Through to Thriving: Advocating for Change with Nora Benavidez

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

Thank you for joining us for another episode of Through To Thriving, a special podcast series where we are imagining futures beyond our current moment. For this episode, I spoke with Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at the nonprofit Free Press.

We dedicated this episode and conversation about advocating for change to the memory and life of our former colleague and tech accountability researcher and advocate Brandi Collins-Dexter.

During our time together, Nora and I discussed the past and present state of platform accountability advocacy, the steps of building a campaign, forming a creative agency to support advocates, and so-called “woke AI.”

Nora explained why she became an advocate and how important is is that people use the skills they have in the current fight for democracy:

I think if you have any social and moral consciousness whatsoever and any proclivity to use your talent, whatever that talent is towards advancing and helping to safeguard people's rights and dignity, you throw yourself in. That might be as an artist or as a journalist or as a mom. I mean, you name it, it can be really wide ranging how people plug in, but that's really why I do what I do and why I got into advocacy. It made me committed to thinking through how I can use the things I might be good at. Because we're all good at different things. What would I be good at and what would be the fastest, surest route to helping to produce impact? Impact being more people, being able to live lives with some dignity and some opportunity.

She also described the current technological landscape:

I think we have to understand what this is and the fight for our lives for safety, for expression online for equity, that is one that has been going on for many, many decades. And this wrinkle where billionaires advance their own personal purse, strings and interests is the newest fight. And it's a big one.

Nora and I also talked about how advocates across disciplines can work together to foster “dignity in their digital selves and in their rights”:

We need trust. We need the sense that there is no ability to do things when we're just a lone wolf in a given sector, civil society is a tremendous muscle, but civil society is under immense pressure and attack right now by the second Trump administration. Funders are weakening their ability and interest in supporting disinformation studies and research about platform accountability altogether. These are in many ways considered pariah topics now, and so one of the only ways we can move forward if we have any hope of a kind of tech accountability 2.0 era is to come together and understand lessons learned, research shared, and actions planned have to be coordinated.

She also shared the first things that people can do now to advocate for change and brought us back to the theme of the first podcast episode:

The first thing we have to do, one is educate ourselves about what's going on. But then there are some really powerful steps you can take. I think one is connecting with your community. We think we're somehow powerless sometimes, or, or lacking influence and we all have a sphere of influence, so we should name it. It could be that you just have a great girl group and you hold a dinner and you start holding a monthly dinner. That sounds so silly, but it is very powerful. Connect with your community that could ultimately become you testifying at local city council meetings. You going and sitting at a school board meeting, You name it. But connecting with community is where we must start because we have become so siloed.

Nora also encouraged people to take action:

Well, there's a great line many of my colleagues talk about in the civil rights space, which is we can't wait for hope. We have to take action. And I think in this environment there's a sense of, well, let's wait, let's have this chat and somehow hope that a feeling comes to us. And then take action. And it's like, no. Just take an action. Just show up at a protest. Just go to the city council meeting. Send the email to your representative. Do the thing, whatever it is, start small, but start.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Nora, welcome to the podcast.

Nora Benavidez:

It's so great to be here. When I got the invite, I was so excited. So we're going to spice it out. We're going to bring energy.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

I'm so excited to have you here. Would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners?

Nora Benavidez:

Sure. I'm Nora Benavidez. In my day job, I have the longest title imaginable. Senior Counsel and—strap in—Director of Digital Justice and Civil Rights. It's at a nonprofit and media reform organization called Free Press. And what we do is we try to help make connection for communities easier, whether that's the way that we connect online, offline, the way we connect through media and technology. But I've been a civil rights attorney for over a decade, and my heart is really in civil rights and free speech. And so I think one of the newest and most emergent areas of civil rights is the digital realm and how our digital lives and digital selves are or are not protected and how our rights are safeguarded. So I think a lot about questions of dignity, questions around the way that we have opportunity and really practice living with our full selves or the ways that structures make it harder for that to happen. And so that's what I get to spend my time doing. I've been a litigator, I've been a policy expert, I've been a spokesperson and I love all of it from the organizing all the way up through working with more grass tops folks.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us today and for introducing yourself to us. Advocacy and community organizing is something that is really close to my heart. I used to work at Color of Change back in the day in 2016, and it was something that I remember specifically thinking when I got into the policy world and the tech policy world, recognizing that I wanted to be able to use my skill set to advocate for better policies, especially for people on the internet and protect people that look like me and love like me. And so in that vein, I would love to dedicate this episode to the life and to the memory, into the work of my former boss at Color of Change, Brandi Collins-Dexter.

And with that, Nora, would you give us a little bit of insight into why you decided to get into advocacy work and what kind of world you were hoping to build?

Nora Benavidez:

The best question you could ever get and also like, okay.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Just starting off with the easy one.

Nora Benavidez:

I think if you have any social and moral consciousness whatsoever and any proclivity to use your talent, whatever that talent is towards advancing and helping to safeguard people's rights and dignity, you throw yourself in. That might be as an artist or as a journalist or as a mom. You name it can be really wide-ranging how people plug in, but that's really why I do what I do and why I got into advocacy because I saw many, many years ago, not just gross injustice, but latent structural violence that helps fuel the impossibility of progress and the difficulty for people to move beyond their current circumstances.

When I was in college, we can talk of course about political theory and how I was inspired, but also then once I really entered the working world fully ... I've always worked. I've always had jobs while I was in school and college, etc. But I remember really distinctly in my very first job out of college, I worked at a small public opinion polling firm and we studied what people think about different issues of the day and then we would go into communities and talk with them about those issues. And one of the questions that we really had was what communities should we work with? And I often felt we should work with the most disadvantaged. Let's find the Native American and tribal groups that are completely invisible. Let's work with them, let's talk with them.

And the tension that I found—I was like 23 years old at the time—Was funders really didn't want to fund that because the impact wouldn't be as good as the wealthy white communities that could easily be wrapped around in success stories that they made, progress, etc. It was really appalling and catalyzing for me to realize that there are structures of oppression and there is a lack of courage that people just operate with. And it made me committed to think through, well, how can I use the things I might be good at because we're all good at different things. What would I be good at and what would be the fastest surest route to helping to produce impact? Impact being more people being able to live lives with some dignity and some opportunity.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Yeah. I love the way that you described this as using your talent to safeguard people's rights and whatever your talent may be. Thinking about what you would be good at. I think I've said this a couple of times, but my career has been in so many different areas because I've had to ask myself that question at so many different times and at so many different moments, especially in the political arena, where can I have the most impact with the specific skill set that I have working in policy? And that has changed. It has gone from working in civil society to working in advocacy to working in industry. And so I'd love to talk a little bit more about the background and the traditional playbook of advocacy organizations. You mentioned that you work at a nonprofit that has led a lot of the big campaigns that we know of and have been a part of for the past couple of years. Can you tell us a little bit about how that traditional playbook came to be and what it looked like when we talked about platform accountability, let's say like 2018, the good old days, 2018, 2019.

Nora Benavidez:

So quaint, isn't it?

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Funny.

Nora Benavidez:

When you say those dates it's like, yeah, those are the happy days.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Hooray. Hooray. I remember to say I worked on the first civil rights audit of Airbnb and to think back on those moments, it was a different world. So I think going from that civil rights audit and recognizing there's something here. There's a playbook that we as advocates can run. Would you talk to us a little bit about that?

Nora Benavidez:

Yeah. Well, there's a playbook for everything. There's a playbook for the authoritarian takeover that's happening, and we can get into that. There's a playbook for how you think through what pressure looks like when you're on the tech accountability side, but that era that you're speaking to was so rich, it was so hopeful because a number of things were happening. I think there was growing evidence of tech failures or tech apathy. We didn't quite know yet what it was in let's say the 2014, '15, '16 period. But a really troubling marriage between online and offline was emerging. Much of that was dovetailed with Donald Trump's first presidency. I know from my own work, I didn't quite have the language yet to describe in 2016 what disinformation really looked like on the ground. I didn't have the language yet for what ultimately became large information operations and manipulation campaigns. We didn't ... At least I didn't have that as a lawyer in the south. And so a lot of folks I think were observing this and hungry for not just answers and language, but then what do we do? How do we pivot and try to change the circumstances? And so classic organizing of course helps you identify a number of pressure points.

Some of that is I think naming and shaming, really being able to put in front of people who might otherwise not know what's going on, the evidence and framing that we want. And I never want to understate how valuable that role is. Naming what is happening and then spreading that word and that frame honestly, that's just education. To be clear, that's just public education. It's the work we've seen from Black Panther groups, we've seen over the years in the civil rights movement. We've seen it then from all of the various progressive movements on environment. It follows a very classic arc of expansion of public awareness, expansion of public outrage, and then core groups activating and putting pressure on executives.

So we have our naming and shaming and public awareness building. We have the pressure on tech executives or any leader that might otherwise be shirking their responsibilities. And then we have public activation. Getting people to take action in some way. And I think of those as often the pillars of really how we want to build advocacy campaigns. We've done that over the years at Free Press from our work long ago in the quaint era, shall we say, when we said maybe tech platforms have a role to play and they should revise their policies to reflect the signs of the times and reflect the role they should be playing. And we worked to launch what was called change the terms. An effort to adapt-

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Oh, I remember.

Nora Benavidez:

So quaint. And the work was amazing. All the way through then Stop Toxic Twitter, which was an explosively popular campaign to push Elon Musk to do less that would erode Twitter, which ultimately became X. And we worked with advertisers and we worked with others to put pressure on Musk and for advertisers to put their money where their values were and not by bankrolling neo-Nazi content, hate, violent dehumanizing rhetoric. But whatever it is in the circumstance, I think having the ability to engage at a high level with expansive public awareness, pressure directly towards the actors that are responsible and engaging and exciting people who otherwise might not think they have a role to play. Everyone can join in and that call to action is always essential.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for walking those of us through that who have never been through those experiences. I know folks see advocacy campaigns and recognize this is something that I want to join on. I'll sign my name on this petition and don't necessarily know the full scope and theory of change that goes behind all of these things that are going on behind the scenes to make this work push forward. So those were the good old days. That was the back in the day of naming and shaming when people could be named and shamed. And so I want to ask, what is the current state of platform accountability, advocacy? What does it currently look like? I'm working in academia now, and so this is something that I haven't had my eyes on. Does this traditional playbook still work? Are companies responding to demands? What are we looking at with this landscape now?

Nora Benavidez:

I thought a lot about this question because I know you sent me some ideas in advance for us and I wondered to myself, okay, how bleak should Nora be?

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Be honest. Being honest. That's what we're here for. The truth. Yes.

Nora Benavidez:

Hopefully this will be lightly bleak, but then hopeful, so let's go. I think we've seen ... So where we are now, to me feels like the natural end place of a small cohort of billionaires that have profit far before people. That ethos property, profit money over people is the fundamental tension that we are working through always in whatever work we're doing. But with tech and with the tremendous financial power that these companies have, it was a tremendous uphill battle to think that any moral consciousness could be placed upon them. And I think what we really saw was over the last several years, executives walking back the structural protections they had put in place due to pressure, the teams they had put in place due to pressure and concurrent companies like YouTube, Meta, Twitter, TikTok began giving more and more airtime and more leeway to leaders who were VIPs in a way like, oh, well we all want to hear what Trump has to say, or Duterte or you name it, illiberal autocratic leader because they are public figures. And it was such a difficult question from a free speech perspective like, well, what do we do with that? What do we do when someone says a blatant lie? And how do we as a platform address that content moderation is really fun in theory, and it's really hard in practice.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Sucks in practice.

Nora Benavidez:

There's so many difficulties with implementation. You name the topic. And yet whatever basement level of performance you might say the platforms behaved with, they definitely went sub-basement around 2022, 2023. Some of that I think was because of Elon Musk and he really just showed everyone that the big fuck you didn't then have consequence. His willingness to court hate, his willingness to court profit at not just the expense of people but at the profit of people actually then showed no consequence legally or otherwise. And I do believe we're turning a corner, but I think we have to understand what this is and the fight for our lives for safety, for expression online, for equity, that is one that has been going on for many, many decades and this wrinkle where billionaires advance their own personal purse strings and interests is the newest fight and it's a big one.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Yeah. So you mentioned this wrinkle and turning the corner, and I'm definitely going to get back to this because I want to ask you some of your ideas for what we can do, especially in this moment to advocate for change. But going back to the current state that we're in and recognizing how much things have changed from the days of the stop hate for profit campaigns and the stop Asian hate campaigns, and as someone who created those playbooks and then sat inside of companies on the opposite side when they were being run, hell of an experience. And one thing that I learned throughout those experiences was just how much everybody within the ecosystem was needed. As much as we needed advocates and we needed people in civil society, we needed people inside of industry like me who were sitting there, who were able to rewrite the policies and make the arguments.

And so a question that I have from you that also comes from one of the last episodes that I have in the series, I talked to two trust and safety folks and ask them how can we work better together? How can those of us who are working for platform accountability, whether it be inside of academia, whether it be inside of TikTok, whether it be inside of free press. Those of us who has these same ideas that you said of making sure that there is dignity, that people have dignity in their digital selves and in their rights, how can we better open these lines of communication and start working together, especially in this moment when we have so much of this regression going on?

Nora Benavidez:

That to me is the question, and that's where all the work really needs to be radical solidarity and radical tent building. I'm so glad, actually, you mentioned your own experience within companies. I think we sometimes as humans tend to create black and white ideas of what's happening across sectors or in places we don't really know. And I only briefly consulted with TikTok, for example, and my own experience there was there was tremendous upward pressure from people in the company to do the right thing.

When I would meet regularly in 2020, 2021 with people at Twitter, they often wanted to do the right thing. People at Meta, the story is very similar. And yet culture flows from the top and when the executives one, two, three, you name them, but when those small handful of people are opaque and unwilling to engage or take the advice of those who are doing the work within the company, the tide can't turn. And so I just want to first recognize that because I actually think one of the worst things has been the unfortunate abandonment of great people in these companies who understand how difficult or impossible the work might be because that upward pressure, they're hitting not just a wall, but a concrete three-foot deep ceiling, whatever. You name it.

And I think it then of course builds animosity and uncertainty where trust might otherwise be across sectors and we need trust. We need the sense that there is no ability to do things when we're just a lone wolf in a given sector. Civil society is a tremendous muscle, but civil society is under immense pressure and attack right now by the second Trump administration. Funders are weakening their ability and interest in supporting disinformation studies, research about platform accountability altogether. These are in many ways considered pariah topics now, and so one of the only ways we can move forward if we have any hope of a tech accountability 2.0 era is to come together and understand lessons learned, research shared and actions planned have to be coordinated.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Yeah, yeah. I love that you say that the coordination and the lessons learned. You said mentioning my own experience of a company so I'm actually going to tell a little bit of a story of one of the experiences I had inside of a company that I don't think that I have ever shared publicly, but I was working again inside of a company that shall remain nameless on the opposite side of a campaign that was being run against the company. You mentioned the tech executives were typically unwilling to engage. Well, in this specific situation, there was a tech exec who was on board and they were-

Nora Benavidez:

Hmm.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Right. They were ready, willing, able to listen to the demands and wanted to sit down and have conversations, listen to the ask. And one of the organizations that was working with the coalition and this campaign ended up running an email campaign, which I had done plenty of these in my own time of send an email to the executive and tell them that they're policies are disproportionately harming black people, whatever the case may be.

Well, this series of emails was sent in such succession that it ended up actually knocking their email offline. It's not funny, but they received this advocacy campaign as a DDoS attack. Their phone was literally unable to connect to the company servers because they were getting all of these emails that was basically they felt like was calling them racist. And so we had this moment in which I get the phone call that I'm like, "Hey. What's going on? How did they get my email?" You know what I mean? This feeling of doxing, this feeling of harassment, this feeling of unsafety, which I, as someone who has been on the other side of this was like ... And then I had to sit and think with it and I recognized and watch the only person in the company who would've been willing to engage on the topic pull back because of the tactics that were being used and how closely they linked to harassment. I think of that example a lot as something that you're saying of we need to talk about these lessons, we need to coordinate a little bit better more between ourselves such that we don't end up in these situations.

Nora Benavidez:

Well, I think that's so interesting because inherent in the possibility of partnering across these sectors is the issue of power.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Exactly.

Nora Benavidez:

Who holds that power? And let's be clear, because of their financial heft, the platforms hold power. I do think we also have power outside of these sectors, and we do have to claim that and reclaim it and continue to claim it for people who feel somehow powerless or voiceless, but in the middle of a potential imbalance, the tactics used may feel intuitively right for people on the outside and also both things can then be true that sometimes civil society is brought in and lulled into a submission. And we've seen this as well how experts are brought in to give the rubber stamp that platforms say, "Well, we engaged with experts. We've brought them in and facilitated a civil rights dialogue." But it's really ultimately extractive. It is then without action or accountability or follow through. And so there's this really awkward question of, well, given the power imbalance, what do people do? What do people in the company do and then what do people outside of it do when there is that tension? And we could talk about, honestly, that issue for a long time.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Yeah, yeah. I appreciate you engaging with me on this specific conversation to say ... One of the last podcasts, again, I talked to trust and safety folks, and one of the things that they were saying was how important back channeling is and just how important it is to recognize that we are all people and we were all people who tend to have the same goals in mind and how can we see each other as people and outside of separating even the company from the person and even separating the NGO or the nonprofit from the person who's working in that and recognizing that we are all working together in this area.

With that in mind, I wanted to talk about something that I saw you post about because I have also had a similar idea and I'm so excited to share and talk a little bit about this. So I saw you talking about this idea of a creative agency for advocates, and why doesn't this thing exist out there where there is support for people who are engaging in advocacy, who are engaging in activism to be able to not necessarily have to be tied to a specific organization or be tied to something else, but be able to lift up their voice and be thought leaders within this space. Tell me a little bit about what you were thinking about when you were talking about that, because I love this idea.

Nora Benavidez:

It's funny, I'm so here for the traditional organizing work. We can't abandon that. And this is all caps, and-

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Yes, and.

Nora Benavidez:

We've got to think about the post Obama era of organizing, which, talk about quaint. People I think in a progressive space fall back on a set of tactics and a way of engaging online that is so far backwards at this point. And so my questions to myself and to others is always, what are new tactics? What are new ways that we leverage people's voices and what are the ways that we, I think, build to serve our communities? Because at the end of the day, tied up with your question is this issue I see people raising of the systems are breaking down, and we're seeing that I think now with the Trump administration, with the way the platforms are behaving. People say, "God, the structures are breaking." And I actually think the structures are working exactly as those in power want them to, to serve a small select set of interests and users and individuals, and that's where power and platform come into play.

And so if we know that, how do we create alternatives that are not us removing ourselves from public life or visibility, but to create things that serve black women, to create things that serve non-English language? These are pretty baseline issues that a global majority I think could buy into, which is ultimately the premise of we all deserve to live and we deserve to be safe. And so in trying to answer or grapple with that question, I think about all the creative ways we are not leveraging our voices, and in part it's because our voices are actively targeted, and some of it is because we play by the rules of what is commercially corporate available. So I'm interested to hear your reactions now. I'm definitely not an interviewer, but I'm thrilled to hear, and I'm curious what lights you up about this.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Yeah, yeah. I love the thing that you said about creative ways of leveraging our voices and coming up with new tactics. I hate to say it in this way, but I think it's the most blunt and honest way to say it is I think for so long the advocacy field has not had a full-blown ... Let's call it an influencer strategy. There is nothing that has been in place in order to insert that thought leadership into the places to meet people where they are. And again, I've talked to a couple of foundations about creating something along these lines, and I think you're right in that this is something that's new. It's something that's different. It's something that is against the current structure and grain of we support XYZ nonprofit, XYZ NGO, and if you go work for that place, then you might be able to get some support. Versus here are these voices who across organizations, across industries, across fields have been able to continue to do the work and how do we uplift those voices? I think so much about this conversation that folks are having of like, we need a Joe Rogan of the right, and it's like-

Nora Benavidez:

Of the left. We need-

Anika Collier Navaroli:

My apologies. We have that, but the conversation then of course is the Joe Rogan of the left. There needs to be something along those lines, and I don't know that it's right, but I definitely hear the call of we need voices. We need voices that are meeting people where they're at.

Nora Benavidez:

And it's funny, we have voices. That's the thing. I think even the frame is minimizing and dimming our own light. I'm like, we have plenty of voices. And I was just talking about this with another colleague of mine in the democracy space, the analog democracy space shall we say, about how we have not fully taken up the new and alternative media channels that are really the tools now of the right. Streamers, podcasting, et cetera. And I think in a real misstep, people outside of MAGA thought that that was unserious, which it is to be clear in some ways. We're in an unserious era. But it was also a really great hack. And so I just think we blunt our own progress by saying we have no voices. And I'm like, we have great voices. I'm a great voice, you're a great voice. But we have to then meet where the demand is.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

And how do we support those voices?

Nora Benavidez:

There's demand in new and different places.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Yeah, I hear you on that. As someone who used to work at Twitch, you know what I mean?

Nora Benavidez:

Yes.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

I watched that platform become so vital to so many of these voices now that are part of the Manosphere or whatever we're calling it these days, and recognizing the importance of just having these ... We didn't like to call them political conversations at Twitch because that would mean they were actually politics, but these non-gaming conversations that just so happened to center around politics, but recognizing how important that is, and I think a lot about Mamdani's win and just the ability that he was able to tap into and recognize the new strategies. And I think the establishment is losing minds about it, and I think it's a blueprint that so many of us should be looking at, especially when it comes to advocacy of, again, how do we meet people where they are, how do we talk to folks and how do we advocate for change in a space where people are almost hopeless.

Nora Benavidez:

And it's odd because I've now said this a few times, but I'm a lawyer, I'm a civil rights attorney, I love to get nerdy, but I'm really fired up now about electoral politics. I'm fired up about how we actually claim power in ways that people, I think in what you very rightly used as the establishment phrase, have been able to cordon off to everyday people for the most part. And so I don't want to go too far into a left and right politics discussion, but I think the beholding of power and the calcified inability we have to access power as a populace is really fueled by media and tech now. And that's why I love you saying the establishment because I'm like yes. It's all become so brittle. Trying to break through that has become very hard, but that is actually the work we have to do in whatever field we are in.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Yes. So with that in mind, let me ask you, what can people and those of us listening and those of us who care about this space, what can we do right now in order to fight back against this tech oligarchy that we are seeing form within the United States?

Nora Benavidez:

I love the question. This is the number one question I get now pretty much across fields, across interest areas, whether it's moms or activists or journalists, and I think the first thing we have to do, one, is educate ourselves about what's going on. And I find that endlessly fascinating actually to really observe and name as we started this conversation, the naming of what's going on.

But then there are some really powerful steps you can take. I think one is connect with your community. We think we're somehow powerless sometimes or lacking influence, and we all have a sphere of influence, so we should name it. It could be that you just have a great girl group and you have the dinner and you start holding a monthly dinner. That sounds so silly, but it is very powerful. Connect with your community. That could ultimately become you testifying at local city council meetings, you going and sitting at a school board meeting, you name it. But connecting with community is where we must start because we have become so siloed. COVID helped do that. I think the various fascist takeover environment has helped us feel very paralyzed and we have to break out of that. So one, people should connect. I also think we have to imagine things will be possible, which is ...

Well, there's a great line many of my colleagues talk about in the civil rights space, which is we can't wait for hope. We have to take action. And I think in this environment there's a sense of, well, let's wait. Like you and me, let's have this chat and somehow hope that a feeling comes to us and then you take action. And it's like, no, just take an action. Just show up at a protest. Just go to the city council meeting. Send the email to your representative. Do the thing. Whatever it is, start small, but start and rip that bandaid off because action will produce hope not the other way around.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

I love that thing that you just ended on action and hope, right? Because I started this question by saying this is a moment where so many of us do feel hopeless, and I think to say this is the origin of this podcast series was sitting around and saying, we need to pause. We're in a moment where we feel like there is no consensus of how to move forward as a tech policy community who is advocating for change and we're sitting in a world that so many of us warned against, but now we're here and what do we do in this moment and how do we, against all odds, find a hope to carry on to say we're not just going to survive this thing, but at some point we're going to come through it and we are going to be thriving, which I think is a radical statement, but something that I am holding very, very deeply within myself, especially within this space. And I'd love to ask you in that vein, what does the future of tech advocacy look like in this world and this space of hope and action that are coupled together and married together and leading us forward?

Nora Benavidez:

Well, whenever this podcast comes out, it will be at least a little bit after something that has occurred this week, but I just want to name that what we are up against is significant. On July 17th, the White House published news that they would be preparing an executive order to target woke AI.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Oh, yes.

Nora Benavidez:

The goal being to target tech companies with what they see, the Trump administration, as woke artificial intelligence models that would protect neutrality, observe and correct AI models that are producing inequitable results. The premise to me, I want to be really clear, because it sounds complicated, but I think that's ultimately to give a free pass so that companies can enhance and encourage AI models that do discriminate, that even allow discrimination as part of their business model. And so I name that because where are we going? Well, this is where we're going. We're going towards a place where consolidation of power and platform will continue. And so the vision we have, the future of our freedom is contingent on our ability to understand that that is happening. The train has fully left the station and we have a Congress that is in many ways amenable to Trump's growing his executive power and his grabbing of outrageous areas of power outside of his control, and we have tech companies that then write checks to make sure that they have a front row seat to that. I think to appropriately grapple with the question of any positive future, we cannot put our heads in the sand to where we are now and where we are going over the next few years. The democratic backslide we are seeing in the U.S. and globally is less violent coup and more techno overlord takeover.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Oh, interesting. Okay.

Nora Benavidez:

And so to really address and combat that, we have to get organized, we have to share, we have to share stories, we have to connect with community and we have to know what we're good at. We have to each of us individually, and I think each sector has to know what they bring to the table. Lawyers, journalists, tech visionaries will be essential. And honestly, I think it is very long work because in the first Trump administration for example, he rolled back about 200 plus regulatory protections for civil rights environment and information broadly. We are seeing just, no pun intended, trumped up efforts to stir and deeper and across more agencies now. That backslide will take years to correct and redirect. And so it's not a fight for the next two years. It's really the fight for the next 25 years.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad that you mentioned this executive order. I was looking at it and reading the scant information that we have about it now and to say it's something that has I think been a common place for those of us who have worked in tech policy for the past decade or so of all of this work that we have been doing to try and provide safeguards and implement some sort of anti-bias within these systems is being rolled back again and watching the hard work and the policies and the dedication that so many of us have put into this work just be thoughtlessly destroyed. In that space, how do you keep going?

Nora Benavidez:

Well, I think it's been very thoughtfully destroyed. No, I do a lot of work now on naming what the chaos is, how chaos has been created for all of us as recipients and consumers, and I think there's been a real window for autocratic leaders to grab power when we're distracted and that there's only the need to light the fire and then chaos can be originally coordinated and then it's organic. And so it's thoughtfully destroyed and burned down while also I think allowing for natural and organic destruction. Which I'm in LA and I think about the fires and how spark that's can then grow into an uncontrollable situation. But how do we have hope I guess is a question that we often grapple with.

How do we move forward knowing that by design, this is where many of those in power want us to be. And it's part of why I'm really interested in bringing young and new and different voices to the table. it is what we've talked about this whole time. The Zohran piece is exciting because it's different because it's anti-establishment in some ways, and I think there's a hunger for really deep dialogue actually. We've reached, I believe, peak attention deficit and peak memory loss. We have short-term and long-term memory loss, and I'm like, I actually think people are now really excited for ways we build curiosity. We see this even in the streamer culture. Part of what's so great is the banter and the dialogue with people who are typing in the chat. There's a hunger for conversation, and I don't think that's something we ignore. I think that's something we invite in and we say, "All right, these will be messy spaces, but they will be generative spaces."

Anika Collier Navaroli:

Yeah, I think that's incredibly vital. But my brain has been trying to put together a sort of understanding and argument of this backlash against DEI, how it relates to the rollback of trust and safety, and again, this discriminatory AI that we want to push forward and how much I believe that it's linked with the idea of free speech absolutism and having to give AI that right as well, which I find to be horrifying and also fascinating at the same time. So putting that out there as someone who also thinks about these things, any reaction to my very uncooked theory?

Nora Benavidez:

It's not an uncooked theory. This is where all of my work now focuses. I call this a age of retaliation. We have a small group of oligarchs, shall we say. Media and tech overlords. They're influencing people's opinions and attitudes and behaviors, and they're obstructing our grasp on truth or just basic facts. They're undermining our connection with each other. They control our legacy and social media platforms. And then they say that they, whether it's Trump or Musk or Linda Iaccarino, for example, that they actually are the free speech champions. And so it's so far beyond hypocrisy. It's really just a ridiculous doublespeak. Because we then look at the ways that those in power suppress dissent, reward harassment and sideline journalism or fact-finding.

News outlets have been removed from White House access. Journalists are attacked during protests. Protesters are seen as criminal, which is antithetical to the first amendment. And so it's an environment in which the online and offline tensions you're talking about are central. And actually, I don't think it's an unscripted question. This is the question to grapple with. And the DEI piece has been a successful scapegoat frame. It's similar to when the acronym CRT was critical race theory really blew up a few years ago. Anything that smacks of giving preferential treatment to black or brown or other marginalized people, Trump and his cronies want to obliterate. Trump has posted online that if you are in debt, you might very well welcome a servitude to pay off your debts. Well, so to be clear, that's slavery. Let's be clear.

Musk has said he has better genes than anyone and should be reproducing with women all over. That's a eugenics friendly view. Look at these people who have power and influence and they are promoting bigoted, misogynistic and deeply white supremacist values, and they pull the strings of these information structures while then claiming to be champions of speech and freedom. And so we have to be able to reject that and say, actually that is an anti-speech. That is an anti-freedom. That is an anti-accountability framework and language. And we finally have seen public consciousness, I believe, because of these ICE raids. People saying, "Wait. That's not what I want. I don't want to be on the wrong side of history like that. Wait, that's not the military coming in to keep us safe." And we have to be able to help name, correct and really expose what are deeply authoritarian practices.

Anika Collier Navaroli:

That reminds me a lot of something that I used to say so much inside of companies that I'm sure used to drive people crazy, but every time there was the idea of balancing free speech, free expression and safety and I would always say, "Well, free speech for whom and safety for whom?" Because we are making these trade-offs every single day and having to acknowledge them and actually say out loud, we are making this decision that this person's free speech is more important than this group's over here safety. Or we're willing to let these people's safety fly to the wind because of the that we think that this person's speech was so important.

And so I appreciate you bringing in the nuances of power into this conversation, especially as it comes to things as wide-ranging as speech and AI and advocacy. And I want to thank you so much, Nora, for being here and joining us in this amazing conversation about advocating for future and advocating for change, especially within a world that is so difficult sometimes. And I think one of the things I'm going to be leaving here with is the piece that you mentioned about hope and action and how those things can play off of each other. So thank you, Nora, for being here with us.

Nora Benavidez:

Well, thank you so much for having me. It's such a joy.