AOC took to Instagram Live to share her story of being in the Capitol complex during the insurrection. But now she's at the center of a coordinated right wing disinformation attack. Digital organizer Leslie Mac explains the double edged sword of being a political woman of color in the public eye comes disinformation campaigns and harassment.
Follow Leslie: https://twitter.com/LeslieMacWatch AOC's IG Live: https://www.instagram.com/p/CKxlyx4g-Yb/Check out UltraViolet's disinformation media guide: https://weareultraviolet.org/fairness-guide/
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There Are No Girls on the Internet. As a production of I Heart Radio and Unboss Creative. I'm Bridget Todd and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. Last week, Representative Paul Gosar tweeted an anime video depiction of him killing his colleague, Representative Alexandria Acasio Cortes. Now, this is pretty clearly unacceptable. It's against Twitter's terms of service. And if I tweeted a video of myself murdering a coworker, not only would I be fired, I'd probably beginning a visit from law enforcement. Twitter removed the tweet, but did not kick Gosar off the platform, and after he was censured and stripped of his two committee assignments by a vote of two to two of seven for tweeting the video, he retweeted it because he doesn't care women of color like AOC, they disproportionate levels of harassment, disinformation, and threats online, and this kind of abuse impacts us all because we're not able to have a healthy functioning toocracy unless everyone is able to fully participate. Let's revisit this episode that originally aired in February after AOC faced attacks online because she shared her experience of the insurrection to really hear the toll that harassment takes on women of color in the public eye. If you were online at all last week, you probably saw a Representative Alexandria Acazio Cortes used Instagram Live to get the harrowing account of what she experienced from inside the Capitol complex during the insurrection on the Capitol. In this account, she also shared that, like so many of us, she is a survivor of sexual violence. Now this triggered a real time tsunami of disinformation. Right wing figures like Representative Nancy Mace and Jack Possabik and others falsely accused AOC of not really being at the Capitol at all or exaggerating her claims. So it's true. While she was not in the main domed Capitol building, that building that you think of when you picture the capital on your head when rioters breached it, she also never claim to be She accurately said that she was in the Cannon House office building, which is part of the Capital complex and is connected to the main building by tunnels. Here's what she said on Instagram. I hide back in um in the bathroom behind the door, and then I just start to hear these yells of where is she? Where is she? And I just thought to myself, they got inside. It felt like my brain was able to have so many thoughts in that moment. So AOC never said that rioters were in her hallway. That's a claim she never made, But that didn't stop Nancy Mas from tweeting, I'm two doors down from AOC and no insurrection has stormed our hallway, even though ANOC never said they did. Now, in AOC's Instagram live, she recounted hearing somebody bang on her office door, coming to her office and say where is she. At the time, she was afraid that rioters had found her, but she later realized this person was a Capitol Police officer who was there to help her. Now, after this, we saw really ugly trends on Twitter like hashtag AOC lied and hashtag Alexandria Occasio Smalett comparing her to Jusie Smalllett to suggest that she was making up her account, despite it being corroborated by multiple people like Representative Katie Porter and Bernie Sanders, aid Ari Rabin, So this is actually a really good example of how disinformation works in real time. This complete distortion of what AOC said has become part of the public dialogue despite it being based on lies. After this, AOC tweeted, the sad thing about disinformation is that once the truth comes out, the damage has already been done. People have already been misled, radicalized and believe lies to the point where their hatred is brewed to violence. That's what led to the six and that's what's happening now. And you know what she's right. After she bravely shared her story of what happened at the Capitol and connected it to being us her viber of sexual assault, she faced a coordinated public disinformation campaign and sadly, this is not an isolated thing for women of color in the public political eye. Leslie mac is a prominent digital activists, an organizer who I work with a ultraviolet where we create resources to curb sexist, racist disinformation, like our media guy that you can find on the show description. And sadly, Leslie really knows what it's like to face these kinds of attacks online. You're a long time digital organizer, activists, someone who spent a lot of time making the world a better place via the Internet. How did you get into this work. Tell me about your role in this work. Yeah, my roles work started in the digital space. UM in twenty uh fourteen, I started organizing faith spaces online after I joined Twitter. I had been in Twitter for like two thousand eight or something, which seems like ages ago. UM, and I had started doing some legislative organizing that way. We were working in New Jersey to ban the box, UM and also some bail reform UM initiatives and so a lot of that. My my initial digital organizing work was around legislative work, which was really interesting and UM at the time a little cutting edge. Not a lot of folks were doing it, but we kind of dipped our toes in and started organizing folks online. And then UM, after Mike Brown was murdered, UM feminist Jones had UM kind of put this call out on from Twitter to say, hey, what would you be interested in hosting a vigil in your city this week? And I was like, sure, I could do one in Philly. And I I call that the you know, the moment that the full digital organizer that is Leslie Mac was born. So that that's where I started out, was organizing that first vigil in Philadelphia UM the national moment of silence, and I guess I liked it because I just kept ongoing, Yeah, you're kind of a prolific digital organizer. You're someone who I feel is one. It was one of the sort of when I think about some of the foundational black feminists who were showing up online, I definitely think about you, and you know, full disclosure, you and I worked together UM at Ultra Violet. And so yesterday was kind of a a long wild day for folks who are online and in feminist spaces online because we saw AOC really being at the center of this coordinated right wing disinformation campaign against her after she really bravely shared her story about what happened in the insurrection on January six and her own personal story as a survivor of sexual violence. And so my first question for you is how do you see disinformation and abuse being linked? Well, they're linked, you know, on two on two levels. And I was talking about this with you yesterday, which is one is UM at the personal level, which is that abusers in our real lives are personal lives, use disinformation against us, right so they tell us lies about ourselves about the world that nobody will love us and that that's a tool that they utilize at the personal level. And what we're watching is UM public abusers, right, people that are abusing the system, people that are abusing UM, people within it, UM using disinformation for that same purpose, which is to um degrade, denigrade, and deny the experiences, real life experiences of marginalized people. So watching that play out with AOC, you know, she bravely UM not only shared her story, but she went personally one to one to the people, which I think this is such a digital story in and of itself, UM that she took to I G live to UM have this hour long conversation, and the way I saw it play out, I didn't I didn't know she was live until I saw on Twitter people were tweeting about it and they were like, Wow, AOC is doing x y Z And I said, oh, let me, let me go over to UM I G and watch her. So I was watching her UM, and while that was happening, somebody was starting a chat clubhouse room to talk about it, to debriefit. UM shout out to Tracy Cord and then as I was watching it, it said, O, Katie Porter's gonna be talking about this I G Live on MSNBC shortly. So it was this moment of like, whoa, all of this digital stuff was happening. It was pinging and and and UM creating waves all over the place. And and then subsequently what that's what we watched was the abusers that UM AOC was naming in her I G Live namely, UH folks like Marjorie Taylor Green and really all the insurrectionists that and seditionists, UM electives that UM supported UM the coup on on January six, and they've subsequently now tried to discount her personal experience in this harrowing moment. And it's been wild to watch people just blatantly lie. You know. One of her fellow congress uh uh congress people said, oh, I'm I'm, I was too. I'm two dolls two doors down from her, and there were knows nobody in the hallway. And then we find out that the person evacuated before anything happened. There's the level of disinformation is really disturbing to watch in real time. Yeah, it is completely like a coordinated at the text you're talking about. Nancy Maates from South Carolina, So she tweeted yesterday I'm two doors down from an oblec and no insurrection has stormed our hallway. But that day, she herself tweeted on January six, that she was being evacuated because of this threat. You know, she she described it as quote a nearby threat. Um. She later did an interview, I think, on Good Morning America where she said that she was so frightened by what happened that she her she stayed overnight in her office, she was working, you know, her motherly instincts kicked in, and that she was so afraid for her life that she was thinking about bringing a gun with her to Capitol Hill from now on because she was so afraid. And so that's how she talked about it right after it happened. And so it's very telling that now weeks later, after aoc A, Saenti really says the same thing that I was afraid for my life. Um, somebody knocked on the door, and I was afraid for my life. She's saying that didn't happen. And I think it's really interesting how you see the way that this is coordinated. You know, we saw some another big account on the right tweeting a map with arrows trying to indicate that AOC was not, you know, not in the capital when folk storm and a see yourself replied and said, your arrows are wrong. And AOC had a really good tweet where she talked about the fact that disinformation. One of the ways that it plays out is that once it's out there in the public narrative, it doesn't matter if it's not based in reality or if it's an outright fabrication. That becomes part of the narrative for so many people in a way that you can almost never kind of correct. Yeah, you never can pull it back once once the cats out of the bag with disinformation, and it also gets spread in such innocuous ways. Um, it just becomes fact, and it happens so quickly it's really an impossible thing to to corral back in. One other thing I'd mentioned is that even you know, AOC herself never said insurrection is stormed there that hallway. What she said was somebody was walking down there and she was afraid of who it was. So even in the um disinformation, they were already twisting the things that AOC said and saying things that she she never said at all. And so the levels of lies right, um start to compound themselves. They've misinterpreted what AOC said at the start. Then they're calling her a liar erroneously, and now we have, you know, these ridiculous hashtags UM that are you know, attempting to discredit Alexandria and and you know the real obvious pain that she she was in. And and it's interesting because nobody's discounting Katie Porter's UM account. So she also gave a very similar account, talked about when Alexandra was in her office and what happened in there. She was opening up door and and I was like, can I help you? Like, what are you looking for? And she said, I'm looking for where I'm going to hide. And the thing that will always stay with me was when she said, I just hope I get to be a mom. I hope I don't die today. It's fascinating to watch that two people can talk about an incident, that their stories match up exactly the same, but only one is targeted for for disinformation. That That's what tells me it's coordinated, it's deliberate, and it's um um and it's supposed to be specific to individuals. It's not happenstance. Absolutely, I mean that drives with everything that we know from the research. We know disinformation is worse for women of color in politics. A report from the Institute for Strategic Diet a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue reveals that women of color candidates and political and political officials are targeted on the right but on social media at alarming rate. So this this report found that women of color were particularly likely to be targeted. Um elon Omar received the highest proportion three percent of abusive messages of all the candidates and their studies, and AOC received the highest ratio of abusive comments on Facebook. So you know, we know, you know, it's completely jives with this research that Katie Porter, her testimony, her her sharing her story would not be picked apart and sort of targeted for this kind of coordinated disinformation campaign in the same way that someone like AOC would be. So one question I have for you is why do you think that women of color are such bigger targets for this kind of disinformation online? Yeah, I mean I think we're bigger targets in general, UM and especially for our elected UM women of color because we get shipped done, and we really are there to stand in the gap for UM. Those that are marginalized right in ways that are white counterparts are not UM. So off the bat, we're all already facing UM some some pushback to the work that we want to do in the world, and whether that's in political spaces or wherever. UM. The other side of that is that we're we're easy targets, which is which means that somebody attacking Katie Porter is going to be seen as mean. UM, They're going to be seen is not nice. But somebody attacking a woman of color, it becomes something so it's so okay, And then the pylonic occurs and people are waiting, are just waiting for opportunities to attack woman of color. And and this is something that you know, you and I've been dealing with in digital spaces for you know, a decade plus now, so it's not UM news. But I think those two things or why we become such lightning rods. I mean, the goal is to silence us. The goal is to get us out of positions of power. The goal is to make UM the kinds of changes that we are collectively and individually pushed for, not reality. And so starting with attacking woman of color, that's like the that's the front line of that of that a pushback. What you just said completely jives with what you know about disinformation, right, Like one of the points of disinformation is to silence people, Right, So I think at disinformers, they don't want women of color to be putting their ideas out into the world, to be creating the kind of changes that they want to be responsible for in the world. And so these kinds of really scary, coordinated disinformation attacks are meant to have a chilling effect on their targets. And so they're meant to make AOC and women who aspire to be like her, other women of color who might want to be activists, might want to be involved in politics, or might just want to put their ideas about these things into the world via Twitter or social media. It's meant to make these people feel so afraid and be so fearful that this kind of thing is going to happen to them that they just stop. They don't put their opinions out into the world, they don't try to shape the world. They don't they stop with their activism online. And I think, you know, when we have conversations about disinformation, they often turn into conversations about free speech, and we need to be talking about the ways that this is shut It an attempt to shut down free speech and to make it so that people don't feel comfortable engaging in public discourse. Absolutely, and it's so you know, the thing that has been hitting me so much is how normalized, you know, these types of attacks against women of color elected officials have become. UM. You know, I was listening to Rashida to leave from the floor last night UM and the hearing around stripping Marjorie Taylor Green's UM committee assignments, and she said, I wanted to go last because I knew it was gonna be hard for me to talk about it. And she talked about the fact that her first day on Capitol Hill, she hadn't even been sworn in yet, and they there was already a death threat against her, serious enough that the FBI had to come and pull her aside. It was her first one, not even sworn in yet, first day in DC, and she said she was paralyzed, and everyone after that paralyzed. One mentioned her son. You know, she really talked about the trauma of it. And her team had to decide to kind of shield her from it moving forward because they recognized how it paralyzed her. And she said, when she saw what was happening on January six, the things she thought was thank God, thank allah, I'm not I'm not there, um, because she knew that she would be a direct target as well. And So when we think about, you know, so many, so much work that's been going into getting more women of color to run for office, getting more when women of color elected, the flip side of that is we do not have systems set up to actually hold the space that women of color UM, that that serve UM in that way, to hold them in the trauma that is sure to follow. And and the other thing I want to bring to attention is that are our decades of ignoring this kind of violence and digital spaces is why we're seeing it accepted UM in real world spaces. There's a direct correlation between all of the work that we have been doing UM in digital spaces to to throwing up these red flags for so so long. I know you had sharene on the on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, and um, you know, just she's she's amazing and her groundbreaking work to just point out that Nope, this is not just uh general harassment, it's very specific, it's very targeted, and it's meant to silence women of color. All of that is now in the in in in the real world, and it it became normalized in digital spaces. And that's the danger. When things become normalized in digital spaces, it means they're going to be acceptable outside of digital spaces. There's no barrier between the two. We are living beyond the digital age. There's a complete melding of digital life and quote unquote real life. That means that anything we we find acceptable or or treat as acceptable online become the same in real world. A very short time, let's take a quick break enter back. One thing that I wish that people understood is that what happens digitally and what happens in the real world, those two things are not distinct. And I think for so long, and I think we're starting to see that. You know, the insurrection was one way that I think that folks who were unwilling to see this maybe are like, oh, I think that perhaps what happens online does have real world impact. But for so long when it was a lot of women and women of color and black women online who were saying, hey, we're being harassed, Hey, this is happening to us, and no one was listening. I think one of the reasons why that was minimized is because it was happening quote unquote just online, and the perception that you could just step away from your computer or turn off your computer or get off social media and it wouldn't be happening anymore, completely completely divorced from the reality that if it's out there in the ether happening online, it's out there in the real world. Right, these words, these worlds are not so distinct and so separate. Yeah, and if you think of you, I know, I think if you think of this, info at some point is an unsharpened pencil, right, just the thing UM can't do very much, but it is. It is a tool. I would say that that what happened was it was sharpened against women of color, It was sharpened against I just think back to some of the early um moments of dis info that I remember, like gamer Gate is a that that entire thing started with disinfo, and so the tool of disinformation was sharpened on all of our pain and all of the attacks that came against us. It was sharpened, it was sharpened, and it was perfected. UM. And so now that it's being used to great effect across the board, not just directed at us, but directed at government generally speaking, directed at you know, misinformation and elections, miss disinformation in so many sectors, um, even around COVID nineteen. Um, it's wild because you know we are. I wrote an article a couple of for b y P One Dred like two years ago, and I think I called it something like black women, um, always playing, always cast in the role of Cassandra, and and the piece was really just like, we're really tired of not being able to see the future telling you what's going to happen, and nobody listening to us. Uh. It gets exhausting, right. I do feel like we have this this like narrative of like trust black women, listen to black women. And obviously I have a shirt that says that, Obviously I agree with that, but we also have to have a very real conversation about what happens when you're expected to be the person who can see in the crystal ball and warn everybody time and time and time again. And I think you know, you and I had a good conversation about this moment regarding AOC but also disinformation kind of writ large. And I do think like this is a moment where we can have a reckoning or a hard reset and say no, we're not going to do this again, where we, after the facts, say oh, we should have listened to black women. This is an opportunity to really get it right. And that's what I would love to see. I would love to not just see this be another time where you know, in six months, we all say, oh, we should have listened to these these you know, black women activists, black women social media users, or black women researchers who saw this coming. But we actually say, oh, people warned us and we did something, we took meaningful action. Yeah. Absolutely. And even in the like after acknowledgements, it never goes as far as what you just said. It's always an acknowledgement like, oh, we should have known this, right, we should have known this, or we should have known from this more recent thing. And what I'd like, folks, the the acknowledgement needs to go away further back. It needs to acknowledge the fact that the entire ecosystem collectively decided not to listen to women of color and especially black women in digital spaces as we were shouting from the rooftops about how abuse was being weaponized, how it was being coordinated, you know, in small ways and large ways, and how every single platform has ways in which we can be targeted for harassment that that they refused to close the loop on. I'll use an example. Twitter lists great lists. It's a great function. You can make a list of people that like to talk about a specific thing. But there's no setting that allows me to stop anyone from putting me on a list. So once a month I go through the list that I'm on, and invariably I find four or five that are horrible, that say things that are terrible and have put me on a list with you know, a bunch of you know, great people. But the name of the list is something you know, really egregious and um clearly meant for people to target me and anybody else on the list as well, And so I have to remove myself by blocking the person. They don't even let you remove yourself from a list. By the way, these are small functional things within a system, right within within a platform. That enable abuse that are very easy to correct and yet doesn't happen. Articles have been written about this, people have pointed it out. Every month I go live and I just like screenshot the list that I'm on, and it's like horrible, And I can tell. I can tell when I start getting attacks. I'm like, oh shit, I'm on a list somewhere, like I can I just know it, I can feel it, Like why this tweet is an is? Why are so many trolls jumping on it? Okay? You know, and it's it's um. I think that you're right that that it needs to be a much more proactive approach now that all of this data exists, Like you can't say you don't know. You can't say you don't have we don't have the data to back it up. You can't say that we're not seeing the very real, dangerous implications and repercussions from unchecked digital harassment. And that that's the part that I think we need to get to. You're someone who is a prominent visible black woman activist on on digital in digital spaces, right, and so that sounds phenomenal. You know, you have a blue check mark. I see people who are like oh, that must mean you're rich or very powerful. But with that visibility calm, it's like a double edged sword where you also deal with this oversized, you know, oversized abusive reaction online like people, people, I see people pile on you the time. You'll say something innocuous and people it's like people were waiting in the rafters to attack you. And I think that we really have to acknowledge the toll that can take. You know, there are people out there who are probably like, oh, if you have a zillion followers on Twitter and a blue check mark, you must be having the best time on social media. I wish I had that. But with that kind of visibility and that with that kind of platform comes a lot of this abuse and that all of this nonsense that makes your experiences online when you're just trying to put your opinions out there difficult, and we have these platforms really doing nothing about it and enabling it. Absolutely. It definitely is one of those weird things of um realizing that you have become not a real person in digital spaces to a lot of folks, and it takes it takes them. For me, it took some getting used to just like, oh, like, let I'll put and put an air quotes up. Y'all can't see me. But by mac, it's not actually a person to to people, Um, it's it's this you know, it's an entity or it's it's a thing. And I'm like, I'm I'm just a forty five year old black woman and I'm a real person. I have feelings, I have a family, I have, uh, I have you know, mental health struggles I have. I'm just a regular person. And yeah, I think a lot of the mechanisms UM in digital spaces actually dehumanize us. Some of these things that are meant to like, you know, amplify us or elevate us, um, like a blue check or like a lot of followers. UM. For me, it's like Greeks, I'm able to do more work and deeper work and have my my work reach wider, but the price that you have to pay for that is so large. Um. You know, I've left Twitter multiple times because of those pylon moments. And You're right, it does feel like folks were just like sitting with a bag of ship to throw at me and waiting for whatever moment when it was deemed okay to do that, right, because it's it's clear. You can't do it anytime. You can't just do it out of the blue. It has to be when there's a mass of it happening. And I think that that speaks to the connection again between abuse and disinformation, because we're watching bullies coordinate themselves to attack, and this is exactly how abusers um act and disinformation works the same way. The same people with the same mindset pick up on disinformation and they decide that's what they're going to push out as the truth. And and you know, as AOC said, once it's out there, it's impossible to refute it. Anything you say will be just dismissed. Oh you're just saying that because X Y Z UM and and there isn't a I don't know what the solution is, but I do know we've got to make some strides because, um, you know, every week I talked to more and more you know, black women in particular and digital spaces that are just like, I'm just ready to leave. I'm just ready to stop, because, um, it's interfering with the The pros of the reach are not weighing out with the cons of how this is affecting me and um, you know, we are so disposable as black women that, um, there's no consequences and also no empathy when we are feeling and dealing with these moments, um, besides from each other, and and it just really has to stop. It really makes me reflect on my own use of social media, which is actually quite guarded. A C was so vulnerable, she really showed up as her full self in this way that I really often don't. I almost never talk about my personal life or my romantic life because I see the way that people will use it to target women of color online who do. Yeah, it's definitely true. I think, you know, I share a lot of my personal life because that's how I build my following and my you know, my platform. So I still I still share, you know, especially about my dogs, and I share about, you know, whatever other things I'm doing or working on. But I the thing that has stopped my interactions more like I have way less um interactions with strangers than I used to. Um, I definitely used to like I didn't need to know what you're you know, I didn't need I would rarely even go look at someone's platform before engaging with them. Around just innocuous topics, and now if I don't know you, like I'm not talking to you anymore because I don't have I don't know you, you could be suspicious. And the time and effort it takes to you know, vet you it is not it is not some time that I'm willing to spend. And so it's definitely changed the way that I can interact with people. And it's sad to me because I met a lot of amazing people in those earlier days where I was able to interact with strangers and be like, oh, this person seems cool, Like what other stuff are you doing, and getting to know them more and meeting them and talking with them and having them on my own podcast when I had one end UM, A lot of that has just stopped, and I've just become yeah, a little bit walled off in the context of I'll share what I want, but I'm really not interested in as much interaction UM or One of the the tactics that I m employees that I have specific posts that are meant to be interactive or conversational UM and I usually do one or two a week just to have a conversation with with folks. But I've had to systemize it because it can't be organic for me anymore. Um, the risk is too great and it is sad it's made. UM. I would say my interactions with strangers a little less authentic and that I'm trying to craft a moment to talk with them versus organic conversations happening. And you know, some of that is just the way that digital spaces have evolved, but a lot of it is just me having to make different choices because of the harassment. More after a quick brain to get right back into it. Wouldn't it be something if you didn't have to spend your time and your energy and your capacity and your brain space systematizing these things because of these abusive platforms. Wouldn't it be great at these platforms, you know, especially simple things like the Twitter list, you know, wouldn't it be great at these platforms listen to their users and said, these are the things that you are that you are, these are the things that you are doing to enable abuse. If you if you it will be very easy to fix to stop it. It. Wouldn't it be great if you did not have to individually dedicate brain space to managing how you were going to deal with this just to show up and like, do do your job, live your life the way that you want to live it online. Yeah, I mean it would be amazing. I mean I have the they we have protocols in our house when things, you know, when when the attacks really get bad, my phone gets taken away from me. Uh, everybody knows to text my husband if they need me because I won't have it on me anymore. I mean, these are you know, coping mechanisms just to protect my own mental health when these one of these things, um happen. And I know, I mean so much. The reason why I have those protocols because I've learned them from other black women who were like, Okay, here's how you can deal with it, or here's you know when I step away, and um, yeah, I mean that's the insidiousness of white supremacy, right, is that the onus is on those of us that are under its boot too create situations or to create systems just to help us survive, and our white counterparts just don't have to deal with that. They do not have to reckon with the possibility of simply speaking your truth, meaning you're going to have to deal with a whole list of stuff that have nothing to do with your initial um, you know, purpose for interacting online, and you know, we do a lot of our work in digital spaces, so it's not a place that I can step away from. I also, you know, center a lot of my work around direct giving, and I move a lot of money directly, especially to black women and fems um through social media. So from it's it's not a place that I'm really willing to leave because the resources are there and um and it works. So I don't have a position of like I'm going to step away. I just have had to take a position of protecting myself as best I can, sharing that knowledge with other people, and then pushing with folks like you to to create actual, real change in digital spaces. I'm so we we need people like you. Yeah, you've you've been individually responsible for funding so many black women and fems, you know, direct direct aid to them into their pockets. You are so important in this work, and so I am glad that you have steps in place where you can stay in this work because God knows we need you. But it's hard, like we need to acknowledge that you know, you're not a superwoman, You're a person or a real person and that you know, it sucks. Sometimes it's just really it sucks. Sometimes it really does. Uh. You know. I started doing these TikTok threads on Sunday on my Twitter, and I did the first one because I really was just like, I need to put something up that's fun. I need to put something up that is not going to be a lightning rod for anything, where I can just interact with people in a fun way and bring some joy. It has changed my entire countenance because now people look forward to the threat every Sunday and um, it's injected in a strange way, just a buffer around me. And I know I have a little bit of time and digital space every Sunday that's joyful and peaceful and fun um. And I had lost that. I really had lost that feeling of enjoying interacting with strangers um online, which you know is such a big part of digital organizing. And I needed to figure out a way to bring that back into my platform and into the ways that I interact naturally. And this ended up working. I had tried some other things before that wereness successful, and this this seems to be working quite well for that purpose. And it kind of it. This sounds strange, but it's sort of like if the temperature has been rising on the stove around you know, negative reactions to me all week, Um that Sunday thread it like it's like a throwing water on a fire. It just puts it out completely. So I sort of have a reset every week now because now it looks silly that you're like arguing and someone's mentions when people are like talking about dogs or like you seem weird. So um yeah, I mean those are just like little tricks that I've started to pick up just to kind of be like, Okay, how can I continue to exist in this space and not have it, um be so toxic to me that I have to like build all of these different systems And that this trick has seemed to work so far. I'm hoping it will continue because it's been really nice to be able to bring that that part of digital interaction back in a safe way. That's a great tip, I hope people out there if I'm going to use it, that's a great tip. Um. And again, it sucks that you have to do these things, but I'm happy that you have systems in place that just protect your health protect your wellness and continue to give you that outlet to to do that community building and engaging that I know that you're so good at and that you love so much. So I'm thankful for that, Leslie. Where can folks keep up with you? Online? You're doing amazing stuff all over the Internet. Where can folks keep up with you? You can just find me Leslie Mac m a C. You can search that. That's my handle on Twitter. If you just search it in Google, you'll see my all the things Facebook and UM my website Leslie mac dot com. You can find me there as well. Yeah, I I want to I just want to thank you to Bridget for for UM calling this UH extra episode, and and thank you for all of your podcast but especially for this UM series you've been doing around disinformation, because I think it's really UM allowed a lot of folks to put into context the long UM you know, trail of this work against disinformation. You know, we've wanted it in this election cycle in a way that I think has woken people up to the realities and dangers of it. But it's really important to put it into the context that we've been screaming about this for almost a decade, more than a decade. And so yeah, I mean, y'all could have just listened to women from the first place, and you can start doing that now, and we can avoid things like forty and Marjorie Taylor Green and all the other you know, horrible things that have stemmed from digital spaces because frankly, somebody like MTG, the only way that they've built a platform is through digital space. Oh absolutely, I was just talking about this. How the problem really is is that we have for people like her, we have made it politically advantageous to do things like this online. It's it's not you know, it's not like, oh she sounds wild, like get her out of here. It's oh she sounds wild, Amplify her, amplify her. Yes, um and you know, uh, as Bridget is closed, we both work a ultra violet. But you know, one of the great things about the Media Guide is that it really has specific um ways for people to not share disinformation. And one of the biggest culprits in the media they share disinformation inadvertently and deliberately UM in covering it. And it's it's wild that they have not seen UM the light and understood their role in in spreading it, because if you're considered fake news quote unquote by by a portion of the population, and then you write, you report on disinformation and in a specific way, you legitimize it, really specifically with a specific audience. And I I don't know what the answer is, but I'll say this, when I was in journalism school, clearly I did not become a journalist because I actually saw when when I was in j school, I saw this as the future of journalism and it really scared me. Um. I went to Northwest University and this isn't the you know, the mids late nineties, and I really I remember saying to my mom, I can't be in this industry. This, this the track that this is on is leading in a really dangerous and scary place. And I don't think it's something that I could do for my my career. I don't think it's something I could do. She was not thrilled. It was a lot of money anyways, Um, but yeah, I just remember, and it's it's silly now. I talked about this all the time and certainly age myself. But you know, you go to the computer lab to write your you know, your stories and stuff for the paper, and um, you know, people would bring magnets into the computer lab to like swipe people's um floppy disks so that their stories couldn't get it on time, so that they could get the byline the next day. And like I remember just being like this is these are these will be my colleagues. Yeah, I this is not It's not gonna be for me. And UM, it's been while sitting back outside of journalism and watching you know, everything that I felt as a nineteen year old um come to pass, every every single thing, I was like, this is going really itself. Um, the idea of ethics were so loosey goosey and not at all um ethical, and I just was like, this is this is the one of the best jealous of schools in the country, and these are the people they've matriculated, and this is the attitude that they have towards women, towards black people, towards marginalized spokes, towards poor people. I just, yeah, the reckoning has been long coming, and I think that the digital space has only added to um to that absolutely, And I think we see it in the way that folks are reporting about the AOC situation. I was really disgusted to see it sort of framed as almost like a cat fight or a spat between two female members of Congress as opposed to a wider coordinated disinformation campaign that AOC is at the heart of. Like this is not two women beef and over a man or something, right, like this is someone So this is people making up cordon, making up lies about someone in a corn needed way to smear them for for sharing their story. I was really dismade to see it kind of framed as like a she said, she said kind of thing, as opposed to disinformation. But that becomes a question, right, why did anybody feel the need to discount AOC's account of what happened to her personally? That's the ultimate question, is why was that something you felt you needed to do. And at the heart of that is that is that we go back to silence saying of women of color and especially progressive, radical women of color, And that's the ultimate goal, and people will pay any price to do that. So true, and I think, like, what do you think it tell like people who are survivors of abuse sexual violence when they see the way that the wagon circled to smear AOC for sharing her story. What do you think that the responses, you know, like someone who would would speak up but sees what happened to AOC, What do you think that? What do you think that's going to do to them? You know, it's going to further tell them that they shouldn't speak out. It's going to let them know that there will be negative consequences to them speaking out. And Um, I think it's it's why it's so important for us to show support for AOC and for all survivors, because there's a survivor listening right now that's contemplating and she's at a crossroads of speaking her truth or burying it and having to deal with it in ten, fifteen, twenty years. And the more that we can show support for survivors and for moments like this where AOC is so transparent, not only in um speaking about her experience as a sexual assault survivor, but also linking the trauma of that moment to January six, where she was also feeling under attack. And you know, Um, I'm just put in my you know, Katie Porter, it was interesting listening to AOC's account and then Katie talking about it on on Laurence O'donald Show because Katie mentioned some details that that Alexandria didn't share, and she said, you know, uh she she said to AOC, you know, I'm a mom. I've got everything you know covered here. Don't worry. I'm calm. And AOC looked at her and said, I hope I get to be a mom. And I just I want people to hear that this is a young woman who has a huge platform. She takes it very seriously. She does diligent and amazing work, but she's still a young woman who shouldn't be made to feel like this just for doing her job. And I I don't I don't know what it's going to take. And I think that's what's really been scaring me the most in this last you know, a few years, is that I have a a sinking suspicion that it's going to take something so violent that um yeah, I just I'm just really actually afraid for the physical safety of so many of these UM elected officials right now. Um, And I don't know what to do with that fear. I can only imagine how they are all feeling. Um. This has been just like like I'm reaching out to you know my son Louis Crew Like, what, who's watching Corey? Like, I'm obsessed about it. Literally, I I find myself just constantly being concerned. UM. Some of them I don't worry about because like Ianna, I know she's she's she's got a very strong, uh you know, protective system around her. But I just worry. I just worry UM. As we're watching UM, continuing to watch UM, these conspiracy theorists and UM and white supremacists continued to take up space, continue to not be challenged. H It was really disturbing to watch the hearing yesterday. I was so triggered to hear UM the gop UM representatives, one after the other get up and make a quip occasion for UM mark MTGS behavior and these false equivalences that they kept throwing up. But I was really bullied by the Democrats that got up and and really were specific about the harms that were done, about who these were targeted against, and why we can't stand for it any longer. I have not heard the Democrats speak in such large collective voice about this yet, and and it's sad that it took someone UM like Marjorie Taylor Green to get them to do it, because had they been doing this all along, perhaps there wouldn't be a Marjorie Tailor Green in Congress right now. I'm hopeful that in this moment people can see this is this is real stuff, really serious and has variable consequences. Absolutely, and and um, it needs to be said that these moments always come at the expense of women of color. And I think that, um, it plays into our disposability and in this notion that what we can just take it, and this notion that um, we're really just here to serve as an example for other people to to learn from. Um. And that's a hard reality that we that we actually live with every single day, that our lives themselves are an example. Um. Uh, we really just want to live. I say this all the time, like I don't know an organizer that would not be rather, that would not rather be doing something else. We are organizers because we are called and because we have to be. Um. I'd love to just go to you know, Paris, and and go to pastry school and and uh bake all day if I had a choice. Um, but that's not the world that I live in, and it demands more of me because I want my nieces to have a better world. And I want, uh, you know, my nephews to not be ray in a world that would have them become misogynists. And I feel called to support people that are in need. Um, and so the ways in which we are dehumanized in digital spaces that we become you know, these two dimensional um you know, flattened out personalities in ways that our white counterparts are always seen as three dimensional. It's always about the nuance of their experience, and for us everything is black and white. And I it's it's a while to um watch um. Your sisters just become a lesson for people to learn their pain, be a lesson for people to learn from. And I want that to stop as well. I want better for us all but I almost have tears in my head. I want better for us. I want you to be able to go to pastry school and not not feel like you have to be in this like in this fight that latins us so cruelly. I want. I want better for all of us. Names got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi, You can reach us at Hello at tang Godi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangdi dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget Tod. It's a production of iHeart Radio and Unboss creative Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Terry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. 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