Tracy Chou’s life as a tech activist: abuse, and optimism

Around this time, Pao lost her gender discrimination suit against Kleiner Perkins and then was pushed out of Reddit. Meanwhile, Erica Joy Baker—an engineer who’s now CTO of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—had compiled a spreadsheet of salaries while at Google to help stamp out pay disparities. Chou’s blog post had prompted diversity reports and a wave of admissions from tech leaders that their numbers were disappointing and as they reflexively admitted, there was more work to be done.

But not much had really changed in the intervening years. “We were going through this phase where companies were doing unconscious bias trainings, and they would put out these big press releases,” Pao says. “They would pat themselves on the back and feel great about themselves. And we all looked at these announcements and were like: This is not the right answer at all.” Pao and other advocates realized there could be value in pulling together resources for companies that were genuinely committed to doing the work. “If we all take the effort to put something out that directs companies on what they should be doing, it could be very powerful,” she adds.

The idea was also to streamline the advocacy that many of them were doing in separate channels, Chou says. “All of us in this group [were] constantly being called upon to give commentary for press pieces,” she says. “[We realized] it would be helpful if we coordinated on the message we want to hit home.”

So Chou and Pao teamed up with Baker and five other prominent diversity advocates and women in tech—including Freada Kapor Klein, cofounder of social impact firm Kapor Capital—to create Project Include in 2016. The nonprofit organization pulled together 87 recommendations for companies and leaders, including guidance on how to craft an effective code of conduct and root out biases in performance reviews. Since then, Project Include has started convening small groups of CEOs and conducting industry-wide surveys on issues like harassment in remote workplaces.

And yet, in an industry that typically demands returns from billion-dollar investments, there has been minimal progress on the composition of the tech workforce. Apple, Facebook, and Google have made incremental progress hiring women, but the share of female technical workers has hardly budged. Much of the increase in Black and Latinx employees is in nontechnical roles. “While there was a bit of a reckoning around the murder of George Floyd, it for the most part has not resulted in sustained activity,” says Kapor Klein, who laments that there has not been “any widespread soul-searching about the role of venture capital in furthering systemic racism, wealth inequality, income inequality, or the increased segregation of cities and neighborhoods.”

By the time Project Include came to fruition, Chou started noticing that she didn’t recognize most of her colleagues at Pinterest anymore. The company had 1,000 employees, as compared to just 10 when Chou joined. “It was just big enough that you no longer know everybody,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh, it’s just a different type of company now—and I like the really small companies.’” It was time to move on.

But what would she do next? She was intrigued by the challenge of building a company from the ground up, and she also thought firsthand experience as an operator would help inform her advocacy work. “Now that I’ve actually been a founder for some number of years, I’ve had to go through fundraising,” she says. “I can speak much more authentically to [how] it’s not great to be sexually harassed while fundraising. And apparently it still happens—even in my case, where I have made a partial career out of calling people out for their shit.”

The process of getting to Block Party was a meandering one. “This is the thing that a lot of media reporting doesn’t usually cover around startups,” she tells me. “There [were] a few areas in which I might have been interested in creating a startup, and I spent a lot of time doing the research to understand: ‘Is there an opportunity here?’” She explored ideas relating to childcare—because she had realized that caregiving responsibilities were a major driving force behind inequities in the workplace—but Chou wasn’t convinced that was a problem tech could solve, especially without adequate support from government policy. “I [felt] like I should work on something where I have some particular advantage,” she says.

Then it struck her: She was, in fact, the right person to tackle a problem that had disrupted her own life, as her follower count and celebrity had grown. At the time, her harassers had multiplied to include someone who was peddling an absurd theory that Chou was romantically involved with a public figure, and they had even manipulated images in an effort to prove it. By the fall of 2018, Chou had done extensive research on the market for anti-harassment and moderation tools and set her sights on what would turn into Block Party, a suite of tools to screen out online abuse on platforms such as Twitter.

Chou’s path didn’t get any easier once she’d settled upon the idea. “There’s all this advice for founders,” she says. “I discovered that a lot of it is just irrelevant for female founders. The farther you are from the archetype that Silicon Valley thinks of as the ideal founder, the less applicable the advice is.”

Consider the canonical example that a cofounding team is better than a solo entrepreneur. Usually a founder following that wisdom would recruit that person from former colleagues, which would be mostly men in Chou’s case. If some of those men happened to be outright sexists, they wouldn’t have any appreciation for the problem Chou is trying to solve, and would not respond well to her superior technical skills. Among the much smaller potential pool of female and underrepresented tech workers, it could be a big risk to give up a lucrative job at a major tech company for an early-stage startup with minimal funding.

By 2020, Block Party had opened up to beta testers on an invite-only basis. Chou had been disappointed by startup accelerators in years past and was rejected by perhaps the most famed program in Silicon Valley, whose “stamp of approval” she hoped would counteract investor bias and create some momentum. But one of the major browser companies had recently launched a new incubator whose stated mission was to invest in startups that aspire to “fix the internet.”

The opportunity ultimately seemed too good to pass up, and she joined in the summer of 2020. But Chou’s skepticism proved to be well founded when a mentor she found “condescending and aggressive” pushed her to scrap her deliberate, gated approach to bringing in new users.

It was paradoxical for Block Party to compromise on safety and security for the sake of growth. But Chou felt pressured to take the advice, so she hosted a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session. It was promptly overrun with trolls, sparking an onslaught of abuse across Twitter and email, and polluting the Block Party waitlist. “There were thousands of trolls that descended on me, and Reddit’s response was: ‘We don’t condone harassment. You can report any harassment you see,’” she says. “I was like, ‘Why is the burden on me?’”

looooollll just remembered the white dudes in my yc interview panel telling me the platforms are already solving the problem of online harassment, though, RIGHT?? with machine learning, RIGHT?? https://t.co/1cQ9M1NFxe

— Tracy Chou (@triketora) August 20, 2020

None of this seems to have shaken Chou’s resolve, which doesn’t come as much of a surprise when you’ve spent enough time with her, or hear from people who know her. Chou’s tweets might sound off the cuff, but much of her public persona is carefully calibrated. As honest as she is about the harassment and sexism she encounters—and how that weighs on her mental health—she frequently shows restraint, choosing not to reveal someone’s name or withholding a piece of information until the right moment. When you get her talking, Chou is thoughtful and nuanced, and even a little optimistic.

“What am I gonna do about that, if I’m really depressed about the state of the ecosystem?” she says, when I note that her optimism doesn’t exactly square with her own experiences. “Do I complain on Twitter about it? Do I try to get people to do something differently? Or do I just change my mindset? Even if it is bad, I just have to keep going. The only way it will get better is if I keep a more positive mindset and keep pushing forward. So it’s a little bit of a psychological trick on myself, too. If I let myself be overcome with the pessimism, then maybe nothing changes at all.”

She is also the sort of person whose persistence and pursuit of self-optimization can make you feel a little inferior. For most of its life, Block Party had virtually no capital, and Chou had no full-time employees, relying largely on her own formidable engineering talents to create a product from scratch. “If I was not technical,” she says, “there is no way we could have built those products.” Chou spent most of her days coding, while also squeezing in her myriad other duties as CEO, from recruiting to press interviews. She took breaks primarily to eat, sleep, and hop on her Peloton or go for a run. She also managed to read 85 books in 2020. (Naturally, she tracks the demographics of the authors: Most were female, nearly half of them women of color.)

When Block Party launched in public beta in January, it allowed Twitter users to mute accounts entirely, rerouting any messages from them into a separate folder that they can check as needed. Unlike Twitter itself, Block Party did not (and does not) rely on machine learning to filter out abusive content. Users can choose the types of accounts they’d like to block, which means that they could send tweets from new accounts, for example, straight to a lockout folder. Users could also recruit a “helper” to sift through the folder on their behalf if they needed to do so.

Some skeptics have argued that Twitter could more or less replicate these tools. Or that AI could solve the problem. As Chou struggled to raise funding, a startup called Sentropy whose stated mission was “to protect digital communities from hate and harassment using AI,” raised $13 million from several VC firms. It didn’t seem to matter that according to the Pew Research Center, more than 40% of Americans have experienced some kind of online harassment. Or that social media companies have been slow to take any action, and even those that have finally responded to pressure—like Twitter—have just scratched the surface.

But the initial response to Block Party speaks for itself: Many power users found that the tool radically changed their Twitter experience. “Block Party has made a significant difference in my online life,” says Karla Monterroso, the founder of consultancy Brava Leaders and former CEO of nonprofit Code2040. “I notice that I no longer worry when I’m going to tweet something. Before I was like, ‘Okay, what are the repercussions? Do I have the emotional bandwidth? What do I need to do to protect myself?’” A few months back, one of Monterroso’s tweets about incarceration and marijuana went semi-viral. “I looked at my Block Party and it was, like, 96 accounts blocked,” she adds.

In October, Block Party finally came out of beta and introduced a paid premium tier that costs $12 a month, or $120 annually. (Previously, Block Party has been free, though a portion of its users elected to pay for the service.) Chou says that few people have complained about the new pricing model so far, and some users have even asked to pay more. “To save yourself the mental trauma of seeing some of this stuff,” she says, “you can be willing to pay quite a lot.”

Chou is also thinking about how Block Party could harness and monetize interest from people who may not face too much harassment themselves but want to support this type of work. “There’s more for us to think about in terms of how we can get more creative with how other people can support folks in the ecosystem,” she says. “Do you gift subscriptions? Can you pay into a fund to help other people?”

Block Party also launched with a new feature that many users had requested: curated block lists. When you’re building anti-abuse tools, Chou says, you always have to think about how they can be misused or have unintended effects. If a block list includes thousands of accounts and many other Twitter users adopt the same list, any account blocked by the original list creator could be silenced on a much larger scale. This is called the dragnet effect, and bad actors can exploit this sort of functionality to sneak marginalized folks onto block lists, potentially cutting them off from their online support networks. For now, Block Party is limiting block lists to 100 accounts, a number Chou believes is manageable enough that users can review the entire thing; the block lists also can’t be shared easily.

The positive public reception also created some potential relief for Chou having to build Block Party effectively by herself. “I hope I’m not jinxing it by telling you,” she says, “but we have two senior engineers who have signed, and I’m super excited.” These candidates had sought out the company on their own and applied. “It feels like finally, a lot of the work I’ve been putting in—building awareness of Block Party, continuously tweeting about it and just being out there, and also getting [the product] to a point that people are using it and appreciating it—it’s finally starting to pay off. It is very rewarding to see that candidates of this caliber, who truly could work at any place, want to come work with Block Party.”

If Chou embodies how the tech industry fails so many women, she also represents a cohort of tech workers—entrepreneurs, organizers, and activists—who are trying to find real solutions to problems not of their making. When she takes the long view, Chou says there’s a glimmer of hope. Over a decade ago, when she started working in tech, the term “diversity” was usually shorthand for only gender diversity—not racial diversity, or anything beyond that. “A lot more people know the concept of intersectionality, or at least have heard the phrase,” she says. And far more people are now willing to speak on issues of diversity.

“In the day to day, at any given moment, if you ask me how I’m feeling about diversity and equity, I’m usually very pessimistic,” Chou continues. “But when I widen the aperture a bit and look at the last five years or last 10 years, I actually am impressed by how much things have shifted. Change doesn’t happen overnight.”

Still, the latest flashpoint in the tech industry’s labor awakening makes clear that, despite the surge in activism over the last few years, speaking out as a marginalized tech worker is no less risky. Terra Field, a trans engineer who was suspended from Netflix for tweeting about the Dave Chappelle special, has said that Block Party is the only reason that she was able to continue using Twitter. “If we hadn’t made judicious use of Block Party (with help from my partners in reviewing the cesspool that my mentions had become) and some custom tooling my partner wrote, I don’t think I could have made it through this week,” she recently wrote on Medium.

Field’s experience encapsulates Chou’s greatest hopes for Block Party: to both provide a tool for the people most vulnerable to harassment and help protect anyone as they speak up about the systemic inequities that can marginalize them. “Whenever someone needs Block Party as much as Terra has needed it, I am disappointed and sad—though not surprised—that that’s the state of the world,” Chou says. “I’m also glad that we can be of some service in shielding them from the vitriol, and helping them to stay online if they want to be.”

During one of our last conversations, Chou seems more excited about the future of Block Party than she has been since we started speaking. I had asked if she felt like the long hours, the funding challenges, the new strain of online abuse were worth it. Did she ever fantasize about a cushy engineering job at a big tech company?

It does cross her mind at times, she admits, but “I feel very lucky to be working on a product that serves exactly the type of people I most want to help—women, minorities, and people who I think should have a voice.”