Hi, Technology 202 readers! It’s great to be back in your inboxes this morning filling in for my colleague Cristiano Lima. We’re less than two weeks out from Election Day! Send your tips about tech and the midterms to cat.zakrzewski@washpost.com.
Women of color running for office face higher rates of violent threats online
Less than four hours after Kentucky state Rep. Attica Scott (D) announced last year that she planned to run for Congress, an email calling her a “slimey, ignorant c---” appeared in the inbox she uses for legislative business.
Scott’s team had been running posts on social media all day promoting her campaign, and she immediately recognized the threatening note filled with slurs as an attempt to silence her.
“The threat I received was to immediately try to shut me down, try to stop me before I even got started with the campaign,” Scott said in an interview with The Post. “It’s designed to have that chilling effect, that silencing effect.”
Scott decided to stay the course, ultimately carrying out the campaign until she lost in the Democratic primary in May. But she constantly receives harassing messages in her work email, on her voice mail and across social networks, including messages attacking her appearance or saying her mother should have aborted her. The threats have become so frequent that she regularly takes steps to protect her privacy online, like waiting until after she leaves an event to post about it to protect her geolocation information.
Scott’s experience signals a hurdle disproportionately confronting women of color running for office. They are more than four times as likely as White candidates to be targeted with violent abuse, according to a new study by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that has received funding from tech companies, that was shared exclusively with The Washington Post.
They’re also twice as likely as other candidates to be targeted with misinformation and disinformation. Women of color were also at least five times more likely than other candidates to be targeted with tweets related to their identity.
Dhanaraj Thakur, the research director at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), told The Technology 202 that such levels and abuse will result in maintaining the “unrepresentative status quo.”
“A lack of representation means that we lose the important insights and solutions to public policy problems that women of color will bring,” he said. “We all suffer if everyone does not have a seat at the table.”
Women of color are increasingly represented in politics. But even as they ascend to the highest levels of government, there has been limited research to date into the online harassment confronting them. CDT’s conclusions are based on an analysis of more than 100,000 tweets during the 2020 election that included mentions, replies or responses to a set of nearly 300 randomly selected candidates.
The researchers notably found that women of color on average faced a lower proportion than White men of abusive tweets that included generally offensive language. But they were far more likely to receive abusive tweets including sexism, racism or promotion of violence.
Scott said the vast majority of tweets she receives are not related to her policies.
“It’s hardly ever about policy,” she said. “It’s almost always about me being a Black woman.”
In addition to analyzing Twitter, the researchers sought to better understand the impact of online abuse by conducting anonymous interviews with more than a dozen candidates and staffers from 14 campaigns. In those interviews, researchers repeatedly heard that the aim of the online attacks was to destroy the candidates’ resolve and force them to drop out of politics. Interviewees recounted instances on social media where people implied they wanted to have sex with them, or asked the politicians if they had an account on OnlyFans, a service known for hosting pornography.
“When it came to this, I felt I had never felt more dehumanized, more minimized in the work that I had done and the work that I was doing,” said one candidate, whose identity was kept anonymous by the researchers.
There are existing laws that make threatening violence illegal. But Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Virginia who studies online harassment, says perpetrators are rarely prosecuted because law enforcement lacks the technical chops and resources to investigate online threats, especially when they’re made anonymously, she said.
“If you start enforcing the law, it serves as a deterrent,” said Citron, author of the book “The Fight for Privacy.”
The entire tech industry also has a role to play in deterring online harassment, Citron and Thakur say. Major tech companies often have policies forbidding harassment, but they are unevenly enforced. The CDT report recommends that tech companies provide reports about election-related abuse before, during and after elections, and that companies also make data available that enables researchers to study these trends.
Scott says that her experiences have deterred other women that she knows from running for office. They say they cannot face the kind of abuse she has sustained, she said. She warned that online harassment against women of color is a “serious attack on our democracy.”
“When we allow this to happen to women of color, we are saying we’re are willing to allow our democracy to burn,” she said.
Our top tabs
Democrats turn to TikTok stars in bid to influence the midterms
The eight TikTok influencers, who have 58 million followers combined, spent more than an hour with President Biden at the White House this week, Taylor Lorenz reports. The Democratic National Committee paid for the eight TikTok stars’ travel fees and expenses.
“The trip was the most visible effort to date of Democrats attempting to leverage TikTok’s vast audience to influence the midterms and is likely to prove controversial with Republicans, many of whom have been harshly critical of TikTok’s Chinese ownership,” Taylor writes. “Former president Donald Trump at one point ordered TikTok shut down in the United States, then tried to force the sale of its U.S. operations. Those efforts failed, however, though Republicans have continued to accuse the app of being a threat.”
The influencers also met with former president Barack Obama, visited the Supreme Court and the Capitol, and met with leaders of the DNC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House Democrats’ main campaign arm.
DCCC leaders showed the creators a map of battleground states and described which key districts they hoped the creators could help them sway, Taylor reports. “To a group of people who consider a video that gets only 400,000 views a flop, being told that many elections come down to fewer than 5,000 votes was eye opening,” said Palette Media founder Daniel Daks, who helped organize the trip.
Twitter’s midterm election plan could clash with Musk’s vision
A dozen engineers from within Twitter have volunteered to help the company’s “Election Squad” enforce its rules as part of a strategy that Twitter has used for major elections since 2018. But changing winds at Twitter could boost the risk to the midterm elections, which are less than two weeks away, Will Oremus, Naomi Nix and Elizabeth Dwoskin report.
“But this election cycle, the company is in greater disarray than ever — increasing the risk that cagey political operatives will be able to use the platform to deceive voters or undermine the legitimacy of the results,” they write. “Twitter has weathered a year of managerial chaos since a CEO change, hundreds of employees have reportedly left, and a high-level whistleblower warned that the company lacks the resources to enforce its own election policies globally.”
Adding to the uncertainty, Elon Musk is expected to close his deal to buy the company by Friday. He’s suggested that he could roll back some of Twitter’s content moderation efforts, such as by allowing Trump to return to the site, and has indicated that he could lay off as much as 75 percent of the company’s workforce. All told, it’s not clear how Musk’s changes will affect Twitter’s plan for the midterms.
Musk didn’t respond to The Post’s request for comment on what he’d do in his first days owning the company. He visited Twitter’s offices on Wednesday and is expected to address employees on Friday. Twitter spokesperson Katie Rosborough confirmed that Twitter called for volunteers for the midterms and said the company did the same thing during the 2020 U.S. presidential election and elections in Brazil. “People use Twitter to find real-time, reliable information about elections, and our investment in this work underscores how seriously we take that responsibility,” Rosborough said.
NLRB accuses Amazon’s CEO of breaking the law
The National Labor Relations Board said Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy broke the law in two interviews shortly after Amazon workers in Staten Island voted to unionize in April, Lauren Kaori Gurley reports. The NLRB said Amazon broke laws protecting employees involved in union activity from being interfered with or coerced.
- In one of the interviews, on April 14, Jassy told Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that union-represented workers would be less empowered at work, and that unionization would make it more difficult for them to have direct relationships with management and would make things “much slower” and “much more bureaucratic.”
- In another interview, on June 8 at the Bloomberg Tech Summit, Jassy said employees were better off without a union and made similar statements about unions making it more difficult for employees to have direct relationships with management and have things move quickly.
“Amazon will now have the opportunity to settle with Amazon Labor Union, the charging party, or take the case before an administrative law judge,” Lauren writes.
(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Inside the industry
Agency scanner
Hill happenings
Trending
Daybook
- Alan F. Estevez, the undersecretary of commerce for industry and security, discusses new semiconductor export controls at an event hosted by the Center for a New American Security today at 10 a.m.
- Amazon senior vice president Dave Limp discusses the company’s satellite internet technology at a Washington Post Live event today at 10:30 a.m.
Before you log off
Man this the best costume ever 🤣
— Overtime (@overtime) October 26, 2022
(via personalfinanceclub/IG) pic.twitter.com/HpMq4bLpYW
