, very good eye because the Twitter, the tweet that they showed belonged to Twitter user, Nenei Can't Stop, who if you go to that Twitter profile now, oh, wait, you can't because it's been suspended because it was a fake account.

They showed someone who is a known troll impersonating a black woman to create chaos and confusion on social media platforms. They showed that tweet. not knowing, or maybe I'm not even going to say not knowing, not caring to check to see whether or not that was an actual person espousing their actual views. Just showing it to your nana and pop up. I wonder if there's, because some of these people actually went to journalism school

and you wonder if there's any, like, moment where there's just, like, deep regret or concern or, like, they have to know that the rest of the journalism community is just, like, beside themselves. You're like, what are you doing? Your one job is to research and report facts, you fools. I mean, who has time for deep regret when there's money to be made? And, you know, what's interesting, and I feel like I should really note is that I'm talking about how this campaign was like sort of successful.

But I mean successful, you know, every person that I talked to in my research, who was every black woman who was involved in all of this, they really make it clear that it was really people who were predisposed to be suspicious of black women and feminists in general who fell for this. So it wasn't that like, when I say it was effective, I mean effective specifically among people who don't like black women and also have platforms like Fox News. I don't think that black women, because we're, you know, we're a skeptical bunch. We're like a, we're, you know, we do our due diligence as black women. We weren't the ones who were being fooled.

I actually don't think this campaign was necessarily meant to target us. I think this campaign was meant to trick people like the folks at Fox News into amplifying it. So in that way, it was successful. I don't mean to say that, like, black women didn't fall for this. No. And we went, like, the black community has some of the most active fathers as far as, like, direct involvement with children on a day-to-day basis in America anyway. Like, the statistics are very clear. So it's always funky and pretty noticeable when someone's like, oh, black dads are not around.

Be like, boo, sir, no, this is not the 80s. We're very aware of what's happening in our own communities because we're part of them. He fools. Exactly. And what you just said, like, if a black person, if somebody who says they are a black person says certain things on social media and that this makes you kind of scratched your head and say, are you really black? Because I don't know that a black person would really say that.

that is exactly what kind of undid this troll and Father's Day campaign. You know, if you ever see somebody on social media pretending to be a black woman, sometimes they'll say things that are just off. Well, they'll say things that just like don't make sense. In an interview that I did with Twitter user Shafika Hudson, she says that the big giveaway is how often these people pretending to be black women bungled the linguistic construction that we call the habitual bee. I see you nodding.

are you familiar with the habitual bee? Yes. Yeah, my favorite little truism about the habitual bee is that some linguists were doing studies on children and they showed a bunch of white children a picture of cookie monster and a picture of Oscar the Grouch. And Oscar was eating cookies and Cookie Monster wasn't. And so they asked, who is eating cookies? And they were like, cookie monster, even though that wasn't correct.

They showed black children the same question. and they asked, who is eating cookies? And they were like, Oscar the Grouch. And they were like, but who be eaten cookies? And they were like, oh, Cookie Monster, of course. Like, they know. And so all of these little nuances of black lived experience and black identity, you really can't fake that if you have no proximity with blackness

and you really don't know what you're talking about. And so all of these black women were ended up reporting to Twitter that people were pretending to be black feminists. and using the platform to try to sow discord and confusion, but Twitter pretty much didn't do anything. They were like, okay, and like took no action. And so Shafika Hudson created a hashtag called, hashtag your slippish showing to help weed out these trolls

pretending to be black women. Joel, where are you from geographically? Are you from the South? I'm from Chicago. Okay. Does the phrase, your slip is showing? Does this mean anything to you? Yes, my folks did come up from the Mississippi.

be my group. Okay, I had a feeling. Yes. And heard it as a child in church because I did wear a slip under my dress in church because I went to a Southern Baptist church. Exactly. So if a black Southern lady tells you, oh, your slip is showing, basically what she's telling you is that you don't look as put together as you think that you do. And that is why Shafika Hudson used that phrase to weed out these people posing as black women, right? Like, you think that you're coming off as a black woman, but actually, your hashtag, you're Slipfish showing. Right, right, right.

She created a list of Twitter users pretending to be black women, and some of them were really, really obvious. Like, one of them, their avie image was of, like, well-known black podcaster, Heben Nagatu. So, like, someone that people know. Dummy. Right, just, like, really stupid. And I think to me, the fact that a regular Twitter user like Shafika had to take it upon herself to do this work, like creating a hashtag, creating a whole list that she added to, doing that labor of making Twitter a safer platform, despite the fact that like she didn't work at Twitter, she was doing it completely unpaid at a time when she was actually between jobs.

It says a lot to me about the way that platforms like Twitter operate. You know, shouldn't tech leaders at places like Twitter want their platforms to be more secure? Shouldn't they be interested in not having their platforms be places where bad actors can completely hijack conversations? You know, it should not be up to just regular black women like Shafika Hudson to do the work of making Twitter safer. Yet, time in time again, that labor, which is often unpaid and often dangerous work, falls on the shoulders of just regular black women because the power. powers that be do nothing when we are harmed. Yeah, it's absolutely shouldn't be anybody outside of getting a Twitter paycheck, responsibility to keep its users safe.

That's foolish. But capitalism being what it is and these social media spaces making money the way they do, I mean, even YouTube, which has a pretty good system of like, here's how we make money, how we pay out the users who create content for us. Still understands at the end of the day, it's down to videos watched and ads consumed. And because of that, have no interest in people's safety

because this sort of unrelegated Wild West of post what you want, let's create a lot of hate, which is going to hopefully create more comments. I mean, it's weird because we're sort of seeing Netflix tap into this too, where they create these shows that are like mildly devices. if you think of like an Emily in Paris, right? Emily and Paris has a pretty stacked cast, but it didn't cause that much to make. It's easy and fast to make. So I can turn that out. And if you hate it, all the better, because when you hate watch it, at least you're tweeting

about it, at least you're giving that show promotion, at least you're watching it, at least you're spending more time on Netflix. And I think we're seeing this throughout our internet landscape. You know, we're still in the infancy of the internet. Despite, you know, a lot of us grew up with me. I had the internet since I was like four or five, but I don't really recall a time without there being internet access available to me. And because of that, I think to a larger degree, because our government has not stepped in and decided to make any rules or structures or has made very limited rules and structures for how the internet is to be used, I think we're just going to keep conceiving these things until something like that, until there's actual laws passed because it's financially, people are financially behooved to continue to allow this kind of negative reaction. and interactions. I could not have put that better myself. And I think that at this point,

what we really, first step is, we need to acknowledge the way that this kind of hate as an engagement strategy on social media platforms, one, typically targets people who are traditionally marginalized, and two, just keeps us all locked into this same toxic engagement system of hate. The studies are super clear that people who use social media are not happier. It makes us all unhappy.

And that social media algorithms, by design, amplify content that makes us angrier, more polarized, more divided, and less informed. And so it's not doing any of us any good, but I tell you what it is doing.

It is lining a lot of people's pockets. And I don't want to create, I don't want us to have an internet ecosystem and landscape where it's a marketplace for our pain, right? Like, I don't want our negative. experiences to just be lining the pockets of some asshole tech leader somewhere. We deserve so much better.

And the people, the young people who come behind us, the next generation, they don't deserve to have, you know, their negative experiences be weaponized and marketed and profited from in this callous way. Like, we really need to think about what kind of internet landscape we want to have. Do we want to have one that makes us more informed and more thoughtful or one that allows people like Elon Musk to add another fucking comma to their paycheck. You know, I would argue it's not that. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite.

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Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-8-4-I-Hart. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation.

There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, it's hard, too, because as much as I know, it should be avoiding the negative. You know, on the day that we're recording this,

Drake dropped his new album late last night, I think, early this morning. And so it has been a wave of black women being like, not you going after Serena and Megan in the same album, you fool. And it's hard not to instantly be like, what's happening? Like, Drid Drake out here slandering black women,

his number one, like, hold it down fan base? What is going on? And you're like, you're probably just telling my voice. Like there's an actively engaging aspect about that. But I do, but you're 100% right when we continue to commodify our own anguish, really. I mean, you can go back to pandemic days when we were starting to see the beginnings of an uprising. And at the very least, activation of a lot of black people in America. I mean, there's a time and that's pretty much all we, or it felt like all we were talking.

about was like Black Liberation and America and the struggles to find it. And it was dark and a challenge. And I don't know. The internet is a tool, as my mother would say, and you can use a tool to help build something great and you can use a tool to destroy. And I think we are struggling to find a good balance between those two positions. Just like snap. So give it up for Joelle's mom, first of all, because I did some wisdom. But I think, you know, I was reading the Drake stuff before I hopped on. And I think it really shows that attacking black women will always have an audience. If you trash black women on the internet, that will always be a winning engagement strategy.

And I think it's because we feel compelled to engage because we have to protect ourselves as you've just perfectly laid out. We feel compelled to because if we don't know what else is going to do it. Yeah. Exactly. And yeah, I think that we need. to be honest about the ways that massage noir and hate against black women has propped up our internet landscape and really been a feature, not a bug, that is at the heart of engagement strategies for so many internet platforms. And we're not even being honest about it. Like,

you see it, I see it. I feel it when I'm on the internet. I cannot help myself but to engage when a black woman is being smeared in this way. And I know that I don't. am just a cog in this hate cycle, this internet hate machine that tells me that I have to vocally support this black woman. But that's just another engagement point that it's helping to amplify an ugly toxic conversation that I know dehumanizes us. It's like we are so locked into this fucked up cycle. I hate it.

Yeah. I think we're all about to figure out how we get off of it just by virtue of a new owner, which just sort of crazy to think about. Like, we maybe all should have made this move much earlier, but it's hard to leave Twitter. There's a lot of comfort and a lot of support there as almost as much as there is, hey, I'm going to be really interested to see where black women as a community, specifically this corner of black women wind up.

Yeah. It might be Tumblr. And it's sad because, like, black women and black people more broadly, like we make these platforms. Nobody was fucking showing up on Twitter before black Twitter. Like we made these platforms cool places to be. And yet here. Amazing.

Exactly. And here we are feeling like we need, that we're being pushed off of these platforms. So let's talk about Elon Musk and his ownership of Twitter because I feel like it just feels so, this conversation we're having feels so timely. You know, we're talking about this against the backdrop of Elon Musk taking over Twitter and talking about making users pay for verification.

As we've talked about, I feel like so much in this episode, having a blue checkmark is not just a vanity thing. You know, it started as a way to help users identify people that they actually were who they say they are. And this is an extra level of security for people who are at risk of being impersonated online. And we already know from all the stuff I've talked about in this episode that marginalized people are particularly at risk

for being unpersated online. We already know that this is a thing that is used to create chaos on the part of bad actors. And so, you know, I got verified on Twitter, not because I'm like so great or this and that. It was because in 2016 somebody was using my picture, like a terrible picture of me from LinkedIn, to create a Twitter account essentially to like shit on Hillary Clinton.

Not that I was some like huge Hillary Clinton like person, but like clearly they just wanted an image of a black woman who would say things about Hillary Clinton, right? And so we already know this is a huge issue on Twitter and it kind of seems like a bad idea to overhaul this one tool that we have. have to combat it via verification. And it also seems like a really bad idea to do this when you've like gutted your staff days away from an election, the staff whose job it is to make the platform a little bit safer. You mentioned the Twitter thread by the actor Robert Kaczynski earlier,

and I really, really appreciated what he had to say. He writes, years ago before verified accounts were a thing, back when I was on EastEnders, I was contacted multiple times by parents of children who had been conversing with me online. 11 to 15-year-old children who had been talking with a fake me, I was informed that one of these children went missing. I didn't have social media at the time. I didn't understand it. It's a horror show.

For years, people pushed for some way to root out the fakes. There was a phase, if you remember, of people posting images of themselves with their URL. I did that on every side I could find. Facebook, MySpace, Beboo, anything. I felt powerless to stop people using my face and name to scam or groom people. That's why verification came to be, because it was important to protect people. It wasn't for clout or for leveraging money from a platform. It was to protect people from utter scumbags.

I think that perhaps in the age of social media, there are some CEOs who may have forgotten the importance of protecting people or having trustworthy sources. I don't tweet much. I'm scared of the internet. I struggle with a lot of things in life, but this account exists so that fake accounts can't. If Elon Musk removes that simple ability to protect people, to protect children with verification, then this company is dead in the water. I don't know if it's been expressed to him.

I doubt he will see this thread, but I hope someone is explaining to Elon Musk the actual dangers to children and the vulnerable and why removing that protection is an action that will lead directly to children being endangered. Verification is a public service. It is a good deed performed by companies

who contribute very little good to the world, in my opinion. We should be making easier, clearer paths to verification for everyone, not making it harder. It is their responsibility, not a business model. And I really identified with that because it shouldn't be a business model. It should be a base responsibility for, you know, one of our largest communication platforms in the fucking world. And what's worse, you know, as we're about to have an election, one that, you know, officials have already warned is an election where we could see political violence, violence at the polls, blowing up verification and having users be able to pay $8 to be verified after gutting.

half of your staff, I think it could create a disaster in terms of people being able to depend on our communications platform to get information about the election. And I would also just add, like, I think that bad actors are going to continue using this as a tactic, you know, impersonating people, gamifying platforms via impersonation. And I also think that, like, we know that folks can really steer and dominate and hijack national conversations. You know, if you look back at 2020, Amidst the mobilizations for racial justice in 2020, Twitter announced that a fake account at Antifa underscore U.S. Oh, yeah. That was, yeah, that was calling for violence, was actually run by the white supremacist group.

Is it identity Europa? Is that how you say it? Who cares? I think it's Europa. Yeah, who cares? I'm like, I. It's one of the most active white supremacist groups in the U.S. from 2016 to 2019. And so this was during the height of like protests and tension, this account tweeted, alert,

Tonight's the night, comrades. Tonight we say, fuck the city. We move into residential areas, the white hoods, and we take what's ours. Hashtag Black Lives Matter, hashtag fuck America. And Twitter has confirmed that this was not the only account that they booted off of the platform for impersonating racial justice like demonstrators. Donald Trump Jr. tweeted absolutely insane with a screenshot of that tweet. Just remember what Antifa really is. A terrorist organization.

and they're not even pretending anymore. And this was the same, I think there's like the same day that Trump baselessly blamed Antifa, scare quotes, for violence, you know, for like violence during protest. And, you know, I just think back to that. And I think how long did we have to endure this ridiculous news cycle about like law and order and violence?

So long. Mm-hmm. And like, it is very concerning that extremists are successfully able to dominate. the national dialogue of like what our convert what the conversation is just by using these tactics on Twitter that Twitter is aware of. I would say that our if bad actors can hijack our communication platforms in that way, these platforms are not secure and they're not safe and they're not really serving us. You know, it's super crazy. He said like historically, this is the call, right? Like, they clearly know their audience, which is like how do we scare white people? You know, no,

person of color is using the term whitehood, first of all, unless we're referring to KKK members. Like, oh, this is the whitehood. I was like, are you out of your mind? But second of all, we understand clearly as black people in America that white people have this natural fear that white, that black people are going to retaliate and create like white slavery. It's a narrative we've heard a lot. It's how a lot of lynchings take place. I mean, we can look as far back as American. until and the fact that he whistled at a white woman and that was considered a threat because

the 12 year boy whistled, whistled, a thing we know didn't happen at a white woman. And so for them to tap all the way back into that fear, even today on social media, to say, hey, they're going to come into your neighborhoods and like shake things up. It's frustrating and kind of horrifying to still think about just your blackness, just your presence being a threat. And again, as we've been articulating throughout the episode, every time that's stated, it causes us to have to be extra defensive, extra alert for ourselves and for our direct community because we don't know who's going to take, again, just our presence as a threat and then act on that threat. Exactly. I think it was Tony Morrison who said that the business of racism is like creating a situation where you can't get anything done because you're so busy defending yourself and defending your blackness and like showing up. up defensive, but you then can't do the good work that you want to do. You can't put your

energy towards something else. And I think that's exactly what is happening here, that these bad actors and trolls and extremists are able to create the conditions where folks like you and me, just like regular black folks, are put in a situation where we have to constantly be defending ourselves against the backdrop of a complete fabrication, right? Like, a black activist didn't tweet that. A white supremacist did. And so I'm having to defend myself against something, against a caricature that a white supremacist dreamed up on my behalf, and I had nothing to do with. Yeah, and then we see the real life percussions, not only so, not only the emotional and mental toil online, but then, you know, when we're out in the streets protesting for our goddamn

lives, then all of a sudden, again, just our presence of being in the street, even if it's a peaceful protest, it's lots of me the difference in police presence where I went to the women's march where too many people had on that stupid pussy hat. And the police presence there, soup's calm. Just lots of daughters hanging out, totally fine, whatever. To, you know, if you were at any of the early Black Lives Matters, rallies, if you marched for George Floyd or anything like that, you saw a stark difference in how you were just being treated for doing the exact same action.

And I think a lot of it is like the fearmongering that we saw on social media spilling into real life. And that is kind of my point. These are sensitive conversations that involve very very. real hot button issues that are super raw for many of us. And the fact that our social media platforms are so easily exploited and hijacked by extremists and bad actors to completely derail these conversations is a problem with very big implications. In the case of End Father's Day, many of the people reporting on it, you know, journalists,

they talked about it like the 4chan trolls behind the hoax were just joking, you know, just trolling. But black feminists, they know. knew it wasn't a joke, because they could see what was at stake and they could probably see down the line what was going to happen next. When it comes to online harms, it's always marginalized people who are harmed first. First, it's our problem and nothing is done because nobody takes black women seriously, and then it is everyone's problem. Back in 2014, it was just destabilizing black feminist online spaces through impersonating black folks on Twitter with hoaxes

like End Father's Day. And then, about a year or two later, it's Gamergate. Then, in 2016, it was bad actors using that same tactic in an attempt to sway the presidential election. In 2020, it's hijacking and inflaming national conversations around protest, race, crime, and policing. And by the time folks are listening to this episode, it will be Election Day. Elon Musk is blowing up verification on Twitter

and gutting the teams that actually exist on the platform to try to make some kind of headway into making those platforms safer. So what's next? Where does it end? Joelle, thank you so much for being here. Where can folks follow all of the amazing stuff that you've got going on? Bridger, thank you so much for having me.

This was really lovely, and I'm so excited about this show. Oh, thank you. Folks can follow me all over the internet at Jewel Monique. I don't know if I'll be on Twitter anymore, so we're expanding all the internet at Duel Monique. It's J-O-E-L-L-E-M-O-N-I-Q-U-E. If you find me on Instagram, I got there too late. So there's an underscore between the two.

two names. But please come, come find me on all. I'm on, I'm on the discords, the mastodons, Triceratops, all of them now, just looking for a new home. If you like a social media space that's mostly word-based, hit me up and tell me about it. I'll try it. I am, I need the outlet. I love it. Thank you for being here. I think that's it, Sophie. Yeah, that'll do for us this week on internet hate machine. Joel, we appreciate you. I appreciate you guys. Sophie, so good to see your face. And Bridget, hopefully, I'll talk to you soon, definitely about next. Yeah, yeah.

Anything you need the answer is yes. All right. Thank you, girl. You have a good one. Bye. Bye, guys. Internet hate machine is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media,

check out our website, coolzonemedia.com, or find us on the IHeartRadio 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, me and hilarious guests from Bob Oden,

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 I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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