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March 13th, 2016 
Awake Goy
Susanne Posel ,Chief Editor Occupy Corporatism | Media Spokesperson, HEALTH MAX Brands
The South By Southwest (SXSW) tech conference in Austin, Texas brought many issues to the table, but certain a panel of experts shined a spotlight on harassment and sexism online that cannot be ignored any longer in the realms of social media and online gaming.
With life imitating art because of the barrage of threats of violence directed at the SXSW conference, 2 panels on the subject were cancelled ; and yet it only took the tech industry’s outcry at censorship to make this problem an all-day event.
Which is exactly what happened.
Gamergate is a manifestation of the problem at hand and we’ve only known about this particular incident since 2014; but sexism is rampant in the online gaming world.
Wendy Davis, former Texas state senator, joined the panel at SXSW to share her story of how she became the target of an impressive online harassment campaign simply because she had filibustered for 11 hours in order to block an anti-abortion bill that would restrict access to healthcare for thousands of women.
Davis spoke during a session entitled, “Women in the Media and Online Harassment” where she emphasized how “important [it is] for women who were the subject [of online harassment] to speak up and speak out.”
The former senator recalled the flurry of articles published about her; including personal information and criticizing her appearance. She said “that would not have even been a topic of conversation” for male politicians.
Davis told the audience: “Twice I was asked if I had ever had an abortion and to the first person I responded, when you begin to ask every male candidate whether he’s ever impregnated someone and that’s resulted in an abortion, then you can ask me that question. But what was most interesting about it, both of them told me that they were asking me because their male superiors had insisted that as part of the story they were doing that that question be asked.”
Brianna Wu, a game developer who has been the target of a plethora of online sexism and harassment for the last year spoke on the possibility of “a safer, saner and civil internet” and demanded more accountability from social media platforms to stop the spread of hate.
Wu explained: “When it comes to pragmatically moving the ball forward, we need oversight for social media companies. They need outside people to come in and view their processes to make sure that things like death threats and harassment has no role in the public conversation. We need social media companies to step up their policies – because they are failing us.”
Interestingly, members of Google and Facebook’s staff were in the listening audience and contributed to the discussion.
Monika Bickert, head of policy at Facebook responded by claiming her company was doing all they could to stop “hate speech and harassment”, but the reason why they are ineffectual is because of 2 problems:
- Technological solutions are in short supply
- Hate speech and harassment are “so highly contextual”
Bickert said: “You might for instance have someone using a racial slur to attack a person, and that would violate our policies. [But] you might also have somebody using that slur to say ‘this morning, on the subway, someone called me this word, it was upsetting’. We need a real person looking at it to make a decision.”
Shireen Mitchell, founder of Digital Sisters, offered a different perspective – blaming the lack of diversity in the tech industry at large because “the reason that many who are in the tech industry don’t know what’s happening, or can’t identify it, is because they’re coming from a different cultural spectrum.”
Mitchell suggested: “If you are inclusive of women, women from different backgrounds, transgender women, women of color, you will be able to parse out what the challenges are and get to it sooner.”
Minorities are “asked to have 2 degrees, 3 degrees… but people like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates – they’re dropouts.”
Caroline Sinders, lead of the panel that was cancelled, warned that this SXSW conference “was more around talking about harassment and not about solving harassment.”
Sinders noted: “As opposed to saying ‘everyone come over here’, I think a lot of these panels would have been better situated within SXSW. By creating a completely separate space for an online harassment panel, we are far away, we’re missing all these other people that maybe had no idea.”
For her, the issue of online sexism and harassment is a problem that needs to e addressed, and the SXSW conference could be compared to “domestic violence awareness campaigns of the 1970s and 80s.”
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