Deja Foxx

And so somewhere like Sunroom, they've responded by having content moderation done through a woman's lens, right?

Or zero tolerance for harassment and hate speech.

And something I think we'll probably get to later, but I'd like to touch on is that being a woman online is scary.

It is hard.

There are new kinds of digital violence, gender-based violence, that have been made possible because of these platforms, whether it's something like doxing or deepfakes, which absolutely has to do with the conversation around AI and women's rights and who gets to take up space in our public square.

Yeah.

What I think is interesting about the examples I raise in the talk is that they really are thinking about new models of ownership and control.

Okay.

Which I actually think, to expand it out and not to be too woo-woo, that if we can model a kind of like matriarchal, community-owned digital world, it might just spark a different kind of world in our real lives, too.

Yeah.

I think about something like Archive of Our Own, which was founded in 2008, so not exactly part of this new wave of builders.

And I know the fangirls out there are like, yeah, Archive of Our Own, put that on, mention it.

It's where, you know, all these fan works are hosted, and it supports a user base of 8 million people.

Many girls my age will tell you that that's like where they found the internet for the first time anyway, was through these fan works.

But their structure is nonprofit, noncommercial.

Yeah.

They are run by an elected board, and they're completely volunteer run.

And so they're proving concept that there's a different way to govern online.

And, you know, it'll never not be astounding to me that we let these tech bros write these community guidelines about whose bodies get to show up where and how we get to talk and what counts as hate speech, effectively legislating for a billion people around the world, even though they are unelected and unaccountable.

That's a good question.