Detoxing Twitter

As Twitter’s first Chief Design Officer, Dantley Davis was given a mandate to fight toxicity on the platform and shake up the company’s corporate culture. Both are uphill battles.

- By Mark Wilson

There was a robbery in the neighborhood and Davis—whose father was Black and mother is Korean— fit the description of the thief, the officer said.

While the officer didn’t know Davis, he was almost certainly familiar with Davis’s work. At the time, Davis was a rising design star in Silicon Valley, responsible for some of the most engaged-with interfaces in the world. He had built the shopping cart for PayPal, which lets you seamlessly check out from third-party retailers. He had designed much of Netflix’s modern TV interface, which remains in use today. Davis is why you can have separate accounts for your children, and why shows autoplay as you browse (for which, yes, he’s sorry).

Keeping his hands visible on the steering wheel, Davis explained to the officer that he lived in the neighborhood. When that didn’t work, Davis turned the tables, noting that his supposed “getaway car”—a Nissan Leaf—provided a mere 40-mile range. “[The officer’s] face turned completely red,” Davis recalls, with a laugh, “and they let me go.”

Though Davis can joke about the 2016 encounter now, he’s never really escaped it. Despite having worked on some of the most significant products in the Valley, he’s been repeatedly treated as an outsider—handed the wheel, but asked for his proof of ownership. His work creating interfaces with broad reach has landed him key roles at some of tech’s biggest companies. But with Black employees constituting only 3% of the workforce in design and 7% in tech, he has also found himself stymied when he pushed for more systemic change.