Social Media

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Social media can have a secondary effect of debasing the entire trust in a society. People not knowing what's true at all, or being apathetic is an existential issue. The privilege of being on social media is skewed and skewed to benefit bullies. And that kind of slope is just getting more and more tense. You know, we talk often about the power of social media to generate positive change. But it's not the social media that was promised by governments. It's not thesocial media you hear about when people are talking about political issues. We really define debate through fakt accounts like @mideastfakenews and #justsayinjoe.

The sound of bullies on social media can be deafening, but what about their victims? “They're just sitting there being pummeled and pummeled and pummeled,” says Fadi Quran. As the campaign director of Avaaz, a platform for 62 million activists worldwide, Fadi and his team go to great lengths to figure out exactly how social media is being weaponized against vulnerable communities, including those who have no voice online at all. “They can't report it. They’re not online.” Fadi says. “They can't even have a conversation about it.” But by bringing these voices of survivors to Silicon Valley, Fadi says, tech companies can not just hear the lethal consequences of algorithmic abuse, they can start hacking away at a system that Fadi argues was “designed for bullies.”