| Shireen Mitchell is the founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women, which also runs a project called Stop Digital Voter Suppression. She was one of Fast Company's Most Influential Women in Technology in 2010. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Boigon: How are voter suppression and online violence against women related? Mitchell: When we started tracking online violence and harassment of Black women specifically, and women of color in general, we were able to see and capture the data around accounts pretending to be Black women.
We were just like, why is this happening and why are the tech companies not participating in protecting Black women from these types of harassment?
We saw a pattern of coordinated targeted attacks on Black women that were very clear. That was the alarm bell for us.
A couple of years later, we realized how that transitioned into what we eventually came to see as Russian interference in the 2016 election, which was using the Black identity to suppress the vote.
Boigon: Why do you think foreign and domestic actors impersonate Black people and target Black voters in suppression efforts? Mitchell: There’s no other group that’s been targeted more than African Americans. But in America, we know that people who get out the vote and, without fail, can change elections, are Black women.
Once we identified suppression efforts from 2013 going into 2016, we realized that this wasn’t going to stop. But what we also realized was that no one else was going to protect our voices except for us.
Our work is focused on Black women and how disinformation is using their identity, using Black identity, to weaponize digital voter suppression across the spectrum — to invalidate and discredit the Black voice, when you take on our caricatures and try to use that as the weapon.
Boigon: How else is the weaponization of Black identity online harmful?
Mitchell: Bad actors are using Black identity not only to suppress the Black vote, but also using it among other groups to incite anger. They were using us to gain trust from us, to later put in voter suppression content, but at the same time using that same content to basically anger other groups of people.
Boigon: Are technology companies able to successfully find and weed out online hatred and voter suppression targeting Black people and Black women in particular?
Mitchell: I want to know what the distinctions are, who the moderators are. How many of those are people of color who know what they’re looking at? They never answer that question.
All these things are happening that no one in these tech companies has ever been able to identify. They were not hiring Black people who would know what any of that messaging meant. | 