Diversity Archives - A Change Is Coming

Where are Black Women’s Voices in the Rolling Stone “Russian Troll” Story?

It’s great to see the recent surge of media interest on disinformation and the 2020 election. Errin Haines’ Manipulation Machines and Whitney Phillips’ The Toxins We Carry are two good examples. Disappointingly, a recent Rolling Stone story with a clickbait headline has gotten a lot more exposure so far than either of these: over 60,000 shares on Facebook. While the article makes some good points, it also has some major problems — starting with a complete erasure of Black women.

‘‘Erasure’’ refers to the ways the media (and more generally society) ignores the existence and contribution of some people and groups. Moya Bailey and Trudy (aka @thetrudz) give an example in On misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism: despite coining the term misogynoir, and writing about it for years they experience, to varying degrees,

our contributions being erased, our writing not cited, or our words plagiarized by people who find the word compelling.

Another example: the Rolling Stone article doesn’t quote, cite, or even mention any Black women — even though it focuses on disinformation campaigns involving fake accounts claiming to be Black women, a topic that (rather unsurprisingly) Black women have been dealing with and developing expertise in for a very long time.

As a result, the article ignores techniques that Black women have successfully used to identify and combat this kind of disinformation. Instead, the Rolling Stone article presents a recommendation with obvious flaws: it won’t work to reduce Russian disinformation, and it’s harmful to Black women.

Erasure of Black women is far too common, on this topic and many others. So before we delve into the Rolling Stone article, I want to highlight a surprisingly easy and straightforward way to help you notice it.

Be very skeptical about any article that doesn’t include Black women with expertise.

I’ll expand on this suggestion with some additional techniques at the end of this article, after looking at the erasure in more detail, and briefly discussing one of the other problems it leads to. First, though, let’s start with the Rolling Stone article’s positive aspects.

In That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It, authors Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren highlight the threat of disinformation. The article does a good job of showing how “professional trolls” like Russia’s IRA start by building trust by sharing tweets and links their target audience agrees with, before mixing in disinformation. As Linvill and Warren say,

Effective disinformation is embedded in an account you agree with

This isn’t a new observation. Shireen Mitchell’s 2018 report How The Facebook Ads that Targeted Voters Centered on Black American Culture, for example, similarly notes the IRA’s initial ads were “designed to build a trusted community of Black and Latino voters” before pivoting to focus on digital voter suppression, a topic she continues to focus on in her ongoing work. Still, it’s a very important point, and one that a lot of people tend not to think about.

It’s easy to assume that just because an account is tweeting things you agree with, it’s on the same side as you are … but that’s not always the case. Don’t trust a Twitter account just because it’s got some good tweets.

The Rolling Stone article’s examples, both of fake accounts impersonating Black women, highlight another valuable takeaway. Of course, accounts of any race and gender can be faked and used for disinformation, so it would have been helpful to include some other examples as well; Linvill’s explanation of why they didn’t (in response to a question from Sabaah Folayan) is, as he admits, unsatisfying. Still, as the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report discusses, Black Americans were the group targeted the most by Russian social media efforts in 2016, and they’re still doing it.

So it’s important to be aware that “impersonation” is one of the techniques manipulators use.

Again, though, this isn’t a new observation. For example, impersonating Black women was discussed in

l’Nasah Crockett’s earlier Model View Culture article “Raving Amazons”: Antiblackness and Misogynoir in Social Media back in 2014.
Rachelle Hampton’s The black feminists behind #YourSlipIsShowing, a campaign against Twitter trolls masquerading as women of color on Slate in 2018 following, with perspectives from Crockett and Safiqah Hudson
Shireen Mitchell’s Twitter Moment Hacking of 2016 would have never happened had folk #ListenedToBW, which connects the dots by relating it to Russian election meddling.

Which brings us back to the erasure. None of this previous work is quoted or cited in the Rolling Stone article. No actual Black women are mentioned. The only hints of Black women’s existence in the article are the fake accounts used as examples.

One consequence of this erasure shows up when the discussion turns to how to combat this kind of disinformation. The Rolling Stone article doesn’t even discuss the techniques which Black women have been developing and refining for years. The authors instead suggest teaching “digital civility.”

As @sassycrass points out on Twitter:

Hey, you know what ISN’T the issue here? Civility. How could it be? Per this SAME piece, trolls are GREAT at mimicking semi-civil discourse.

Conversely, as Black women including Ijeoma Oluo, Jamilah Lemieux, Kintanya Harrison, @sassycrass, @AngryBlackLady, and many others have noted, “civility” is a club that’s often used to attack Black women and other people of color. One way this plays out on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks is that dissenting voices, particularly those of people of color, are routinely dismissed as Russian bots or trolls.

So the authors’ suggestion of “digital civility” as a remedy to disinformation isn’t just unhelpful. It actively aids the Russians in their goal of stoking racial dissent. It’s a good example of a point that Shireen Mitchell and Whitney Phillips discussed last month: when discussing disinformation, white journalists who don’t face the same daily threats as people of color:

tend to add to the harms because they are not affected by it but also don’t know the nuances enough to tell the story effectively.

Unless you’re an expert in disinformation techniques, you probably weren’t aware of the previous work that Black women have done on this front — it hasn’t received very much media attention. As Manipulation Machines points out, too many journalists aren’t connected to the communities where this work is being done and discussed, so they tend not to write about it.

Still, you don’t need to be an expert to notice that Black women weren’t mentioned in an article about impersonating Black women. Here’s three straightforward techniques have helped me a lot.

Always look to see whether an article includes perspectives from Black women with expertise. If not, think twice before sharing it, and be very skeptical about any recommendations it makes. Instead, look for other related articles that are by Black women, or at least include Black women’s perspectives.
Listen to what Black women are saying about an article before amplifying it. If they have critiques, amplify the critiques rather than the article.

Fortunately there are journalists who do feature the work of Black women. So here’s a few additional suggestions:

Seek out perspectives from Black women. Read (and support!) publications that feature their work. Buy their books. Follow them on social media. The people I’ve mentioned and linked to here are all great starting points; Imani Gandy’s Fems of Color list is another.
When somebody else shares a link that erases Black women, point it out, and provide alternate links.
Look at the links you’ve shared, and the links that have been shared to your group. How many are by Black women? How many include Black women’s perspectives? Set a goal of sharing as many artciles by Black women as by white men, and as many articles including Black women’s perspectives as white men’s perspectives.

It’s also worth highlighting that there’s often the same pattern of erasure and disinformation with other perspectives that are usually marginalized. So it’s worth rereading the bullet points above, and whenever you see “Black women”, also think about how these suggestions apply to trans, queer, and non-binary people, disabled people, and other groups that are often both erased and targeted with disinformation.

I certainly do agree with the authors of the Rolling Stone article that dealing with disinformation being created and distributed with the skill that foreign and domestic actors have today is new ground for most of us. Digital voter suppression focused on Black voters is going to be a key battleground in the 2020 campaign. As Shireen Mitchell recently said on Facebook, discussing her appearance on Joy Reid’s MSNBC show:

We got work to do.

Now’s a good time to start.

Thanks to Toshiye, Candace, Shasta, Dragos, Deborah, Jacquie, and everybody else who gave feedback on earlier drafts of this article!

Image credits:

Eraser from PNG All, licensed CC-BY-4.0
Russian nesting dolls and Twitter modified from That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It, Rolling Stone
Screenshot of Joy Reid and Shireen Mitchell on MSNBC’s AM Joy show via Aliza Worthington’s AM Joy Guest: Russian Disinformation Campaigns Helped Drive Kamala Harris Out , Crooks and Liars
Listen to Black Women” picture by Jeff Swensen, Getty Images, via Kiratiana Freelon’s March for Black Women Organizers Want to Put Our Issues Front and Center During March for Racial Justice on The Root

WT:Social will have to pick a side

Over 400,000 people have signed up for WT:Social, Jimmy Wales’ news focused social network. The potential is clearly there: I’ve found some high-quality links on WT:Social that I hadn’t seen elsewhere. There’s also a lot of spam and other kinds of noise, along with usability problems and harassment … still, it’s early days yet; these issues may well get addressed over time. And the problem Jimmy’s trying to solve is a real one: a lot of people want a better way of getting and discussing the news that avoids the clickbait headlines and disinformation that are so common on today’s social networks.

There’s certainly an opportunity here. Even though WT:Social’s often been described as an alternative to Facebook, it’s current functionality is very reddit-like: people can share links to “subwikis” (analogous to “subreddits”) that focus on different topics, and discuss them in comments. Some people love reddit, but there are many topics where reddit’s links are mediocre (or worse) and provide very limited perspectives. Not only that, reddit discussions are often toxic. So it made a lot of sense for Jimmy to do an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on reddit, as a way of getting the word out and recruiting new users.

The AMA was certainly interesting, with Jimmy answering quite a few questions — including one from me, which I’ll talk about more below. I don’t spend a lot of time on reddit, so it was also a vivid reminder to me of just how bad discussions on reddit often are. At the same time, though, it also highlighted one of WT:Social’s biggest challenges.

One of the first questions Jimmy answered was from me, based on an experience I had on WT:Social a couple of days ago, where the software recommended I join a subwiki dedicated to attacks on trans and non-binary people.

My question had two parts. Was that okay? If not, how will keep things like this from happening in the future? Jimmy replied

I’m sure it was deleted quickly – if not let me know. That’s totally unacceptable.

The key to wikis is genuine community control – putting the power in the hands of the quality members of the community rather than having to wait for someone to do something. As we grow, we plan to have more and more tools to allow that kind of control.

It hadn’t been deleted. So I followed up with a link, and Jimmy (or perhaps another admin) immediately deleted it. To me, that’s a very good thing. But not everybody agreed. For example:

Many of us really don’t want to see anti-trans hate speech — I agree with Jimmy that it’s totally unacceptable. Others think that saying trans people’s existence is “unscientific and unrealistic” and “harmful to society” (as this subwiki did) is just a “non-leftist view of gender”, not an an attack on trans and non-binary people; to them. Asking trans and non-binary people to “collaborate kindly” with bigots who think they or their friends shouldn’t exist isn’t a solution. And who winds up getting treated as a “quality member” of the community?

Another question Jimmy answered, this one from sridc, highlights another aspect of the challenge. The question cited my previous post, Why is an “intellectual dark web” site at the top of my feed? , as an example of “victimhood culture” (I feel seen!) and asked how WT:Social would “encourage members to focus on the content, instead of discrediting a news source.” Here’s Jimmy’s response:

My view is that collaboration and kindness as a part of the culture is a big part of it.

One reason we have a victimhood culture (which goes in many directions) on social media is that you typically have only 3 choices to deal with something awful: block the person so you don’t see them anymore (which doesn’t help the broader community), yell at the person (which is why so many places are poisonous), or report the person (into systems that don’t scale and get it wrong quite a lot).

Better is genuine community control in the wiki way.

There was skepticism in the replies. JoeMobley complained that “the anti-trumpers get together and down-vote any message they object to.” Jimmy agreed that voting isn’t particularly helpful in many cases, and talked instead about a technique Wikipedia uses to try to get consensus. In response to that, sridc complained that his Wikipedia updates to the callout culture Wikipedia page had been edited out by three “leftist editors” who rejected his “reliable sources.” sridc also talked gave another example of “leftists,” relating to a page about antifa, and to bolster his case provided a link to an article from … Breitbart.

Looks like not everybody agrees on what’s a “reliable source.”*

Similarly, in the reddit discussion, funknut described Quillette as “a glorified blog for the alt-right to trade misinformation about the humble city of Portland.” Others objected to this message, and got together and down-voted it. It’s not just an issue with voting, though. On WT:Social, the Long Reads subwiki — which everybody joins by default — has featured a series of links from Quillette and other “intellectual dark web” sites, as well as critiques like Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism and 21 Racial Microaggressions You Hear On A Daily Basis. The discussions there are … very reddit-like. As I said in my previous post:

Y’know, there are a lot of reasons people are looking for alternatives, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard people say “the real problem with Facebook and Reddit today is that there’s not enough arguing about white supremacy and the ‘intellectual dark web’.”

When the community is split on an issue that people feel passionately about, “community control” isn’t a good enough answer. In response to another question, Jimmy shared his viewpoint that “Out of every 1,000 people I think 990 of them are perfectly nice and wonderful.” Whatever the numbers are (your mileage may vary) — and no matter how “nice and wonderful” they are to Jimmy — anti-trans bigots, white supremacists, fascists, and their supporters can ruin a site’s experience for everybody else.

To have any chance of succeeding, WT:Social will to have to pick a side.

* For what it’s worth, Facebook sides with sridc — they’re paying Breitbart a bunch of money for the right include their articles as part of their new “high-quality news” page. But that’s part of the reason that so many people I know are looking for Facebook alternatives, so … let’s just say there’s a range of opinions here, and gab.ai already provides an alternative for people who don’t think Facebook favors the Breitbart’s of the world enough.

Thanks to Deborah and everybody else who gave feedback on earlier versions of this post.

Indie.vc’s v3: Did someone mention diversity?

When Indie.vc started three years ago, it saw two or three applications a week, mostly from venture capital rejects. Now it gets as many as 10 applications a week, mostly from companies that could raise venture capital but don’t want to, said Bryce Roberts, the firm’s founder.

— Erin Griffith in More Start-Ups Have an Unfamiliar Message for Venture Capitalists: Get Lost, New York Times

As Kara Swisher’s guest Jason Fried said on the Recode podcast a couple of weeks ago, “venture capital money kills more businesses than it helps.” Then again, it’s got upsides as well: the right VCs can open up a lot of possibilities for a startup, both by providing the money to spend ahead of revenue and just as importantly bringing entrees to potential customers and key hires, solid advice, credibility, and access to a valuable network. Are there ways to get the positives without the downsides?

When Seattle startup mainstay (and Create 33 Director) Rebecca Lovell told me that Bryce Roberts was giving a fireside chat about Indie.vc’s upcoming v3 batch, it seemed like a good opportunity to find out more. As indeed it was! Bryce’s brief presentation was clear and to the point. As Alan Meekins, founder of RosHub, commented to me afterwards, Indie.vc‘s model leads to founders retaining higher equity, so they have an opportunity to enable more win-win outcomes for their portfolio.

The presentation isn’t available online as far as I know, but most of the material is available elsewhere on the web: in textual form in Bryce’s v3 post and the v3 FAQ on the Indie.vc site, or as podcasts on Product Hunt Radio podcast with Ryan Hoover and Rad Dad with Kirill Zubovsky.

There was also plenty of time for question and answers, covering a variety of topics. I even got a chance* to ask one myself!

Did somebody mention diversity?

Detail from Bryce Roberts’ v3 slides at Create 33

One thing I really liked about Bryce’s presentation was that he was explicit about industry-wide diversity problems — and Indie.vc’s own much-better-than-industry-norm numbers. They’re in the v3 announcement post too, in the footnote:

50% of the companies we’ve backed are led by female founders. Nearly 20% are led by black founders.

A lot of VCs try to explain that their non-diverse portfolios aren’t due to any bias, no, of course not, they actively try to fund marginalized founders, it’s just that people don’t apply or there aren’t any investment opportunities that “meet their bar.” Indie.vc’s numbers – and the success of the founders and companies they invest in — make it clear that in reality, people do apply and there are plenty of good investment opportunities out there.

It’s a strategy that makes a huge amount of business sense for Indie.vc and their parent company, Tim O’Reilly’s OATV (where Bryce is Managing Director along with Marc Jacobson). Arlan Hamilton of Backstage Capital talks about diversity as a competitive advantage: founders from groups who have been the targets of the VC and tech industries’ historical biases are generally underestimated. The Indie.vc founders Bryce mentioned in his talk — Angelica Nwandu of the Shade Room, Thompson Aderonkomi of Nice Healthcare, and Sarah van Dell of Plum Relish — are exactly the kinds of people (and companies!) any VC should want to invest in.

Too many VCs find excuses not to — or try to do better, but don’t make any real progress. So after complimenting Bryce on Indie.vc’s numbers, I asked what they had done to achieve this diversity.

It’s not rocket science

Bryce started by citing Marci Harris’ post from 2015.**

The indie.vc model seems, at first blush, designed to reward and encourage many of the qualities frequently cited as inherent characteristics of women entrepreneurs. For many, that will be a welcome departure from the norm — and potentially quite a lucrative one.

— Marci Harris, Bullish on indie.vc, the Li.st

From Bryce’s perspective, this post — coming at an early stage in Indie.vc — helped them realize they should pay attention to this opportunity. In some ways, he added, just being aware is really the most important thing; being mindful of what they were doing and making it a point to extend the invitation broadly. He also gave a couple of very concrete examples, talking about the way their application process cuts down insiders’ advantages, and noting the importance of putting forward diverse founders’ faces and stories (as he done in his presentation and blog post).

These are all good points. And the followup to the fireside chat illustrates a great example of the value of extending the invitation: Astrid Scholz of Zebras Unite responded to Bryce’s offer of a private online session for groups of founders and investors, and now Indie.vc’s presenting another large, diverse, woman-led group right in their sweet spot. Funny how that works!

It’s not like any of these things are rocket science … and that’s an important point. When you start looking at improving diversity the way you would any other important business problem, there are very often straightforward things you can do that have a real impact. When Rebecca and I co-chaired the Northwest Entrepreneur Network’s First Look Forum pitch competition a few years ago (along with Rochelle Whelan), we got huge improvements in diversity just by deciding to prioritize it*** and making some straightforward improvements to our outreach, training, and processes.

But most VCs don’t. So kudos to Indie.vc for thinking about it.

Resisting the gravitational pull

At the end of his answer, though, Bryce mentioned that they’re not seeing the same kind of gender diversity numbers in the early applications to the current v3 iteration. Instead, the overwhelming majority of applications are from guys. The deadline’s not until March 1, but once a pattern like that sets in it can be very hard to change.

There’s an important underlying point here: even when you’ve got a diverse group, it doesn’t necessarily sustain. Pinterest is a good example: Abby Maldonado and Evan Sharpe 2016 Tech Inclusion fireside chat discussed how their relatively-diverse engineering team turned into a much-less-diverse team before they realized what was going on. One way to think of this effect: the intersecting dimensions of power and demographics in the tech and startup worlds cause a “gravitational pull” that tends to drag you in a cis able-bodied white male direction.

To counter this, even after you’re off to a good start, it’s important to put processes, systems, and people in place. One simple example that could have helped Indie.vc’s v3: going beyond just extending the invitation to a more organized diversity-focused outreach strategy — involving groups like Code2040, Lesbians Who Tech, and Tech Inclusion. And this outreach will go better if Indie.vc already has a presence in those communities; so having employees attend these conferences, and sponsoring some of them, will make things even more effective.

There are a lot more investors looking to fund underestimated founders than a few years ago — including new firms like Backstage Capital, Harlem Capital, and Precursor Ventures who have started from the beginning with this focus. And some traditional VCs are opening their eyes too; Jessica Guynn’s Black women entrepreneurs’ startups are changing Silicon Valley highlights founders like Julia Collins, whose robotic food prep company Zume Pizza just got a $375 million investment. Which means that at the same time as the gravitational pull is kicking in, Indie.vc’s competition is getting more intense.

So without taking anything away from their progress so far, if Indie.vc wants to keep their valuable diversity going forward, they’ll have to keep upping their game.

There are some great strategically-focused consultants who incorporate intersectional diversity and inclusion in their work and could be very helpful on different aspects of this problem, people like Y-Vonne Hutchinson of Ready Set, Nicole Sanchez of Vaya Consulting, and Bärí A. Williams. Hopefully, Indie.vc is already working with one or more of them and is listening to their advice.

Key takeaways

So there’s a lot to learn here on the diversity front — not just for other investors, but really for almost any company or organization looking to improve its diversity in a meaningful way. Here’s a short list:

Start by setting intention
Highlight diverse people’s stories and successes
If somebody tells you your offering is appealing to women in tech (or any other marginalized group), listen to them, and view it as an opportunity
Extend the invitation
Don’t assume that early successes will continue; instead, look for ways to build on them and institutionalize key practices and processes
Sustaining diversity requires investment

Again, none of this is rocket science. Which is good news! Since most companies today don’t bother doing any of them, it’s a chance for a competitive advantage against incumbents.

And it doesn’t get any easier if you wait. The best time to start focusing more on diversity and inclusion is when you’re just getting started. The second-best time is right now.

* eventually – after a guy who had already asked the very first question (and talked to Bryce for a while before the presentation) cut me off in order to ask a second question … well actually it was really a comment more than a question …. And later on, after the presentation, when I was waiting to talk to Bryce on his way out, the same guy interposed himself between me and Bryce again. Man!

** I resisted the temptation to interrupt and say “hey, I know Marci!” It’s a great example of how small the startup world can be: I blogged about Marci’s startup POPVOX back in 2011 in Patriot Act renewal: Time to make some noise. Fortunately, there’s an app for that!

*** As Tammarrian Rogers and I said in Supporting diversity with a new approach to software: it starts with intention

Algorithmic Glass Ceilings and Gendered Echo Chambers: “Bias Amplification” in Social Networks

A pair of recent papers highlights how today’s social networks not only reflect societal biases, but can actually amplify them.

Ana-Andreea Stoica et. al.’s Algorithmic glass ceiling in social networks: the effects of social recommendations on network diversity looks at the effect of “social recommendations” such as friend suggestions and people to follow, both at the theoretical level and empirically on Instagram. The authors find that “prominent social recommendation algorithms can exacerbate the under-representation of certain demographic groups at the top of the social hierarchy.” More specifically:

Our mathematical analysis demonstrates the existence of an algorithmic glass ceiling that exhibits all the properties of the metaphorical social barrier that hinders groups like women or people of colour from attaining equal representation.

One would a priori expect similarity metrics, usually the basis of recommender systems, to contribute to sustaining disparities among various groups. We show much more: using empirical evidence from newly collected data on Instagram and a rigorous analysis of mathematical models, we prove that prominent recommender algorithms reinforce the rate at which disparity grows.

The first couple of sections of the paper are a quick read, after which it gets into some heavy-duty math. Fortunately, Kim Martineau’s How Social Networking Sites May Discriminate Against Women on Columbia News, is a good summary; and Adrian Collyer, on the ACM’s The morning paper, walks through the paper in detail.

The underlying dynamic here of homophily — people’s tendency to prefer to interact with people similar to themselves — isn’t new. Neither is the idea of a “glass ceiling” in social media,* or realization that algorithmic recommendations reflect societal biases.** What’s important about this paper is both the formal model and the experimental results showing bias amplification.

Meanwhile, Nikki Usher et al‘s Twitter Makes It Worse: Political Journalists, looks at “beltway journalists’ peer-to-peer relationships on Twitter—or how journalists use the platform to legitimate, amplify, and engage each other,” and similarly finds substantial evidence of gender bias. In particular:

Most alarming is that male journalists amplify and engage male peers almost exclusively, while female journalists tend to engage most with each other. The significant support for claims of gender asymmetry as well as evidence of gender silos are findings that not only underscore the importance of further research but also suggest overarching consequences for the structure of contemporary political communication.

Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here!

* see for example Susan Herring et. al.’s classic 2003 paper Women and children last: the discursive construction of Weblogs and Shirin Nilizadeh et. al.’s 2016 Twitter’s Glass Ceiling: The Effect of Perceived Gender on Online Visibility.

** recent books like Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism and Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality have plenty of examples; here’s a 2011 post from me focusing on TechMeme‘s recommendation algorithms

Sex, pleasure, and diversity-friendly software: the article the ACM wouldn’t publish

Sex, pleasure, and diversity-friendly software was originally written as an invited contribution to the Human to Human issue of XRDS: Crossroads, the Association of Computing Machinery’s student magazine. After a series of presentations on diversity-friendly software, it seemed like an exciting opportunity to bring broaden awareness among budding computer scientists of important topics that are generally overlooked both in university courses and the industry.

Alas, things didn’t work out that way.

Overriding the objections of the student editors, and despite agreeing that the quality of the work was high and the ideas were interesting, the ACM refused to publish the article. The ACM employees involved were all professional and respectful, and agreed on the importance of diversity. Still, due to concerns about discussions of sex and sexuality offending ACM subscribers and members, they would not even consider publishing a revised version.

The CHI paper What’s at Issue: Sex, Stigma, and Politics in ACM Publishing (authored by Alex Ahmed, Judeth Oden Choi, Teresa Almeida, Kelly Ireland, and me) explores some of the underlying institutional and sociopolitical problems this episode and others involved in editing the Human to Human issue highlights, and proposes starting points for future action for HCI-related research and academic publishing practices.

This revised version of Sex pleasure, and diversity-friendly software is written as a companion piece to What’s at Issue. After a brief background section, it includes extended (and lightly-edited) excerpts from the earlier version of the article, and my reflections on the experience and the opportunities it highlights for software engineering. An appendix includes a brief overview of diversity-friendly software along with links to more detailed discussions.

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