February 20, 2024 • 38 mins
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.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd and this
is there Are No Girls on the Internet. I have
some sad news to share. Shapika Hudson, whose work basically
created the field of study on how to mobilize against
(00:25):
bad actors on social media when she created the hashtag
your slip is Showing in twenty fourteen, 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 Shappeka, and it's often tough, thankless, ignored,
and sometimes even dangerous. Even though Shappeka's work changed the
(00:49):
way we think about the Internet, she did it all unpaid.
She died crowdfunding for healthcare costs. Shaffika wanted people to
know the realities of long COVID. Last year, she tweeted,
when long COVID affects kill me sooner than later, I
need you all to recognize and say loudly what it was,
adding this won't be considered a massive crime against humanity
(01:11):
until we're all gone.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Just tell them.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
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
(01:33):
very first interviews I ever did for their No Girls
on the Internet back in twenty twenty 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 one hundred times
and one hundred different ways. People just don't listen to women,
(01:55):
especially Black women, and it comes with big consequences. 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
(02:17):
democracy and safety. Okay, so let's just get this out
of the way right now. Twitter is a bucking cesspool.
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
(02:39):
it and were ignored.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
These women weren't just being attacked.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
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?
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Shadika Hudson, freelancer tat Lady Sometimes activists.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Shapika had been using Twitter regularly since almost this very beginning,
where she spent most of her time online connecting with
other black feminists. In twenty fourteen year old 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 we should have polished Father's Day because too
(03:23):
many black men day outside of their race, or because
black men don't support their children.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Stuff that just seemed really out there.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Unless have had like ten different tabs open because I
was also like doing a job search and just going
about my life, and it some 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
(03:55):
any black feminist anywhere would say. It was like, what
was 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,
(04:15):
and the avatar was someone who I didn't recognize. Now,
the thing about the black women's 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 whoeveryone is like, and if you haven't met them
or seen them out, or you know, done a tweet up,
(04:36):
hung out at a party, something someone you know has
And in this particular instance, I'm clicked on the person
well the accounts profile. 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,
(04:59):
the photo of a black woman, but it just nothing
adds up. So that drove me to click on the
hashtag and 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,
(05:21):
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
(05:42):
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 were saying these awful things,
and I'm smart enough to know that nothing here that
(06:05):
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 feminists 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,
(06:26):
is is what I mean. But they were getting some reaction.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
That's when Shapika went from curious to piste.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
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 in the cartoons where the
character like starts seeming from their sp coming to your
ears as he hear the tea kettle whistle. I was curious.
(07:00):
So 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 in 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
(07:21):
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
(07:44):
be able to point out all of these accounts alone.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
You know how in movies when a character discovers this
thing they've been investigating as much, much bigger than they realized.
There is no pepe silvia, and this thing goes all
the way to the top. Well, that's how she speaks out.
She knew the Twitter accounts Pushing and 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 this to be a one off thing. It
(08:09):
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 fought back with a hashtag of her own, your
slipp ish Showing.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
I went ahead with your slippish showing. I might've run
another line like, I don't know your mess scare is
running something like that, but your slippy is showing just
seemed to work. It really just seemed to work.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Okay, So, if you're not a lady from the South,
the phrase your slipp ish 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 us a versiveness 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
(08:51):
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 pop that you aren't looking as
good and put together as you think you are.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
You know, just the sort of thing that one of
your aunties might say to you in church whence, oh, honey,
you need to you need to fix your slip. It's
showing except mean, because right, there's a there's a difference
between your slip is showing from one of your aunties
(09:24):
and your slip 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.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
I love how you kind of use this Southern auntie
expression that.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
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 probably that nu once probably
goes right over their head. 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
(10:13):
pick up on the nuance, and they really weren't.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
It's fitting that we're talking about getting the nuance. That's
certain something you can't really teach.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
This would ultimately be the undoing of people and personating
black women online, their inability to authentically sound like black women.
They'd try to use aave or African American evernacular 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 twenty fourteen,
(10:44):
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 aav
(11:08):
they're approximating.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
The thing that like really really really seemed to like
immediately point them out was this consistent and ability to
understand and properly use the habitual B. They didn't get it.
They did not like they they would use the habitual
(11:31):
B just kind of like for the future tents, 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.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
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 Forshan could sew with the feminist
online communities and to make actual feminists and 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 hijacking public
(12:12):
conversations about sensitive topics or wedge issues through medium manipulation
is a way of making people afraid of having an
opinion in public and ultimately trying to silence them.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
I'm Joan Donovan and I'm the research director at the
Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Doctor 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.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
Over time, just like the politicians learned 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
(13:15):
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
(13:37):
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
(13:57):
be artificial. It might be the case that people do
sympathize with you, people do want to help you grow
and learn, but certain medium manipulators see that as an
opportunity to swarm in and really drive the witch as
deep as it can go.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
A few right wing news outlets picked up the hashtag
and Father's Day and amplified it as a legitimate feminist take.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
This is how Fox News covered it, Like some of
these tweets, heres from Tasha. She wrote in and everyone
knows we only need mothers, Why do we even need
Father's Day? Fathers are useless?
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Hashtag and come.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
On, oh, come on, you're this nasty feminist rhetoric that
they're not just like interested in ending Father's Day, interesting
ending men, that's really what they want. But Shafika says,
only the kind of people who were already predisposed to
be skeptical of women and feminists, especially black women, fell
for it. Well, it was actually at first, I remember
(14:52):
I was incredulous, Like, honestly, I was looking at people like, oh,
and Father's Day feminists take a terrible turn and blah blah,
and I was like, you got to be hitting.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
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 her too much of anything outside of their
(15:25):
little Fox News bubble like that. 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.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
What's happening with black women online is much less widely
known than gamer Gate. Were angry men coordinated to harass
progressive voices online who were mostly women in the month's
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
(15:59):
it was happening. Wouldn't go forgotten or raised just because
it was happening to black women.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
As you're probably aware of, a lot of us are
big on what we call receipts, So there are plenty
of receipts. We've got the screen cabs. You can't even
you know, delete the tweets because we got it, we
got the information. But yeah, I mean, that's that's been
(16:26):
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'm not
I wouldn't consider myself a scholar at this particular point.
And my friend so True who also was absolutely integral
(16:50):
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.
(17:12):
It's a huge feature of a ra Sure 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 gamer
Gate as this weird thing that sort of happened before
(17:34):
gamer Gate 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 peak into the future. And again,
(17:54):
like I said, hindsight being twenty twenty once, when you
start to look back on all of these four chan
for I'm sorry, I can't say four chan without making
that noise. You have a special four chan noise I do.
Oh my gosh. Someone else pointed out to me. It's like,
do you realize that you just kind of make this
disgusted noise? What I mean you say, I'm like, I
(18:18):
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
(18:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Even at a time where we're having a conversations 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.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
Why do you think that is not? Yeah? That 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 four chan operation were black women. It's honestly, that's
my That's I have no other answer at this point,
(19:31):
has 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
(19:51):
were of black women, but particularly black feminists.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
We'll be right back after this quick break. People who
are traditionally marginalized online, like black women, are specifically impacted
by things like disinformation and harassment on social media.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
The ultimate goal is to freak them.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Out so much that they'll shut down their social media
and just stop talking.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Here's doctor Donovan again. Yeah, so we have.
Speaker 4 (20:24):
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 uh, there's a concept called gender trolling. It's
(20:44):
evolved into transtrolling, race trolling, queer trolling, where the characteristics
of your identity become the thing that they focus on,
and they'll, you know, they'll be a swarm of folk
that have coordinated in some other place, usually on a
message board, and they will target specific public figures or women,
(21:10):
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
(21:34):
level of threat making when it comes to trolling male candidates.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
And that has to do with.
Speaker 4 (21:42):
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 piece of the culture.
And so a lot of these people to to be
misogynists as well as racists, and in their smaller online
(22:07):
communities where they don't think they're watch 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,
(22:29):
and especially in this moment, we're seeing an incredible amount
of trolling around anti black racism. And the responsibility though,
for dealing with this, lies with the platform companies first
and foremost.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey hasn't always been the most responsive
to the misuse of the platform. You'd think you'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?
Speaker 3 (23:09):
No, that 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 it made the
news like so it's not as though he was ignorant.
(23:34):
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 had and had tools on
(23:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
As much as being left to fend for her own
community online sucked, it did teach Chapika that her online
community could do a lot with a little And while
that wasn't.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
Cool at all, and hopefully at some point, and 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,
(24:41):
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 on
a commission, there would have been a lot less for
(25:06):
gamer Gate 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.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
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 and 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,
(25:38):
then it might not be the sort of wide scale
situation that it is now.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
That is exactly correct, and that 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 well later taking the whole situation from like, you know,
(26:04):
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.
(26:27):
So you know that when you're selling your product, basically
we're we're the products 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 interests to say, Okay, well,
we have twenty accounts with one IP address that's suspicious
(26:52):
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
me Like, I'm pretty sure that was after everybody who
(27:13):
was like the head of social media got called in
front of Congress. Mm hmm, Like that's what it took.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
So that pretty much brings us to today.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
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
nineteen 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,
(27:45):
so division an increased polarization.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
This isn't just an online saying either.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
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 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
(28:11):
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.
Speaker 5 (28:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
We already know that Russia used social media to interfere
with the twenty sixteen 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 bony
(28:53):
black activist groups to influence Black voters to either stay
home or vote for Trump on election day. The Senate
Intelligence for 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 Shaffika were
complaining about years earlier, accounts posing as black people and
(29:13):
infistrating 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 unaddressed. Instead of identifying and learning the
spot tactics used to make our social media communities less
(29:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Now it's a tough question for her.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
This is always going to be a question that kind
of hangs in my mind because while I understand the
black voters were absolutely targeted, I'm not entirely sure that
we were fooled. Do you know what I mean? Right? Like,
(30:15):
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 posts, but that's neither here nor there.
I get not if you ask him, he didn't he
but we don't ask him things because we like honest answers.
But yeah, I mean, just the fact that this happened,
(30:38):
like it left us arguably vulnerable, and that even even
though I'm not sure how ultimately successful successful, it was
just the fact that we had foreign agents targeting voting
populations in the United States of America should have been
(31:02):
serious and due cause for alarm, because 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 we
left the door open like this. This was that was
a failure. That was I don't want to say it
(31:25):
was on me, because I feel like it definitely wasn't
on me, and it definitely wasn't on you, But it
was 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,
(31:48):
you know who's who's looking after us now? But yeah,
that that was a glaring example of just kind of
the general failure. Who addressed something that did not have
to get as big as a gout.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
More, there are no girls on the internet after this
quick break. The twenty twenty presidential election is one hundred
and twelve days away. Digital security experts agree that American
elections are vulnerable and not enough it's being done about it.
(32:26):
During Trump's impeachment hearing, Fiona Hill, the former National Security
Council advisor specializing in Russia and European affairs, said.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Right now Russia's security services and their proxies are geared
up to repeat their interference in the twenty twenty election.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
We're running out of time to stop them.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
So what do we do? Doctor Donovan says.
Speaker 4 (32:45):
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
(33:05):
quoted out of context. We've seen this happen to Joe
Biden a few different times. Then, of course we've seen
gas that these done 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
(33:27):
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
(33:49):
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 true 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
(34:09):
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 that feature.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
But will Twitter actually do any of that?
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Shapika 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's said one
(34:55):
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 for somebody.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
And I'm going to lead that right there. But it
looks like you know things aren't working, you start asking
questions and as a whole rabbit hole.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
That's the thing about the Internet. There's so much darkness
lurking in its corner. It's just waiting to spill out.
Or there's darkness, there's light too, or 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.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Being online is a constant.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Tight rope walk of acknowledging that darkness while still being
able to see the corners of light peeking through, and
even while wading through all of that darkness and ugliness.
It's the light that is really sustained Shaffika, after everything
she's been through, she's still grateful for Twitter as a
platform and all the good things that's brought to her life.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Honestly, it really helps that I have a strong and
supportive community, both online and off. I've really am super
grateful for Twitter for so many reasons, not the least
of which is because it's helped me expand my network,
(36:28):
and I've met amazing people and connected of 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,
(36:51):
you know, connect with people who understand one hundred percent
where I'm coming from. And that's in a world where
you know, we're frequently gas lit about the things that
we see and experience. That is absolutely invaluable.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
Oh and one more thing that helps.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
It also helps that I'm funny, honestly, having a sense
of humor and a wit of We'll get you through
pretty much. I don't want to say pretty much anything,
but how about this. It's gotten me through pretty.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Much everything, and you've been through some stuff.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
I've been through it.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
There are No Girls on the Internet. What's created by
me Frigetad. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative
Jonathan Stricklan is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our
producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer.
I'm your host, Brigittad. For more podcasts from iHeart, check
out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcast us. Thanks so much for listening to their
(38:04):
No Girls on the Internet. If you want to help
our podcast grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.
There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd and this
is there Are No Girls on the Internet. I have
some sad news to share. Shapika Hudson, whose work basically
created the field of study on how to mobilize against
(00:25):
bad actors on social media when she created the hashtag
your slip is Showing in twenty fourteen, 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 Shappeka, and it's often tough, thankless, ignored,
and sometimes even dangerous. Even though Shappeka's work changed the
(00:49):
way we think about the Internet, she did it all unpaid.
She died crowdfunding for healthcare costs. Shaffika wanted people to
know the realities of long COVID. Last year, she tweeted,
when long COVID affects kill me sooner than later, I
need you all to recognize and say loudly what it was,
adding this won't be considered a massive crime against humanity
(01:11):
until we're all gone.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Just tell them.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
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
(01:33):
very first interviews I ever did for their No Girls
on the Internet back in twenty twenty 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 one hundred times
and one hundred different ways. People just don't listen to women,
(01:55):
especially Black women, and it comes with big consequences. 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
(02:17):
democracy and safety. Okay, so let's just get this out
of the way right now. Twitter is a bucking cesspool.
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
(02:39):
it and were ignored.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
These women weren't just being attacked.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
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?
Speaker 3 (02:56):
Shadika Hudson, freelancer tat Lady Sometimes activists.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Shapika had been using Twitter regularly since almost this very beginning,
where she spent most of her time online connecting with
other black feminists. In twenty fourteen year old 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 we should have polished Father's Day because too
(03:23):
many black men day outside of their race, or because
black men don't support their children.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Stuff that just seemed really out there.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Unless have had like ten different tabs open because I
was also like doing a job search and just going
about my life, and it some 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
(03:55):
any black feminist anywhere would say. It was like, what
was 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,
(04:15):
and the avatar was someone who I didn't recognize. Now,
the thing about the black women's 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 whoeveryone is like, and if you haven't met them
or seen them out, or you know, done a tweet up,
(04:36):
hung out at a party, something someone you know has
And in this particular instance, I'm clicked on the person
well the accounts profile. 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,
(04:59):
the photo of a black woman, but it just nothing
adds up. So that drove me to click on the
hashtag and 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,
(05:21):
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
(05:42):
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 were saying these awful things,
and I'm smart enough to know that nothing here that
(06:05):
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 feminists 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,
(06:26):
is is what I mean. But they were getting some reaction.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
That's when Shapika went from curious to piste.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
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 in the cartoons where the
character like starts seeming from their sp coming to your
ears as he hear the tea kettle whistle. I was curious.
(07:00):
So 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 in 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
(07:21):
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
(07:44):
be able to point out all of these accounts alone.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
You know how in movies when a character discovers this
thing they've been investigating as much, much bigger than they realized.
There is no pepe silvia, and this thing goes all
the way to the top. Well, that's how she speaks out.
She knew the Twitter accounts Pushing and 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 this to be a one off thing. It
(08:09):
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 fought back with a hashtag of her own, your
slipp ish Showing.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
I went ahead with your slippish showing. I might've run
another line like, I don't know your mess scare is
running something like that, but your slippy is showing just
seemed to work. It really just seemed to work.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Okay, So, if you're not a lady from the South,
the phrase your slipp ish 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 us a versiveness 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
(08:51):
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 pop that you aren't looking as
good and put together as you think you are.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
You know, just the sort of thing that one of
your aunties might say to you in church whence, oh, honey,
you need to you need to fix your slip. It's
showing except mean, because right, there's a there's a difference
between your slip is showing from one of your aunties
(09:24):
and your slip 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.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
I love how you kind of use this Southern auntie
expression that.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
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 probably that nu once probably
goes right over their head. 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
(10:13):
pick up on the nuance, and they really weren't.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
It's fitting that we're talking about getting the nuance. That's
certain something you can't really teach.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
This would ultimately be the undoing of people and personating
black women online, their inability to authentically sound like black women.
They'd try to use aave or African American evernacular 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 twenty fourteen,
(10:44):
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 aav
(11:08):
they're approximating.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
The thing that like really really really seemed to like
immediately point them out was this consistent and ability to
understand and properly use the habitual B. They didn't get it.
They did not like they they would use the habitual
(11:31):
B just kind of like for the future tents, 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.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
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 Forshan could sew with the feminist
online communities and to make actual feminists and 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 hijacking public
(12:12):
conversations about sensitive topics or wedge issues through medium manipulation
is a way of making people afraid of having an
opinion in public and ultimately trying to silence them.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
I'm Joan Donovan and I'm the research director at the
Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Doctor 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.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
Over time, just like the politicians learned 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
(13:15):
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
(13:37):
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
(13:57):
be artificial. It might be the case that people do
sympathize with you, people do want to help you grow
and learn, but certain medium manipulators see that as an
opportunity to swarm in and really drive the witch as
deep as it can go.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
A few right wing news outlets picked up the hashtag
and Father's Day and amplified it as a legitimate feminist take.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
This is how Fox News covered it, Like some of
these tweets, heres from Tasha. She wrote in and everyone
knows we only need mothers, Why do we even need
Father's Day? Fathers are useless?
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Hashtag and come.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
On, oh, come on, you're this nasty feminist rhetoric that
they're not just like interested in ending Father's Day, interesting
ending men, that's really what they want. But Shafika says,
only the kind of people who were already predisposed to
be skeptical of women and feminists, especially black women, fell
for it. Well, it was actually at first, I remember
(14:52):
I was incredulous, Like, honestly, I was looking at people like, oh,
and Father's Day feminists take a terrible turn and blah blah,
and I was like, you got to be hitting.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
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 her too much of anything outside of their
(15:25):
little Fox News bubble like that. 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.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
What's happening with black women online is much less widely
known than gamer Gate. Were angry men coordinated to harass
progressive voices online who were mostly women in the month's
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
(15:59):
it was happening. Wouldn't go forgotten or raised just because
it was happening to black women.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
As you're probably aware of, a lot of us are
big on what we call receipts, So there are plenty
of receipts. We've got the screen cabs. You can't even
you know, delete the tweets because we got it, we
got the information. But yeah, I mean, that's that's been
(16:26):
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'm not
I wouldn't consider myself a scholar at this particular point.
And my friend so True who also was absolutely integral
(16:50):
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.
(17:12):
It's a huge feature of a ra Sure 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 gamer
Gate as this weird thing that sort of happened before
(17:34):
gamer Gate 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 peak into the future. And again,
(17:54):
like I said, hindsight being twenty twenty once, when you
start to look back on all of these four chan
for I'm sorry, I can't say four chan without making
that noise. You have a special four chan noise I do.
Oh my gosh. Someone else pointed out to me. It's like,
do you realize that you just kind of make this
disgusted noise? What I mean you say, I'm like, I
(18:18):
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
(18:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Even at a time where we're having a conversations 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.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
Why do you think that is not? Yeah? That 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 four chan operation were black women. It's honestly, that's
my That's I have no other answer at this point,
(19:31):
has 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
(19:51):
were of black women, but particularly black feminists.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
We'll be right back after this quick break. People who
are traditionally marginalized online, like black women, are specifically impacted
by things like disinformation and harassment on social media.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
The ultimate goal is to freak them.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Out so much that they'll shut down their social media
and just stop talking.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Here's doctor Donovan again. Yeah, so we have.
Speaker 4 (20:24):
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 uh, there's a concept called gender trolling. It's
(20:44):
evolved into transtrolling, race trolling, queer trolling, where the characteristics
of your identity become the thing that they focus on,
and they'll, you know, they'll be a swarm of folk
that have coordinated in some other place, usually on a
message board, and they will target specific public figures or women,
(21:10):
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
(21:34):
level of threat making when it comes to trolling male candidates.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
And that has to do with.
Speaker 4 (21:42):
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 piece of the culture.
And so a lot of these people to to be
misogynists as well as racists, and in their smaller online
(22:07):
communities where they don't think they're watch 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,
(22:29):
and especially in this moment, we're seeing an incredible amount
of trolling around anti black racism. And the responsibility though,
for dealing with this, lies with the platform companies first
and foremost.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey hasn't always been the most responsive
to the misuse of the platform. You'd think you'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?
Speaker 3 (23:09):
No, that 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 it made the
news like so it's not as though he was ignorant.
(23:34):
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 had and had tools on
(23:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
As much as being left to fend for her own
community online sucked, it did teach Chapika that her online
community could do a lot with a little And while
that wasn't.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
Cool at all, and hopefully at some point, and 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,
(24:41):
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 on
a commission, there would have been a lot less for
(25:06):
gamer Gate 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.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
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 and 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,
(25:38):
then it might not be the sort of wide scale
situation that it is now.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
That is exactly correct, and that 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 well later taking the whole situation from like, you know,
(26:04):
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.
(26:27):
So you know that when you're selling your product, basically
we're we're the products 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 interests to say, Okay, well,
we have twenty accounts with one IP address that's suspicious
(26:52):
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
me Like, I'm pretty sure that was after everybody who
(27:13):
was like the head of social media got called in
front of Congress. Mm hmm, Like that's what it took.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
So that pretty much brings us to today.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
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
nineteen 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,
(27:45):
so division an increased polarization.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
This isn't just an online saying either.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
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 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
(28:11):
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.
Speaker 5 (28:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
We already know that Russia used social media to interfere
with the twenty sixteen 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 bony
(28:53):
black activist groups to influence Black voters to either stay
home or vote for Trump on election day. The Senate
Intelligence for 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 Shaffika were
complaining about years earlier, accounts posing as black people and
(29:13):
infistrating 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 unaddressed. Instead of identifying and learning the
spot tactics used to make our social media communities less
(29:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Now it's a tough question for her.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
This is always going to be a question that kind
of hangs in my mind because while I understand the
black voters were absolutely targeted, I'm not entirely sure that
we were fooled. Do you know what I mean? Right? Like,
(30:15):
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 posts, but that's neither here nor there.
I get not if you ask him, he didn't he
but we don't ask him things because we like honest answers.
But yeah, I mean, just the fact that this happened,
(30:38):
like it left us arguably vulnerable, and that even even
though I'm not sure how ultimately successful successful, it was
just the fact that we had foreign agents targeting voting
populations in the United States of America should have been
(31:02):
serious and due cause for alarm, because 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 we
left the door open like this. This was that was
a failure. That was I don't want to say it
(31:25):
was on me, because I feel like it definitely wasn't
on me, and it definitely wasn't on you, But it
was 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,
(31:48):
you know who's who's looking after us now? But yeah,
that that was a glaring example of just kind of
the general failure. Who addressed something that did not have
to get as big as a gout.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
More, there are no girls on the internet after this
quick break. The twenty twenty presidential election is one hundred
and twelve days away. Digital security experts agree that American
elections are vulnerable and not enough it's being done about it.
(32:26):
During Trump's impeachment hearing, Fiona Hill, the former National Security
Council advisor specializing in Russia and European affairs, said.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
Right now Russia's security services and their proxies are geared
up to repeat their interference in the twenty twenty election.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
We're running out of time to stop them.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
So what do we do? Doctor Donovan says.
Speaker 4 (32:45):
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
(33:05):
quoted out of context. We've seen this happen to Joe
Biden a few different times. Then, of course we've seen
gas that these done 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
(33:27):
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
(33:49):
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 true 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
(34:09):
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 that feature.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
But will Twitter actually do any of that?
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Shapika 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's said one
(34:55):
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 for somebody.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
And I'm going to lead that right there. But it
looks like you know things aren't working, you start asking
questions and as a whole rabbit hole.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
That's the thing about the Internet. There's so much darkness
lurking in its corner. It's just waiting to spill out.
Or there's darkness, there's light too, or 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.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Being online is a constant.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Tight rope walk of acknowledging that darkness while still being
able to see the corners of light peeking through, and
even while wading through all of that darkness and ugliness.
It's the light that is really sustained Shaffika, after everything
she's been through, she's still grateful for Twitter as a
platform and all the good things that's brought to her life.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Honestly, it really helps that I have a strong and
supportive community, both online and off. I've really am super
grateful for Twitter for so many reasons, not the least
of which is because it's helped me expand my network,
(36:28):
and I've met amazing people and connected of 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,
(36:51):
you know, connect with people who understand one hundred percent
where I'm coming from. And that's in a world where
you know, we're frequently gas lit about the things that
we see and experience. That is absolutely invaluable.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
Oh and one more thing that helps.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
It also helps that I'm funny, honestly, having a sense
of humor and a wit of We'll get you through
pretty much. I don't want to say pretty much anything,
but how about this. It's gotten me through pretty.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Much everything, and you've been through some stuff.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
I've been through it.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
There are No Girls on the Internet. What's created by
me Frigetad. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative
Jonathan Stricklan is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our
producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer.
I'm your host, Brigittad. For more podcasts from iHeart, check
out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcast us. Thanks so much for listening to their
(38:04):
No Girls on the Internet. If you want to help
our podcast grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.