Transcript of episode 004 -

How Black women tried to save Twitter

Bridget Todd (00:17):

Okay, so I could tell you this story a hundred times in a hundred different ways. People just don't listen to women, especially Black women, and it comes with big consequences.

Bridget Todd (00:35):

Six years ago, Black feminists were experiencing a coordinated pattern of disinformation on Twitter. They spoke up, but no one listened. That failure to listen to Black women had a big impact. It allowed for the weaponization of online harassment tactics against other marginalized people on social media, and presents continued threats to our democracy and safety.

Bridget Todd (00:55):

Okay, so let's just get this out of the way right now: Twitter is a fucking cesspool. If you spend any time there, you probably already know this. Bad faith commentary, reply guys, trolls, harassment, it can really just be an unpleasant place. In May, Twitter announced they would start labeling tweets that spread misleading information, but this comes years after Black feminists raised the alarm about it and were ignored. These women weren't just being attacked, they were learning about the tactics that bad actors used to infiltrate online communities. They spoke up about what they were experiencing online. So why didn't anyone listen, and what might've happened if they had?

Shafiqah Hudson (01:32):

Shafiqah Hudson, freelancer, cat lady, sometimes activist.

Bridget Todd (01:39):

Shafiqah had been using Twitter regularly since almost its very beginning, where she spent most of her time online connecting with other Black feminists. In 2014 while job searching, she noticed a hashtag that just did not make sense, EndFathersDay. The people pushing the EndFathersDay hashtag on Twitter appeared to be Black feminists. They talked about how we should abolish Father's Day because too many Black men date outside of their race, or because Black men don't support their children, stuff that just seemed really out there.

Shafiqah Hudson (02:06):

I must've had 10 different tabs open because I was also doing a job search and just going about my life. One tweet caught my attention because it was so completely off the wall. And I don't know who retweeted it or how it even arrived in my timeline, but it wasn't anything that any Black feminist anywhere would say. It was like... What was it? Oh gosh. Yeah. "EndFathersDay. I wish these White women would stop stealing our men." Something just completely off the wall that had nothing to do with anything, and the avatar was someone who I didn't recognize.

Black Feminist Twitter

Shafiqah Hudson (02:54):

Now, the thing about the Black feminist community on Twitter, the thing about a lot of communities on Twitter, is that you might not necessarily get along with everybody, but you know who everyone is. And if you haven't met them or seen them out or done a tweet up, hung out at a party, something, someone you know has. In this particular instance, I clicked on the person... well, the account's profile and I said, "Okay, who is this? I have never seen this person, and it looks like they just joined two days ago and they're just tweeting about this with this hashtag and they have the photo of a Black woman, but nothing adds up."

Shafiqah Hudson (03:39):

So, that drove me to click on the hashtag EndFathersDay, and lo and behold, when I did a Twitter search, there's a bunch of accounts that are saying things that are completely left. Not left politically, just left, where are you coming from left. And I didn't recognize any of them. So at that point, I just asked the general question from my timeline to say, "Okay. You guys, what's going on? I keep seeing this hashtag and these accounts that I don't recognize with people who look like they just joined five seconds ago." Someone said, "Yeah, it looks like this is some 4chan thing."

Shafiqah Hudson (04:25):

That's when I really started digging and I said, "Okay. Well, this is really awful because they're pretending to be Black women who are saying these awful things. And I'm smart enough to know that nothing here that they're saying is even remotely what a real Black feminist would say." I honestly think the people who they fooled immediately were already probably biased against feminists or Black women or some combination of the two. I didn't get the impression that they were fooling most of the people I followed, is what I mean, but they were getting some reaction.

Bridget Todd (05:06):

That's when Shafiqah went from curious to pissed.

Shafiqah Hudson (05:09):

I got so mad. I remember just being so angry. I could feel my cheeks and my ears heat up. Honestly, like in the cartoons, where the character starts steaming from their-

Bridget Todd (05:28):

Smoke coming out of your ears.

Shafiqah Hudson (05:29):

... Yes, and you hear the tea kettle whistle. I was furious. I was like, "It's not like we don't get enough garbage online just being Black women." With people just randomly showing up in our mentions to argue with something that we said." Not because they necessarily disagree, but because that's what people do when you're a Black woman online, apparently. Because we don't deal with enough. Out here in real life and online, we don't deal with enough. We've got this whole silly operation thing happening.

Shafiqah Hudson (06:05):

So I said, "Well, let me just go ahead and take a look and see what's really going on and see how bad this is." And as I began to dig, I saw just how bad it was. And I realized that I would not be able to point out all of these accounts alone.

Bridget Todd (06:24):

You know how in movies when a character discovers this thing they've been investigating is much, much bigger than they realized? "There is no Pepe Silvia and this thing goes all the way to the top." Well, that's how Shafiqah felt.

Bridget Todd (06:34):

She knew the Twitter accounts pushing EndFathersDay weren't actually Black women. They were just impersonating Black women and pretty badly at that. But there were too many of them for this to be a one-off thing. It had to be coordinated. And there were also too many for her to tackle alone. She wanted to give other Black feminists a tool to sniff out these imposters. So, she fought back with a hashtag of her own, YourSlipIsShowing.

Shafiqah Hudson (06:54):

I went ahead with YourSlipIsShowing. I might've run another line like I don't know, your mascara's running, something like that. But YourSlipIsShowing just seemed to work. It really just seemed to work.

Bridget Todd (07:07):

Okay. So if you're not a lady from the South, the phrase YourSlipIsShowing might not mean anything to you. Literally, it means when your slip is peeking out from underneath your skirt or dress, a big fashion no-no. But where I come from, that one phrase really highlights the subversiveness what I'll call auntie speak. Think of it a bit like the phrase, bless your heart. A lady at church might tell you that your slip is peeking out from the bottom of your skirt because they care about you looking your best. Or, they could tell you YourSlipIsShowing because they don't like you and they're pointing out publicly that you aren't looking as good and put together as you think you are.

Shafiqah Hudson (07:40):

Just the sort of thing that one of your aunties might say to you in church, when it's, "Oh honey, you need to fix your slip because it's showing." Except mean because there's a difference between a YourSlipIsShowing from one of your aunties and YourSlipIsShowing from somebody who doesn't like you.

Bridget Todd (08:02):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shafiqah Hudson (08:05):

And that was what I was going with it. Like, "Yeah, YourSlipIsShowing. I'm telling you because I was raised right, not because I particularly care about you being embarrassed."

Bridget Todd (08:19):

I love that so much. I love how you kind of use this Southern auntie expression that we all sort of know what it means. What's also funny is that I would imagine the people who are impersonating Black women, that nuance probably goes right over their heads.

Shafiqah Hudson (08:36):

Yes. Yes. That was also one of the things that I also delighted in, because of course they wouldn't get it. Because you have to be somewhat embedded within certain communities to pick up on the nuance. And they really weren't.

“I am a white person pretending to be a Black woman.”

Bridget Todd (08:54):

It's fitting that we're talking about getting the nuance, that certain something you can't really teach. This would ultimately be the undoing of people impersonating Black women online, their inability to authentically sound like Black women. They'd try to use AAVE, or African American Vernacular English, but get the expressions all wrong in ways that might as well be screaming, "I am a White person pretending to be a Black woman."

Bridget Todd (09:16):

This is where I should probably say that around the same time in 2014, I noticed someone on Twitter using my photo and tweeting confusing things about Black people. I never knew who was behind it or why it was happening, but if I had to say, I would say it wasn't an actual Black woman because the things they were saying were just so out there, things like "I'm going to be voting for Trump because Hillary Clinton is whack, y'all." Things that just didn't sound right.

Shafiqah Hudson (09:39):

Because they're not speakers of AAVE. They're approximating. The thing that really, really, really seemed to immediately point them out was this consistent inability to understand and properly use the habitual be. They didn't get it. They would use the habitual be just kind of for the future tense, you know what I mean? It was terrible. And a lot of the time it was just really obviously racist word salad.

Bridget Todd (10:21):

Obviously racist word salad. I love it. My new band name.

Bridget Todd (10:25):

Ultimately, it seemed like the point of EndFathersDay was to see what kind of discord bad actors organizing on message boards like 4chan could sow within feminist online communities and to make actual feminists and our issues look like petty stupid man haters whose issues were so outlandish, they could never be taken seriously. It turns out, this is actually a pretty common disinformation tactic, hijacking public conversations about sensitive topics or wedge issues through media manipulation is a way of making people afraid of having an opinion in public and ultimately trying to silence them.

Joan Donovan (10:58):

I'm Joan Donovan and I'm the Research Director at the Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy.

Bridget Todd (11:05):

Dr. Donovan says the same way that brands and politicians realize the power of social media, the kind of people who want to harass others did too. It can have a big impact, especially as we're using social media to talk about thorny issues like race, gender, and sexuality issues that require nuance to discuss thoughtfully. It makes it tough for anyone to have a good faith dialogue online.

Joan Donovan (11:26):

Over time, just like the politicians learn to use social media, we had White supremacists figure out that you don't actually need to show up in public to have an impact on people's lives. And so, we saw networked and coordinated harassment campaigns that just continue, even to this day, continue to be useful ways to shut down journalists, to impersonate different groups, and to really cause a fracture in public conversation about really important issues that require some level of nuance, some level of understanding, and a lot of compassion to talk about. Especially racism in this moment, people are reticent to talk about it because they're afraid of saying something wrong, especially in the environments online, where if you do make a misstep, you could get dragged, you could get canceled, but also some of that might be artificial. It might be the case that people do sympathize with you. People do want to help you grow and learn, but certain media manipulators see that as an opportunity to swarm in and really drive the wedge as deep as it can go.

Bridget Todd (12:50):

A few right-wing news outlets picked up the hashtag EndFathersDay and amplified it as a legitimate feminist take. This is how Fox News covered it.

Speaker 4 (12:58):

Some of these tweets here is from Tasha, she wrote in, "Everyone knows we only need mothers. Why do we even need Father's Day? Fathers are useless."

Speaker 5 (13:06):

Oh, come on.

Speaker 6 (13:08):

Oh, come on.

Speaker 4 (13:08):

#EndFathersDay.

Speaker 5 (13:08):

Oh, come on. Just more of this nasty feminist rhetoric that they're not just looking interested in ending Father's Day. They're interested in ending men. That's really what they want.

Bridget Todd (13:16):

End Fathers’ Day

But Shafiqah says, "Only the kind of people who were already predisposed to be skeptical of women and feminists and especially Black women fell for it."

Shafiqah Hudson (13:27):

At first, I remember I was incredulous. Honestly, I was looking at people like, "Oh, EndFathersDay feminists take a terrible turn and radical blah, blah, blah blah." And I was like, "You have got to be kidding." But then I realized that no, they were completely serious. And then it dawned on me that these are people who could not possibly understand the feminism, possibly women in general, Black people, or too much of anything outside of their little Fox News bubble. That was the impression that I got. Basically, if you fell for this, it's because you already had a certain set of bigotries in place to fall for it.

Bridget Todd (14:14):

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

Shafiqah Hudson (14:42):

As you're probably aware, a lot of us are big on what we call receipts. So, there are plenty of receipts. We've the screen calves. You can't even delete the tweet because we got it. We've got the information. But yeah. I mean, that's been a big part of it for me and it's frustrating for a lot of us to see essentially a history erased. It's particularly distressing for me because I wouldn't consider myself a scholar at this particular point and my friend So Treu who also was absolutely integral with formulating YourSlipIsShowing and how it kind of played out and became a useful tool.

Shafiqah Hudson (15:34):

But back when I was a scholar, I understood that one of the things that people do when they're trying to erase the impact of a movement is they kind of start deleting history. It's a huge feature of erasure. When people talk about YourSlipIsShowing if they talk about it or if they mention it at all, it's weird. It kind of gets vaguely mentioned in relation to Gamergate as this weird thing that sort of happened before Gamergate that wasn't really relevant and didn't provide anybody any tools. It was just kind of a blip as opposed to what it was, which was a scary peek into the future.

Shafiqah Hudson (16:29):

And again like I said, hindsight being 20/20, when you start to look back on all of these 4chan... I'm sorry. I can't say 4chan without making that noise.

Bridget Todd (16:43):

You have a special 4chan noise.

Shafiqah Hudson (16:45):

I do. I do. Oh, my gosh. Someone else pointed it out to me. It's like, "Do you realize that you just kind of make this disgusted noise whenever you say 4chan?" I'm like, "Ugh." Sorry, it's automatic. I'm working on it.

Shafiqah Hudson (17:02):

When you try to kind of understand how everything happened, you have to take all of it into account. And I really think that in EndFathersDay and consequently YourSlipIsShowing were a huge part of it and it can be frustrating to see it left out of the history because it's like, "Okay. You're missing a really relevant chunk of understanding how all of this mess happened."

Bridget Todd (17:32):

Even in a time where we're having the conversations around women's experiences online, why do you think YourSlipIsShowing and EndFathersDay and the way that women and folks of color have been harassed online pretty much goes overlooked? Why do you think that is?

Shafiqah Hudson (17:46):

Yeah. And again, it's frustrating. And my theory remains, it's because the targeted group at the time for the EndFathersDay of 4chan operation were Black women. I have no other answer at this point. It has been six years. I've watched this just kind of repeatedly happen. And the only answer unfortunately, that I have is that, okay. Well, this is being largely ignored at this rate because of who the targets were and the targets were Black women, particularly Black feminists.

Bridget Todd (18:31):

We'll be right back after this quick break.

Bridget Todd (18:42):

People who are traditionally marginalized online like Black women are specifically impacted by things like disinformation and harassment on social media. The ultimate goal is to freak them out so much that they'll shut down their social media and just stop talking. Here's Dr. Donovan again.

Joan Donovan (18:58):

Gendertrolling

Yeah. So, we have to remember that a lot of the ways in which disinformation is carried through networks are also related to the ways in which people are harassed online. There's a concept called Gendertrolling. It's evolved into trans trolling, race trolling, queer trolling, where the characteristics of your identity become the thing that they focus on and there'll be a swarm of folks that have coordinated in some other place, usually on a message board, and they will target specific public figures or women or trans folks or prominent Black activists in order to get them to shut off their social media. And they will use all kinds of horrendous images and threats to try to get you to feel fear and to shut it down.

Joan Donovan (20:07):

And we don't see that same kind of level of threat making when it comes to trolling male candidates. And that has to do with the characteristics of the harassers themselves, which often see the harassment as a form of activism and as a form of defending themselves or defending their piece of the culture. And so, a lot of these people tend to be misogynists as well as racists. And in their smaller online communities where they don't think they're watched, they'll talk openly about that and they'll talk openly about who they should target and why and what the problem is.

Joan Donovan (20:55):

And I think at this stage, we've been through this enough to know it's a serious problem, but it still happens every day. And especially in this moment, we're seeing an incredible amount of trolling around anti-Black racism and the responsibility though for dealing with this lies with the platform companies, first and foremost.

Bridget Todd (21:23):

Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey hasn't always been the most responsive to the misuse of the platform. You'd think he'd be more concerned, but Shafiqah says that wasn't the case. She and the other Black women targeted were pretty much left on their own to figure it out.

Bridget Todd (21:38):

So did the powers that be at Twitter or any other social media company or any other official do anything to fix this?

Shafiqah Hudson (21:44):

No. The short answer there is no. Now, the longer explanation is that we repeatedly brought this whole thing to the attention of Twitter support, to Jack directly. I'm actually not really sure how his mentions work. I'm sure they're probably a whole mess most of the time, but it's not like nobody knew what was happening. It had made the news, so it's not as though he was ignorant. The general impression that I got from Twitter support was that, "Oh, well, we're so sorry. Our hands are tied and blah, blah, blah." And I started looking into the tech side of everything and I realized that that wasn't the truth. They absolutely have and had tools on hand to stop this and they just didn't. They just let it happen. They just let us clean up the mess and defend our communities ourselves.

Bridget Todd (22:49):

As much as being left to fend for her own community online sucked, it did teach Shafiqah that her online community could do a lot with a little.

Shafiqah Hudson (22:56):

And while that wasn't cool at all, and hopefully at some point down the line, they will be sufficiently shamed for it because it was just really awful, we learned what we could do on the ground with just the very basic tool of community, organization and a hashtag. We were able to do a whole lot to just stop something that could've gotten way out of hand. We outed it early and we ended it early. And if something had been done to make sure that these fake accounts that we were reporting had been taken out of commission, there would have been a lot less for Gamergate to work with. They wouldn't have had the opportunity to just go ahead and access those same tools that they'd already created.

Bridget Todd (23:59):

So in a kind of way, it sounds like your work with YourSlipIsShowing and your work organizing community responses online was kind of this canary in a coal mine. And you all did all that you could to prevent this, to stamp this out, but if only the powers that be at Twitter or elsewhere had done anything, then it might not be the sort of wide scale situation that it is now.

Shafiqah Hudson (24:24):

That is exactly correct. And I know that sounds damning, but that's accurate. They could have stopped it. They could still stop it. But the reason why, unfortunately, and this was absolutely pointed out by people at the time and people later taking a look at the whole situation from the whole post-mortem of the whole incident, the reason why they didn't is because of the profit model at the time was based on number of accounts and interaction. So then when you're selling your product basically to, we're the product, to advertisers and what have you, the more users it looks like you have, the better.

Shafiqah Hudson (25:21):

So, it really wasn't in Twitter's best interests to say, "Okay. Well, we have 20 accounts with one IP address that's suspicious and we should look into it." And that's why they didn't. They didn't. It took them a full two and a half years, I think to even really address it in a serious way. And I think that was only after the whole congressional meeting. I'm pretty sure that was after everybody who was the head of social media got called in front of Congress.

Bridget Todd (25:59):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shafiqah Hudson (26:02):

That's what it took.

Bridget Todd (26:05):

So, that pretty much brings us to today. Today, Twitter leads all other social media platforms on the spread of misleading information about coronavirus, according to a study by Oxford researchers called Types, Sources and Claims of COVID-19 Misinformation. And a study out of Carnegie Mellon found that most of the accounts pushing this misleading content are actually convincing looking bots using Twitter to prey on people, sow division and increase polarization.

Bridget Todd (26:30):

This isn't just an online thing, either. Kathleen Carley, the Director for the Center for Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity says, "Increased polarization will have a variety of real world consequences and play out in things like voting behavior and hostility toward ethnic groups."

Bridget Todd (26:46):

And this Summer, as Black Lives Matter protests popped up all over the globe, Twitter confirmed that multiple accounts posing as Black Lives Matter activists were calling for violence in White suburbs, but those accounts were actually run by White supremacist groups just posing as activists and quote Antifa to cause chaos.

Speaker 7 (27:03):

Facebook under fire again as Senate Intelligence Committee report claiming Russian agents use social media sites like Facebook to target African Americans in an effort to suppress voter turnout.

Bridget Todd (27:15):

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

Bridget Todd (27:46):

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

Bridget Todd (28:23):

I asked Shafiqah if she thinks that if someone had listened to Black women when they spoke up about being targeted online, things might be different now. It's a tough question for her.

Shafiqah Hudson (28:37):

This is always going to be a question that kind of hangs in my mind because while I understand that Black voters were absolutely targeted, I'm not entirely sure that we were fooled. Do you know what I mean? Right. Honestly, because it seems like to me, we kind of all got out and voted anyway. And it also seems like to me, Donald Trump may have lost the popular vote by three million votes, but that's neither here nor there, I guess.

Bridget Todd (29:10):

Not if you ask him, he didn't.

Shafiqah Hudson (29:12):

Well, we don't ask him things because we like honest answers. But yeah. I mean, just the fact that this happened, it left us arguably vulnerable and that even though I'm not sure how ultimately successful it was, just the fact that we had foreign agents targeting voting populations in the United States of America should have been serious and due cause for alarm because even if it doesn't work, it's just the fact that they tried and that they could.

Shafiqah Hudson (29:54):

Why do you do it. Can we get it together? It's because we left a door open. That was a failure that was... I don't want to say it was on me because I feel like it definitely wasn't on me and it definitely wasn't on you. It was a failure on the side of whatever agents are supposed to be protecting us. And I guess that offers... it opens up a lot for speculations. Like, "Well, who's looking after us now?" But yeah. That was a glaring example of just kind of the general failure to address something that did not have to get as big as it got.

Bridget Todd (30:48):

More There Are No Girls on the Internet after this quick break.

Bridget Todd (31:00):

The 2020 Presidential Election is 112 days away. Digital security experts agree that American elections are vulnerable and not enough is being done about it. During Trump's impeachment hearing, Fiona Hill, the former National Security Council Advisor specializing in Russian and European affairs said...

Fiona Hill (31:17):

Right now, Russia's security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are running out of time to stop them.

Bridget Todd (31:25):

So, what do we do? Dr. Donovan says...

Joan Donovan (31:28):

As we get closer to the election, we know that all different kinds of tactics are going to get utilized, including potentially deep fakes or cheap fakes like manipulated video, manipulated audio. We're going to see probably clips of people quoted out of context. We've seen this happen to Joe Biden a few different times. Then of course, we've seen gaffes that he's done that are completely within context and a problem. You can't forget that every once in a while you're watching it and you're like, "This can't be real." And it's totally real.

Joan Donovan (32:07):

Well, what's crazy to me about it is as a researcher, you're supposed to be attuned to all of this, but I still get fooled here and there. But the last thing I'll say about the way in which I think platform companies need to better serve our political elections and the integrity of elections is that they need to hire some serious specialists. They need to hire a whole army of librarians to do content curations so that when people are looking for information, they find things that have been fact checked that are true and correct.

Joan Donovan (32:40):

I think that we have a right to truth. And part of the problem is the way in which these algorithms are designed is to bring up things that are quote unquote fresh and relevant. And the problem with fresh and relevant content is that disinformation is usually incredibly popular because there are people trying to push it and there are people trying to dispute it. And so as a result, it rises generally to the top of search algorithms or trending algorithms very quickly because of that feature.

Bridget Todd (33:13):

But will Twitter actually do any of that? Shafiqah isn't super confident that the platform will do anything at all.

Shafiqah Hudson (33:20):

I haven't even thought about it. And I guess that's sort of a reflection on my general skepticism right now with not their ability, but their willingness to address this. I have a good friend who said one of the smartest things I've ever heard anybody say and I quote it all the time, but he said, "When things look like they're not working out, you can always trust that they're working out for somebody."

Bridget Todd (33:50):

Damn.

Shafiqah Hudson (33:50):

So, I'm going to leave that right there. When it looks like things aren't working, you start asking questions and it's a whole rabbit hole.

Bridget Todd (34:09):

That's the thing about the internet. There's so much darkness lurking in its corners just waiting to spill out. But where there's darkness, there's light too. Where there's someone being ugly online, there's someone else reaching out to make a genuine connection. There's real community to be built and laughs to be had, the kind of laughs that can sustain you through difficult times.

Bridget Todd (34:29):

Being online as a constant tightrope walk of acknowledging that darkness while still being able to see the corners of light peeking through. And even while wading through all of that darkness and ugliness, it's the light that is really sustained Shafiqah. After everything she's been through, she's still grateful for Twitter as a platform and all the good things it's brought to her life.

Shafiqah Hudson (34:50):

Honestly, it really helps that I have a strong and supportive community both online and off. I really am super grateful for Twitter for so many reasons, not the least of which is because it's helped me expand my network. And I've met amazing people and connected with people who are like me, people who aren't like me and gotten to know so much about them and learn about their lived experiences. And that has saved me because it helps me kind of get out of my own head space or likewise, connect with people who understand 100% where I'm coming from. In a world where we're frequently gas lit about the things that we see and experience, that is absolutely invaluable.

Bridget Todd (35:54):

Oh, and one more thing that helps.

Shafiqah Hudson (35:56):

It also helps that I'm funny. Honestly, having a sense of humor and a wit will get you through pretty much... I don't want to say pretty much anything, but how about this? It's gotten me through pretty much everything.

Bridget Todd (36:17):

And you've been through some stuff.

Shafiqah Hudson (36:19):

I've been through it.

Bridget Todd (36:24):

There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our Executive Producer. Tari Harrison is our Producer and Sound Engineer. Michael Amato is our Contributing Producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. For more podcasts from iHeart, check out the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Bridget Todd (36:46):

Thanks so much for listening to There Are No Girls on the Internet. If you want to help our podcast grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.