Women of Color vs The World (of Social Media)
Hack Mental Health’s “Reverse Hackathon” that transpired on June 9th, 2018 should have been renamed,
“What’s good, facebook?” Half-hackathon
I attended the event as a Technologist, with the skillset of Android and Web UI development and general UI/UX design under my belt, as well as a decent amount of knowledge of social media inner-workings, especially that of facebook.
My group was comprised of 4 other well-spoken women with different skillsets and knowledge bases to offer, ranging form filmmaking to data science to health care technology.
Did I mention we are all women of color?
We spent the majority of our hacking time figuring out today’s issues with technology and how we could turn the current state of affairs around positively. We went through our individual gripes and glories about tech in general. In the end, we narrowed it down to an issue near and dear to our hearts:
…Representation.
What mattered to us was our fellow women of color: how we were represented — or rather — the lack and inaccurate representation of us, how we consume media through technology, namely facebook’s newsfeed, and what could be done to make our experience better.
I explained that facebook does not give us the choice to curate the content we see on newsfeed; we either must silence our friends (hide for 30 days or unfollow completely) or simply scroll through until the post disappears. Even so, the process to at least filter which friends we would like to see was:
1) Not intuitive — on desktop, at least, you have to select the three-dot menu up on the top-left corner where the link says, “News Feed”, then select “Edit Preferences”
2) Too polarized — you can’t choose a category of content, you have to choose the friend to wholly follow or unfollow.
Our dilemma was that we were interested and invested in our friends and families’ lives (baby pictures, personal accomplishments, etc.) , however, we did not want irrelevant or triggering link shares to articles that our friends and families are currently sharing (i.e. Trump’s BS).
Setting an example
My teammate, Krystal Cooper, identifies as a Black American woman, however, during the entire week of Prince Harry and (now) Princess Meghan Markle’s wedding, “Princess Meghan this and that” was all she saw.
The bigger issue was that Meghan Markle did not identify as a black woman, rather, she identified as a person of mixed race.
Krystal deemed news about Princess Meghan irrelevant to her interests. However, her many of her friends and family incessantly shared links to articles about the new and official Royal British power couple. She still wants to hear about her loved ones’ lives and accomplishments, but did not want to constantly see the new American Princess on her newsfeed.
Our solution: a couple of demands we ask of our social media overlords
- “Prioritize content by women of color in order to increase equity and diversity in content creators” — one way we can do this by having more women of color volunteer to find and post content from outside of facebook, and having their entire social circles copy and paste the source onto their own timelines as well.
- “Hire women of color data scientists in order to reduce bias in the design of the machine-learning model that facebook uses in developing the newsfeed algorithm” — essentially, fix it from the inside.
We called ourselves Team WOC
— “WOC” pronounced like, “woke”.
Our hack made it to the top 10, and placed 2nd overall. The judges agreed that the content ranking algorithm is a problem that needs to be addressed heavily and having the focus on ethnicity would be a great start toward a better experience for all.
Other groups addressed ways that the app’s software can be altered, ranging from fading the UI’s colors, to implementing a in-app usage timer. Most groups targeted facebook as well, as it is currently under fire for various reasons, including being the most downloaded social media app in the world, but at the same time, the world’s source of the most mental health woes.
Moving forward
We must shift the focus onto women of color, whether they are an academic, a technologist, an entertainer. Sharing their work and accomplishments on social media and by word-of-mouth is the first big step we can all take.
Personally, I will go out of my way to share Filipinx-created content as much as I can on my own personal accounts across all of social media. I know many outspoken Filipinx academics, artists, chefs, and healthcare professionals that need to have their voices heard.
What will you do?
Thank you for reading! You can reach out to me via my site: http://catcarbn.com, or on twitter!
Please consider donating to the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation: a nonprofit organization that reward grants to scientists to further research to better understand the causes of mental illness.
