What Ellen Pao Tells Us About the State of the Internet

“Outspoken women, especially non-white women like Pao, are instant targets if they publicly acknowledge the existence of prejudice, worse still if they purport to do something about it.” –Katherine Cross

Ellen Pao, now titled as the *former* CEO of Reddit, has faced it all. Death threats, harassment, abuse– oh wait, that’s just the gender-focused hate she received. She also was and is the target of many incredibly racist memes and attacks. I will not link to the awful Chairman Pao memes, but if you’re interested in reading more about the vicious attacks Pao has faced for showing up in the tech world, having a vagina, and not being white, there is plenty out there. Pao has said the the vitriol she receives has made her “doubt humanity.” And certainly, who can blame her?

If you aren’t familiar with Pao’s story, here is some brief background. Ellen Pao joined Reddit in 2013, and was named Interim CEO of Reddit in November 2015. Several things happen over the next couple months that Reddit decides are Pao’s evil doing: the anti-harassment policy, banning salary negotiations, Victoria Taylor is fired (more on this below), and Reddit banning a few subreddits that only exist to spew hate. This month, as we all know, Pao resigned. Kaliya Young stated in a Guardian article, “Ellen was at the center of a high-profile sexual discrimination suit versus a major VC firm and she was put in charge of the teenage boy section of the internet. What did you expect was going to happen? It was inevitable that they would turn on her.”

While Reddit very much may act like the teenage boy section of the internet, it is worth noting that many people, including friends of mine, college professors, and people who do tech for a living have the utmost trust in Reddit. While admitting it has its problems, Reddit users often have absolute certainty in the credibility of the information on Reddit. The Victoria Taylor firing, for example, was 100% done by Pao. Reddit knew that for a fact. They started hashtags about it, they formed a mob, and they sharpened their pitchforks. They circulated a petition garnering tens of thousands of signatures for Pao to be fired. Unfortunately, the former CEO of Reddit, Yishan Wong, explained after the fact that it was the co-founder who fired Taylor: “He had different ideas for AMAs, he didn’t like Victoria’s role, and decided to fire her. Pao wasn’t able to do anything about it. In this case it shouldn’t have traveled upstream to her, it came from above her.”

Not to go conspiracy theorist, but it certainly seems that Pao was set up as the fall person for a lot of changes happening in Reddit. She was brought on in an interim capacity, meaning she could be easily sacked without recourse. Within the few months of her being appointed, many groundbreaking policies were enacted. As Pao had spoken out before about making the Internet less of a cesspool as well as being a feminist, she seems like the perfect face for these changes, even if they were in the works before she got there. She is Asian and a woman, which pretty much guaranteed that most of the outspoken men and boys on Reddit would automatically hate and distrust her, and it guaranteed that even people of intelligence who follow Reddit would find something “unsettling” or “problematic” about her (you know, how you sometimes just get a “bad feeling” about people? Though perhaps those people are always women or POC?). So you have the perfect person to implement sweeping change, change that *had* to happen, and then go down in flames for it, while the rest of the high ups at Reddit are now victims of Pao, rather than comrades who helped institute change.

Ellen Pao was guilty of two things: being a woman, and being visible in the tech world. That’s it. She did almost none of the things the community turned on her for. Sheryl Sandberg, Marrisa Mayer, and other high-up tech feminists have continually faced similar harassment and smear campaigns as Pao. I only wonder when we will stop believing these ridiculous, sexist, racist echo chambers like Reddit when it comes to anything dealing with women, with feminists, in the tech industry. The fact that the echo was loud enough to convince so many people that Pao had done terrible things for the Reddit community and Internet freedom in general is shocking. Would the same timeline hold if Pao had different genitalia or skin color? Absolutely not. And that’s a big fucking problem. This is the true battle of Internet freedom: will we ever have a space where people like Pao, or all women, aren’t threatened, harassed, and abused into silence? Before you all take up your pitchforks to defend your right to hate on fat people or use racial slurs at will, have you considered that you are far more damaging to freedom of speech than Pao–even in the world made up about her–could ever be?

When the fuck will we stop pretending this isn’t all about gender? That while sites like Reddit serve a purpose, that the compass of reality is so far off when it comes to women that it is no better than going to a gamergate website to learn about ethics?