There are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative.

I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.

In recent weeks, we've seen demands for racial justice reach an unignorable roar, and a lot of it is played out online.

If you were scrolling Instagram back on June 2nd, you probably saw people posting a black square as a way to pause normal social media chatter and make room for voices calling for change.

And today, July 7th, is Blackout Day 2020, a boycott campaign urging people not to spend

any money unless a set of black-owned business.

But where did these initiatives come from?

And how did we get here?

The story about that is confusing and familiar at the same time.

It's a story about how easy it is to erase Black women online, even as we're supposedly trying

to make room for our voices and affirming that our lives matter. More on that at a moment. But first, let's go to Mars.

My name is Marissa, Mars, Sebastian. I go by just Mars.

I am a writer, an author, and a social media manager.

I just say that I like to have fun on the internet and crack jokes.

Girl-centric web games like Neopets and Polypocket

cemented Mars' lifelong love of being online. And when she

discovered all the cool, weird nerds congregating on the social media platform Tumblr, it was so

affirming that she describes it as a rebirth. Being a nerd on Tumblr is really like my second, I call

it my second internet rebirth, like because I was on the internet as a little one,

but really joining Tumblr gave me a true sense of what, like, having friendships that were

internet-based were like. And so that's always been my favorite part.

Mars was on Tumblr in 2015 when just like today, police and state violence against black people was impossible to ignore.

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