WP_Post Object
(
[ID] => 3356
[post_author] => 2
[post_date] => 2021-10-20 13:47:51
[post_date_gmt] => 2021-10-20 13:47:51
[post_content] => Why white, cis feminists must not be the ‘default’ version of tech critique, or anything else.
In 2021 two former Facebook employees stepped forward as whistleblowers. One became an international media star, while the other is virtually unknown. Frances Haugen garnered global headlines after her 60 Minutes interview on October 3, during which she revealed that she was the anonymous whistleblower who supplied the internal documents for the Wall Street Journal’s investigative series, which showed that Facebook knew Instagram harms many teenage girls and that it was fully aware of the damage caused by its for-profit disinformation. Two days later, she testified at a Senate subcommittee hearing that was watched around the world.
In September 2020 Sophie Zhang blew the whistle on Facebook’s refusal to act against dictators who were creating fake accounts on a vast scale to manipulate their own citizens and steal elections. Facebook’s response was to fire her. Zhang promptly published a nearly 8,000-word memo detailing her concerns on her personal website, parts of which Buzzfeed excerpted —before Facebook pressured the company that hosted her website to delete both the site and her domain name.
When Zhang went public with her identity in mid-2021, journalist Julie Carrie Wong wrote a long feature report about her for The Guardian, while Karen Hao’s deep dive interview with the whistleblower was published by MIT Tech Review . But the Senate did not invite Zhang to a special Senate hearing; nor, until a recent outcry over the disparate treatment, did any high- profile television news shows ask to interview her. As Wong tweeted on October 12, “I’m glad people are paying attention to her now but it’s weird to retcon her into a secondary player in Haugen’s narrative.”
Why is Frances Haugen the default whistleblower to whom all others are compared—even those that came before her?
Zhang might have been shunted into a secondary role partly because she is “not charismatic” and “not good at attracting or receiving attention,” as she told CNN reporter Donnie O’Sullivan in an interview broadcast on October 12. “I am an introvert who wants to stay home and pet my cats,” Zhang said. Another factor that might be partly responsible for Zhang’s relative anonymity: Americans who work for the Wall Street Journal and convene Senate sub-committee hearings care more about Instagram’s possible effects on their adolescent daughters’ self-image than about stolen elections and human rights abuses in Honduras and Azerbaijan.
A year after Zhang published her memo, the claims and documentation that both she and Haugen provided are now central to a new push in the US to regulate Facebook. And yet Haugen is “the Facebook whistleblower” while, to some, Zhang is just “an ex-employee.” (The unspoken “disgruntled” in that last sentence is silent, but powerful.)
In this tale of two American whistleblowers, one was given the role of the princess, commanding attention and praise, inspiring king-makers in Washington D.C. to insist the time has finally come for regulation. And the other? I’m not going to say she played the step-sister, because I hope we’ve all come a long way from denigrating blended families, but Zhang’s reception made it clear she’s expected to be part of a different and much smaller story. If it were a house-party, she’d be the help, not the host. Meanwhile, the significant ongoing work to document, explain, and stop the systematic harms of tech companies has been carried out by women of color; and they have gone almost completely unnoticed.
The Facebook fiasco inadvertently shines a light on different strains of feminism, and the wildly disparate varieties of attention and support they receive both from the media and from policymakers.
At the top of the status game sits Sheryl Sandberg, a key inspiration for girlboss feminists, for whom victory simply means winning power, not challenging it. Corporate feminism, often the reserve of privileged white women, celebrates women who “lean in” to a man’s world, not those who insist it needs to change so that everyone has a fair chance. It’s about “diversity and inclusion”— i.e., same values, different faces. It’s about having a nanny taking care of your children in a private, dedicated playroom next to your C-suite office, rather than building an on-site daycare center for all the employees’ children—let alone mandating parental leave and ending discrimination against parents and caregivers at every socioeconomic level. It’s about the magazines covers, nonfiction bestseller lists, and keynote slots at conferences. It is about the stranglehold of soft-spoken, acceptable female power, everywhere.
When it comes to criticism of big tech, corporate feminists are OK with data-extraction and surveillance, so long as the women doing it earn almost as much as the men. Those with misgivings tend to be “reformist” critics who lament what they see as unintended consequences of the business model; and they suggest only the gentlest of nudges. As Meredith Whittaker, Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute at NYU, puts it, " ‘nuance’ is also a term heard increasingly from tech reformists, in reference to their prescriptions— usually adding oversight, transparency, accountability to the status quo. …more structural approaches like bans, breakups, redistribution, they imply, lack nuance.” In theory, not all corporate feminists are also tech apologists or, at best, reformists, but they all share a basic political stance that things are mostly OK, and just need a little tweaking at the edges. Call it “nudge criticism”; executives are just good people doing their best, and we just need a few rules changes to optimize the incentives of corporations. Nudge criticism gives establishment journalists and policymakers material for articles and legislative bills, but doesn’t change anything fundamental.
When Frances Haugen came forward as a whistleblower, she slipped smoothly into the role of the acceptable girlboss face of reformist tech criticism. This is not a criticism of Haugen, or her considerable PR resources, but of how media, policymakers and so many of us respond to her. Haugen is doing everything she can, and with all she’s got, but she’s never going to suggest lawmakers change the real rules of the game. And that, more than anything, is why she is center stage.
Sophie Zhang is a trans woman, and, echoing how trans feminists are forced to fight simply for their right to exist, she has sacrificed her physical and mental health, her relationships, her livelihood, status and peace of mind—just to be heard. None of this came easily to her, yet she has persisted far more than what is rational or reasonable, simply because she felt she must. Karen Hao’s painstakingly researched profile documents the physical and emotional abuse Zhang suffered as a teenager when she came out, and contains the quietly devastating reason why Zhang first tried so hard to change Facebook from within: “Ultimately, I decided that I was the person who stayed in imperfect situations to try and fix them.” Facebook fired Zhang for under-performance because, despite the company’s refusal to act against dictators who used the platform for political and electoral fraud, she kept on trying to fix it, in addition to doing the job she was officially paid to do, as a data scientist. Zhang knew from a previous experience of sexual harassment that she would be downplayed, discredited and disbelieved, so she documented every single claim she made.
It still wasn’t enough.
In July 2021, after almost a year doing everything she could think of to keep blowing the whistle, Zhang was disappointed by the lack of public and political response. Yet she couldn’t regret what she had done. It simply wasn’t in her character to do otherwise.
Zhang’s drive to broadcast the truth and protect people she’ll never meet, despite the high price she knew she would pay, is powerfully reminiscent of Chelsea Manning, who blew the whistle on the US military. Manning leaked videos and documentation of US abuse of detainees in Guantanamo and killing of civilians in Iraq to Wikileaks, amongst other materials, and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. (President Obama, icon of gradualists and nuance-lovers everywhere, locked up more whistleblowers in eight years than all the presidents, cumulatively, before him. He commuted Manning’s sentence just before he left office, and she was finally able to transition.)
It cannot be a coincidence that two American trans women have been at the forefront of speaking truth to intensely coercive power. Holding fast to the truth despite the gaslighting denials of those who wield authority over them is integral to who they are. And knowing the truth was insufficient, they were compelled to act on it. Not all trans women are heroic truth-tellers, sure, but a surprising number of trans women I have known in public and private life are more courageous than anyone should need to be. I don’t know why trans sisters have been moved to risk and sacrifice so much, in different fields. I do know that the changes their revelations demand are not milquetoast solutions like “better oversight” or “more transparency.” The barriers and costs to these whistleblowers of speaking out are so much greater, and their critiques are indifferent to whether you like them or not. These sisters know what power truly looks like before it dons a pantsuit, pussy-hat, and professional smile.
Zhang’s criticisms of Facebook stick to her area of specialist knowledge, cutting narrow but deep. Unlike Haugen, she doesn’t claim “Mark” (Zuckerberg) is doing his best but is in over his head. Zhang says that Facebook systematically downgrades the priority of poorer, less prominent countries, refusing to spend the resources necessary to stop dictators from exploiting the platform’s baked-in elements to manipulate their own citizens. This is a far more devastating criticism, affecting many millions of people around the world. It goes to the heart of the business model; if Facebook can afford to be present globally, it can afford to invest in protecting the world’s most fragile democracies.
People are finally catching on. A UK parliamentary committee just invited Zhang to give evidence. I hope they look further than the incremental solutions so beloved of the management class, and instead open their minds to the possibilities that appear when you understand that progress will only happen when you tear down its quiet coercion and unequal distribution, instead of merely changing its face. To truly understand the vindictive, velvet-gloved power wielded by Facebook, we all need to understand that the harms women like Zhang and Haugen have exposed as whistleblowers are not exceptional. They’re not “abuses” of the platform, but simply what happens when third parties use it as it was designed to be used. And it won’t be fixed by asking nicely, because asking nicely never brought down a rotten system.
If we roll with the obvious narrative, that acceptable tech critique is defined around a “default whistleblower”—a white, cis, middle management American woman who was fine with it all until one day she wasn’t— we choose to avert our eyes from the worst, most systemic harms. We choose to pretend that it’s just “too hard” to find structural solutions that would stop the slow violence of for-profit hate, which is precisely Facebook’s business model. By centering white, corporate feminism in all questions that affect all kinds of women and girls, we’ll make exactly the same, systemic error Facebook does: prioritize fixing more prominent but much less serious harms.
Zhang did what she had to do because she knew that power lies. Power lies, above all, to and through those who covet it the most. To honor Zhang’s courage, we should do as she has done: see things exactly as they are, and do what truth demands.
[post_title] => Two Facebook whistleblowers leaned in, but only one became a media star
[post_excerpt] => Why is Frances Haugen the default whistleblower to whom all others are compared—even those that came before her?
[post_status] => publish
[comment_status] => closed
[ping_status] => open
[post_password] =>
[post_name] => two-facebook-whistleblowers-leaned-in-but-only-one-became-a-media-star
[to_ping] =>
[pinged] =>
https://conversationalist.org/2021/10/05/blowing-the-whistle-on-facebook-is-just-the-first-step/
[post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:08:26
[post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:08:26
[post_content_filtered] =>
[post_parent] => 0
[guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3356
[menu_order] => 169
[post_type] => post
[post_mime_type] =>
[comment_count] => 0
[filter] => raw
)
Hazal Sipahi, host of the podcast "Mental Klitoris."[/caption]
When she was a child growing up in provincial Turkey, Sipahi said, sexuality was only discussed in whispers; but as soon as she could speak English, she found an ocean of sexuality content available on the internet.
“I searched for information online and found it, only because I was curious,” she said. “I also learned many false things on the internet, and they were very hard to correct later on.”
For example, Sipahi explained, “For so long, we thought that the hymen was a literal veil like a membrane.” In Turkey there is a widespread belief that once the hymen is “deformed,” a woman’s femininity is damaged, and she somehow becomes less valuable as a future spouse.
“Mental Klitoris” is both Sipahi’s public service and her means of self-expression. She uses her podcast to correct misunderstandings and disinformation, to go beyond censorship and to translate new terminology into Turkish.
“I really wish I had been able to access this kind of information when I was around 14 or 15,” she said.
More than 45,000 people listen to Mental Klitoris, which provides them with access to crucial information in their native tongue. They learn terms like “stealthing,” “pegging,” “abortion,” “consent,” “vulva,” “menstruation,” and “slut-shaming.” Sipahi covers all these topics on her podcast; she says she’s adding important new vocabulary to the Turkish vernacular.
She’s also adding a liberal voice to the ongoing discussion about feminism, “Which became even stronger in Turkey after #MeToo.” She believes her program will lead to a wave of similar content in Turkey.
“This will go beyond podcasts,” she said. “We will have a sexual opening overall on the internet.”
Inspired by contemporary creatives like Lena Dunham (“Girls”), Michaela Coel (“I Might Detroy You”), 
Tuluğ Özlü[/caption]
Asked to describe how she feels when she crosses the barriers created by widely shared social taboos about human sexuality, Özlü, who lives in Istanbul’s hip 
Rayka Kumru[/caption]
Kumru said one of the current barriers to freedom in Turkey was the lack of access to comprehensive sexuality education, information and skills such as sex-positivity, critical thinking around values and diversity, and communication about consent. She circumvents that barrier by informing her viewers and listeners about them directly.
“Once connections and a collaborations are established between policy, education, and [particularly sexual] health, and when access to education and to shame-free, culturally specific, scientific, and empowering skills training are allowed, we see that these barriers are removed,” Kumru explains. Otherwise, she says, the same myths and taboos continue to play out, making misinformation, disinformation, taboos, and shame ever-more toxic.
Şükran Moral[/caption]
When it comes to female sexuality, Moral said, Turkey’s art scene is still conservative. “There’s self-censorship among not only creators, but also viewers and buyers, so it’s a vicious cycle.”
Part being an artist, particularly one who challenges the position of women, she said, is seeing a reaction to her work. “When art isn’t displayed,” she asked, “how do you get people to talk about taboos?”
Turkish academia also suffers from a censorship of sex studies.
Dr. Asli Carkoglu, a professor of psychology at Kadir Has University, said it was not easy finding a precise translation for the English word “intimacy” in Turkish.
“There’s the word ‘mahrem,’” she said, but that term has religious connotations.
The difficulty in interpretation, she explains, illustrates the problem: In Turkey, intimacy has not been normalized.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) have many times expressed support for gender-based segregation and a conservative lifestyle that protects their interpretation of Muslim values.
Erdogan, who has has been in power since 2003, has his own ways of promoting those values.
“At least three children,” has long been the slogan of Erdogan’s population campaign, as the president implores married couples to expand their families and increase Turkey’s population of 82 million.
“For the government, sex means children, population,” Dr. Carkoglu explained.
Dr. Carkoglu believes that sex education should be left to the family, but “when the government acts as though sexuality is nonexistent, the family doesn’t discuss it. It’s the chicken-and-egg dilemma,” she said.
So, how do you overcome a taboo as deep-rooted as sexuality in Turkey? Carkoglu believes that that the topic will have to be normalized through conversations between friends.
“That’s where the taboo starts to break,” she said. “Speaking with friends [about sexuality] becomes normal, speaking in public becomes normal, and then the system adapts.”
But for many Turks, speaking about sexuality is very difficult.
Berkant, 40, has made a living selling sex toys at his shop in the city of Adana, in southern Turkey, for the past two decades. But he said that he’s still too embarrassed to go up to a cashier in another store and say he wants to buy a condom.
“It doesn’t feel right,” he said, adding he doesn’t want to make the cashier uncomfortable.
He is seated comfortably at his desk as we speak; behind him, a wide selection of vibrators are arrayed on shelves.
Berkant and his older brother own one of three erotica shops in Adana. Most of their customers are lower middle class; one-third are female. “Many of them are government workers who come after hearing about us from a friend,” he said.
The shopkeeper said female customers phone in advance to check whether the shop is “available,” meaning empty.
He said he often refers women who describe certain complaints to a gynecologist.
“I see countless women who are barely aware of their own bodies,” he said.
Dr. Doğan Şahin, a psychiatrist and sexual therapist, said that the information women in Turkey hear when they are growing up has a lot to do with their avoidance of discussions about sex, even when the subject concerns their health.
[caption id="attachment_2971" align="aligncenter" width="1600"]
Advertisement for men's underwear in Izmir, Turkey.[/caption]
Men don’t really care whether the woman is aroused, willing or having an orgasm, he said. Unless the problem is due to pain, or vaginismus, couples rarely head to a therapist, he adds.
“[Women who grew up hearing false myths] tend to take sexuality as something bad happening to their bodies, and so, they unintentionally shut their vaginas, leading to vaginismus. This is actually a defense method,” he told The Conversationalist.
“They fear dying, they fear becoming a lower quality woman, or that sex is their duty.”
While most Turkish women find out about their sexual needs after getting married, the doctor says that, based on research he completed about 10 years ago, men tend to fall for myths about sexuality by watching pornography, which plants unrealistic fantasies about sex in their minds.
“Sexuality is also presented as criminal or banned in [Turkish] television shows. The shows take sexuality to be part of cheating, damaging passions or crimes instead of part of a normal, healthy, and happy life.”
He recommends that couples talk about sexuality and normalize it. Talking is crucial, and so is the language used in those conversations.
Bahar Aldanmaz, a Turkish sociologist studying for her PhD at Boston University, told The Conversationalist why talking about menstruation matters.
“A woman’s period is unfortunately seen as something to be ashamed of, something to be hidden,” she said. (According to Turkey’s language authority, the word “dirty” also means “a woman having her period.”)
“There are many children who can’t share their menstruation experience, or can’t even understand they are having their periods, or who experience this with fear and trauma.”
And this is what builds a wall of taboo around this essential issue, the professor says. It is one of the issues her non-profit organization “We Need To Talk” aims to accomplish, among other problems related to menstruation, such as period poverty and period stigma.
Female hygiene products are taxed as much as 18 percent—the same ratio as diamonds, said Ms. Aldanmaz. She adds that this is what mainly causes inequality—privileged access to basic health goods, the consequence of the roles imposed by Turkish social mores.
“Despite declining income due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a serious increase in the pricing of hygiene pads and tampons. This worsens period poverty,” Aldanmaz says. She offers Scotland as an example of what would like to see in Turkey: free sanitary products for all.
During Turkey’s government-imposed lockdown in May 2021, several photos showing tampons and pads in the non-essential sales part of markets stirred heated debates around the subject, but neither the Ministry of Family and Social Services nor the Health Ministry weighed in.
“We are fighting this shaming culture in Turkey,” Aldanmaz says, “by understanding and talking about it.”
[post_title] => Sexually aware and on air: Beyond Turkey's comfort zone
[post_excerpt] => Turkish podcasts that host frank conversations about sexuality are smashing taboos and filling information vacuums.
[post_status] => publish
[comment_status] => closed
[ping_status] => open
[post_password] =>
[post_name] => sexually-aware-and-on-air-beyond-turkeys-comfort-zone
[to_ping] =>
[pinged] =>
[post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02
[post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02
[post_content_filtered] =>
[post_parent] => 0
[guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=2949
[menu_order] => 187
[post_type] => post
[post_mime_type] =>
[comment_count] => 0
[filter] => raw
)
During the decade prior to the 2011 uprising, Egypt saw a blogging boom, with people from diverse socio-economic backgrounds writing outspoken commentary about social and political issues, even though they ran the risk of arrest and imprisonment for criticizing the state. The internet provided space for discussions that had previously been restricted to private gatherings; it also enabled cross-national dialogue throughout the region, between bloggers who shared a common language. Public protests weren’t unheard of—in fact, as those I interviewed for the book argued, they had been building up slowly over time—but they were sporadic and lacked mass support.
While some bloggers and social media users chose to publish under their own names, others were justifiably concerned for their safety. And so, the creators of “We Are All Khaled Saeed” chose to manage the Facebook page using pseudonyms.
Facebook, however, has always had a policy that forbids the use of “fake names,” predicated on the misguided belief that people behave with more civility when using their “real” identity. Mark Zuckerberg famously claimed that having more than one identity represents a lack of integrity, thus demonstrating a profound lack of imagination and considerable ignorance. Not only had Zuckerberg never considered why a person of integrity who lived in an oppressive authoritarian state might fear revealing their identity, but he had clearly never explored the rich history of anonymous and pseudonymous publishing.
In November 2010, just before Egypt’s parliamentary elections and a planned anti-regime demonstration, Facebook, acting on a tip that its owners were using fake names, removed the “We are all Khaled Saeed” page.
At this point I had been writing and communicating for some time with Facebook staff about the problematic nature of the policy banning anonymous users. It was Thanksgiving weekend in the U.S., where I lived at the time, but a group of activists scrambled to contact Facebook to see if there was anything they could do. To their credit, the company offered a creative solution: If the Egyptian activists could find an administrator who was willing to use their real name, the page would be restored.
They did so, and the page went on to call for what became the January 25 revolution.
A few months later, I joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation and began to work full-time in advocacy, which gave my criticisms more weight and enabled me to communicate more directly with policymakers at various tech companies.
Three years later, while driving across the United States with my mother and writing a piece about social media and the Egyptian revolution, I turned on the hotel television one night and saw on the news that police in Ferguson, Missouri had shot an 18-year-old Black man, Michael Brown, sparking protests that drew a disproportionate militarized response.
The parallels between Egypt and the United States struck me even then, but only in 2016 did I become fully aware. That summer, a police officer in Minnesota pulled over 32-year-old Philando Castile—a Black man—at a traffic stop and, as he reached for his license and registration, fatally shot him five times at close range.
Castile’s partner, Diamond Reynolds, was in the passenger’s seat and had the presence of mind to whip out her phone in the immediate aftermath, streaming her exchange with the police officer on Facebook Live.
Almost immediately, Facebook removed the video. The company later restored it, citing a “technical glitch,” but the incident demonstrated the power that technology companies—accountable to no one but their shareholders and driven by profit motives—have over our expression.
The internet brought about a fundamental shift in the way we communicate and relate to one another, but its commercialization has laid bare the limits of existing systems of governance. In the years following these incidents, content moderation and the systems surrounding it became almost a singular obsession. I worked to document the experiences of social media users, collaborated with numerous individuals, and learned about the structural limitations to changing the system.
Over the years, my views on the relationship between free speech and tech have evolved. Once I believed that companies should play no role in governing our speech, but later I shifted to pragmatism, seeking ways to mitigate the harm of their decisions and enforce limits on their power.
But while the parameters of the problem and its potential solutions grew clearer, so did my thesis: Content moderation— specifically, the uneven enforcement of already-inconsistent policies—disproportionately impacts marginalized communities and exacerbates existing structural power balances. Offline repression is, as it turns out, replicated online.
The 2016 election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency brought the issue of content moderation to the fore; suddenly, the terms of the debate shifted. Conservatives in the United States claimed they were unjustly singled out by Big Tech and the media amplified those claims—much to my chagrin, since they were not borne out by data. At the same time, the rise of right-wing extremism, disinformation, and harassment—such as the spread of the QAnon conspiracy and wildly inaccurate information about vaccines—on social media led me to doubt some of my earlier conclusions about the role Big Tech should play in governing speech.
That’s when I knew that it was time to write about content moderation’s less-debated harms and to document them in a book.
Setting out to write about a subject I know so intimately (and have even experienced firsthand), I thought I knew what I would say. But the process turned out to be a learning experience that caused me to rethink some of my own assumptions about the right way forward.
One of the final interviews I conducted for the book was with Dave Willner, one of the early policy architects at Facebook. Sitting at a café in San Francisco just a few months before the pandemic hit, he told me: “Social media empowers previously marginal people, and some of those previously marginal people are trans teenagers and some are neo-Nazis. The empowerment sense is the same, and some of it we think is good and some of it we think is not good. The coming together of people with rare problems or views is agnostic.”
That framing guided me in the final months of writing. My instinct, based on those early experiences with social media as a democratizing force, has always been to think about the unintended consequences of any policy for the world’s most vulnerable users, and it is that lens that guides my passion for protecting free expression. But I also see now that it is imperative never to forget a crucial fact—that the very same tools which have empowered historically marginalized communities can also enable their oppressors.
[post_title] => Between Nazis and democracy activists: social media and the free speech dilemma
[post_excerpt] => The content moderation policies employed by social media platforms disproportionately affect marginalized communities and exacerbate power imbalances. Offline repression is replicated online.
[post_status] => publish
[comment_status] => closed
[ping_status] => open
[post_password] =>
[post_name] => between-nazis-and-democracy-activists-social-media-and-the-free-speech-dilemma
[to_ping] =>
[pinged] =>
[post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:13
[post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:13
[post_content_filtered] =>
[post_parent] => 0
[guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=2452
[menu_order] => 216
[post_type] => post
[post_mime_type] =>
[comment_count] => 0
[filter] => raw
)
