Pushing for online accountability

Jessica González’s father was a truck driver, and her grandfather was a longshoreman, but she noticed growing up that they both read the newspaper cover to cover daily, an appreciation for the value of media that has stuck with her all her life.

González herself has worked in jobs ranging from stocking grocery shelves at 4 a.m. to teaching at a public school in Los Angeles. And as co-chief executive of the advocacy group Free Press, she fights to defend net neutrality protections, combat misinformation and even fend off Trump administration cuts to a federal program that helped her launch her legal career years ago.

Lifeline, which provides a discount on phone service for qualifying low-income consumers, gave her a steady phone number that was critical as she applied to law school after she was laid off as a public school teacher, González said.

“It’s not that common for someone who’s benefited from a government program to then go on and actually advocate for the expansion of that program, or at least it hasn’t been in my field,” she told The Hill in an interview last week.

“I understand firsthand the importance of stable communications, and that informs a lot of my work,” González said.

She joined Free Press in the wake of the 2016 election after spending more than seven years at the National Hispanic Media Coalition, which followed serving as a staff attorney at Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Public Representation, where she represented consumer, civil rights and public interest organizations.

“There I just really fell in love with the idea of reforming the media so that it better serves the public, so that it actually exposes racism and sexism instead of perpetuating it,” González said. “So that people have the information that they need to make good choices and so we could better understand one another.”

She’s been on the front line of the fight to hold social media giants accountable for the misinformation and hate speech spread on their platforms, including co-founding Change the Terms, a coalition of more than 60 civil and digital rights groups pushing for social media platforms to adopt a set of recommended policies aimed at addressing hate speech.

González also helped lead the Stop Hate for Profit campaign in July calling for a boycott of Facebook’s advertising based on the platform’s policies, which the campaign said prioritized profit over fighting hate and disinformation. The boycott gained support from more than 1,200 businesses, including high-profile companies such as Patagonia, The North Face, Ben & Jerry’s and REI.

González knows the impact of hate speech personally, saying she was called slurs and “all kinds of horrible names” when she was young.

“It was so common that it was just normal, so normal that I hid to myself how hurtful that was. But as I got older it really made me think about, ‘Wow, how do cultural norms get set? What is the role of the media and journalism and at this point, of course, technology in setting the cultural norms that make it harder for us to get along and be in community with people that are different than us?’ ” she said.

Hate, bigotry and racism in the U.S. are nothing new, of course, but the internet has uniquely granted users anonymity and the ability to connect and organize across geographic regions, González said.

“Usually, that’s largely a good thing, but when it’s folks organizing to create white ethnostates, yeah I have a problem with that,” she said.

González said there has been some success in platforms amending their policies, pointing to Twitter’s announcement last week that it will update its dehumanization policy to include prohibiting language about a person’s race, ethnicity or national origin.  

“However, we’ve also seen a lot of foot-dragging,” she said.

“Particularly, Facebook — giving us crumbs and pretending like it was the whole cake,” she added.

González and other advocates are not the only force pushing for tech giants to take greater action: The companies are also facing pushback from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Democrats have issued calls similar to González’s, urging platforms to clamp down on misinformation and hate speech. Republicans, however, have accused the tech companies of censorship and issued allegations of anti-conservative bias, which have not been substantiated.

But González said she’s unsure if the root of the problem can be solved through a regulatory lens.

“That’s why we’ve organized. That’s why we have Change the Terms. That’s why we have these campaigns to pressure for more corporate accountability,” she said. “I think we need to look at the business models that underlie these platforms and other places that spread hate, and look at why is it profitable to spread hate and false information? What are the business models that prop that up and what do we need to do as a society to make hate less profitable?”

For González, the fight will always be personal, not just policy-based.

“I feel it. There’s an intellectual side that I love of what is good policy — what does the data say, what does the statistics say — and that’s important too,” she said, but hearing directly from people affected by policies is one of her favorite parts of working for Free Press.

She said she uses those interactions to make sure their voices are heard in the halls of Washington.

“I still have a lot of friends who are teachers, I still have a lot of friends who stock groceries, I have family members who are poor or near poor,” González said.

“I don’t live that life anymore but I remember it and I have a lot of people in my social circles who are still struggling on the margins,” she added. “And I think there needs to be more people who understand, who’ve experienced poverty and who are in relationships with others who are struggling with poverty, making decisions and informing policymaking.” 

–Updated at 8:59 a.m.