Opinion: Tech leaders are letting meanness win. Here’s what we need to do

Photo credit: tverdohlib / 123RF Stock Photo.

Disclosure: Pieces of this argument are directly adapted from the author’s book The Power of Onlyness.

Facebook questions their role as “censors.” Google claims it is struggling to deal with sexism and the aftermath of firing James Damore. And Twitter’s former CEO wonders if it’s possible that Twitter enabled a white supremacist to win the White House.

These are complex issues, surely, yet I’m not convinced there is much mystery. Are you?

I grew up in Silicon Valley, literally picking apricots in the orchards where Apple built its first building, then spending seven years working for that company. Later, in the same buildings of Apple, I helped run the North American division of Autodesk.

So, I want to believe Google, Facebook, and Twitter when they espouse “do no evil” values. The internet is a way to democratize the power of all our ideas. But, what I know is that tech “leaders” have had their chance to address these issues for at least 10 years, yet they persist in feigning naivete instead of demonstrating leadership.

Now is the time to rewrite the rules of engagement on tech platforms. The “leaders” apparently will not. So we, the community, must organize to make the much-needed changes.

Stop pretending you don’t know

According to Pew Research, 39 percent of people online have experienced bullying, online harassment, and intimidation. According to Wired, online harassment disproportionately affects women, people of color, and LGBT individuals—that’s 69 percent of the US population. So, how can tech leaders—supposedly such fans of data—act like they don’t know how big a problem this is?

Today’s online dumpster fire has become so ingrained in internet culture that most people don’t remember that it doesn’t need to be this way. In 2003, internet pioneer Clay Shirky described how online groups could be their own worst enemy, arguing that “the many‑to‑many aspect of web-enabled communication can transform a group into a mob in a very short time.” He offered solutions back then, but executives in tech took no responsibility.

I was in the audience in 2007 when Kathy Sierra, a Sun Microsystems programming instructor and Java developer, failed to show up to her keynote speech at a conference because of online harassment. Two weeks earlier, she had found herself on the receiving end of the web’s dark side and was forced to go into hiding after receiving online attacks, including a picture of her head in a noose and a threat to rape her by sundown. “I’m afraid to leave my yard, I will never feel the same, I will never be the same,” she wrote on her personal blog.

What could have prompted this? Believe it or not, it was a blog post she wrote saying that sites should be able to delete unproductive user comments and that web dialogue should have guidelines. Some of her readers didn’t agree, and they posted hateful notes on her blog to show her their displeasure. The “protest,” as the anonymous users called it, was forcing Sierra to deal with hate in order to simply do something she loved.

Such a prominent, respected tech leader must have gotten support, right? But people effectively just said, “Hey, Kathy. That sucks for you.” Instead, what those supposed leaders should have recognized is that it sucks for us. Sierra wound up shutting down her blog, and we lost a fresh, strong voice in technology.

Silencing her, we lost her ideas. But it also signaled something dangerous: the “free speech” internet was letting the haters win.

Naming what this all is: hate

I interviewed Brianna Wu, the co-founder of Giant Spacekat, an independent video game development studio, for my latest book, and she described the groups that attacked her as the “KKK of the gaming industry,” referring to the oldest of American hate groups.

Choosing money over meaning

Entirely solvable

All our ideas need to count