https://www.npr.org/2021/02/23/970300911/block-party-aims-to-be-a-spam-folder-for-social-media-harassment

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Block Party Aims To Be A 'Spam Folder' For Social Media Harassment In
part because of her own experience being targeted with online
harassment and threats, Tracy Chou launched Block Party, a startup
that aims to help people feel safer on social media.
NPR logo Block Party Aims To Be A 'Spam Folder' For Social Media
Harassment

Technology

Block Party Aims To Be A 'Spam Folder' For Social Media Harassment

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February 23, 20212:07 PM ET
Shannon Bond

Shannon Bond

Twitter
[tracy-chow]
Enlarge this image

Software engineer Tracy Chou's own experience on social media led her
to create Block Party, an app that helps people filter their feeds to
manage online abuse and harassment. Elizabeth Dalziel for NPR hide
caption

toggle caption
Elizabeth Dalziel for NPR

Software engineer Tracy Chou's own experience on social media led her
to create Block Party, an app that helps people filter their feeds to
manage online abuse and harassment.

Elizabeth Dalziel for NPR

There's a saying in Silicon Valley: Solve your own problems. Tracy
Chou didn't have to look further than her social media feeds to see
those problems.

"I've experienced a pretty wide range of harassment," she said.
"Everything from the casual mansplaining-reply guys to really
targeted, persistent harassment and stalking and explicit threats
that have led me to have to go to the police and file reports."

Chou is a Stanford-educated software engineer who worked at tech
companies including Pinterest and Quora before setting out on her
own. Along the way, she's become a leading advocate for diversity,
pushing Silicon Valley to open up about how few women work in tech --
a field long dominated by men.

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Twitter's 'Birdwatch' Aims to Crowdsource Fight Against
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That work has made her a big target of online abuse, from Twitter to
Facebook to Reddit.

"I am so devoted to solving this problem because it is a personal one
and it's a pain that I live with literally every day," Chou said.

Her solution is Block Party, an app that launched publicly in
January. It's meant to help people feel safer on social media by
giving them more control over their experiences and interactions.

A 'spam folder' for social media

Chou's experience pushing for greater diversity in tech has led her
to a theory of why abuse is so persistent on social media. As she
sees it, it's because the predominately white men who start, run and
invest in most big tech companies are less likely to personally
experience harassment.

"They didn't prioritize safety solutions because they never needed
them for themselves," she said.

During her time building social media platforms, she said, she saw
"how the lack of diversity and representation on those teams has led
to areas that got ignored." She believes some of social media's
problems "might have been anticipated if there had been more
representation on the teams thinking through uses and misuses of the
technology."

Groups including Amnesty International and the Wilson Center have
documented how women and people of color are particularly targeted
for online abuse. Chou knew from her own experience that harassment
and threats can be so pervasive, some people simply quit social media
altogether.

Technology

Troll Watch: Online Harassment Toward Women

Troll Watch: Online Harassment Toward Women

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  * Transcript

Block Party connects to a person's Twitter account and provides a set
of filters they can use to decide what messages they want to see and
what they don't. For example, they could filter mentions from people
they don't already follow on Twitter. Those are sent to a separate
online folder that they can choose to check when and if they want to,
or enlist a friend to review.

Chou likens it to a spam folder for social media. "We don't pretend
that it doesn't exist. It still exists, it's there, but you can
choose when to look at it," she said.

That choice is key to Block Party's design and goals. Most social
networks already provide tools to block, mute or report other users.
Block Party makes that easier to do, on users' own terms.

"If I'm just looking at my Twitter account before I go to sleep, I
don't want to deal with harassment, and it's nice to know I won't
have to," said Ellen Pao, the former CEO of Reddit--and a diversity
advocate herself--who is among Block Party's first investors. "I do
that when I'm ready or I have somebody else do it."

Right now, Block Party only works with Twitter, but Chou's ambition
is to expand the tool across social media.

As companies like Facebook and Twitter undertake fraught debates over
what they do and don't allow people to post on their platforms, Chou
wants to provide tools for the average user, who cares less about
banning speech than about avoiding social-media trolls.

[tracy-chow]
Enlarge this image

Chou drew on her work building anti-harassment tools at social media
companies including Pinterest and Quora, and her advocacy for greater
diversity in Silicon Valley when conceiving Block Party. Elizabeth
Dalziel for NPR hide caption

toggle caption
Elizabeth Dalziel for NPR

Chou drew on her work building anti-harassment tools at social media
companies including Pinterest and Quora, and her advocacy for greater
diversity in Silicon Valley when conceiving Block Party.

Elizabeth Dalziel for NPR

"There's a pretty big space in between what is permitted on a
platform and what you as an individual may want to see," Chou said.
"I have people who've tweeted mean things at me, like, 'You're just
like an ugly, skinny Chinese girl from San Francisco.' Do they need
to be deplatformed? Maybe not. Do I want to see that? No."

Block Party is also designed to help deal with the worst abuse, by
letting people collect evidence of threats or stalking, even if they
are deleted by the users who post them or by the platforms. That
documentation is critical for filing police reports, getting
restraining orders and pursuing legal cases.

"Any feature that collects the evidence and puts it somewhere I am
all for," said Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer who represents people
targeted by online abuse. "Especially if it means that a victim has
control over when he or she looks at it."

Pressuring social networks to take harassment seriously

But Goldberg says she's also frustrated that Block Party needs to
exist in the first place. She says tech platforms should be on the
hook for keeping their users safe.

"We shouldn't have to be farming that out to third-party companies
and putting the onus on the victim to have the software and figure
out how to use it," she said, "because it still is based on this
premise that the abuse is inevitable."

Block Party investor and venture capitalist Charles Hudson says he
thinks the company could show big tech companies there's real demand
for curbing harassment.

"If a small startup can come up with a product that can make life
better for people who are trying to get work done on these platforms,
there's no excuse for why the platforms themselves can't actually
undertake more vigorous effort on this front," he said.

What's more, if Block Party succeeds, it could pave the way for
social networks to encourage more third-party tools that give users
greater control, said Sarah Roberts, a UCLA professor who studies
online content moderation.

"Their biggest fear is that we all flee [social media] because it's
such a terrible experience," Roberts said.

Chou has encountered concerns that the tools she's building at Block
Party could exacerbate another problem of social media: the filter
bubble, where people shut themselves off from views they disagree
with.

Chou says the goal is not to filter out alternative perspectives, but
to give users a break from the kind of toxic behavior that can turn
them off social media entirely.

The biggest risk is losing their voices, she said.

"The people who often are disproportionately targeted for harassment
are people that we really need to hear from. It's often women,
minorities, people from marginalized backgrounds," she said. "These
are the people who are being silenced. And that has pretty big
consequences for all of our society."

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