Take Back the Net

(inquisitive music)

Technology has enabled people

to cause certain types of harm to each other online

that have really disproportionate and damaging effects,

particularly to women, particularly to people of color,

and it removes their voices from the discourse online,

in a lot of cases.

Online harassment isn't people being mean,

that you should just ignore.

Online harassment is orderly campaigns of trying

to destroy peoples' lives.

So just being a black woman online,

so outside of any kind of movement work

or social justice work, just being a black person online,

I've had to deal with harassment.

We had an incident of a former police officer,

like take a picture of himself pointing a gun at us,

and tweeting it over and over and over.

A lot of what we're dealing with

when we're dealing with online harassment is the exposure

of people's private information.

Due to my work with EFF on harassment,

I was recently doxxed.

So doxxing is when you take information

that can be gathered publicly in people's home addresses,

phone numbers, private email addresses,

and this information is put online,

generally for the purpose of encouraging offline harassment,

so phone calls, swatting, where

somebody gets a SWAT team called to their house,

things like that.

The industry actually talks with each other,

pretty regularly about things we see,

and ways that we're trying to combat it,

what's working, what's not.

No one really thinks that they've got this solved yet,

but we're all working toward that.

I feel like a lot of times it comes down

to something as simple as how many small barriers

you put between people who want to abuse

and the people that they want to abuse.

You have to have people that are watching,

are sophisticated enough to recognize trolling

and people faking identity.

That is a job for humans.

Software's terrible at it.

So there's a lot of people who will harass you,

or comment, or really badger you.

With some of them, I will try to educate.

I will try to reach.

And then there's a lot of people

that I just report.

(mumble) if I'm on Twitter, I will report it.

From Facebook, YouTube, all of it I just report now,

and ignore and block.

(inquisitive music)