Brotopia
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Redditors staged a full-on revolt, attacking Pao and claiming their right to free speech. While that argument might suggest the users were high-minded, their attack tactics showed otherwise. Trolls attempted to post private information about Pao and threatened her life. When one of the site’s popular employees—responsible for managing Reddit’s famous Ask Me Anything series—was fired, over 200,000 people signed a petition calling for Pao to be fired, and the site’s moderators took its most popular sections private—essentially holding Reddit hostage. Days later, Pao resigned.
“The trolls are winning,” Pao wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post following her resignation. “The foundations of the Internet were laid on free expression, but the founders just did not understand how effective their creation would be for the coordination and amplification of harassing behavior. Or that the users who were the biggest bullies would be rewarded with attention for their behavior . . . No one has figured out the best place to draw the line between bad and ugly—or whether that line can support a viable business model . . . I’m rooting for the humans over the trolls. I know we can win.”
Steve Huffman, Reddit’s original co-founder, came back as the company’s CEO, while Ohanian remained executive chairman. I sat down with both of them in 2016 in the aftermath of Pao’s resignation. Did they believe they took online harassment seriously enough in the company’s early days? “Alexis and I grew up in the generation on the leading edge of the internet, as teenagers, as boys going through puberty,” Huffman told me. “That comes with a certain desensitization.” Translation: they simply got too used to it. After seeing what Pao had endured, however, they insisted they were more committed than ever to cleaning up Reddit for good.
One of Huffman’s first efforts was to continue what Pao had started. He strengthened the company’s anti-hate policies and shut down a few more nasty sub-forums including “Coontown” (a favorite for racists) and “Raping Women” (a favorite for, well, aspiring rapists). With each ban, users protested; some even turned on him. “I have said many times I thought the way [Pao] was treated on Reddit was despicable,” Huffman said. “The changes we made to r/all [shorthand for the Reddit home page] would have mitigated some of the harassment, and I regret we didn’t make those changes years ago.”
After she left the company, Pao told me, “It is very difficult to change a community, once it has gone in a certain direction. What I hope other internet companies realize is, when you have problems, they scale with your company, and it becomes very hard to revise the approach you have taken once the genie is out of the bottle.” However, there is hope.
In a new study, researchers at Georgia Tech found that the changes Pao started on Reddit have made a meaningful difference. After Reddit banned those forums like “Fat People Hate” and “Coontown,” more Redditors than expected left the site entirely. Those who stayed were better behaved; their use of hate speech dropped dramatically by at least 80 percent. “Perhaps existing community norms and moderation policies within these other, well-established subreddits prevented the migrating users from repeating the same hateful behavior,” the researchers suggest. Some users undoubtedly flocked to other, more permissive sites (you can now find “Fat People Hate” and “Coontown” on a newer Reddit alternative called Voat). But the exercise proves that companies can change, if their leaders understand the problem and are willing to make hard choices.
But what about free speech? That’s a red herring, Pao says: “The purpose of free speech is to allow everybody to have a voice, to have these conversations, and if one group is pushing everybody else off you can have this free speech platform, but there are not many voices or opinions being represented.”
Pao strongly believes that if more women, especially women of color (she says they get the worst of the online harassment), had been involved at the creation of networks like Reddit and Twitter and Facebook from the start, the internet would be a very different place. “I think people would have invested more in tools, would have invested more in community management, would have had different rules, would have taken down more content faster and banned more people in a more consistent way.”
It’s an alternative reality we can only imagine.
A COMPANY THAT FOUGHT HARASSMENT AND WON
Could the reforms that helped Reddit have an effect even in the troll haven of online gaming?
Benchmark-backed Riot Games, maker of one of the most popular multiplayer games in the world, League of Legends, has attempted to curb online harassment without alienating the game’s players.
In League of Legends—which boasts 100 million active players monthly—teams of gamers battle in an online arena using magical powers. As with many multiplayer online games, vitriolic, abusive, and misogynistic comments slung at other users have been a long-standing problem. In fact, research shows female gamers receive three times as many negative comments as male gamers. One player, under her gaming pseudonym Jenny Haniver, keeps track of such comments on a blog; entries include “Shut that fucking bitch up” and “Shut your mouth girl before I put my dick in it!” Just another day in the life of a female gamer.
In 2012, however, the game makers behind League of Legends noticed that a significant number of players were quitting due to these obnoxious comments. In response, Riot Games put together a “player behavior” team including experts on psychology and neuroscience to examine the issue more closely.
Reporting on what they found, Wired’s Laura Hudson wrote, “If you think most online abuse is hurled by a small group of maladapted trolls, you’re wrong. Riot found that persistently negative players were only responsible for roughly 13 percent of the game’s bad behavior. The other 87 percent was coming from players whose presence, most of the time, seemed to be generally inoffensive or even positive. These gamers were lashing out only occasionally, in isolated incidents—but their outbursts often snowballed through the community. Banning the worst trolls wouldn’t be enough to clean up League of Legends, Riot’s player behavior team realized. Nothing less than community-wide reforms could succeed.”
Riot experimented with several ways to accomplish this, such as turning off the chat function by default but allowing players to turn it on when they wanted to. It saw not only a 30 percent decrease in negative chat but also a nearly 35 percent increase in positive chat. By creating hurdles to bad behavior that were minimal but real, it was able to change that behavior dramatically.
Riot also decided that when it kicked players off the game for negative remarks, it would give those users more details about exactly why they were being penalized. When those players returned, the company found, their incidents of bad behavior dropped significantly. Riot also instituted a system called the Tribunal that enlisted a jury of players to vote on reports of bad behavior. It turns out the Tribunal gave players a greater sense of responsibility to do their part in creating a more positive environment.
Riot Games found that it could decrease negative behavior by enforcing certain consequences, and it could also create more positive norms of behavior. This supports the theory that at least one reason online harassment has proliferated is that there have been no consequences. To put it another way: when you threaten to rape or murder someone in public, you typically experience certain repercussions from the community.
At least one League of Legends troll found out that being a model citizen has rewards. A player whose highly negative behavior got him banned from competitive play for an entire year later said, “It took Riot’s interjection for me to realize that I could be a positive influence, not just in League but with everything. I started to enjoy the game more, this time not at anyone’s expense.”
If any of the internet’s managers need more convincing, there’s this: League of Legends had 67 million active players per month when Riot unveiled its efforts to reshape online behavior. Two years later, there were 100 million. As Riot waged war on negativity, growth soared.
They can’t control everything—there will always be those who flout social expectations—and we already know that communicating through screens and keyboards creates social distance. However, when these companies fail to do everything they can to create virtual environments that encourage respectful behavior, they should accept at least some responsibility for the impulsive, hostile, and antisocial outcomes.
How these companies decide to proceed really matters, because the internet revolution has only just begun. The future is coming, and there is little doubt we will soon be spending more and more of our lives in sophisticated virtual worlds, for both work and play. Those worlds will be dark and disturbing places—unless cyberspace is fundamentally reshaped.
SAFEGUARDING OUR VIRTUAL FUTURE
In 2016, Jordan Belamire, another female gamer who plays under a pseudonym, was visiting her brother-in-law when she decided to try out a new VR game he owned, QuiVr, in which players shoot arrows at zombies and demons in a snowy, medieval world. Belamire put on the headset and played by herself for a while. But soon after she entered multiplayer mode, another gamer, identified as BigBro442, used his avatar to start groping her avatar’s chest. Players could hear each other’s voices (that was the only way BigBro could have known she was a woman, because all the players’ avatars were identical), so she said, “Stop!” He didn’t. She moved away, but when she did, BigBro442 started chasing her, then shoved his hand toward her virtual crotch and started rubbing. The virtual groping, Belamire later wrote in a Medium post, felt disturbingly real: “You’re not physically being touched . . . but it’s still scary as hell . . . As VR becomes increasingly real, how do we decide what crosses the line from an annoyance to an actual assault?”
Upon hearing of Belamire’s experience, QuiVr developers Aaron Stanton and Jonathan Schenker tweaked the game to include a new superpower, one that enables players to surround themselves with a personal bubble that shields them from any kind of virtual assault. But as the industry moves forward, not every developer may act so responsibly. In fact, there’s good reason to think that some won’t.
Engineers are now working to make virtual reality even more real with the help of new technologies such as haptic feedback, which enables players to physically feel it when they are punched or kicked. Augmented reality promises to further integrate our real and online worlds. Increasingly, these are spaces in which we will live, work, and play that will have dramatic physical and psychological effects. The norms of behavior for these new virtual and augmented worlds are being laid down right now, so right now is the time for the makers of VR and AR technology to build respect and safety into their products.
Let me be clear: Our shared goal shouldn’t be to remove all bad behavior, hateful comments, or potentially disturbing imagery from the internet. That is not only impossible, it’s undesirable too, because it involves a slippery slope of deciding whose judgment will determine what’s objectionable. A more reasonable goal would be to create an online social landscape that roughly mirrors that of a healthy city. In most cities, you can, if you desire, find a dive bar, a strip club, or a rough neighborhood where rude or obnoxious behavior is allowed or even encouraged. But in most public spaces—the parks, restaurants, museums, and theaters—you should be fairly confident that neither you nor your children will be verbally assaulted or followed around by some creep shouting threats. To make the internet a version of that safe and welcoming city, women should be involved in building the next generation of products from the start, from new social networks to the video games of the VR future.
Brianna Wu tells me her heart races when she hears these stories of women being stalked, threatened, and groped in virtual worlds. For her, it feels like déjà vu but on another platform. Running for Congress in Massachusetts in 2018, these are her campaign promises: to help get more women into high-tech fields and to write stronger cyber-security and antiharassment laws. Her goal: to make sure that women on the internet of the future don’t fall victim to the mistakes of its past.
9
SILICON VALLEY’S SECOND CHANCE
WRITING THIS BOOK HAS been like going on a trek through a minefield, with fresh mines being laid as I walked. Not a month has gone by without some major revelation about discrimination or harassment in the tech industry exploding in the press (not to mention the deluge of allegations in Hollywood, beginning with Harvey Weinstein, in politics, and in the media). Most followed the same pattern: angry accusations followed first by denials and then by public mea culpas. Several powerful men in Silicon Valley, including the once-untouchable Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and the investors Justin Caldbeck, Dave McClure, Chris Sacca, Steve Jurvetson, and Shervin Pishevar subsequently resigned, were fired, or were publicly disgraced. There were moments when it seemed we had reached a turning point in how Silicon Valley would treat women, and other moments when it felt that if we had not hit rock bottom, it was only because the bottom was lower than we thought.
In response to these scandals, women rose up. At the end of 2017, the Twitter hashtag #MeToo was trending hot, with millions of women sharing their stories of abuse and sexual harassment both through tweets and on Facebook. That wellspring proved not only the size and scale of the problem but also that these social media platforms could be used to create solidarity and seek justice. “I’ve never seen anything quite like the environment where now women are much freer to speak up than perhaps they were in my professional career,” former eBay and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman told me. “Every once in a while in history, there’s something big that happens that changes the culture and I’m hopeful that this is it.”
As we begin 2018, one thing is clear: in tech, people’s interest in, anxiety about, and desire for change have become palpable. The exclusion of women didn’t have to be the story of how we got here, and it certainly doesn’t need to be our future. Let’s take advantage of this moment.
In previous chapters, I’ve asked this question: How different might the world be if women had been included in this transformative industry from the start? In this last chapter, I want to ask a similar set of questions that look ahead: What if the tech industry, starting now, grows up and begins to create a truly diverse workforce? How would the industry make that happen? And what would be the advantages to such a fundamental shift?
Let’s imagine a world where women hold half the jobs in Silicon Valley. Where half of entrepreneurs, executives, venture capitalists, board members, and employees—including engineers—are women.
We can’t know exactly how that world would look, but some are willing to make educated guesses. “I think there would be two enormous differences,” the longtime tech investor Roger McNamee told me. “I think Silicon Valley would be wildly more profitable. I think there would be a significant reduction in the number of absolute failures. And so I think success would go up dramatically.”
McNamee’s scenario isn’t wishful thinking. Research shows that companies with more women represented in their leadership ranks make more money, and their employees, both men and women, are more innovative, diligent, and creative. Higher morale and a more successful company mean lower turnover, higher retention, and higher rates of productivity. Another way to look at this is that gender inequality is expensive, in that it leads to more unhappiness, higher turnover, lower productivity, and more money and time spent on hiring and recruiting. What’s good for women is good for men, good for companies, good for their customers, good for the products they produce, good for the economy, and good for our future.
Europe has already begun to mandate gender parity in businesses and is starting to see the value of it. Countries such as Norway and Germany have instituted quotas to get women on corporate boards, and companies in other European countries are responding to pressure to appoint more female directors, even if they are not required to do so by law. In a wide-ranging study of two million public and private companies in Europe, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) found that firms with more women in senior roles realized a “significantly higher return on assets.” On average, replacing just one man with one woman in management or on the board led to a 3 to 8 percent increase in profitability. In the tech sector specifically, the benefit was even greater. Tech companies saw a greater boost, the report suggests, because those companies “demand higher creativity and critical thinking that diversity in general may bring.”
With those results, one might wonder whether firms would do even better with leadership that was all women. The IMF found that when women occupied over 60 percent of leadership positions, results began to diminish. Having women entirely run our companies would not lead to the best returns, just as having men entirely run them does not either. It’s the workplaces with balance that appear to have the best results.
SILICON VALLEY 3.0
Silicon Valley has long celebrated failure, encouraging founders to aim big and fail fast, pick themselves up, and try again. In that spirit, there’s one big failure to add to the list: Silicon Valley has failed women, period, and it’s time for the industry to own it. At the current rate, with VCs celebrated for hiring their first (first!) female partners and companies ever so slowly achieving single-digit increases in the number of female engineers and managers, it will take us a generation or more to get to anywhere near fifty-fifty. That is unacceptable. Women not only represent half the population but drive 70 to 80 percent of consumer purchases. If only for the sake of profits, women should not be excluded from the process of imagining and creating new products.