Tech’s Ethical Challenges

As I entered my career into tech after I graduated, how did I really think about the ethicals or the social responsibilities of working at these companies? And did I have a support system? That's an excellent question. I worked as a contractor. The little red badge at YouTube. When I started off there, they had just been acquired by Google and the content moderators were like the most depressed people. And you can see the same now in other tools. They would tell me some of the videos that they would see and I would purposely not walk in that direction. And there were only 300 employees. I look back and I look back. I'm also part of this other, like I don't have enough time, but I'm also part of this other organization called Build Tech with Trust where we saw radicalization online not being held accountable by the tech companies by the content that they're providing. And so after the mass shootings around white supremacy and radicalization, a bunch of Women of Color CEOs here in the Bay Area, we came and Built Tech with Trust as a coalition. And then we even submitted questions to Congress when Mark Zuckerberg went there a couple weeks ago on the questions around the ethics. Going back to your question, if I could go back, I would have taken more ethics courses in college and thinking about what I'm building to compliment my more technical or my more social degrees. Then I worked at Twitter and the first time a dictator started tweeting on Twitter was Hugo Chavez, which is a dictator of Venezuela. And I was in charge of Twitter en Espanol. So I went to the general counsel there and I said, should we have a policy on how leaders or dictators should tweet on this platform if it threatens the citizens lives? But it was kind of like a passing thought. Do I wake up and think about it? Yes, especially given nowadays. So I do believe that I did not have that. And so maybe this is my way of atonement of working for all the tech companies to try to reverse a little bit. I think after the 2016 elections, one of my colleagues at Twitter tweeted out what have we done? And I just remember that tweet and I was crying. And then my partner worked early at Facebook and so he was, he has been, he. Yeah, he worked at, through the API on Facebook. So he knows everything that happened there on data and the Cambridge analytics stuff. So I think we're all, everyone in this industry is really torn on how we can make a change and hold ourselves accountable. I always tell people I have a love hate relationship with tech, but I love the industry enough to want to change it and stick around for a while.