Going Viral Taught Me the Internet Is Broken — but Fixable | Deja Foxx | TED

I was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, by a single mom, and when I was 15 years old, I moved out because of her struggles with substance abuse.

The next year, 2017, while living with my boyfriend and his family, my senator voted to strip the funding that I needed when I walked into a clinic with no money, no insurance and no parents to walk out with the birth control I needed to take control of my body, my future.

It was personal, and I told him so at a town-hall meeting in Mesa.

I asked, if birth control was helping me to be successful, reach for higher education, why would he deny me the American Dream?

Millions of people saw that video. Overnight, I had gone viral.

My life went from private to public. Requests from CNN rolled in, to go live.

"The Washington Post" called me the new face of Planned Parenthood.

Social media put me, a 16-year-old-girl working at a gas station, on even footing in the public discourse with a United States senator.

My world has opened up in unimaginable ways because of social media, both good and bad.

And in the nearly decade since, it's made possible things I couldn't have even imagined.

But I've seen the dark side of insidious algorithms and the ways that companies profit from them.

Like the day in 2021, when a stranger labeled me the enemy.

Four days later, hundreds of thousands of impressions, 60,000 likes, 4,000 retweets, 600 replies later, and this cyber mob had filled my DMs and comments across all social media platforms.

And now I need you to be in my shoes for a second.