Changemakers: Maura Tuohy Di Muro on Avoiding Unintended Consequences in Tech

Maura Tuohy Di Muro is an aspiring tech ethicist who combats abuse and misinformation online as Head of Product Marketing for Twitter’s Health initiative. She’s passionate about bringing together the study of technology, law, and anthropology to influence policies and products that serve society. Andrew from All Tech is Human spoke with Maura about what tech companies can do to prevent their products from being used for harm.

Andrew: Walk us through your career; how did you first become passionate about the need to think critically and thoughtfully about technology?

Maura: After a short-lived career as a professional ballet dancer, I started my Maura: After a short-lived career as a professional ballet dancer, I started my tech journey on the “dark side” of the internet ecosystem, buying digital ads for Microsoft. I went on to drive communication planning globally, living in Australia and building social marketing businesses in the “age of innocence” when social media was nothing but upside.

Joining Mozilla was a turning point for me and the impetus for starting a part time law degree so I could better understand the intersection of technology and regulation. When I had the opportunity to move to Twitter on their Health initiative to combat abuse and misinformation, and work on the front lines of one of the most influential platforms in the world, it was a chance I had to take.

I spent just over a year working in the product organization on Health as a Strategy & Operations lead, helping establish, scale and integrate organizational practices across product, policy and customer support. Recently, I made the shift to product marketing on Health, also taking on Privacy - two of our biggest priorities at Twitter. Product marketing hits the sweet spot of my professional experience, combining product strategy, customer insight and go-to-market communications. In this role I have the opportunity to weave together the overarching narrative for Health, helping our policy and product teams consider how to message and time their work in a way that regular humans can understand.

Aligning the many teams across Twitter who contribute to Health is no small feat, but it’s a top priority, and one the company is invested in getting right.

We have a big election coming up in the United States, with the role of social media companies under scrutiny after 2016, what is Twitter doing to prepare?

As you can imagine this is an incredibly critical focal point at the company, and one we have been working on for some time. In fact, we’ve supported many global elections since 2016 and are constantly improving and iterating our election integrity work worldwide.

There are an increasing number of verticals that impact election integrity - from preventing account compromise and platform manipulation to detecting misleading information and labelling Government and State Affiliated Accounts to give users more context on the content they’re seeing. It is our job to safeguard the public conversation and ensure that people can better interpret the content they’re seeing and the accounts sharing it. We understand the responsibility of this task and are committed to getting it right.

Elevating credible information is key. We are partnering with non-partisan organizations to provide people with voter support resources, such as adding reminder prompts within the product experience. While we’re not able to publicize everything we’re doing, we will absolutely be creating and sharing more resources. We have a significant number of resources dedicated to this work both in the US and globally (including a global team that hand-selects credible political news following public available guidelines), and extending to civic events beyond elections.

How are tech companies adapting their own approach to content moderation?

We are starting to see some real divergence in how different platforms manage their content moderation. Last year, just as Facebook said they would not fact-check political ads, Twitter banned them outright. Platforms like reddit are experimenting with restorative justice programs, where they reach out to people who have had a conflict and see if they can moderate a live discussion to allow Terms of Service violators back on the platform. Twitter is likewise considering how we can make our decision and appeals process more transparent.

What can tech companies do to give voice to underrepresented groups who are affected by their products, but who aren’t employees or traditional stakeholders in the company?

As an industry, we have been having a dialogue about ethics and bias in tech and AI/ML for a couple years now, so there’s really no excuse not to have addressed this in some meaningful way.

We’re certainly not perfect at Twitter, but we are taking steps in the right direction. For example, we have an entire department whose job it is to review products for unintended uses, and look at how features’ intended benefits could be used to harm other groups -- especially under-represented groups. We also recently formed an Accessibility Center of Excellence that will set goals, drive accountability and serve as strategic consultants to help make all aspects of Twitter accessible to everyone.

We are also launching a program to undertake a sort of assessment on the impact of our products and policies on a macro scale, with a view that Twitter should be contributing to the betterment of society and human rights and not undermining them.

In order to understand the full spectrum of people using Twitter we also need to hire and empower diverse teams. And we need to incentivize all our teams in the right way. We intentionally combined our user growth goals with our “health” goals (anti-abuse and information integrity) so that they would inform each other. What this means in practice is that we cannot launch any product feature that negatively impacts the health of our users.

You can connect with Maura on LinkedIn and Twitter

Guest UserJanuary 30, 2020Comment