Transcript

Bridget Todd (00:03):

You're listening to Disinformed, a mini series from There Are No Girls On The Internet. I'm Bridget Todd.

Newscaster (00:12):

“Two democratic candidates actually outperformed Joe Biden among key democratic constituencies among African-Americans, among young people. CBS news projects that both Democrats have won those two seats, really extraordinary development given to not only just about what's changed in the state of Georgia, once a ruby red state.”

Bridget Todd (00:35):

The morning of January 6, I woke up beaming. There had been a historic win in the Georgia Senate runoff election shifting the power of the Senate and people were crediting Black women like Stacey Abrams for the win. I felt like I was truly walking in the power of Black women and that that power was impossible for anyone to ignore.

Bridget Todd (00:55):

Y'all, we didn't even get a day. Hours later, that feeling of power from the Georgia runoffs was replaced with feelings of fear and powerlessness as I watched violent insurrectionists storm the Capitol. Our moment of joy overshadowed. And the worst part, we likely wouldn't even be here if people with power had just listened to Black women.

Black women have been warning about the spread of disinformation for years. In 2014, it was Black women like Shafiqah Hudson, who sounded the alarm about coordinated harassment campaigns meant to spread chaos distortions and confusion on social media.

This was years before a Senate inquiry would confirm what these women had said all along that bad actors were using social media to spread disinformation in the 2016 election. The report also confirmed that Black communities were their biggest targets. We already know that communities of color are disproportionately impacted by disinformation.

But also much of the foundational work to combat it has been driven by Black women researchers, organizers, and users, women like Shireen Mitchell have been talking about the ways they saw disinformation target our communities since the very beginning.

In 1999, Shireen created Digital Sisters. The first organization dedicated to bringing women and girls of color online. And later she founded Stop Online Violence Against Women, a project that addresses laws and policies to provide protections for women online. In January of 2020, Shireen authored a report outlining the past and present of disinformation campaigns used during election cycles starting from 2016, leading up to today. Black women aren't often cited as experts on disinformation and while that impacts our communities the most. Our stories about it are not often centered, Shireen is pretty pissed about this.

And now on the heels of the disinformation fueled riot at the Capitol and as more and more institutions and outlets start to see disinformation as a real problem, she wonders what took you so long.

Shireen's life work has been carving out space for women of color and Black women online. And it all started in an unlikely place an arcade.

Bridget Todd

So you have been involved with the internet almost for as long as the internet has been a thing. How did you get started online? Like what were your early experiences on the internet life?

Shireen Mitchell (03:12):

I started coding at 10 years old in Harlem, in the projects, but one of the other things I used to do after school every day was to go down the other side of the street, heading back home, but across the street to the arcade room. That's what I fell in love with video games which is, we're talking the stand up machines, the early days Pac-Man, Centipede, this is when our age shows up. We're talking Space invaders is like, we're talking some of the original games I would go and play.

Shireen Mitchell (03:44):

I didn't realize at the time I was the only girl. The store owner didn't want me there because I would play the entire time on the single quarter. So the store owner couldn't make any money and the boys were mad that I would beat them and they didn't want to play the games either if I was present.

Shireen Mitchell (03:59):

And so the truth is my mom thought that I was going there every day and in hindsight, we had debates about this when I got older, in hindsight, as we were fighting about me going there everyday she thought I was going in because there was some boy there I liked when all I was doing is going there to beat boys at the game.

Shireen Mitchell (04:19):

That there was something else going on so it was... And also she was, Harlem, Bronx, the life of a Black girl in spaces like that, where she was like, "As your mother, I'm just going to bring you home if I can." And she did. So she was like, if you really, really, really do love these games then I'm going to buy, we're poor. But she was like, "I'm going to buy the Atari." Which is what she did. And you get to play these games at home. And so I'm thinking I get to go play by myself with no interference, heck yeah, I'm going to do that.

Shireen Mitchell (04:55):

Like I don't get the boys acting all stupid, I don't get the store. In my view of that, I was like, absolutely, my mom going to pay. Now mind you, she spent a lot of money on that so I didn't even understand the cost of that at that particular time.

Shireen Mitchell (05:08):

That led me from just the gaming to when she realized that I actually did love to the home computer that she bought me and then I started coding. So it went from that trajectory to there all by myself, by the way, my mom didn't understand any of it. She just knew that it's something I love so she bought it.

Bridget Todd (05:28):

Is that why you feel compelled in your professional life now as an adult to carve out these spaces for women of color and Black women online that we can talk about our experiences on the internet?

Shireen Mitchell (05:39):

That absolutely 100%. it's like no one even understands what my experience was in that moment. And everyone who had, were projecting upon me, were projecting a whole bunch of different things than what I was dealing with. It was like, I just love to play the video game, I just love to code like the concept of everything else in between. By the way, also people telling me, even at 10, I can't code because I'm Black from Harlem and a girl. I'm going click, click, click, click, click, machine telling me I could code, I'm good.

Bridget Todd (06:10):

Yeah, you're telling me I can't but this machine tells me I know how to do it so I don't know.

Shireen Mitchell (06:15):

I don't know what you're talking about. So the concept of someone saying to me or anyone else who looks like me, that somehow you can't code just because of what you look like. I was like, where does that come from? I don't know that world and so yeah.

Shireen Mitchell (06:27):

So it fast forwards me into a broader context of why I looked at forming Digital Sisters because I wanted to form Digital Sisters for the girls who weren't me, the girls who was sent the message and believe the message they couldn't code. Believe that there's some part of their identity made it impossible for them to even know how to navigate that space.

Shireen Mitchell (06:47):

So I always tell people after forming Digital Sisters, one of the things that was very clear to me was the easiest part of my job was what? Teaching girls to code. The rest of my job was dealing with parents who were stopping their kids from coding, parents who were stopping their kids from getting online. The system in schools that were doing the same thing.

Shireen Mitchell (07:08):

The system in general, where we now move into this tech space that we're in in 2020 of dystopia that basically said, we have the right to tell you, you cannot be in this space, you do not belong in this space and you have no reason to even think that you have ownership in this space.

Bridget Todd (07:23):

Shireen wanted to reimagine the internet as a space for women and girls of color could feel supported, heard, and protected. But she also couldn't shake the idea that maybe these spaces weren't so safe for these women and girls and that assumed the lack of safety was a big problem.

Shireen Mitchell (07:39):

In those moments, there were moments where I had to have conversations with parents, especially moms saying, "Your daughter will be safe if I teach her how to code, your daughter will be safe if she goes online." Because that was one of the reasons why they unplug their daughters but they had their sons go run amok online in any form. It was the fear factor harms on their daughters. In some ways there's a part of me that said, here we are in 2020. And I was lying to those moms.

Shireen Mitchell (08:09):

I didn't know I was lying. Because it wasn't just them being worried about predators because that really wasn't the thing they had to worry the most about. They had to worry about their surroundings more than that. It was about the industry of which that would be built to target them and target them in a way that no one would show up and to protect them in any fashion.

Shireen Mitchell (08:32):

So when I formed Stop Online Violence Against Women, I specifically formed it because I wanted to have a sense of what women of color saw and what their experience was online. But it was that moment that I started to look at the work around looking at what online violence and online harassment looked like specifically to women of color. Because it was different than White women. It was different than men in general but also white men in specifically.

Bridget Todd (09:02):

Disinformation, especially when it's weaponized against women and people of color, doesn't just stay online. It could have real world consequences like voter suppression or the kind of violence we saw at the Capitol. And this has been a focus of Shireen's work. So how have you seen disinformation play out, especially as it pertains to women of color online?

Shireen Mitchell (09:21):

Yes, absolutely and you and I know about women like Shafiqah Hudson and Anissa Crockett who basically helped identify fake accounts pretending to be Black women. If looking at the way in which people of color, Black people specifically are trying to change their environment, trying to stop the harassment, trying to stop being killed by the state, trying to stop all these things that are happening to them and their communities and they're seen as the problem of which they should not be protected.

Shireen Mitchell (09:58):

But also of which that any violence upon them is acceptable, whether it's digital violence or in real life violence, which we know now has translated to organizing events like what happened in Kenosha, right? We have seen this trajectory. What I'm saying is I have witnessed it and I've collected data on that trajectory.

Shireen Mitchell (10:22):

I'm saying, I not only know that this was going to happen, where we are in 2020, is that I have been trying to tell us and prepare us for it before we got here. My report in the beginning of January 2020 that really defined what digital world suppression was, was to define what we had already collected data on.

Shireen Mitchell (10:41):

Targeted Black voters, then which we define campaigns to do so of which to give strategies to stop it. And nothing has been done. We have still not been protected. We have systems in place, not only from tech companies but even our government systems that are accepting harms against us.

Bridget Todd (11:02):

If people with power had listened to women like Shireen, would things have gone differently? Would our social media platforms been as vulnerable for bad actors to exploit like they did in the 2016 election? Let's take a quick break.

Bridget Todd (11:27):

And we're back. I think what you really crystallized for me is, and I hate to keep relying on this and keep going back to this, but if we had listened so much in our country might've gone differently. If we had just listened to Black women who have been talking about this, collecting data about this, studying this, raising the alarm about this for so long, and here it is. It seems like people have only just now started to get on board and it's so late, it might be too late.

If we’d listen to Black women, the hacking of 2016 would have never happened

Shireen Mitchell (11:59):

I feel strongly about that, I feel extremely strongly about that. I have a pin, I left it up there. I can't remember when I wrote that one, I think it was 2016. I don't even remember the date when I wrote that pin to basically say, I'm going to put this moment up here on Twitter to basically say, if we’d listen to Black women, the hacking of 2016 would have never happened.

Shireen Mitchell (12:19):

And I haven't updated as much recently because so much has happened. But when I put that up there, it was to stay up there forever until people got it. And the sad part is from that moment to present people coming to me now going, "Shireen I get it." And my thing is, why didn't you hear me before? Why do you get it now? And you know why did people get it now, Bridget seriously, you know why they get it now?

Bridget Todd (12:44):

Why do you think?

Shireen Mitchell (12:45):

Because it's happening to them, it's happening to their families. It's happening in front of their eyes in a way that they can't look away. But when we were speaking, they could pretend, oh it's just us being angry. They could pretend that it was us being out of sync with the rest of the world. Not that we were seeing what we were knowing going to happen down the road.

Our report was the first report to even say that Russia targeted African-Americans

Shireen Mitchell (13:11):

That we were predicting it, that we were trying to collect the data and present it, of which I've done. Our first report was the first report to even say that Russia targeted African-Americans overwhelmingly over any other group. Then there's a report that comes from Oxford and the report that comes from the Senate Intelligence Committee. But my report somehow gets missing in the rest of the dialogue, right?

Shireen Mitchell (13:39):

Because they needed all these other "Institutions." To validate what I said. And this has happened and this happens over and over again, there are multiple institutions, even in this moment coming up with versions of my report for them to validate that I was correct. Instead of saying, let me credit Shireen and elevate what she's been doing so that we can have more reports from her because she knew what she was looking at and continue that work.

Bridget Todd (14:09):

Right. That's something that I see a lot in putting together this podcast about disinformation, how rare it is to find Black women cited as experts on disinformation. When we have been the ones who have been raising the alarm, studying it, writing the reports, trying to legitimize it as an issue for so long. Why do you think that is?

Shireen Mitchell (14:33):

There's a hashtag like cite Black women, right? It's really very problematic. In my opinion, in many ways is that there's a problem with people being able to credit Black women for the work that they've done. I don't know why that is in its full entirety. I think there is some resistance, I think there's some social commentary which I feel about the way in which I grew up. Which is people still telling me that there's no way I can code at 10 coming from Harlem.

Shireen Mitchell (15:04):

There was something about the body that I have and the existence that the place I was born in that says that anything I say or do is not valid in comparison to anyone else. And so, in other words, to validate me somebody else has to do it instead of me. That someone else actually has to be able to say even my own identity is valid externally.

Shireen Mitchell (15:26):

And we've seen this Bridget with 16, 19, we've seen this with other aspects of us telling our narrative. Katherine Johnson existed and people are still pretending that katherine Johnson is not the reason that a White man made it to the moon. That the concept that we are not a part of this historical through on as to why America is what it is and all the pieces that we were a part of.

Shireen Mitchell (15:54):

Instead, what they do is remove us out of those pieces. So when I say, why they don't add us to some of these aspects to cite us is to make sure that we're removed from the historical narrative. You don't cite me, you don't know I exist.

Bridget Todd (16:14):

How do you think things might've been different if people had meaningfully listened to and centered the Black women like yourself, Shafika Hudson, when you all tried to raise the alarm about this?

Shireen Mitchell (16:26):

If they had listened to us, even in 2018, what we're up against now would have been totally different and we'd have been totally prepared. And we'd have been able to knock out most, if not the majority of the disinformation that we're faced with. And that tells me that we were never, ever wanting to be prepared for reality.

Shireen Mitchell (16:46):

They wanted to live in an ahistorical framework, taking us out of the timeline means that you get to have some version of the world that you feel comfortable with. And that you're saying to us, that that version of the world does not include us.

breaking news, new report, bad actors are impersonating Black people on social media to try to influence the election.

Bridget Todd (17:00):

Part of this is just me being annoyed on social media. But I can't tell you how many times I have seen this, breaking news, new report, bad actors are impersonating Black people on social media to try to influence the election.

Bridget Todd (17:15):

And it's so difficult for me to not reply saying, "Yeah, you could have listened to the any number of Black women who have been saying this since day one." It's so difficult to see people make this discovery over and over and over again. It's a bit like being in that movie Groundhog Day where-

Shireen Mitchell (17:32):

Exactly.

Bridget Todd (17:33):

We Black women have been saying this forever, forever, and now welcome to the party.

Shireen Mitchell (17:40):

A miracle someone discovered it. A miracle someone found these accounts and doing these various things in these various ways and it's like, you're seeing one piece of it, the stuff that we've been following since, I don't know, 2013. It's amazing and what's more amazing is the way that those people get elevated as if they actually did discover it.

Shireen Mitchell (18:05):

No citations to any of us. No, none of that. And then when we say something about it, we're the bad guys. Because somehow you just learning about it means that it's important but us who've been doing it for years it's like, "Oh, we know you were doing it, but that was cute." As if it was a hobby, oh that was a cute little hobby that you did. No, I have data, I can collect data.

Shireen Mitchell (18:35):

I've been collecting data, we've been doing synopsis, this is not a cute thing. I have experience in most of this work anyway. Also my technological background. But to say that somehow all my experience and skillsets is not as important as some reporter who decided that their beat was disinfo in 2020.

Bridget Todd (18:56):

Yeah the more I hear from you the more this sounds like an intentional erasing of our labor and our contribution to our work.

Shireen Mitchell (19:02):

I'm sorry to tell you, yes, and it's not new. Let me also explain to you the basis of this. One of the things that happens in the tech industry is around use cases when you're trying to build tech. And multiple aspects of this you have to come up with what you think the technology can be but also what the problem is that you think the technology can solve.

I think about [tech] from centering the most marginalized and then building something that will help them

Shireen Mitchell (19:25):

And so whenever I look at use cases, I look at use cases from my perspective, particularly around my community, issues that impact my community. And I think about that from a perspective that can help other communities. I tend to think about technology building from the concept of the people who are the most privileged to help them. I think about it from centering the most marginalized and then building something that will help them and save them or protect them and then elevate that to everybody else.

Shireen Mitchell (19:52):

We operate in a very different system, not just the American system in general, but also a technological system. We operate from the top tier level, people who are the most privileged coming up with something that works for them and then trying to nudge everybody else below to use it even at their own detriment. And so when you come up with use cases, you have to think about like, what are the things you're trying to solve. But one of the other pieces of use cases that you think about, you think about people's narrative.

Shireen Mitchell (20:18):

When you look at someone's narrative and you think about how you solve a problem based on people's narrative, you have to think about them from a very diverse perspective in many, many ways. I've been in multiple aspects of these events, white papers and the like, where I have come up with a technology that will eventually people want but the narrative they don't want.

Shireen Mitchell (20:38):

Because the narrative is centered on a woman of color. And when I think about that, that erasure is they will come out of that coming up with some technological solution but writing out and wiping out the narrative of where it originated from, which is women of color.

Bridget Todd (20:56):

More after a quick break.

Let's get right back into it. So how We make sure that our work, our labor, our voices don't go erased in these conversations that are so integral to our communities?

Shireen Mitchell (21:21):

That is the most important part and Bridget, you and I are in spaces on a daily basis where we're still struggling to make this happen. I have been in aspects where stories get told by White people instead of us. I've had people repeat my story in ways that made it look like it was not connected to me at all, I've seen versions.

Shireen Mitchell (21:43):

I've also seen people present my data as if it was theirs, I've seen so many versions of that. And so I think the challenge is always for us to decide when we stand up, but also decide when we basically hold people accountable. I think that what we are seeing in some ways when people say, "Hey, Shafiqah, myself, Sadat and others existed." Is basically trying to say, you just showed up in 2020 and this has been going on since 2013, that's seven years.

Shireen Mitchell (22:17):

You don't get to have ownership over something i.e. discovering fake accounts pretending to be Black people in 2020. And everybody should be stepping up to that because we've documented over and over and over again. And anyone that dares to do it should be held accountable and we should all be, all of us, anyone who's hearing my voice should be able to say, we do not allow this to go without us being cited or us being quoted in anything that references that conversation.

Bridget Todd (22:53):

Hell yes, I could not plus one that enough. It's so complicated because I think that on the one hand, it's like we're being told that we should just be happy to be a footnote on something that's ours that we created. We should just be happy to be in the conversation at all, the conversation that we started.

"Oh we're inviting you to this conversation." No, no, no, we started this conversation.

Shireen Mitchell (23:17):

And that's it, that's exactly right. It's like, "Oh we're inviting you to this conversation." No, no, no, we started this conversation. What are you talking about you inviting us to the conversation, you are lucky that we will even show up to your event versus you thinking you're inviting us. It's a very different just the position to be in multiple times, I've been in multiple rooms like that.

Shireen Mitchell (23:37):

And it's like, no, no, no, no no. No, no this conversation is based on our first report, this conversation is not a nuance because other people got their hands in it and they come up with other versions of it. No, I thank you for coming with other versions of my report but my report is first. Erasure of that is part of this narrative and this is why I've been so vocal.

Shireen Mitchell (23:58):

But the funny thing is Bridget, leading up to the election, funny enough people were like, "Oh Shireen Now we see your report, oh Shireen now we know what you were saying." And that's the bad part. It's like for those that go, "Oh finally, I now get what you were saying back then because I didn't get it then." Right, fine. You didn't get it then but then you have to credit me for getting it.

Bridget Todd (24:20):

There's a real cost to allowing lies and distortions to dominate our political discourse. How many real issues have gone overlooked because we were too busy discussing a conspiracy theory. And now after the attacks at the Capitol, the media is still giving conspiracy theorists and bad faith, charlatans a platform to further spread and legitimize their lies.

Shireen Mitchell (24:41):

This whole year has been basically a culture of disinformation.

This whole year has been basically a culture of disinformation. We're either talking about the disinformation or talking about combating the disinformation. We are not talking about election politics, we're not talking about policies and that's the failure of us dealing with disinformation right now. We are in the ocean of disinformation.

Shireen Mitchell (25:04):

So either we're trying to counter it or what we're trying to... Or there's some levels of it being elevated, unwillingly. Whether it's us trying to counter it and then unfortunately amplifying it or we have a media houses who thinks that they're talking about disinformation or these conspiracy theorists which by the way drives me absolutely crazy Bridget.

Shireen Mitchell (25:30):

It's the elevation of the conspiracy theories as if they're mainstream so much so that we now have candidates running with conspiracy theories as their marker. I don't know how that makes sense and how we can't look at that and say, have we elevated conspiracy theories this much to the extent that it is considered mainstream instead of a conspiracy and should not be considered a part of a narrative or conversation to be had?

Shireen Mitchell (25:57):

What my struggle is that we aren't having policy discussions, we're having disinfo discussions. And I am not saying that it's wrong to have disinfo discussions, what I am saying is that because we're having so much more conversation on disinfo discussions, we're not elevating enough of the facts. The real policies, the real impacts, the lives of people. What we have done as a society is failed telling more of the factual narrative versus the disinfo as we are all working to stop the disinfo.

Shireen Mitchell (26:35):

One of the things we have failed at is telling the true stories. That's not going to stop me from doing this work by the way, I'm making a statement about the visual of what that difference is. And so when people think they're going to show up to represent me or speak for me or speak for my community with no context or understanding that not only is it disingenuous, but it's a full frontal assault.

Bridget Todd (27:01):

When you look on the horizon, do you feel hopeful or does it feel like you don't even know how we're going to get out of this mess?

Shireen Mitchell (27:11):

I'm glad you asked that question because I think that what I just... And it's also a good way to uplift after what I said because it sounds like everything is horrible. But it's true, parts of that is actually true. Why would I do this if I didn't think that we, us, individuals, not the government who's failing us, not the healthcare system who has failed Black people in this country for a long time. I'm not going to remove that from this narrative.

Shireen Mitchell (27:44):

What I am saying is I fully feel in all of my being, I am our ancestor's greatest dreams. I know that everything I'm doing, all the things I'm embodying, every choice that I've made so far to try to fight this for my community, despite being attacked doing so is to make sure that I'm helping to protect us in some way.

Shireen Mitchell (28:09):

Who else is going to protect us? Who else is going to know what's going on? So I ask people to show up too, for us and for others to not only protect our democracy but protect individuals. What I'm saying is what we can do to stop that. Stop the disinformation about the virus, the vaccines, stop the disinformation about our democracy and the ways in which we can vote because we have the power to change that.

Shireen Mitchell (28:37):

Stop the disinformation from the aspects of what kind of lives we can all possibly live if we weren't giving the wealthiest in this country more tax cuts while we get nothing. Most of people, what people don't understand about the disinformation that our culture and our history has been built on is when we erase certain parts of it, disinformation feeds off of it.

Shireen Mitchell (29:06):

So I'm asking us all to participate in knowing and understanding our entire history as to why we got here. But also you have the ability to counter the disinformation, use the truth sandwich. Basically, if you see some disinformation, put out the facts, debunk the disinfo and put out the facts again.

Shireen Mitchell (29:28):

You don't have to get into heated debates but do not allow the disinformation to have more space in our ecosystem than the facts. What I'm saying is that I think what's viscerally happening for some folks is that they're understanding there's a broader context here, there's a power grab here, there's a whole different understanding about American exceptionalism.

Shireen Mitchell (29:52):

We are not exceptional in any way. We have horrific versions of our story and we all need to accept that with the hope that we can change it and not repeat it. My thing is, I am hoping that we understand why so many people didn't know Tulsa existed until Watchmen, a TV series, sci-fi, for people to even believe it existed, right?

Shireen Mitchell (30:20):

It's that removal of history in that way that makes it impossible for us not to repeat it. So telling that story 16, 19 others, telling those stories allow us to all walk into our truth. There's so many people that still think that some of those stories are revisionism of our history when it's the truth of our history. That's part of why I'm asking people to report disinformation because I'm saying, you get to say this is a false narrative.

Shireen Mitchell (30:48):

You get to act upon it and tell the truth and you get to report the false narrative so we have a story to tell so that we don't repeat any of this. So I am hopeful, I do think there's a lot more people who will understand what's going on. But I also know that there, in all honesty, there's a sliver of this country that doesn't want to ever, ever move forward. And they're okay with the horrific nature of this country. I know that, I'm not oblivious to that.

Shireen Mitchell (31:20):

However what I am saying, there are more of us that sees what we can be. So I don't agree with the narrative, this is not America. This is America, it's exactly who America has always been. But what I'm asking you to do is be hopeful with me is that now that you see who we've always been, that you work towards changing to become what we should be.

Bridget Todd (31:46):

Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi, we'd love to hear from you at hello @tangoti.com. Disinformed is brought to you by, There Are No Girls On The Internet. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbox Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer, Terry Harrison is our supervising producer and engineer. Mike Amato is our producer, I'm your host, Bridget Todd. For more great podcasts, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.