After the Whistle Blows

Silicon Valley likes to lionize disruptors. But for women in the tech industry who speak out, there can be a high price to pay for rocking the boat.

- By Prachi Gupta

One day when Anika Collier Navaroli was in middle school, her mother took her on a trip to the supermarket in their Florida hometown. On their way, a man driving a pickup truck with a Confederate flag on the back veered onto the sidewalk and yelled racial slurs at them. Navaroli and her mother quickly ran inside a store, where they called the police and waited for help to arrive-while the truck sat parked outside. "This person had parked their car, gone on shopping," Navaroli recalls, still mystified. "The cops basically told my mother and I that there was nothing they could do because there was no crime that had been committed and that this person had the First Amendment right to say and do what they had done," she explains. But the experience stuck with her. "It really started something in my brain, trying to understand the interpretation of the First Amendment and free speech that could allow or condone or make room for these sorts of experiences that were incredibly violent and incredibly dangerous."

It's a question Navaroli would dedicate her career to exploring. After graduating from the University of Florida, she earned her law degree at the University of North Carolina and studied journalism at Columbia University, where she wrote her master's thesis, "The Revolution Will Be Tweeted," on the role of social media in movements like Occupy Wall Street. Her interest in free speech and technology eventually led her in 2019 to Twitter, where she was hired to help improve the company's content moderation and conduct policies. But in the months leading up to the 2020 U.S.election, that work became increasingly complex to navigate.