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.

Black women and other marginalized folks on Twitter have been speaking up about things like harassment

on the platform for a really long time.

But for a long time, our warnings were basically ignored.

Now, there was a time under former CEO Jack Dorsey when Twitter higher-ups did kind of seem

to be working to curb at least some of the harassment and hate speech on the platform. With the hiring of folks like Vajaya God, Twitter's policy and trust lead, whose job it is

to curb things like hate speech and harassment. Unfortunately, Elon Musk, who may be buying

Twitter for $44 billion, spent the week publicly attacking her leadership.

Fajaya is a woman of color.

And we already know that women of color disproportionately face harassment on Twitter.

So when using the platform to attack his would-be employee for just doing her job trying to make Twitter safer, a wave of his supporters flooded her mentions with hate.

And it isn't hard to see this as a signal of how Musk would handle or not handle harassment on the platform. And it seems like

the ultimate move grounded in a refusal to listen to the users who make the platform what it is.

We've been here before, and it has big consequences. So let's revisit one of my favorite episodes about what happens when Twitter fails to listen to women when we speak up about our experiences on the platform.

Okay, so I could tell you this story a hundred times and a hundred different ways.

People just don't listen to women, especially black women.

And it comes with big consequences.

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.

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