October 28, 2025 • 49 mins
We all know the internet loves a viral story. But what happens when that story is about a real woman being harassed and the platforms that ostensibly should be protecting her instead punish her? That’s what happened to Livie, a DoorDash driver in New York State whose story is currently going viral on TikTok. Bridget breaks down what actually happened, why the story is drowning in misinformation and AI generated fake videos, and what the story tells us about where we’re at right now when it comes to women speaking up online.
See Livie's video(s) for yourself: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/19jTtPWjZH/?mibextid=wwXIfr
MuURLS, a creator on TikTok was cloned by AI: https://www.tiktok.com/@muurlz/video/7563725293693783309?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc
NotKristen’s TikTok on AI clones: https://www.tiktok.com/@notkhristen/video/7563433687476358430?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc
Liberal feminist “triggered”: https://imgflip.com/i/65wr5r
The real “triggered feminist” video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byOlBCpNKeM
If you’re listening on Spotify, you can leave a comment there to let us know what you thought about these stories, or email us at hello@tangoti.com
Follow Bridget and TANGOTI on social media! || instagram.com/bridgetmarieindc/ || tiktok.com/@bridgetmarieindc || youtube.com/@ThereAreNoGirlsOnTheInternet
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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 Bridge Tad and this
is there are No Girls on the Internet. So we
all know the Internet loves a viral story. It loves outrage, suspense, villains, drama,
(00:24):
all of it. But what happens when the story is
about a real woman who says that she has been
the victim of a sex crime and the platforms that
ostensibly should be protecting her punish her instead. That is
what happened to this woman called Livy, a gor dash
driver in New York State whose story recently went viral
on TikTok. I wanted to talk about this on the
(00:45):
News Roundup, but honestly, I had so much to say
about it that I thought this needs to be its
own episode because I think it shows us so much
about where we're at right now when it comes to
the state of women speaking up online. When we were
talking about potentially doing an episode about this situation. In
the beginning, when I first started researching it, I was
(01:06):
just curious about this story. I was seeing this story
all over my TikTok feed and I wanted to understand
it better. But by the end of putting together my
research and really doing a deep dive into what's going
on here, I went from curious to pissed off and
also quite worried about what this situation means for all
of us. So I'm going to get into the logistics
(01:27):
of what's going on here with this viral door dash
story on TikTok, how Ai is fueling, how we got
to this place and what it all means.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
It seems like a complicated story, an interesting one, I think,
a good one for you to tell.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
In some ways it is complicated, but in other ways
it's very uncomplicated tale as old as time, the most
simple story that we all recognize and understand. It's sort
of both of those things that want. So here's what's
going on. On October twelfth, a woman called Livy, who
does DoorDash for a living, made a TikTok explaining that
she got an order on DoorDash from a customer who
(02:04):
asked her to leave the order on the porch outside.
When she got to the customer's home, she says that
she walks up the stairs to the porch and saw
the door partially open and inside was the customer laying
across the sofa, supposedly asleep, laying motionless with his face
covered and his pants and underwear dad around his ankles
(02:25):
exposed from the waist down. I should explain some logistics
here that the way that the door in the couch
is situated, there is no way that anybody walking up
on this porch, like the door dasher that you thumb
into your home, would not see somebody laying on the
couch from where the couch is positioned. The couch that
he was on is right across from the door facing it.
(02:45):
Like if somebody was standing on the porch and the
door was open, somebody sitting on the couch, you would
see each other directly. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2 (02:54):
It does? Yeah, And we'll link to the video in
the show notes.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah, this episode will include some visual thing I will
do my best to explain them, but this is not
a video podcast, so we will put the links to
the things that you need to see, but I'll make
it clear what's going on even if you don't do that.
So Livy's version of what I just explained is illustrated
in a TikTok that she made and posted that shows
(03:18):
her standing outside of this porch with the door open,
with this man exposing himself in full view. Here's what
Livy said Ator TikTok.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
The customer who committed a crime against me requested that
their order be left at their front door, and when
I arrived to their house, their front door was wide open.
It was fifty nine degrees fahrenheit, all of their lights
were on, and they were sleeping on the couch within
eyesight of the front door, with their pants and underwear
pulled down to their ankles. This person's name is Austin
(03:48):
and their last initial is N. I reported this to
DoorDash and the police, and DoorDash luckily banned the customer,
but the police are doing nothing. I also posted the
video that I have of the proof to TikTok, and
after a day and a half of it going completely viral,
TikTok took down the video for suggestive content and gave
(04:09):
my account a strike. They've also denied my appeal to
have it reinstated. I'm absolutely reposting the video again, but
with a little sensor blur so it can't be removed
for the same reason because this is literally the only
justice I'm getting in the wake of my victimhood. The
police are doing nothing to prevent or stop this man
from doing it again, and they're not doing anything to
(04:30):
punish him for already having done it. So if the
only justice I'm going to get is the fact that
he's banned off the platform and that video went viral
and now he can live with that shame and embarrassment,
then that's what it's going to have to be.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
So TikTok keep this video up.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
So Livy says that she reported this man to DoorDash,
and DoorDash kicks the man off of the platform, but
they also kicked her off the platform too, essentially blocking
her from being able to make money, and she's is
that DoorDash is her only source of income.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
Hey guys, So DoorDash just deactivated me two days after
I reported my sexual assault. Hey guys, I just lost
my job and they won't tell me why. They're supposed
to send an email immediately after deactivation providing you the
reason why and a link to appeal, and they didn't.
So I contacted support and they made me sit on
(05:24):
the phone with them for fifty minutes just to tell
me that they can't tell me the reason why. And
I have to just go ahead and appeal without knowing why,
so my chances of getting my account back. They have
my money in that account. I was working, I was
literally working, and they deactivated me.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
This is not this is related.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
They just punished me for posting about my sexual assault
while door dashing. They just fired me, and the police
are doing nothing. I lost my job and that was
my only way to make money to pay my.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Bilf Initially, Lidy said that DoorDash never even told her
why they kicked her off the platform, though she does
say that she feels that it's connected to the TikTok
that she made about this man, which yeah it is.
DoorDash put out a statement explaining why they kicked her
off the platform. Livy says they made this statement without
ever actually talking to her directly about why they deactivated
(06:23):
her account. She says that when the general public found
out why she was deactivated from being on DoorDash is
the same time that she found out why she was deactivated.
They never talked to her. This put out this statement.
Here's what DoorDash said. No one should ever have to
experience sexual assault, harassment, or abuse, and DoorDash never deactivates
someone for reporting it full stop. We take these reports
(06:44):
incredibly seriously and work closely with law enforcement to investigate
and support those affected. However, posting a video of a
customer in their home and disclosing their personal details publicly
is a clear violation of our policies. That is the
sole reason why this dasher's account was deactivated along with
the customers while we investigated. DoorDash also told Newsweek that
(07:04):
they're investigating to make sure that Livy gets whatever full
payments she's owed from the work she had done from DoorDash,
because she had not been able to cash out before
her account was deactivated. Though I have no idea if
they're going to make good on this, it's just what
they said in their statement, So DoorDash is basically saying,
you know, hey, we didn't deactivate Livy's account because she
reported a sex crime. We deactivated her account because she
(07:26):
posted a video of a DoorDash customer. I'll say it
would have been nice if DoorDash told Livy this directly,
rather than simply deactivating her account with money in it.
But as we'll talk about in a moment, the whole
dynamic of gig work is that companies like DoorDash don't
really have to do shit because they don't have employees,
they have contractors, And so I get where Livy is
(07:49):
coming from, but that is sort of the nature of
the beast here. So a big question that is coming
up online is whether or not Livy should have made
this video in the first place. Livy says that she
had wanted video evidence of what happened, and I will say,
had she come to the Internet without video evidence of
what she says happened, I'm sure the conversation would have
(08:09):
been entirely different.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Yeah, and you know, there's something about this story that
really makes one want to, like, I don't know, like
like way in or like pulls you in to want
to say, like what she you know, was she and
the right? Was she in the wrong? Should she have
done this or that? Or something about the story really
pulls a person in, I think, and I think you're
(08:33):
totally right that without that video, it's hard to even
imagine that there would even be any story there beyond
you know, just what she's going through exactly.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
And a lot of people are saying, oh, well, I
wouldn't have an issue with what she did if she
just sent that video directly to door Dash and left
it at that, like why did she have to post
as the TikTok and I get that. Livy says that
she called the non emergency police line to report this
to the police. After she reports it to DoorDash, she
says a police officer actually came out to speak with
(09:03):
her about what she wanted to do. She said that
she wanted to press charges if possible, to make sure
that this guy was not able to do this to
another person. In one of her videos, she actually points
out that this guy lives in a duplex, and she says,
what if there had been a kid out on the
porch on the other shared unit, And so she said
that she wanted to report this to the police just
(09:23):
to make sure that this wasn't going to be a
recurring thing with this guy. But she says the police
told her that she couldn't really press charges in this
state because this man was in his own house and
that it wasn't like he got up to lunge toward
her or anything like that. So Livy says that she
posted it because the police essentially weren't doing anything about it,
weren't taking it seriously. But her posting that video to
(09:47):
TikTok is what DoorDash says is the reason for her
being deactivated from the platform. Honestly, I can't act like
I don't see where DoorDash is coming from here that
they probably can't have doordashers posting video of their customers
like this on TikTok. Now what I have done this
if I were Livy? Probably not, because personally, at this
(10:08):
point in my life, I almost never think that bringing
something to the Internet is going to make a situation better.
These days, I have only seen the Internet getting involved
making things worse. But that's just me. But I also
think we really crave perfect victims, right, victims who would
act and behave exactly like we think that we would
(10:30):
act and behave in whatever situation. So the fact that
Livy is doing something that I personally would not do
doesn't mean anything, right. I think we really had this idea.
When we hear something like this, we think, well, what
would I do? And if this person didn't do things
like I think I would do things, something must be up.
She must be lying. That's a red flag. I also
think the fact that Livy is on TikTok talking very
(10:54):
loudly about this thing that happened to her. I just
think people don't like that. Like, I'm sad to see
that people have taken one specific bit from one of
Livy's mini videos about this where she's very upset, and
they've turned it into a really hurtful meme on TikTok.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
A man's world.
Speaker 5 (11:14):
I'm the victim, remember.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
So they've taken a screenshot which is a close up
of her face while Livy is pleading with people to
remember that she is the victim in this situation, and
it's been making the rounds on TikTok. If you check
the comments of Livy's other posts on TikTok, people are
putting that screenshot of that image of her face very
pained while while speaking to you at this situation in the
(11:40):
comments to make fun of her. Her face in this
image is tortured and pained because she is very upset,
and it reminds me if you've seen that image of
it's kind of a if you googled liberal feminist triggered.
It's a picture that makes her look like she is screaming,
and it's an image that it's become a me when
people want to reference sort of triggered angry feminist meltdown.
(12:05):
But when you actually look at the real full video
that that image was taken from, it's a feminist woman
in a campus debate and she's just having a fairly
normal conversation with somebody. It's a conversation that's like somewhat
hostile because she's citing rape statistics or something, but she's
not screaming. She barely even raises her voice in that video.
(12:30):
The only issue is is that she has an expressive face,
and so in this image she looks like she is
screaming or having some sort of a triggered feminist meltdown.
But really she's just having a pretty normal conversation with someone,
I would say even like a fairly civil conversation with somebody.
And yet online she has become the face of triggered
(12:52):
lying feminists everywhere. Never mind that men like Alex Jones
and Andrew Breitbart, like, do you remember seeing what it looks
like when they would talk. They would be frothing at
the mouth and screaming and veins popping out of their
necks and foreheads, and fans loved it. So the rules
are simply different for men. You know, Andrew Breitbart did
(13:15):
not become the face of triggered men everywhere when he
would have legit freakouts on camera.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Yeah, the outrage and the performative like energy I think
was a big part of it for those guys.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Absolutely so. I think this image and clip of Livy
speaking with a pained face having a big emotion says
a lot about how we want and expect women to
behave after experiencing something traumatic, and how much stigma there
is around labeling oneself as a victim. I also think
we want victims who are quiet about what they've experienced.
(13:51):
When someone screaming about it, even if whatever happened to
them is worth screaming about, I think for a lot
of people they automatically assume that that person screaming is
in the wrong, because what we actually want is a
society where women who are harmed also just shut up
about it. So people are also taking issue with the
fact that Livy says that she was quote sexually assaulted
(14:12):
in her TikTok, saying, how could someone sexually assault you
if they didn't touch you, if you'd never had physical contact.
This is a little bit in the weeds, but according
to the Office on Violence against Women. The term sexual
assault means any non consensual sexual act prescribed by federal, tribal,
or state law, including the victim lacks capacity to consent.
(14:33):
But in a legal sense, state laws can vary, so
can the definitions used for sexual assault. So flashing or
indecent exposure may be a sexual offense and a sex crime,
but it is not always classified legally as sexual assault
in a stripped legal sense, because that depends on the state.
It really strikes me as an odd thing to get
(14:55):
hung up on this specific legal designation the way that
a lot of people have on TikTok to call Livy
a liar. But I did want to mention it, and
I guess I wish that all of this discourse about
the technical definitions of sexual assault versus sexual offense versus
sex crime was happening in an effort to educate people
rather than belittle this woman who says that she was
(15:15):
forced to look at a stranger's penis while just trying
to do her job. But here we are, like, I've
seen a lot of people say Livy is lying about
saying that she was sexually assaulted, and that minimizes actual
sexual assault and makes it harder for actual victims, but
in decent exposure, is very much a sex crime, even
if it is not specifically legally categorized as sexual assault.
(15:38):
It's very clear to me that people who are bringing
this up are trying to use it to parse Livy's
words to make her look like an unreliable narrator and
a liar. They're not doing it in an effort to
actually advocate for victims of sexualized violence. Because even if
this is not legally a sexual assault the way that
Livy says it is, it is still a sex crime. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
I think a good sort of test for that sort
of thing is like, why don't you try it at work? Like,
if it's not actually any sort of a problem, just
go ahead and do it at work and see what happens.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Yeah, I want all of these guys who are saying
it's not actually a crime, Yeah, do it to your
HR lady and see what she says. See how it
goes for you. Let's take a quick break at our back.
(16:36):
So Liviy post this video to TikTok and says that
TikTok took action against her for uploading this video. She
says the app initially removed her video and issued a
strike against her account. When she initially posted it with
the man with his pants down visible, she uploaded it again,
obscuring the man's junk from the video, but that video
(16:56):
was also removed and she got a second strike. Now,
if it sounds like I'm being super careful and specific
about how I'm describing the situation, it is because the
entire internet. Okay, we'll have the entire Internet, but a
whole hell of a lot of people have decided that
Livy is lying about what happened, because at first it
(17:16):
seemed like people were supporting Livvy and then something turned
and to me, it seems like one of the many
examples that we have of a woman being smeared by
millions of people online for speaking up about something that
she says happened to her. Right, there's a whole shade
of something that we talk about a lot on the podcast,
(17:37):
when people appoint themselves as investigators to litigate the details
of other people's personal lives. I think there's a lot
of true crime brain rot out there that happens where
people online decide that they know the real story that
the rest of us aren't being told about what's happening
with these strangers. And it's one of the reasons why
(17:59):
when these stories come up, which they often do online,
I am the you know, wet blanket voice that says,
maybe it's not good to have millions of people jumping
into the business of strangers in this way. I totally
get that it is exhilarating. Who doesn't love going down
a rabbit hole of somebody else's drama. But it's one
thing when we're talking about a fictional character. It's another
(18:22):
thing when we're talking about a real, everyday person. We
saw it with West Elm Caleb, the guy who worked
at West Elm who met a bunch of women on
a dating app and was making them all personalized playlists
on Spotify to woo them. We saw it with that
TikTok woman who surprised visited her long distance boyfriend and
he gives her kind of a weird chili reception, and
(18:44):
the entire internet decided that he was cheating on her
because they all became body language experts. We saw it
with that Coldplay concert couple, you know, that couple who
made a very weird kind of cought reaction when they
were on the JumboTron canoodling at a Coldplay and Coldplay
frontman Chris Martin wondered out loud like, oh, they must
(19:04):
be having an affair, which, by the way, I have
no idea if this is true. But after the hubbub
died down, I read that at least one of the
couples in that situation said that, yeah, I'm still legally married,
but I've been separated from my spouse for a while
when that cold Play concert happened, Like, my spouse is
also dating. We're not together, so I know it makes
(19:25):
me a wet blanket. But when these big moments happen
that light the Internet on fire, everybody is talking about
somebody else's life, I think they truly illustrate how deeply
surveiled we are socially as a society, how we are
doing the surveiling and we are the surveiled. And I
think this is especially bad for women, because when the
(19:46):
Internet turns on women, even famous women who are the
victims of abuse, people like Megna Stallion or Amber Heard,
it's not just speculation. It is the reliable misogyny of
the Internet being so easily weaponized against her to smear
her and silence her. All the old tropes around gender
that we all know women live for attention, women can't
(20:09):
be trusted. Good innocent men are having their lives ruined
for over nothing by lying bitches. All of these tired
old tropes that permeate how we talk about and understand
gender get dialed up to eleven on social media because
misogyny will always find an audience online just by the
nature of how social media is designed. And this is
(20:32):
a feature, not a bug. It is how our platforms
were designed from their earliest days. I will say it
till I'm blue in the face. Never forget that Facebook
started as a way for Zuckerberg to get revenge on
women who did not want to date him. So this
is just baked into our internet ecosystem, and I think
we really see it with how this whole Livy situation
(20:53):
is playing out. So after Livy shared her story, people
online started saying that she is not really a victim
in situation because she did not just innocently walk up
to the door dash customer's door and find him naked
from the waist down, as she claimed. She actually walked
up to a closed door, opened it without knocking and
(21:14):
without permission, saw an undressed man asleep in his own home,
took a video of him exposed, posted an online and
that she is the one who is actually violating him.
That is the narrative that has really taken off online.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Well, that's odd because that is not what is depicted
in that video that she posted. In that video she posted,
she doesn't open the door. The door is already open.
So where is this other narrative coming from?
Speaker 1 (21:44):
Great question. So one is just sort of logistical. Because
Libby had to remove the original footage that she uploaded
to TikTok from the platform, it has become somewhat difficult,
though not impossible, to find the original video that she
uploaded about the situation, and that has allowed people to
really fill the gap in with their own idea of
what must have happened. So if you search TikTok for
(22:05):
door Dash Lady DoorDash situation, whatever, you will find people
saying with certainty that yes, they know that Livy pushed
this closed door open. That has just become accepted as
fact in this situation. When I was just doing research,
somebody on a different platform threads said, Oh, why is
everybody what's going on with this DoorDash situation. Somebody else replied,
(22:29):
she opened a closed door and is acting like she's
a victim because of it. I replied, can you link
me to proof? How do you know this is their proof?
Everybody is like, there is no proof. Everyone's just saying
they've seen proof, but there is no proof. There are
even people making jokey tiktoks purporting to recreate Livy's POV
where she pushes open a closed door and then winds like,
(22:53):
oh no, I'm being assaulted by a naked man in
his own home. I have to say, some of these
videos being made to make fun of Livy do seem
to be AI generated. They're using AI generators like Sora,
But I'm sad to say that a lot of them
(23:13):
that I've seen are real people, real women, taking the
TikTok to make fun of Livy for saying this happened
to her. So it's just sort of become understood as
the facts of what happened, without any proof at all
that it's actually true. And importantly, there are people saying
(23:33):
that there is another angle, or that the man in
the situation uploaded ringed hamrat footage proving that Livvy actually
opened a closed door without his permission and was the
one violating him. I kind of went down the rabbit
hole on this one. You know, we talked a little
bit about how with the Taylor Swift conversation, how you
(23:56):
can just really sniff it out what a conversation happening
online is not happening in a normal, authentic way. You
can just tell where there are real people jumping on
a bandwagon, and then also some of it is not
authentic conversation, Mike. I know that when we were having
a pitch meeting, I was trying to explain what was
(24:18):
going on with what I had seen on TikTok, and
I felt like when we were speaking, I felt compelled
to keep reiterating to you that I was one hundred percent,
stone cold sober while I was speaking about this, because
I felt like the way that I was talking about
it made me seem like I was not sober.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Do you remember this, Yeah, I remember you showing me
a couple of videos back to back where totally different
people were saying the exact same thing, like word for word,
the exact same script about like, I woke up and
I saw this story and I had to get into it,
but like word for word, and it was weird. It
(24:57):
was like I felt like U like living in the
Truman Show or something like the algorithm was these videos
were created just to like convince you of something.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
Yes, so it is not totally uncommon for a human
creator to recreate a TikTok that another human creator has made.
Like I've seen that. I know that happens, but that
wasn't this. This was the same identical cadence, the same
idea it was. It was yeah, it was as if
they were reading a script. And then I realized one
(25:30):
of these is a I like genuinely, I thought I
was going crazy until I saw this TikTok that broke
it down.
Speaker 6 (25:38):
Everybody's talking about the door dash Girl. I was looking
at certain videos and I came across this one.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
I saw the original video of the door Daft Girl.
And I'm a limited and confused now that I woke
up and see everything that's happening. But I saw it.
I saw, Hey, I understand why DoorDash I guess fired
you again? Why you're a block from now?
Speaker 6 (25:54):
As for the guy, that's a little weird, right, Why
are they saying the same thing in a very similar
tone and a very similar cadence. Is there a script,
is somebody copying somebody? Or is that video on the
right fucking AI? It's a AI, and not just that video.
Her entire fucking page is artificial intelligence generated video. Okay, Now,
when you look at the page, you can kind of
tell it's just gibberish. There's there's no like links or anything,
(26:15):
no name. But when you just scroll by these videos,
it's pretty hard to tell unless you're really paying attention
to how she speaks.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
And it gets even weirder because m u URLs on TikTok,
who is a human TikToker on TikTok, says that somebody
stole her likeness, stole her voice, generated an AI version
of her to make it appear as though she weighed
in on this door dash situation. When she did it,
(26:41):
I would not have known that this was an AI
clone of a real person unless I really really look.
If I'm just swipe swipe swiping, I don't think I
would have clocked that this is AI if I had
not also come across this woman saying, Hey, this isn't me,
It's an AI clone of me that somebody has made,
please report it so you can really see how the
proliferation of AI can turbocharge manipulated, inauthentic conversation about a
(27:06):
hot button charged topic, even when it's not about a
big celebrity like Taylor Swift but a regular person like Livy.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
I really think, Slash hope that there will be a
time in the future when we look back at this
era when it's totally legal and fine for whoever to
be creating all these AI generated videos that just like
steal people's likenesses report to be real people even though
(27:36):
they're not, and just like flooding the information ecosystem that
we all have to live in, just flooding that with
these fake accounts that are not fake but like inauthentic,
that are purporting to be real humans when they are not.
And it's just it's just like fine, Like the platforms
don't really care. It's totally legal, it's not stable. And
(28:00):
so I really think at some point in the future
we're going to look back at this time and just
like shake our heads and uh, I can't wait to
get to that future.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
Yes, And what's so interesting to me is the woman
who was cloned the real woman really put it well
that this is a credibility issue. If you are a
big TikToker and you make your living like I'm a podcaster,
I make my living putting my ideas out into the world,
expressing myself using my voice. If somebody cloned me, which
(28:30):
please don't do that. If you're listening in your thing,
I'm going to make a bridget clone, please don't. But
if somebody did, that could materially harm me as somebody
whose credibility and body of work depends on people being
able to trust me, people being able to take what
I say as something they should be listening to to
help them understand the world. If somebody steals my voice
(28:51):
in my likeness to just say whatever, to weigh in
on things that I would never weigh in on, or
put ideas out into the world that I would never express,
that could materially harm me in a real way.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Yeah, that's not like some new concept, Like we've had
laws about that sort of thing for many, many years. Right,
you can't just like impersonate someone else, like obviously there
are laws against that in the offline world. But somehow,
with this new technology, people are acting like it's fine,
even though It's like the exact same dynamic and the
(29:24):
exact same risk.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
But what if you could impersonate somebody else and make
a little change doing it? Then what See the thing
is here companies like open ai are making money, So
what if you could do it and it was okay
and it was legal.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
You know, it does get engagement, so the people want
it so.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Counter So the conversation about door dash Lady has really
gotten out of hand with AI clones and bots being
weaponized and lies and images being manipuulated. But to be clear,
I don't think this is some big conspiracy where DoorDash
is buying bots and AI clones to manipulate the conversation
(30:08):
around what happened here. It is possible, and I don't
put anything past or corporation. If you ever think a
company wouldn't do something absolutely fucking unhinged to protect their
bottom line, look into one of the weirdest stories I
have ever covered on this podcast, which is the eBay
stalking and harassment case, where high level eBay executives were
(30:31):
arrested for a year's long harassment campaign against an elderly
couple where they were doing things like putting dead animals
in their mailbox to harass them out of running a
blog about eBay. Right, So if you ever think, oh,
executives don't do shady stuff to protect their business interest,
they wouldn't do that. They would. So I'm not saying
(30:53):
this because I think it's a bridge too far that
a company would buy and exploit AI clones and bots
to manipulate a situation. But my gut is telling me
that what's going on here it's just an engagement thing.
It is possible that DoorDash is running this complex bot
and AI campaign to semere Livy, but I think what
is probably more likely is that these bots and AI
(31:15):
clones are jumping on any trending, big topic that people
are talking about on social media, and that they don't
care if it's based on amplifying lies about a real woman.
And that is what pisses me off and worries me
so much about this story. That we have reached a
point where there is an entire slate of digital tools,
(31:36):
including AI, that can be used to discredit somebody who
says that they were the victim of a sex crime,
because I've seen AI generated ring camera footage that supposedly
exonerates this man and proves that Livy open this door,
but it's not real. I've seen manipulated photos that purport
to exonerate this man. That is an image of this
(31:58):
man's front door that is obviously been cropped in such
a way to make the door look a lot less
open than Livy's footage initially showed what seems like, oh well,
the door was open just a tiny bit, but they've
cropped it to make it look that way. And because
Livy's original footage was taken down from TikTok, it's a
little bit harder for people to go back and compare
it with what she actually posted. Then you have obvious
(32:21):
bot accounts amplifying and repeating these claims to the point
where they've just become true online, whether or not they
actually happened or not. I've talked about how my ethos
on this show is that I'm a nosy bitch and
I just want to get to the bottom of what's
going on. So nosy bitch that I am. I have
searched high and low for any additional footage, ring camera footage,
(32:43):
other angles, whatever, whatever, all of the stuff that people
in bots say they have seen online that exonerates this man,
improves that Livy's in the wrong. I have not seen
a stitch of evidence. It just doesn't mass the smell
test with me. People upload videos on TikTok and elite them,
and there's always somebody that gets the screen shot. There's
always somebody that gets the screen recording of it. The
(33:05):
fact that there would not be a stitch of evidence
for this video that so many people have said that
they saw with their own eyes that exonerates this man.
I just don't believe that it's out there. It is
possible that it is, but I tell you I have
not if it exists, I have searched high and low.
I have not seen it. The only video footage of
the situation that I have found is the footage that
(33:27):
Livy took initially, which backs up her version of what
she says happened. More after a quick break, let's get
right back into it now. I want to be clear.
(33:51):
It is entirely possible that Livy did push that door
open and then whip out her phone and start filming
to a video that backs up her version of events.
It's entirely possible that that happened. We have no way
of knowing for sure, I am a mere spectator here,
just like everybody in this situation. But to me, that
(34:13):
makes absolutely no sense, just doesn't pass muster.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Earlier in this episode, you talked about how this whole
story one of the things that shows is how surveiled
we all are, and I think that's a good insight.
And part of that fact of life these days is
that there's an expectation of surveillance that of course there's
going to be multiple camera angles and there's like more
(34:40):
footage from somewhere else, And you know, I have to
wonder if that maybe is part of why people are
so like eager to believe that the other footage is
out there, because you know, this thing happened and there's
a lot of interest about it, and so of course
there has to be more footage, when in fact, most
things that happened in the world do not get recorded
(35:01):
on video.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Yeah, but again, I think it goes back to that
true crime brain rot where people assume everything's going to
happen the way it would happen in a fictional movie
or a fictional series, and in reality, there probably isn't
going to be any you know, extended footage that she
didn't know was being recorded. That comes out it could happen,
(35:25):
But I feel like if it was going to happen,
it would have happened already. Right, we had the footage
that we have as the footage that we have, and
you know this claim that Livy pushed the door open herself.
You know that my forever problematic fave is Judge. Judy,
she's one of my heroes. I think she's the best.
She has this thing that she says where she says
(35:46):
if something doesn't make sense, it's because it's not true.
And to believe that Livy pushed that door open herself,
you would have to believe a lot of things that
just to me don't make any sense. So the door
was either open or the door was closed. If it
was open, than Livy's story and the results that followed
all makes sense checks out, got it. But if the
door was closed, like people on the internet would have,
(36:08):
you believed to exonerate this man. That means that Livy,
as a door dasher, walked up to a closed door
with an order, rather than leaving the order on the
porch as she was instructed to do, for some reason,
opened this closed door without permission on the off chance
that there might be a man exposing himself in there,
(36:29):
and jack Pot, could you believe it there was? What
are the odds? Then took out her phone started recording,
recorded it in such a way that made it seem
like that door had just been open, posted it to
the internet just to get hordes and hordes of negative
attention that led to her losing her only source of income.
Why what would be the endgame?
Speaker 4 (36:50):
Like?
Speaker 1 (36:50):
It just does not make sense. And when you add
in the fact that we know that women lying about
things like sexual violence is statistically very uncommon. I think
that most studies estimate that false report rates are something
between two percent and eight percent. The overwhelming majority of
reports of sexual violence on his conduct are true. But
when you already have a narrative in your head that
(37:13):
women lie about sexual abuse for attention, which the Internet
definitely adds to, none of that reality makes any sense.
It all just goes right out the window. And I
think it illustrates how people will believe absolutely anything without
proof to validate this worldview about women and support a
worldview where people don't speak up when something like this
(37:34):
happens to them. If the entire Internet is going to
come together and use this arsenal of AI tools to
discredit a survivor of sexualized violence less unless people are
going to come forward. And I have to think that
is the point of all of this. And here is
something that I just have to add and have to say.
A lot of people on TikToker saying, hey, this guy
(37:57):
was just drunk or high passed out in his own home.
Even if he did have the door open, he didn't
really do anything wrong. So obviously, as I said, I
don't know any more about this situation than anybody else does.
I'm just watching it from the sidelines. But come on,
women know when a man is trying to expose himself
(38:21):
to get his sexual kicks. We know. I have had
strangers exposed themselves to me twice in my life. The
first one happened when I was maybe fifteen a man.
I was walking down the street outside of my high
school and a man called me over and was like,
I'm in his car and was like, I'm can you
help me? I'm lost looking for directions. He had a
(38:43):
map unfolded out on his lap, and when I came over,
he moved the map and exposed himself to me, and
it wasn't a misunderstanding, It wasn't ambiguous. I didn't like
misunderstand something. I knew exactly what was going on instantly
right away. Women know when a man is trying to
(39:06):
do this. The fact that people are rushing in to
give this man the benefit of the doubt, I think
is really discounting the reality that women live in where
this kind of thing happens. I have to wonder if
the men who are saying, oh, this is totally normal behavior,
even if he did leave the door open and have
his self exposed, it's not that big of a deal.
I think that they are trying to create the conditions
(39:26):
where if they did that or something similar, it wouldn't
be a big deal. That's the only reason I could
think why you would jump to normalize what I think
we all can sort of see is like not normal behavior.
So again, this is just my opinion. But you're not
going to be able to convince me that somebody who
summoned a door dasher to their home just happened to
be waiting adjacent from the porch that they summoned them
(39:47):
to with their pants down. I'm unwilling to believe this
was not purposeful. This is my opinion, but it is
backed up by so much research about what we know
women experience who who are doing gigwork, because gigwork things
like lift, uber, uber eat stordash, It's just like this
for women. A study by University of British Columbia interviewed
(40:10):
twenty women gig workers in home services, food delivery, and
ride share in the US and Canada and found that
women often experience harassment, unwanted sexual comments or behavior, feel unsafe,
and face limited recourse. One woman they spoke to put
it like this, you just said, is it worth it?
Most of the time it's not, so you just don't.
Their study also found that women just brush off harassment
(40:34):
because of things like rating systems where if they get
enough bad ratings they'll be kicked off the platform, fear
of retaliation. All of that leads to women just brushing
off this kind of harassment. That same research highlights that
platforms often have gender agnostic design, in that the systems
do not account for women's specific vulnerabilities, and that gender
(40:55):
agnostic design just leads to women workers opting out of
risk your time, so saying, oh, I'm not going to
go to this, I'm gonna not take this order if
it's dark out, or if it's in a bad neighborhood
or something like that, which then worsens income gaps. A
separate study by the Markup found that among app based
drivers in Chicago, a high percentage felt unsafe, and that
(41:16):
female drivers reported higher rates of sexual harassment. Another UK
based study found that while app based courriers who are
mostly male faced harassment and assault, female couriers had particular
difficulties accessing reporting mechanisms and felt less supported. So the
research about women in gigwork pretty much backs up what
(41:36):
most of us anecdotally probably already knew that this kind
of sexualized harassment and abuse of women gig workers is
not rare. It's actually an occupational hazard recognized by scores
of research. That's why I didn't want to say Livy
was fired from door Dash, really because in the gig
economy it just comes with a lot less support for workers,
(41:58):
especially workers who are women, who are victims of sexualized
abuse while working. That's kind of the nature of the beasts.
With the gig economy, there's a lot less support structures,
things like reporting and deactivation protections and retaliation protections, and
when they do have these things, they're pretty inconsistent the
design of the gig economy. You have people who these
(42:18):
companies say are independent contractors, not employees. Things like app
rating systems, an algorithmic dispatch often puts workers in vulnerable
positions where they have less insight and don't have access
to things like formal HR. You know, humans we know
can be pretty variable in these uncontrolled environments. On top
(42:38):
of that, you have this power asymmetry baked in right
where the worker risks losing access to the platform or
is getting bad ratings if they complain, where they might
get kicked off of this of this app that is
a source of income for them that they need. And
so all of this makes it a perfect environment for
the kind of thing that Livy says that she experienced
(42:59):
while doing door dash. And so while all these big
creators on TikTok are arguing that Livy pushed this door
open without permission to engineer this whole thing to make
herself an online victim, my question is what is more
likely that Livvy manipulated this whole situation just to get
attention online and make herselves sound like a victim online,
(43:21):
or that this guy was sexually harassing a woman gigworker
in a way the research could not make clearer. Is
incredibly commonplace for women who do this kind of work,
and so my question is, why are we not talking
about what we know about the risks and lack of
support for women in the gig economy like Livy In
(43:42):
a different social media landscape, that would be the conversation
we will be having. But I think it's a lot
more lucrative to instead talk about how Livy is a
liar who is lying for attention on the Internet, and
the man who exposed himself to a gig worker did
nothing wrong. Because if there's one thing that this moment
with Livy has showed me about the Internet, especially big
(44:05):
accounts on platforms like TikTok and honestly across every platform,
is that they will straight up lie about a woman
who says that she was a victim of sexual abuse
if it gets them clicks. And that is a problem.
These people are materially benefiting from lying about Livy. There
is money in outrage, there's clout in being the first
(44:27):
one to jump on a story, whether or not it's true.
I saw somebody with lots and lots and lots of
followers say that Livy have been arrested for a false
report for falsely calling nine to one one to report
this man to the authorities. Keep in mind, Livy herself
said that she called a non emergency line and the
police officer actually showed up to have a conversation with
(44:47):
her about it, So why would she have been arrested
for that doesn't make any sense. People will just get
on this platform and lie to millions of people, and
they are financially incentivized to do so, so they don't
care about whether or not what they are saying is true.
They don't care about context, and they don't care about
helping anybody understand what is actually happening here, what actually
(45:09):
went on. They only care about engagement, even if that
means lying about somebody who is already going through something awful,
and when that person is a woman, the algorithm practically
throws a goddamn party. I started researching this story because
I just wanted to know what was going on. I
was curious, But the more and more videos I watched
(45:30):
of people with huge platforms and lots and lots of
followers across the Internet saying things about Livy that our lies,
our core are just completely unsubstantiated and not backed up
by anything. This pulled out of whole cloth. It really
pissed me off.
Speaker 5 (45:45):
So she gets online and makes up a story that
she was essayed by this gentleman, and it's just come
out today that she was lying about it. That the
man was asleep, had passed out on the couch, and
his pants just happened to be down a little bit.
So she walked into this man's house without his permission,
(46:06):
saw him on the couch, and started taking photos of him,
and then sent those photos to her false claiming that
this man that was passed out assaulted her. First of all,
does she just give the worst name to false accusing
men of that which you should never do, because now
(46:29):
you'll never be trusted. This is like if I was
that dude, I would sue door Dash for millions and
millions and millions of dollars. And that girl, she's not
gonna be able to show her face in public ever again.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
And I say this to say that misogyny always finds
an audience online. It is reliable, it performs, it puts
money in pockets and butts in seats saying she's lying,
she's crazy, she just wants attention. All of those old
stereotype dusting them off and redoing them for the Internet
(47:04):
age will always do numbers. And that is what is
so dangerous about this, because it doesn't just pile on
one woman who got deactivated from door Dash. It sends
a message to everyone that women who call out creepy behavior,
threatening behavior, a legal behavior should just shut up. That
the men who do this kind of thing deserve protection,
(47:25):
even if that means lying for them, making AI generated
or manipulated content to support and exonerate them, and inventing
facts out of whole cloth to excuse their behavior. And
when you step back and look at this in a
bigger picture, the political and social moment that we're in
right now, where our rights are being literally rolled back,
the fact that social media can be so easily gamified
(47:49):
and weaponized to silence women should really scare the hell
out of us. Because if the algorithm keeps on rewarding
misogyny and lies and cruelty and honish people who are
just trying to speak up, and if we keep letting
online engagement be the arbiter of what is real and
what is not. Then it is not just going to
be women like Livy who lose. It's going to be
(48:10):
all of us. Got a story about an interesting thing
in tech, or just want to say hi. You can
reach us at Hello at tangody dot com. You can
also find transcripts for today's episode at tengody dot com.
There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by
me Bridget Toad. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed
(48:31):
creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Tari Harrison is
our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amado is our contributing producer.
I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help
us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
There Are No Girls on the Internet. As a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative, I'm Bridge Tad and this
is there are No Girls on the Internet. So we
all know the Internet loves a viral story. It loves outrage, suspense, villains, drama,
(00:24):
all of it. But what happens when the story is
about a real woman who says that she has been
the victim of a sex crime and the platforms that
ostensibly should be protecting her punish her instead. That is
what happened to this woman called Livy, a gor dash
driver in New York State whose story recently went viral
on TikTok. I wanted to talk about this on the
(00:45):
News Roundup, but honestly, I had so much to say
about it that I thought this needs to be its
own episode because I think it shows us so much
about where we're at right now when it comes to
the state of women speaking up online. When we were
talking about potentially doing an episode about this situation. In
the beginning, when I first started researching it, I was
(01:06):
just curious about this story. I was seeing this story
all over my TikTok feed and I wanted to understand
it better. But by the end of putting together my
research and really doing a deep dive into what's going
on here, I went from curious to pissed off and
also quite worried about what this situation means for all
of us. So I'm going to get into the logistics
(01:27):
of what's going on here with this viral door dash
story on TikTok, how Ai is fueling, how we got
to this place and what it all means.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
It seems like a complicated story, an interesting one, I think,
a good one for you to tell.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
In some ways it is complicated, but in other ways
it's very uncomplicated tale as old as time, the most
simple story that we all recognize and understand. It's sort
of both of those things that want. So here's what's
going on. On October twelfth, a woman called Livy, who
does DoorDash for a living, made a TikTok explaining that
she got an order on DoorDash from a customer who
(02:04):
asked her to leave the order on the porch outside.
When she got to the customer's home, she says that
she walks up the stairs to the porch and saw
the door partially open and inside was the customer laying
across the sofa, supposedly asleep, laying motionless with his face
covered and his pants and underwear dad around his ankles
(02:25):
exposed from the waist down. I should explain some logistics
here that the way that the door in the couch
is situated, there is no way that anybody walking up
on this porch, like the door dasher that you thumb
into your home, would not see somebody laying on the
couch from where the couch is positioned. The couch that
he was on is right across from the door facing it.
(02:45):
Like if somebody was standing on the porch and the
door was open, somebody sitting on the couch, you would
see each other directly. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2 (02:54):
It does? Yeah, And we'll link to the video in
the show notes.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah, this episode will include some visual thing I will
do my best to explain them, but this is not
a video podcast, so we will put the links to
the things that you need to see, but I'll make
it clear what's going on even if you don't do that.
So Livy's version of what I just explained is illustrated
in a TikTok that she made and posted that shows
(03:18):
her standing outside of this porch with the door open,
with this man exposing himself in full view. Here's what
Livy said Ator TikTok.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
The customer who committed a crime against me requested that
their order be left at their front door, and when
I arrived to their house, their front door was wide open.
It was fifty nine degrees fahrenheit, all of their lights
were on, and they were sleeping on the couch within
eyesight of the front door, with their pants and underwear
pulled down to their ankles. This person's name is Austin
(03:48):
and their last initial is N. I reported this to
DoorDash and the police, and DoorDash luckily banned the customer,
but the police are doing nothing. I also posted the
video that I have of the proof to TikTok, and
after a day and a half of it going completely viral,
TikTok took down the video for suggestive content and gave
(04:09):
my account a strike. They've also denied my appeal to
have it reinstated. I'm absolutely reposting the video again, but
with a little sensor blur so it can't be removed
for the same reason because this is literally the only
justice I'm getting in the wake of my victimhood. The
police are doing nothing to prevent or stop this man
from doing it again, and they're not doing anything to
(04:30):
punish him for already having done it. So if the
only justice I'm going to get is the fact that
he's banned off the platform and that video went viral
and now he can live with that shame and embarrassment,
then that's what it's going to have to be.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
So TikTok keep this video up.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
So Livy says that she reported this man to DoorDash,
and DoorDash kicks the man off of the platform, but
they also kicked her off the platform too, essentially blocking
her from being able to make money, and she's is
that DoorDash is her only source of income.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
Hey guys, So DoorDash just deactivated me two days after
I reported my sexual assault. Hey guys, I just lost
my job and they won't tell me why. They're supposed
to send an email immediately after deactivation providing you the
reason why and a link to appeal, and they didn't.
So I contacted support and they made me sit on
(05:24):
the phone with them for fifty minutes just to tell
me that they can't tell me the reason why. And
I have to just go ahead and appeal without knowing why,
so my chances of getting my account back. They have
my money in that account. I was working, I was
literally working, and they deactivated me.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
This is not this is related.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
They just punished me for posting about my sexual assault
while door dashing. They just fired me, and the police
are doing nothing. I lost my job and that was
my only way to make money to pay my.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Bilf Initially, Lidy said that DoorDash never even told her
why they kicked her off the platform, though she does
say that she feels that it's connected to the TikTok
that she made about this man, which yeah it is.
DoorDash put out a statement explaining why they kicked her
off the platform. Livy says they made this statement without
ever actually talking to her directly about why they deactivated
(06:23):
her account. She says that when the general public found
out why she was deactivated from being on DoorDash is
the same time that she found out why she was deactivated.
They never talked to her. This put out this statement.
Here's what DoorDash said. No one should ever have to
experience sexual assault, harassment, or abuse, and DoorDash never deactivates
someone for reporting it full stop. We take these reports
(06:44):
incredibly seriously and work closely with law enforcement to investigate
and support those affected. However, posting a video of a
customer in their home and disclosing their personal details publicly
is a clear violation of our policies. That is the
sole reason why this dasher's account was deactivated along with
the customers while we investigated. DoorDash also told Newsweek that
(07:04):
they're investigating to make sure that Livy gets whatever full
payments she's owed from the work she had done from DoorDash,
because she had not been able to cash out before
her account was deactivated. Though I have no idea if
they're going to make good on this, it's just what
they said in their statement, So DoorDash is basically saying,
you know, hey, we didn't deactivate Livy's account because she
reported a sex crime. We deactivated her account because she
(07:26):
posted a video of a DoorDash customer. I'll say it
would have been nice if DoorDash told Livy this directly,
rather than simply deactivating her account with money in it.
But as we'll talk about in a moment, the whole
dynamic of gig work is that companies like DoorDash don't
really have to do shit because they don't have employees,
they have contractors, And so I get where Livy is
(07:49):
coming from, but that is sort of the nature of
the beast here. So a big question that is coming
up online is whether or not Livy should have made
this video in the first place. Livy says that she
had wanted video evidence of what happened, and I will say,
had she come to the Internet without video evidence of
what she says happened, I'm sure the conversation would have
(08:09):
been entirely different.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Yeah, and you know, there's something about this story that
really makes one want to, like, I don't know, like
like way in or like pulls you in to want
to say, like what she you know, was she and
the right? Was she in the wrong? Should she have
done this or that? Or something about the story really
pulls a person in, I think, and I think you're
(08:33):
totally right that without that video, it's hard to even
imagine that there would even be any story there beyond
you know, just what she's going through exactly.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
And a lot of people are saying, oh, well, I
wouldn't have an issue with what she did if she
just sent that video directly to door Dash and left
it at that, like why did she have to post
as the TikTok and I get that. Livy says that
she called the non emergency police line to report this
to the police. After she reports it to DoorDash, she
says a police officer actually came out to speak with
(09:03):
her about what she wanted to do. She said that
she wanted to press charges if possible, to make sure
that this guy was not able to do this to
another person. In one of her videos, she actually points
out that this guy lives in a duplex, and she says,
what if there had been a kid out on the
porch on the other shared unit, And so she said
that she wanted to report this to the police just
(09:23):
to make sure that this wasn't going to be a
recurring thing with this guy. But she says the police
told her that she couldn't really press charges in this
state because this man was in his own house and
that it wasn't like he got up to lunge toward
her or anything like that. So Livy says that she
posted it because the police essentially weren't doing anything about it,
weren't taking it seriously. But her posting that video to
(09:47):
TikTok is what DoorDash says is the reason for her
being deactivated from the platform. Honestly, I can't act like
I don't see where DoorDash is coming from here that
they probably can't have doordashers posting video of their customers
like this on TikTok. Now what I have done this
if I were Livy? Probably not, because personally, at this
(10:08):
point in my life, I almost never think that bringing
something to the Internet is going to make a situation better.
These days, I have only seen the Internet getting involved
making things worse. But that's just me. But I also
think we really crave perfect victims, right, victims who would
act and behave exactly like we think that we would
(10:30):
act and behave in whatever situation. So the fact that
Livy is doing something that I personally would not do
doesn't mean anything, right. I think we really had this idea.
When we hear something like this, we think, well, what
would I do? And if this person didn't do things
like I think I would do things, something must be up.
She must be lying. That's a red flag. I also
think the fact that Livy is on TikTok talking very
(10:54):
loudly about this thing that happened to her. I just
think people don't like that. Like, I'm sad to see
that people have taken one specific bit from one of
Livy's mini videos about this where she's very upset, and
they've turned it into a really hurtful meme on TikTok.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
A man's world.
Speaker 5 (11:14):
I'm the victim, remember.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
So they've taken a screenshot which is a close up
of her face while Livy is pleading with people to
remember that she is the victim in this situation, and
it's been making the rounds on TikTok. If you check
the comments of Livy's other posts on TikTok, people are
putting that screenshot of that image of her face very
pained while while speaking to you at this situation in the
(11:40):
comments to make fun of her. Her face in this
image is tortured and pained because she is very upset,
and it reminds me if you've seen that image of
it's kind of a if you googled liberal feminist triggered.
It's a picture that makes her look like she is screaming,
and it's an image that it's become a me when
people want to reference sort of triggered angry feminist meltdown.
(12:05):
But when you actually look at the real full video
that that image was taken from, it's a feminist woman
in a campus debate and she's just having a fairly
normal conversation with somebody. It's a conversation that's like somewhat
hostile because she's citing rape statistics or something, but she's
not screaming. She barely even raises her voice in that video.
(12:30):
The only issue is is that she has an expressive face,
and so in this image she looks like she is
screaming or having some sort of a triggered feminist meltdown.
But really she's just having a pretty normal conversation with someone,
I would say even like a fairly civil conversation with somebody.
And yet online she has become the face of triggered
(12:52):
lying feminists everywhere. Never mind that men like Alex Jones
and Andrew Breitbart, like, do you remember seeing what it looks
like when they would talk. They would be frothing at
the mouth and screaming and veins popping out of their
necks and foreheads, and fans loved it. So the rules
are simply different for men. You know, Andrew Breitbart did
(13:15):
not become the face of triggered men everywhere when he
would have legit freakouts on camera.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Yeah, the outrage and the performative like energy I think
was a big part of it for those guys.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Absolutely so. I think this image and clip of Livy
speaking with a pained face having a big emotion says
a lot about how we want and expect women to
behave after experiencing something traumatic, and how much stigma there
is around labeling oneself as a victim. I also think
we want victims who are quiet about what they've experienced.
(13:51):
When someone screaming about it, even if whatever happened to
them is worth screaming about, I think for a lot
of people they automatically assume that that person screaming is
in the wrong, because what we actually want is a
society where women who are harmed also just shut up
about it. So people are also taking issue with the
fact that Livy says that she was quote sexually assaulted
(14:12):
in her TikTok, saying, how could someone sexually assault you
if they didn't touch you, if you'd never had physical contact.
This is a little bit in the weeds, but according
to the Office on Violence against Women. The term sexual
assault means any non consensual sexual act prescribed by federal, tribal,
or state law, including the victim lacks capacity to consent.
(14:33):
But in a legal sense, state laws can vary, so
can the definitions used for sexual assault. So flashing or
indecent exposure may be a sexual offense and a sex crime,
but it is not always classified legally as sexual assault
in a stripped legal sense, because that depends on the state.
It really strikes me as an odd thing to get
(14:55):
hung up on this specific legal designation the way that
a lot of people have on TikTok to call Livy
a liar. But I did want to mention it, and
I guess I wish that all of this discourse about
the technical definitions of sexual assault versus sexual offense versus
sex crime was happening in an effort to educate people
rather than belittle this woman who says that she was
(15:15):
forced to look at a stranger's penis while just trying
to do her job. But here we are, like, I've
seen a lot of people say Livy is lying about
saying that she was sexually assaulted, and that minimizes actual
sexual assault and makes it harder for actual victims, but
in decent exposure, is very much a sex crime, even
if it is not specifically legally categorized as sexual assault.
(15:38):
It's very clear to me that people who are bringing
this up are trying to use it to parse Livy's
words to make her look like an unreliable narrator and
a liar. They're not doing it in an effort to
actually advocate for victims of sexualized violence. Because even if
this is not legally a sexual assault the way that
Livy says it is, it is still a sex crime. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
I think a good sort of test for that sort
of thing is like, why don't you try it at work? Like,
if it's not actually any sort of a problem, just
go ahead and do it at work and see what happens.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Yeah, I want all of these guys who are saying
it's not actually a crime, Yeah, do it to your
HR lady and see what she says. See how it
goes for you. Let's take a quick break at our back.
(16:36):
So Liviy post this video to TikTok and says that
TikTok took action against her for uploading this video. She
says the app initially removed her video and issued a
strike against her account. When she initially posted it with
the man with his pants down visible, she uploaded it again,
obscuring the man's junk from the video, but that video
(16:56):
was also removed and she got a second strike. Now,
if it sounds like I'm being super careful and specific
about how I'm describing the situation, it is because the
entire internet. Okay, we'll have the entire Internet, but a
whole hell of a lot of people have decided that
Livy is lying about what happened, because at first it
(17:16):
seemed like people were supporting Livvy and then something turned
and to me, it seems like one of the many
examples that we have of a woman being smeared by
millions of people online for speaking up about something that
she says happened to her. Right, there's a whole shade
of something that we talk about a lot on the podcast,
(17:37):
when people appoint themselves as investigators to litigate the details
of other people's personal lives. I think there's a lot
of true crime brain rot out there that happens where
people online decide that they know the real story that
the rest of us aren't being told about what's happening
with these strangers. And it's one of the reasons why
(17:59):
when these stories come up, which they often do online,
I am the you know, wet blanket voice that says,
maybe it's not good to have millions of people jumping
into the business of strangers in this way. I totally
get that it is exhilarating. Who doesn't love going down
a rabbit hole of somebody else's drama. But it's one
thing when we're talking about a fictional character. It's another
(18:22):
thing when we're talking about a real, everyday person. We
saw it with West Elm Caleb, the guy who worked
at West Elm who met a bunch of women on
a dating app and was making them all personalized playlists
on Spotify to woo them. We saw it with that
TikTok woman who surprised visited her long distance boyfriend and
he gives her kind of a weird chili reception, and
(18:44):
the entire internet decided that he was cheating on her
because they all became body language experts. We saw it
with that Coldplay concert couple, you know, that couple who
made a very weird kind of cought reaction when they
were on the JumboTron canoodling at a Coldplay and Coldplay
frontman Chris Martin wondered out loud like, oh, they must
(19:04):
be having an affair, which, by the way, I have
no idea if this is true. But after the hubbub
died down, I read that at least one of the
couples in that situation said that, yeah, I'm still legally married,
but I've been separated from my spouse for a while
when that cold Play concert happened, Like, my spouse is
also dating. We're not together, so I know it makes
(19:25):
me a wet blanket. But when these big moments happen
that light the Internet on fire, everybody is talking about
somebody else's life, I think they truly illustrate how deeply
surveiled we are socially as a society, how we are
doing the surveiling and we are the surveiled. And I
think this is especially bad for women, because when the
(19:46):
Internet turns on women, even famous women who are the
victims of abuse, people like Megna Stallion or Amber Heard,
it's not just speculation. It is the reliable misogyny of
the Internet being so easily weaponized against her to smear
her and silence her. All the old tropes around gender
that we all know women live for attention, women can't
(20:09):
be trusted. Good innocent men are having their lives ruined
for over nothing by lying bitches. All of these tired
old tropes that permeate how we talk about and understand
gender get dialed up to eleven on social media because
misogyny will always find an audience online just by the
nature of how social media is designed. And this is
(20:32):
a feature, not a bug. It is how our platforms
were designed from their earliest days. I will say it
till I'm blue in the face. Never forget that Facebook
started as a way for Zuckerberg to get revenge on
women who did not want to date him. So this
is just baked into our internet ecosystem, and I think
we really see it with how this whole Livy situation
(20:53):
is playing out. So after Livy shared her story, people
online started saying that she is not really a victim
in situation because she did not just innocently walk up
to the door dash customer's door and find him naked
from the waist down, as she claimed. She actually walked
up to a closed door, opened it without knocking and
(21:14):
without permission, saw an undressed man asleep in his own home,
took a video of him exposed, posted an online and
that she is the one who is actually violating him.
That is the narrative that has really taken off online.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Well, that's odd because that is not what is depicted
in that video that she posted. In that video she posted,
she doesn't open the door. The door is already open.
So where is this other narrative coming from?
Speaker 1 (21:44):
Great question. So one is just sort of logistical. Because
Libby had to remove the original footage that she uploaded
to TikTok from the platform, it has become somewhat difficult,
though not impossible, to find the original video that she
uploaded about the situation, and that has allowed people to
really fill the gap in with their own idea of
what must have happened. So if you search TikTok for
(22:05):
door Dash Lady DoorDash situation, whatever, you will find people
saying with certainty that yes, they know that Livy pushed
this closed door open. That has just become accepted as
fact in this situation. When I was just doing research,
somebody on a different platform threads said, Oh, why is
everybody what's going on with this DoorDash situation. Somebody else replied,
(22:29):
she opened a closed door and is acting like she's
a victim because of it. I replied, can you link
me to proof? How do you know this is their proof?
Everybody is like, there is no proof. Everyone's just saying
they've seen proof, but there is no proof. There are
even people making jokey tiktoks purporting to recreate Livy's POV
where she pushes open a closed door and then winds like,
(22:53):
oh no, I'm being assaulted by a naked man in
his own home. I have to say, some of these
videos being made to make fun of Livy do seem
to be AI generated. They're using AI generators like Sora,
But I'm sad to say that a lot of them
(23:13):
that I've seen are real people, real women, taking the
TikTok to make fun of Livy for saying this happened
to her. So it's just sort of become understood as
the facts of what happened, without any proof at all
that it's actually true. And importantly, there are people saying
(23:33):
that there is another angle, or that the man in
the situation uploaded ringed hamrat footage proving that Livvy actually
opened a closed door without his permission and was the
one violating him. I kind of went down the rabbit
hole on this one. You know, we talked a little
bit about how with the Taylor Swift conversation, how you
(23:56):
can just really sniff it out what a conversation happening
online is not happening in a normal, authentic way. You
can just tell where there are real people jumping on
a bandwagon, and then also some of it is not
authentic conversation, Mike. I know that when we were having
a pitch meeting, I was trying to explain what was
(24:18):
going on with what I had seen on TikTok, and
I felt like when we were speaking, I felt compelled
to keep reiterating to you that I was one hundred percent,
stone cold sober while I was speaking about this, because
I felt like the way that I was talking about
it made me seem like I was not sober.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
Do you remember this, Yeah, I remember you showing me
a couple of videos back to back where totally different
people were saying the exact same thing, like word for word,
the exact same script about like, I woke up and
I saw this story and I had to get into it,
but like word for word, and it was weird. It
(24:57):
was like I felt like U like living in the
Truman Show or something like the algorithm was these videos
were created just to like convince you of something.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
Yes, so it is not totally uncommon for a human
creator to recreate a TikTok that another human creator has made.
Like I've seen that. I know that happens, but that
wasn't this. This was the same identical cadence, the same
idea it was. It was yeah, it was as if
they were reading a script. And then I realized one
(25:30):
of these is a I like genuinely, I thought I
was going crazy until I saw this TikTok that broke
it down.
Speaker 6 (25:38):
Everybody's talking about the door dash Girl. I was looking
at certain videos and I came across this one.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
I saw the original video of the door Daft Girl.
And I'm a limited and confused now that I woke
up and see everything that's happening. But I saw it.
I saw, Hey, I understand why DoorDash I guess fired
you again? Why you're a block from now?
Speaker 6 (25:54):
As for the guy, that's a little weird, right, Why
are they saying the same thing in a very similar
tone and a very similar cadence. Is there a script,
is somebody copying somebody? Or is that video on the
right fucking AI? It's a AI, and not just that video.
Her entire fucking page is artificial intelligence generated video. Okay, Now,
when you look at the page, you can kind of
tell it's just gibberish. There's there's no like links or anything,
(26:15):
no name. But when you just scroll by these videos,
it's pretty hard to tell unless you're really paying attention
to how she speaks.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
And it gets even weirder because m u URLs on TikTok,
who is a human TikToker on TikTok, says that somebody
stole her likeness, stole her voice, generated an AI version
of her to make it appear as though she weighed
in on this door dash situation. When she did it,
(26:41):
I would not have known that this was an AI
clone of a real person unless I really really look.
If I'm just swipe swipe swiping, I don't think I
would have clocked that this is AI if I had
not also come across this woman saying, Hey, this isn't me,
It's an AI clone of me that somebody has made,
please report it so you can really see how the
proliferation of AI can turbocharge manipulated, inauthentic conversation about a
(27:06):
hot button charged topic, even when it's not about a
big celebrity like Taylor Swift but a regular person like Livy.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
I really think, Slash hope that there will be a
time in the future when we look back at this
era when it's totally legal and fine for whoever to
be creating all these AI generated videos that just like
steal people's likenesses report to be real people even though
(27:36):
they're not, and just like flooding the information ecosystem that
we all have to live in, just flooding that with
these fake accounts that are not fake but like inauthentic,
that are purporting to be real humans when they are not.
And it's just it's just like fine, Like the platforms
don't really care. It's totally legal, it's not stable. And
(28:00):
so I really think at some point in the future
we're going to look back at this time and just
like shake our heads and uh, I can't wait to
get to that future.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
Yes, And what's so interesting to me is the woman
who was cloned the real woman really put it well
that this is a credibility issue. If you are a
big TikToker and you make your living like I'm a podcaster,
I make my living putting my ideas out into the world,
expressing myself using my voice. If somebody cloned me, which
(28:30):
please don't do that. If you're listening in your thing,
I'm going to make a bridget clone, please don't. But
if somebody did, that could materially harm me as somebody
whose credibility and body of work depends on people being
able to trust me, people being able to take what
I say as something they should be listening to to
help them understand the world. If somebody steals my voice
(28:51):
in my likeness to just say whatever, to weigh in
on things that I would never weigh in on, or
put ideas out into the world that I would never express,
that could materially harm me in a real way.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Yeah, that's not like some new concept, Like we've had
laws about that sort of thing for many, many years. Right,
you can't just like impersonate someone else, like obviously there
are laws against that in the offline world. But somehow,
with this new technology, people are acting like it's fine,
even though It's like the exact same dynamic and the
(29:24):
exact same risk.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
But what if you could impersonate somebody else and make
a little change doing it? Then what See the thing
is here companies like open ai are making money, So
what if you could do it and it was okay
and it was legal.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
You know, it does get engagement, so the people want
it so.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Counter So the conversation about door dash Lady has really
gotten out of hand with AI clones and bots being
weaponized and lies and images being manipuulated. But to be clear,
I don't think this is some big conspiracy where DoorDash
is buying bots and AI clones to manipulate the conversation
(30:08):
around what happened here. It is possible, and I don't
put anything past or corporation. If you ever think a
company wouldn't do something absolutely fucking unhinged to protect their
bottom line, look into one of the weirdest stories I
have ever covered on this podcast, which is the eBay
stalking and harassment case, where high level eBay executives were
(30:31):
arrested for a year's long harassment campaign against an elderly
couple where they were doing things like putting dead animals
in their mailbox to harass them out of running a
blog about eBay. Right, So if you ever think, oh,
executives don't do shady stuff to protect their business interest,
they wouldn't do that. They would. So I'm not saying
(30:53):
this because I think it's a bridge too far that
a company would buy and exploit AI clones and bots
to manipulate a situation. But my gut is telling me
that what's going on here it's just an engagement thing.
It is possible that DoorDash is running this complex bot
and AI campaign to semere Livy, but I think what
is probably more likely is that these bots and AI
(31:15):
clones are jumping on any trending, big topic that people
are talking about on social media, and that they don't
care if it's based on amplifying lies about a real woman.
And that is what pisses me off and worries me
so much about this story. That we have reached a
point where there is an entire slate of digital tools,
(31:36):
including AI, that can be used to discredit somebody who
says that they were the victim of a sex crime,
because I've seen AI generated ring camera footage that supposedly
exonerates this man and proves that Livy open this door,
but it's not real. I've seen manipulated photos that purport
to exonerate this man. That is an image of this
(31:58):
man's front door that is obviously been cropped in such
a way to make the door look a lot less
open than Livy's footage initially showed what seems like, oh well,
the door was open just a tiny bit, but they've
cropped it to make it look that way. And because
Livy's original footage was taken down from TikTok, it's a
little bit harder for people to go back and compare
it with what she actually posted. Then you have obvious
(32:21):
bot accounts amplifying and repeating these claims to the point
where they've just become true online, whether or not they
actually happened or not. I've talked about how my ethos
on this show is that I'm a nosy bitch and
I just want to get to the bottom of what's
going on. So nosy bitch that I am. I have
searched high and low for any additional footage, ring camera footage,
(32:43):
other angles, whatever, whatever, all of the stuff that people
in bots say they have seen online that exonerates this man,
improves that Livy's in the wrong. I have not seen
a stitch of evidence. It just doesn't mass the smell
test with me. People upload videos on TikTok and elite them,
and there's always somebody that gets the screen shot. There's
always somebody that gets the screen recording of it. The
(33:05):
fact that there would not be a stitch of evidence
for this video that so many people have said that
they saw with their own eyes that exonerates this man.
I just don't believe that it's out there. It is
possible that it is, but I tell you I have
not if it exists, I have searched high and low.
I have not seen it. The only video footage of
the situation that I have found is the footage that
(33:27):
Livy took initially, which backs up her version of what
she says happened. More after a quick break, let's get
right back into it now. I want to be clear.
(33:51):
It is entirely possible that Livy did push that door
open and then whip out her phone and start filming
to a video that backs up her version of events.
It's entirely possible that that happened. We have no way
of knowing for sure, I am a mere spectator here,
just like everybody in this situation. But to me, that
(34:13):
makes absolutely no sense, just doesn't pass muster.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Earlier in this episode, you talked about how this whole
story one of the things that shows is how surveiled
we all are, and I think that's a good insight.
And part of that fact of life these days is
that there's an expectation of surveillance that of course there's
going to be multiple camera angles and there's like more
(34:40):
footage from somewhere else, And you know, I have to
wonder if that maybe is part of why people are
so like eager to believe that the other footage is
out there, because you know, this thing happened and there's
a lot of interest about it, and so of course
there has to be more footage, when in fact, most
things that happened in the world do not get recorded
(35:01):
on video.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Yeah, but again, I think it goes back to that
true crime brain rot where people assume everything's going to
happen the way it would happen in a fictional movie
or a fictional series, and in reality, there probably isn't
going to be any you know, extended footage that she
didn't know was being recorded. That comes out it could happen,
(35:25):
But I feel like if it was going to happen,
it would have happened already. Right, we had the footage
that we have as the footage that we have, and
you know this claim that Livy pushed the door open herself.
You know that my forever problematic fave is Judge. Judy,
she's one of my heroes. I think she's the best.
She has this thing that she says where she says
(35:46):
if something doesn't make sense, it's because it's not true.
And to believe that Livy pushed that door open herself,
you would have to believe a lot of things that
just to me don't make any sense. So the door
was either open or the door was closed. If it
was open, than Livy's story and the results that followed
all makes sense checks out, got it. But if the
door was closed, like people on the internet would have,
(36:08):
you believed to exonerate this man. That means that Livy,
as a door dasher, walked up to a closed door
with an order, rather than leaving the order on the
porch as she was instructed to do, for some reason,
opened this closed door without permission on the off chance
that there might be a man exposing himself in there,
(36:29):
and jack Pot, could you believe it there was? What
are the odds? Then took out her phone started recording,
recorded it in such a way that made it seem
like that door had just been open, posted it to
the internet just to get hordes and hordes of negative
attention that led to her losing her only source of income.
Why what would be the endgame?
Speaker 4 (36:50):
Like?
Speaker 1 (36:50):
It just does not make sense. And when you add
in the fact that we know that women lying about
things like sexual violence is statistically very uncommon. I think
that most studies estimate that false report rates are something
between two percent and eight percent. The overwhelming majority of
reports of sexual violence on his conduct are true. But
when you already have a narrative in your head that
(37:13):
women lie about sexual abuse for attention, which the Internet
definitely adds to, none of that reality makes any sense.
It all just goes right out the window. And I
think it illustrates how people will believe absolutely anything without
proof to validate this worldview about women and support a
worldview where people don't speak up when something like this
(37:34):
happens to them. If the entire Internet is going to
come together and use this arsenal of AI tools to
discredit a survivor of sexualized violence less unless people are
going to come forward. And I have to think that
is the point of all of this. And here is
something that I just have to add and have to say.
A lot of people on TikToker saying, hey, this guy
(37:57):
was just drunk or high passed out in his own home.
Even if he did have the door open, he didn't
really do anything wrong. So obviously, as I said, I
don't know any more about this situation than anybody else does.
I'm just watching it from the sidelines. But come on,
women know when a man is trying to expose himself
(38:21):
to get his sexual kicks. We know. I have had
strangers exposed themselves to me twice in my life. The
first one happened when I was maybe fifteen a man.
I was walking down the street outside of my high
school and a man called me over and was like,
I'm in his car and was like, I'm can you
help me? I'm lost looking for directions. He had a
(38:43):
map unfolded out on his lap, and when I came over,
he moved the map and exposed himself to me, and
it wasn't a misunderstanding, It wasn't ambiguous. I didn't like
misunderstand something. I knew exactly what was going on instantly
right away. Women know when a man is trying to
(39:06):
do this. The fact that people are rushing in to
give this man the benefit of the doubt, I think
is really discounting the reality that women live in where
this kind of thing happens. I have to wonder if
the men who are saying, oh, this is totally normal behavior,
even if he did leave the door open and have
his self exposed, it's not that big of a deal.
I think that they are trying to create the conditions
(39:26):
where if they did that or something similar, it wouldn't
be a big deal. That's the only reason I could
think why you would jump to normalize what I think
we all can sort of see is like not normal behavior.
So again, this is just my opinion. But you're not
going to be able to convince me that somebody who
summoned a door dasher to their home just happened to
be waiting adjacent from the porch that they summoned them
(39:47):
to with their pants down. I'm unwilling to believe this
was not purposeful. This is my opinion, but it is
backed up by so much research about what we know
women experience who who are doing gigwork, because gigwork things
like lift, uber, uber eat stordash, It's just like this
for women. A study by University of British Columbia interviewed
(40:10):
twenty women gig workers in home services, food delivery, and
ride share in the US and Canada and found that
women often experience harassment, unwanted sexual comments or behavior, feel unsafe,
and face limited recourse. One woman they spoke to put
it like this, you just said, is it worth it?
Most of the time it's not, so you just don't.
Their study also found that women just brush off harassment
(40:34):
because of things like rating systems where if they get
enough bad ratings they'll be kicked off the platform, fear
of retaliation. All of that leads to women just brushing
off this kind of harassment. That same research highlights that
platforms often have gender agnostic design, in that the systems
do not account for women's specific vulnerabilities, and that gender
(40:55):
agnostic design just leads to women workers opting out of
risk your time, so saying, oh, I'm not going to
go to this, I'm gonna not take this order if
it's dark out, or if it's in a bad neighborhood
or something like that, which then worsens income gaps. A
separate study by the Markup found that among app based
drivers in Chicago, a high percentage felt unsafe, and that
(41:16):
female drivers reported higher rates of sexual harassment. Another UK
based study found that while app based courriers who are
mostly male faced harassment and assault, female couriers had particular
difficulties accessing reporting mechanisms and felt less supported. So the
research about women in gigwork pretty much backs up what
(41:36):
most of us anecdotally probably already knew that this kind
of sexualized harassment and abuse of women gig workers is
not rare. It's actually an occupational hazard recognized by scores
of research. That's why I didn't want to say Livy
was fired from door Dash, really because in the gig
economy it just comes with a lot less support for workers,
(41:58):
especially workers who are women, who are victims of sexualized
abuse while working. That's kind of the nature of the beasts.
With the gig economy, there's a lot less support structures,
things like reporting and deactivation protections and retaliation protections, and
when they do have these things, they're pretty inconsistent the
design of the gig economy. You have people who these
(42:18):
companies say are independent contractors, not employees. Things like app
rating systems, an algorithmic dispatch often puts workers in vulnerable
positions where they have less insight and don't have access
to things like formal HR. You know, humans we know
can be pretty variable in these uncontrolled environments. On top
(42:38):
of that, you have this power asymmetry baked in right
where the worker risks losing access to the platform or
is getting bad ratings if they complain, where they might
get kicked off of this of this app that is
a source of income for them that they need. And
so all of this makes it a perfect environment for
the kind of thing that Livy says that she experienced
(42:59):
while doing door dash. And so while all these big
creators on TikTok are arguing that Livy pushed this door
open without permission to engineer this whole thing to make
herself an online victim, my question is what is more
likely that Livvy manipulated this whole situation just to get
attention online and make herselves sound like a victim online,
(43:21):
or that this guy was sexually harassing a woman gigworker
in a way the research could not make clearer. Is
incredibly commonplace for women who do this kind of work,
and so my question is, why are we not talking
about what we know about the risks and lack of
support for women in the gig economy like Livy In
(43:42):
a different social media landscape, that would be the conversation
we will be having. But I think it's a lot
more lucrative to instead talk about how Livy is a
liar who is lying for attention on the Internet, and
the man who exposed himself to a gig worker did
nothing wrong. Because if there's one thing that this moment
with Livy has showed me about the Internet, especially big
(44:05):
accounts on platforms like TikTok and honestly across every platform,
is that they will straight up lie about a woman
who says that she was a victim of sexual abuse
if it gets them clicks. And that is a problem.
These people are materially benefiting from lying about Livy. There
is money in outrage, there's clout in being the first
(44:27):
one to jump on a story, whether or not it's true.
I saw somebody with lots and lots and lots of
followers say that Livy have been arrested for a false
report for falsely calling nine to one one to report
this man to the authorities. Keep in mind, Livy herself
said that she called a non emergency line and the
police officer actually showed up to have a conversation with
(44:47):
her about it, So why would she have been arrested
for that doesn't make any sense. People will just get
on this platform and lie to millions of people, and
they are financially incentivized to do so, so they don't
care about whether or not what they are saying is true.
They don't care about context, and they don't care about
helping anybody understand what is actually happening here, what actually
(45:09):
went on. They only care about engagement, even if that
means lying about somebody who is already going through something awful,
and when that person is a woman, the algorithm practically
throws a goddamn party. I started researching this story because
I just wanted to know what was going on. I
was curious, But the more and more videos I watched
(45:30):
of people with huge platforms and lots and lots of
followers across the Internet saying things about Livy that our lies,
our core are just completely unsubstantiated and not backed up
by anything. This pulled out of whole cloth. It really
pissed me off.
Speaker 5 (45:45):
So she gets online and makes up a story that
she was essayed by this gentleman, and it's just come
out today that she was lying about it. That the
man was asleep, had passed out on the couch, and
his pants just happened to be down a little bit.
So she walked into this man's house without his permission,
(46:06):
saw him on the couch, and started taking photos of him,
and then sent those photos to her false claiming that
this man that was passed out assaulted her. First of all,
does she just give the worst name to false accusing
men of that which you should never do, because now
(46:29):
you'll never be trusted. This is like if I was
that dude, I would sue door Dash for millions and
millions and millions of dollars. And that girl, she's not
gonna be able to show her face in public ever again.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
And I say this to say that misogyny always finds
an audience online. It is reliable, it performs, it puts
money in pockets and butts in seats saying she's lying,
she's crazy, she just wants attention. All of those old
stereotype dusting them off and redoing them for the Internet
(47:04):
age will always do numbers. And that is what is
so dangerous about this, because it doesn't just pile on
one woman who got deactivated from door Dash. It sends
a message to everyone that women who call out creepy behavior,
threatening behavior, a legal behavior should just shut up. That
the men who do this kind of thing deserve protection,
(47:25):
even if that means lying for them, making AI generated
or manipulated content to support and exonerate them, and inventing
facts out of whole cloth to excuse their behavior. And
when you step back and look at this in a
bigger picture, the political and social moment that we're in
right now, where our rights are being literally rolled back,
the fact that social media can be so easily gamified
(47:49):
and weaponized to silence women should really scare the hell
out of us. Because if the algorithm keeps on rewarding
misogyny and lies and cruelty and honish people who are
just trying to speak up, and if we keep letting
online engagement be the arbiter of what is real and
what is not. Then it is not just going to
be women like Livy who lose. It's going to be
(48:10):
all of us. Got a story about an interesting thing
in tech, or just want to say hi. You can
reach us at Hello at tangody dot com. You can
also find transcripts for today's episode at tengody dot com.
There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by
me Bridget Toad. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed
(48:31):
creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Tari Harrison is
our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amado is our contributing producer.
I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help
us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
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