Something fishy might be going on at the Cinnamon Toast Crunch factory—at least according to one Twitter user who claims he found shrimp tails in a box of the popular cereal.
The alleged shellfish discovery, which kickstarted a viral Twitter saga in the vein of Gorilla Glue Girl and Bean Dad, was made on Monday by Jensen Karp, a podcast host and husband of Boy Meets World star Danielle Fishel, who played Topanga Lawrence on the seminal sitcom. Initially, Karp tweeted out what appears to be a photo of two sugar-coated shrimp tails mixed in with the brand’s signature cereal squares. This prompted the official Cinnamon Toast Crunch Twitter account to offer to send a replacement box—a response that didn’t seem to satisfy Karp.
We’re sorry to see what you found! We would like to report this to our quality team and replace the box. Can you please send us a DM to collect more details? Thanks!
That’s when things truly took a turn for the bizarre.
Following an alleged direct message exchange, Cinnamon Toast Crunch popped back up to insist that, actually, what Karp had found were just clumps of cinnamon sugar: “After further investigation with our team that closely examined the image, it appears to be an accumulation of the cinnamon sugar that sometimes can occur when ingredients aren’t thoroughly blended,” the cereal account tweeted. “We assure you that there’s no possibility of cross contamination with shrimp.”
After further investigation with our team that closely examined the image, it appears to be an accumulation of the cinnamon sugar that sometimes can occur when ingredients aren't thoroughly blended. We assure you that there's no possibility of cross contamination with shrimp.
The only issue with that response, for Karp, was that they clearly appeared to be shrimp tails. “Ok, well after further investigation with my eyes, these are cinnamon coated SHRIMP TAILS, you weirdos,” Karp tweeted in response, earning over 154,000 likes as of Wednesday morning. “I wasn’t all that mad until you now tried to gaslight me?”
Ok, we’ll after further investigation with my eyes, these are cinnamon coated SHRIMP TAILS, you weirdos. I wasn’t all that mad until you now tried to gaslight me? https://t.co/7DmADmoqUtpic.twitter.com/rSLE60pvoy
Imagine a universe where I’m like, “Yuck. These are shrimp tails.” Then I re-examine them a few hours later and realize, “Nope. These are just accumulations of sugar.”
Twitter users took it from there, breathing life into the budding controversy by firing off jokes and proposing theories as to what might have caused the shrimp fiasco.
As Karp made a more thorough inspection of the Cinnamon Toast Crunch bag, he claimed he also found a piece of string, cereal squares with mystery black bits baked into them and some more shrimp detritus. This led some to suggest the whole incident was the result of rats having made a home in some of General Mills’ dry ingredients. Karp noted that still didn’t explain why the other bag of cereal in the family pack appeared to be taped shut.
Also, many of the squares have black marks, and some are dyed red? And yes, I ate a bowl before noticing all this. pic.twitter.com/Y9WWmsTznP
UPDATE: my wife has a stronger stomach than me and checked the OTHER bag in the family pack. This one seems taped up (?) and also appears to include…(I don’t even want to say it)…dental floss. pic.twitter.com/yKPkpx7PWq
This is also where I’ve currently landed (unfortunately). It makes me want wash my mouth out with acid. But also, it doesn’t explain the weird taped bag. Is there anyone on LA Twitter who can test these black pieces for me? https://t.co/rSS5O6SjOH
“While we are still investigating this matter, we can say with confidence that this did not occur at our facility,” Mike Siemienas, a spokesperson for General Mills, said in a statement to TIME.“We are waiting for the consumer to send us the package to investigate further. Any consumers who notice their cereal box or bag has been tampered with, such as the clear tape that was found in this case, should contact us.”
“I’m a comedy writer, but like, there’s no joke here,” he told the New York Times. “To take down my favorite cereal brand? I don’t even know why that’s a funny joke. I love Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It’s the only cereal I eat.”
the wildest approach to customer service:
“nah, those shrimp tails are cereal dust.”
“on second thought, without any investigating, we can legitimately claim that someone opened the box/bag after it left our facility, inserted shrimp tails, resealed. BE CAREFUL OUT THERE, Y’ALL!”
Then today, out of nowhere, they needed a 3-hour window to pick it up from my house. Which I said no to, because that’s stupid. They then told me to take the box to a police station like I’m the killer in Se7en turning myself in.
And yes, throughout this process, where I originally thought I was helping them with a real issue, then watched them tell me I was ACTUALLY holding sugar clumps, has made me doubt they can they fairly investigate themselves. Which SHOULD MAKE SENSE?
Only time will tell how this saga of shrimp, cereal and Boy Meets World will come to an end. But some are already using it for actual culinary inspiration.
Cinnamon Toast Crunch tempura shrimp. Custom spice blend, jalapeños, served with a coconut lime dipping sauce.
Facebook could have prevented billions of views on pages that shared misinformation related to the 2020 U.S. election, according to a new report released Tuesday, which slams the platform for “creating the conditions that swept America down the dark path from election to insurrection.”
The report, by the online advocacy group Avaaz, found that if Facebook had not waited until October to tweak its algorithms to stem false and toxic content amplified on the platform, the company could have prevented an estimated 10.1 billion views on the 100 most prominent pages that repeatedly shared misinformation on the platform ahead of the election.
For much of the summer of 2020, at the height of anti-racism protests and amid a surge in COVID-19 cases, data from Avaaz shows that the top 100 “repeat misinformers” received millions more interactions on Facebook than the top 100 traditional U.S. media pages combined.
“The scary thing is that this is just for the top 100 pages—this is not the whole universe of misinformation,” says Fadi Quran, a campaign director at Avaaz who worked on the report. “This doesn’t even include Facebook Groups, so the number is likely much bigger. We took a very, very conservative estimate in this case.”
Avaaz defined the top 100 repeat misinformers as pages that had shared at least three pieces of misinformation (as defined by Facebook’sown third party fact-checkers), including two within 90 days of each other. On average, the top 100 misinformers shared eight confirmed pieces of misinformation each—and refused to correct them after they were labeled by Facebook-affiliated fact-checkers. “Fact-checkers have limited resources, and can only fact-check a subset of misinformation on Facebook,” the report said, explaining the methodology as a way of determining pages that were “highly likely to not be seeking to consistently share trustworthy content.”
In a statement, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone disputed the report’s methodology. “This report distorts the serious work we’ve been doing to fight violent extremism and misinformation on our platform,” he said. “Avaaz uses a flawed methodology to make people think that just because a Page shares a piece of fact-checked content, all the content on that Page is problematic.”
Stone said Facebook has “done more than any other Internet company to combat harmful content,” banning militarized social movements including QAnon, and removing millions of pieces of misinformation about COVID-19 and election interference. “Our enforcement isn’t perfect, which is why we’re always improving it while also working with outside experts to make sure that our policies remain in the right place,” he said.
The 10.1 billion number is intentionally broad to “show Facebook’s role in providing fertile ground for and incentivizing a larger ecosystem of misinformation and toxicity,” Avaaz said. But the group also quantified the number of views accumulated by the 100 most popular pieces of content ahead of the election that were flagged as false or misleading by Facebook-affiliated fact checkers: 162 million.
Zuckerberg heading to the Hill
The report’s findings increase pressure on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ahead of an important week in Washington. On Thursday he, along with Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Sundar Pichai, will face Congress for the first time since the storming of the U.S. Capitol by angry Trump supporters and extremists on Jan. 6—an event that was partly planned on their platforms. Two subcommittees of the House Energy & Commerce Committee are expected to grill them on how their algorithms amplify disinformation and allow the spread of extremist ideologies.
Avaaz also said it found 118 pages, with nearly 27 million followers, still active as of March 19 on the platform, that had shared what the group said was “violence-glorifying content” related to the election. The group said that 58 were aligned with QAnon, anti-government militias, or Boogaloo, a far-right movement based on the idea of an impending civil war.
The posts included calls for “armed revolt,” memes about ambushing National Guard members to steal their ammunition, and other violent threats, according to Avaaz. All 118 of the pages were reported to Facebook by Avaaz during the election cycle, Quran said. Facebook removed 18 of them, including 14 after receiving an advance copy of the report on March 19, said Stone, the Facebook spokesperson. The rest did not violate Facebook’s policies, he said.
Getty Images—2020 Getty ImagesCEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg appears on a monitor as he testifies remotely during the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing ‘Does Section 230’s Sweeping Immunity Enable Big Tech Bad Behavior?’, on Capitol Hill, October 28, 2020 in Washington, DC.
The report’s findings illustrate how quickly movements like QAnon and “Stop the Steal” groups, which connected ordinary Americans, political activists and far-right extremist groups in the same online ecosystem, were able to grow before Facebook took action. By the time it removed some of the largest QAnon groups last summer and fall, the movement was far too large to be contained, and its followers simply moved to other platforms like Parler, Telegram and Gab, where some went on to organize for the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Many of the lawmakers set to grill Zuckerberg in Washington on Thursday have signaled that after years of similar hearings, their patience is wearing thin. “We’ve had Mark Zuckerberg in front of the committee, and he gives us superficial answers and a sad face, but he doesn’t go back to the drawing board,” says Rep. Tony Cardenas, a California Democrat on the committee. He says he intends to use his time to question Zuckerberg about Facebook’s failure to stem the spread ofSpanish language disinformationand conspiracy theories. “The bottom line is: he knows and he’s acknowledged with us that they can improve, but they don’t invest in those improvements.”
Will social media face tougher regulation?
The debate over accountability, content moderation, online misinformation and data privacy issues is likely to take center stage in other ways on Capitol Hill in the coming months as well. Democrats have indicated that they intend to make oversight of social media companies a top priority. Sen. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat who was named the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, has said he also expects to call on Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to testify before his panel. Unlike Republicans, who spent hours in previous hearings pressing social media executives on alleged anti-conservative bias, Democrats plan to focus on the platforms’ role in allowing disinformation, hate speech and violent incitement by extremist groups to go unchecked.
Democrats including President Joe Biden have suggested revoking or rewriting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a key legal provision that protects tech platforms from lawsuits for content posted by their users. Advocates for reform say that the law should be amended to make platforms more legally accountable for content including misinformation and incitement to violence. Although Facebook has publicly said it welcomes Section 230 reform, hostile lawmakers could make changes that would increase the company’s costs or force it to rethink its business model.
Facebook only stepped up its efforts to reduce the reach of repeat sharers of misinformation in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, according to Avaaz. In October, it banned calls for coordinated interference at polling stations and posts that use “militarized language” meant to intimidate voters. This included words like “army” or “battle,” Facebook’s vice president for content policy Monika Bickert told reporters at the time. This came after the President’s son, Donald Trump Jr., was featured in campaign videos calling for “every able-bodied man and woman to join Army for Trump’s election security operation” to “defend their ballots.”
At the time, Facebook touted these last-minute changes as decisive actions. The company also said in October that it would display information about how to vote at the top of users’ feeds and add fact-checking labels to false information about the voting process or premature claims of victory by candidates.
The Avaaz report says even these late measures were implemented inconsistently, allowing millions of views on posts that slipped through the cracks between October and Election Day. It also found that copycats of misinformation posts that Facebook’s own fact-checking partners had debunked went undetected by the company’s AI, accumulating at least 142 million views.
“The message I have for Mark Zuckerberg is that Facebook needs to stop publicly scoring its own exams, and allow experts and democracies to audit the platform,” Quran says. “It’s time for Zuckerberg to stop saying ‘sorry,’ and start investing in proactive solutions to these problems.”
Just a few months ago, Jazmine Boykins was posting her artwork online for free. The 20-year-old digital artist’s dreamy animations of Black life were drawing plenty of likes, comments and shares, but not much income, aside from money she made selling swag with her designs between classes at North Carolina A&T State University.
But Boykins has recently been selling the same pieces for thousands of dollars each, thanks to an emerging technology upending the rules of digital ownership: NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. NFTs—digital tokens tied to assets that can be bought, sold and traded—are enabling artists like Boykins to profit from their work more easily than ever. “At first, I didn’t know if it was trustworthy or legit,” says Boykins, who goes by the online handle “BLACKSNEAKERS” and who has sold more than $60,000 in NFT art over the past six months. “But to see digital art being bought at these prices, it’s pretty astounding. It’s given me the courage to keep going.”
NFTs are having their big-bang moment: collectors and speculators have spent more than $200 million on an array of NFT-based artwork, memes and GIFs in the past month alone, according to market tracker NonFungible.com, compared with $250 million throughout all of 2020. And that was before the digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, sold a piece for a record-setting $69 million at famed auction house Christie’s on March 11—the third highest price ever fetched by any currently living artist, after Jeff Koons and David Hockney.
NFTs are best understood as computer files combined with proof of ownership and authenticity, like a deed. Like cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, they exist on a blockchain—a tamper-resistant digital public ledger. But like dollars, cryptocurrencies are “fungible,” meaning one bitcoin is always worth the same as any other bitcoin. By contrast, NFTs have unique valuations set by the highest bidder, just like a Rembrandt or a Picasso. Artists who want to sell their work as NFTs have to sign up with a marketplace, then “mint” digital tokens by uploading and validating their information on a blockchain (typically the Ethereum blockchain, a rival platform to Bitcoin). Doing so usually costs anywhere from $40 to $200. They can then list their piece for auction on an NFT marketplace, similar to eBay.
At face value, the whole enterprise seems absurd: big-money collectors paying six to eight figures for works that can often be seen and shared online for free. Critics have dismissed the NFT art craze as just the latest bubble, akin to this year’s boom-and-bust mania around “meme stocks” like GameStop. The phenomenon is attracting a strange brew of not just artists and collectors, but also speculators looking to get rich off the latest fad.
Beeple/Christie’sBeeple, The First Emoji. Part of the $69.3 million Everydays.
A bubble it may be. But many digital artists, fed up after years of creating content that generates visits and engagement on Big Tech platforms like Facebook and Instagram while getting almost nothing in return, have lunged headlong into the craze. These artists of all kinds—authors, musicians, filmmakers—envision a future in which NFTs transform both their creative process and how the world values art, now that it’s possible to truly “own” and sell digital art for the first time. “You will have so many people from different backgrounds and genres coming in to share their art, connect with people and potentially build a career,” Boykins says. “Artists put so much of their time—and themselves—into their work. To see them compensated on an appropriate scale, it’s really comforting.” Technologists, meanwhile, say NFTs are the latest step toward a long-promised blockchain revolution that could radically transform consumer capitalism, with major implications for everything from home loans to health care.
Digital art has long been undervalued, in large part because it’s so freely available. To help artists create financial value for their work, NFTs add the crucial ingredient of scarcity. For some collectors, if they know the original version of something exists, they’re more likely to crave the “authentic” piece. Scarcity explains why baseball-card collectors, for example, are willing to pay $3.12 million for a piece of cardboard with a picture of Honus Wagner, a legendary Pittsburgh Pirate. It’s also why sneakerheads obsess over the latest limited-edition drops from Nike and Adidas, and why “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli bought the sole copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin for $2 million in 2015.
But baseball cards, sneakers and that Wu-Tang CD all exist in the physical space, so it’s easier to understand why they’re worth something. It can be harder to understand why digital art, or any other digital file, has value.
Some digital-art collectors say they’re paying not just for pixels but also for digital artists’ labor–in part, the movement is an effort to economically legitimize an emerging art form. “I want you to go on my collection and be like, ‘Oh, these are all unique things that stand out,'” says Shaylin Wallace, a 22-year-old NFT artist and collector. “The artist put so much work into it–and it was sold for the price that it deserved.” The movement is also taking shape after many of us have spent most of the past year online. If nearly your whole world is virtual, it makes sense to spend money on virtual stuff.
BLACKSNEAKERSBLACKSNEAKERS, Holding Up The Sun. Sold for: $7,088
The groundwork for the digital-art boom was laid in 2017 with the launch of CryptoKitties—think digital Beanie Babies. Fans have spent more than $32 million collecting, trading and breeding these images of wide-eyed one-of-a-kind cartoon cats. Video gamers, meanwhile, have been pouring cash into cosmetic upgrades for their avatars—Fortnite players spent an average of $82 on in-game content in 2019—further mainstreaming the idea of spending real-world money on digital goods. At the same time, cryptocurrencies have been booming in value, fueled in part by celebrity enthusiasts like Elon Musk and Mark Cuban. Bitcoin, for instance, is up more than 1,000% over the past year, and anything remotely crypto-adjacent—including NFTs—is getting swept up in that mania.
Sensing an opportunity, tech entrepreneurs and brothers Duncan and Griffin Cock Foster last March launched an NFT art marketplace called Nifty Gateway. At the time, NFT art was just heating up in some circles, but it was difficult for newbies to buy, sell and trade pieces. Nifty Gateway prioritized accessibility and usability, helping fuel wider adoption. “It was such an early stage, we didn’t have many expectations about how it would turn out,” Duncan Cock Foster says. But Nifty Gateway users ended up buying and selling more than $100 million worth of art during its first year. Similar platforms, like SuperRare, OpenSea and MakersPlace, have seen similar surges; they typically pocket 10% to 15% of initial sales.
Big businesses and celebrities are getting in on the action: NBA Top Shot, the National Basketball Association’s official platform to buy and sell NFT-based highlights (packaged like digital trading cards), has racked up over $390 million in sales since its October launch, according to parent company Dapper Labs. Football star Rob Gronkowski has sold NFT trading cards of Super Bowl highlights for over $1.6 million; rock band Kings of Leon made over $2 million by selling NFT music. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey put his first-ever tweet up for auction as an NFT, and it’s expected to sell for at least $2.5 million. The past few months have been a feeding frenzy, with new highs almost daily. Perhaps Beeple put it best after his record-setting auction: “I’m pretty f-cking overwhelmed right now,” he told fans and collaborators gathered on chat app Clubhouse.
So-called whales are making the biggest deals in the NFT art world. These deep-pocketed investors and cryptocurrency evangelists stand to benefit financially from hyping anything remotely related to crypto. “A Winklevoss spending 700 grand on a Beeple or whatever is very much marketing spend for an idea that they are heavily invested in,” the technologist and artist Mat Dryhurst says, referring to Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, two well-known cryptocurrency bulls who bought Nifty Gateway in late 2019 for an undisclosed amount.
Pak/Sotheby’sPak, METANOIA. Not listed for sale.
One of those whales is Daniel Maegaard, an Australian crypto trader who made much of what he claims is a $15 million-plus fortune when Bitcoin exploded in value in 2017. Maegaard has bought and sold millions of dollars worth of digital art and other NFT-based goods, like a $1.5 million parcel of land in Axie Infinity, a virtual universe. While Maegaard initially saw NFTs as a means of adding to his wealth, he’s become a true fan of the work, proudly displaying his collection online and excitedly sharing news of new purchases and sales with his followers. He’s particularly attached to a piece called CryptoPunk 8348, an image of a pixelated man who looks vaguely like Breaking Bad’s Walter White. Maegaard, who uses the work as his social media avatar, recently declined a $1 million offer for the piece. “People almost now tie that character to me,” he says. “It’s almost like I’d be selling a part of myself if I ever sold him.”
But even investors who see NFT art solely as an asset to be bought low and sold high are putting money into artists’ pockets. Andrew Benson, a Los Angeles-based artist, has been experimenting with psychedelic, glitchy digital video work for years. He’s landed his work in museums and galleries, but he’s long held a day job at a software company and taken on commission work for musicians like M.I.A. and Aphex Twin to support himself. “For a long time, my perspective has been that the best way to survive as an artist is to not have to survive as an artist,” Benson says.
A year and a half ago, when his plans to exhibit a new series of videos fell through, Benson was plagued with doubt about his future in the art world. “I was thinking, Do I even want to go through the trouble of trying to do this kind of work and finding places to show it?” he recalls. Then, in January, a friend who works at an NFT platform called Foundation asked Benson to submit a piece. Benson didn’t think much of it, but sent over a video that otherwise “would have gone on a website or something,” he says. The piece—which looks something like a kinetic, colorful Rorschach—sold within 10 days for $1,250. Since then, Benson has sold 10 more works in the same price range. He’s now pondering a future in which he could sustain himself entirely through his art. “It really kind of shook my worldview, actually,” he says. “Seeing this work find a context and a place where it matters makes me want to think like an artist more.”
Many other artists working in groundbreaking and sometimes controversial styles are also receiving unprecedented interest from NFT collectors. Art with whirling 3-D renderings, street-style oversaturated color schemes, and hyper-referential (and often crass) cartoons are thriving. These Internet-fueled aesthetics are grabbing the attention of both a younger generation raised on Instagram and a rabble-rousing crypto clientele. “The street art and countercultural styles are being used to reinforce the impression most finance-crypto people have that they are the ‘punks’ in the broader tech and finance world,” Dryhurst says.
Andrew BensonAndrew Benson, Active Gestures 10. Sold for: $3,049
These developments have left many in the conventional art world agape. “You have a lot of traditional collectors who look at the NFT space and they can’t plug it into any acceptable system of belief,” says Wendy Cromwell, a New York-based art adviser. “We’re at a real inflection point: a lot of the deeply experienced people in the art world are older and don’t have the interest or mental bandwidth to parse the language of the Internet.” Following Christie’s Beeple sale, however, rival auction house Sotheby’s quickly announced its own partnership with NFT artist Pak, showing that even if art powerhouses might not understand the genre, they understand its financial potential.
With or without the establishment’s support, a new wave of digital artists is banding together in tight-knit NFT communities, echoing past generations of artists across disciplines and genres hanging out and influencing one another’s thinking, approach and output. “There is a huge ethic of generosity happening in the space,” Benson says. “Typically in the worlds of independent music or fine art, there is a sense that one person is going to make it out of a scene. With this, there’s a feeling of abundance where it really does seem like everyone could benefit.”
In some cases, the whales and minnows are swimming in tandem. The buyer of the $69 million Beeple piece turned out to be a collector group called Metapurse, two anonymous Singapore-based investors who have been experimenting with tech-driven collective-ownership models. In January, the duo bought 20 Beeple artworks, placed them in a virtual museum that can be visited for free, and then fractionalized their new enterprise into tokens which are now co-owned by 5,400 people. Their value has since increased sixfold as of March 16. The duo is considering a similar move with their latest headline-grabbing purchase, which they hope to display in a cutting-edge virtual museum. The idea, says Metapurse co-partner Twobadour, is to “open up both the experience of art and its ownership to everybody.”
Shaylin WallaceShaylin Wallace, Stellar Goddess. Current bid: $2,647
Even as artists, collectors and speculators benefit from the NFT craze, the phenomenon is not without its dark side. The barriers to entry—it costs money and requires tech savvy to sell an NFT—could prevent some creators from joining in on the action. Many are concerned that young artists of color in particular will be left out, as they have long been marginalized in the “traditional” art world. Legal experts are scrambling to determine how existing copyright laws will interact with this new technology, as some artists have had their work copied and sold as an NFT without their permission. “It’s providing another platform for people to take advantage of other people’s work,” says artist Connor Bell, whose work was plagiarized and posted on an NFT marketplace.
Then there are the environmental concerns. Creating NFTs requires an enormous amount of raw computing power, and many of the server farms where that work happens are powered by fossil fuels. “The environmental impact of blockchain is a huge problem,” says Amy Whitaker, an assistant professor of visual arts administration at New York University, though some cryptocurrency advocates argue these fears are overblown.
Theoretically, climate-minded artists could move to some alternative blockchain platform with less environmental impact. They’re already finding ways to bend NFT technology in other beneficial ways. Some, for instance, are setting up their tokens so they’re compensated every time their work is resold, like an actor getting a royalty check when their show airs as a rerun. Taiwanese tech startup Bitmark has started an NFT-like program to give rights and royalties to music producers around the world. And artists who join NFT-based social media sites, like Friends With Benefits, receive fractional ownership in the platform and can receive direct compensation for the work they create through the network, in sharp contrast to existing tech giants like Facebook and Instagram.
For technology evangelists, meanwhile, the NFT frenzy is just more evidence of their long-held beliefs that cryptocurrency, and blockchain platforms more broadly, has the power to change the world in profound ways. Blockchain technology has already been implemented in attempts to make voting more secure in Utah, combat insurance fraud at Nationwide Insurance, and secure the medical data of several U.S. health care companies. Advocates say it could also help companies ensure transparency in their supply chains, streamline mutual aid efforts and reduce biases in historically racist loan-application processes.
“The potential societal impact … is so important that we should do everything in our power to make it manageable, environmentally and otherwise,” Whitaker says. “New idealistic technologies are always really imperfect in their rollout: they can have a speculative boom, and people can misuse them in unsavory ways,” she adds. “I try to stay centered on what’s possible.”
The day Françoise Brougher was fired from Pinterest began like so many of her workdays. It was April 2, 2020, and the company’s chief operating officer—with her rescue dog Dogbert nearby—was a few weeks into the pandemic and remote work, managing her team of 750 from her home in Silicon Valley. The gentlest social media site, built for “pinning” visual inspiration to virtual boards, appeared to be in equilibrium.
Brougher wasn’t giving much thought to the recent brief but irritating meetings and calls she had had with Todd Morgenfeld, the company’s chief financial officer. On a recent Friday, she had texted their mutual boss, Ben Silbermann, the CEO and co-founder of Pinterest, about what she describes as a particularly dismissive and erratic interaction she had with Morgenfeld where he had hung up on her. On Monday, Silbermann suggested Brougher talk to human resources to smooth over the conflict. It was the first time in Brougher’s 30-year career she had gone to HR about her own issue.
Now, a few weeks later, Jo Dennis, Pinterest’s chief human-resources officer, was on the line. “She said, ‘I want to prepare you for your call with Ben tomorrow,’” recalls Brougher, who had a standing one-on-one scheduled with her boss. “‘Your job is going to change.’”
“I said, ‘Oh interesting, can you tell me more?’ She said, ‘No, I cannot,’” says Brougher. “And I said, O.K., don’t waste my time. Put Ben on the call.’”A calendar invite from Silbermann soon popped up on Brougher’s screen. They exchanged brief pleasantries. Then, he fired his second-in-command over video chat. “I never saw it coming,” she says. “I was like the intern, fired in a 10-minute call.”
Lisa DeNeffe“The line was crossed when a description of my performance was reduced to my gender,” says Francoise Brougher.
And thus the French-born engineer, 55, would begin a journey far from her decades of anonymity as a Harvard Business School graduate and respected senior executive at Google and Square, suing a company with a market cap today of $122 billion for gender discrimination—the most senior Silicon Valley executive ever to do so. Now, in her first major interview since her lawsuit settled, Brougher says flatly of her last day at Pinterest, “No, we didn’t have a giant going-away party.”
That month, Ifeoma Ozoma was waging her own battle at Pinterest. The daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Ozoma, a Yale graduate who joined Pinterest from Facebook, had been new to the company’s burgeoning public-policy and social-impact department. Wonky and raised in Anchorage, she was behind widely praised Pinterest initiatives that blocked searches for antivaccination posts and stopped promotion of plantation weddings. She also had concluded that she and another experienced woman on her team, Aerica Shimizu Banks, who is Black and Japanese American, were being paid less than what their job descriptions indicated per Pinterest guidelines. Ozoma’s salary disparity—about $64,000 annually—was significant but not as meaningful as the stock grant given every employee based on position, and hers appeared to be 33,675 shares short of what her job description merited. Post-IPO, she says the shares could have amounted to a value close to $2.5 million over a four-year period of vesting. After human resources refused to increase their compensation, they involved a lawyer. The friction, Ozoma believed, caused her white male manager to snipe with statements such as, “Why does everything have to be about race?” Later, Ozoma’s cell-phone number and internal company emails appeared on extremist platforms including 4chan and 8chan following leaks by a white male colleague, a software developer, to Project Veritas, the far-right activist group founded by James O’Keefe. She received threats of rape and death. She kept a gun. She moved. And then she and Banks, whose allegations of mistreatment were dismissed by the company after repeated internal investigations, negotiated their departures in May.
When, on June 2, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the company posted an earnest Black Lives Matter message on its corporate website and social channels, Ozoma reached her breaking point. “Are you f-cking kidding me?” she thought. Days later, she and Banks, 33, would go public with their stories, violating nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) attached to their severance packages. “I lost my mother in college,” says Ozoma, 28. “I can’t think of a single thing I’ve been afraid of since then, because the worst thing that could happen to me already did.”
Over the next months, Pinterest’s warm, fuzzy veneer would unravel like one of the platform’s chunky knitted sweaters. An employee walkout to show solidarity for Ozoma, Banks and Brougher followed; Pinterest hired law firm WilmerHale to conduct an investigation of workplace culture; a shareholder lawsuit alleged mishandling around issues of discrimination; and a record $22.5 million settlement was paid to Brougher—the largest known settlement for gender discrimination in U.S. history—with $2.5 million of that jointly committed to nonprofits that support underrepresented groups in tech.
Now, nearly a year after their departures, Brougher and the two colleagues she had never met while at Pinterest—all performance-driven, and obsessed with process and results—stand among the most significant figures in a reckoning not just at Pinterest, but in the long exclusionary saga of Silicon Valley, where 5% of tech leaders are women, far fewer are Black or Latinx, and only 2% of venture capital money goes to female founders. Their stories fit an unnerving pattern in an industry once optimistic about changing the world that instead has fallen behind even legacy industries in diversity and inclusion. This, even as study after study, in particular a 2015 McKinsey report, reveals how diverse teams perform better financially. Pinterest, Google, Oracle, MailChimp and Facebook are among the behemoths that publicly champion women and diversity through initiatives and hashtags — even as their own employees come forward as regularly as smartphones on an assembly line with allegations of discrimination and pay disparity. Ozoma calls much of Silicon Valley’s talk performative, or, as she puts it, “diversity theater.”
San Francisco attorney David Lowe represented Brougher and has argued dozens of gender-discrimination cases. His firm handled Ellen Pao’s landmark gender-discrimination case. He calls the stories of professional women “startlingly similar.” “Often the critiques are, like what Françoise heard, ‘You are not collaborative, not good with working with others. Too assertive,’” he says. Being a person of color adds another layer of potential bias and pain, particularly, as in the case of Ozoma and Banks, when a company’s external messaging is at odds with its internal culture or stated company values.
“As you go higher, the number of women and people of color thin out,” says Lowe. “When you get to the apex, there are hardly any. It’s not because they lose talent or interest. In fact they are gaining talent. The only plausible explanation is that stereotypes and subtle forms of bias seep in. It’s like climbing a ladder and then getting knocked down, rung by rung.”
Among all the big talk and little action, the three women are now taking extraordinary steps to help fix things themselves. Brougher says the first two organizations that have received money from her settlement are /dev/color, which supports a professional network of Black engineers, and Last Mile Education Fund, which offers financial support for low-income students to bring them to graduation and into tech. After attorney’s fees and taxes, Brougher and her husband Bill additionally have set aside half of her remaining settlement for groups with similar missions through a donor-advised fund. From the other half, they paid off their mortgage and gave directly to other causes, including medical research. “Some donations will be public, some not,” says Brougher, whose parents never graduated college. “I’m trying to do good with what I got.”
Meanwhile, Ozoma and Banks are flexing their public-policy skills. A California senate committee will hear arguments on March 23 for legislation abolishing employer NDAs around racial discrimination that they and their attorney helped draft. Ozoma raised $108,000 to support the cause and, along with state senator Connie Leyva, Earthseed, her own consulting firm, will act as the bill’s co-sponsor. Ozoma will offer main testimony on behalf of the bill; their lawyer, Peter Rukin, will be the second person to testify in favor, on behalf of the California Employment Lawyers Association. Banks’ powerful letter of support also has been submitted to State Senator Leyva, in which she condemns how NDAs leave victims to “suffer in silence.”
How it happens
In the past decade, social media has been used to share often devastating stories using #MeToo, #BlackLives Matter or more recently #StopAsianHate. Those who post often are met with even more abuse, threats of violence and graphic memes. Consequences for harassment are rare. The consistent message sent to the outspoken: Shut up. Or else.
Pinterest was considered different. A sort of Internet Xanax, since its 2010 launch, it has been a haven for the women who comprise 70% of its users and tilt toward the crafty and domestic. The perils of other social media—the trolling, the culture wars—are largely absent. The top-performing content is about food and drink; after that, home decor. With his benign platform and mild-mannered image, Silbermann, a 38-year-old Iowan, wasn’t a swaggering mononym à la Bezos and Zuck, and certainly wasn’t subject to congressional tongue-lashings or consumer finger-wags. President Trump—presumably not a baker or scrapbooker—never became one of the 459 million users of Pinterest, instead communicating on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram.
It was the potential of that special culture, not yet as buzzy or revenue-optimized as its peers, that attracted Brougher and Ozoma to Pinterest in 2018 a few months apart; Banks joined in 2019. “Like everyone else, I thought Ben was very reserved and thoughtful,” says Brougher. “I was excited.” Another selling point was Pinterest’s upcoming IPO. “Every Big Tech employee’s dream is to work pre-IPO at a company,” says Ozoma. “This wasn’t some no-name startup. This was a company that people love.”
Brougher and Ozoma each would survive Pinterest for only 23 months.
Banks, drawn by the opportunity to lead Pinterest’s Washington, D.C., office, just 12.
At Google, Brougher had run “an unsexy part of [ad] sales,” recalls former Google CFO Patrick Pichette, now Twitter’s board chair. But Brougher became a star, driving revenue for small and medium business to 23% year-over-year growth near the end of her tenure, delivering an annual $16 billion in sales. “She would say, ‘Here’s my return. Here it is by cohort; here it is by month. And here’s what I’ve given you for the last quarter, and what I’m going to do next quarter. And that’s why you should allow me to hire another 46 people,’” says Pichette, laughing. “Resistance was futile … but she also takes the time to listen. Fairness matters to her.”
In 2013, Brougher joined Square, reporting to CEO Jack Dorsey as business lead for the payments platform startup. Like Google, Square had a similar Silicon Valley culture of candor; Brougher recalls the environment as “incredibly egalitarian.” “One of the things we’ve both always agreed on is you come to work to be respected, not to be liked,” says Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar, Brougher’s colleague as Square’s CFO. “I actually didn’t think about my gender a lot. I worked on Wall Street for 11 years, and believe me, I thought about my gender.” They were both part of the team that brought Square to its 2015 IPO. Today it’s worth $107 billion.
Brougher became Pinterest’s first chief operating officer and its most senior woman. Pinterest’s sluggish $500 million in annual ad sales needed goosing before the April 2019 IPO. Brougher was given half the company, including global ad sales and marketing.
Immediately, she noticed something amiss in the San Francisco headquarters: The culture was secretive. Turnover was high. Decisions were made between Silbermann and a small circle—all men—in private sidebars, causing organizational chaos. Recalls Banks: “The entire structure was built on being friends with the CEO.” Soon, Brougher, who calls herself “excessively transparent,” wasn’t being invited to certain meetings. “I asked why once, twice, and there was always an excuse. And then I’m trying at the next meeting to really contribute to the team, thinking, ‘Maybe they will invite me to the next one.’”
A CNBC story in 2019 detailed the dysfunctional culture. The story ran with the headline, “The nicest company in Silicon Valley: How Pinterest’s friendly culture has slowed decisions and hurt growth.” The writer argued that Pinterest’s avoidant culture was diametrically opposed to confrontational styles at an Amazon or Netflix, citing missed revenue targets set by investor Andreessen Horowitz. One former employee, who claimed to be fired for insubordination after criticizing a strategy by one of Silbermann’s staff, told CNBC there was an extremely passive-aggressive climate. Or as Brougher would later say, “Saying what you really thought was still dangerous at Pinterest.”
In response to request for comment on this story, Pinterest declined to make any executives available, but answered some specific questions and issued a statement detailing their commitment to diversity and inclusion and steps they have taken to improve internal culture.
For the first time in her career, maybe her life, Brougher felt self-conscious. “You speak up and have the feeling people are not focused on what you said,” she says. “A lot has been written about ‘othering,’ that you could be viewed as a female or Black first, not as your job.” In his court filing for Brougher, attorney Lowe cited a 2014 study by Kieran Snyder of tech-industry performance reviews that revealed an “abrasiveness trap” for women, where women are given feedback to be nicer and speak less. The study says “negative personality criticism—Watch your tone! Step back! Stop being so judgmental!”—showed up in 2.2% of reviews of men but 76% of women, even when reviewed by women.
“Having a seat at the table matters, but [also] having a voice at the table matters,” says Brougher. “I didn’t think [Ben] was happy when I had a different opinion. I think when it came from a woman, it was much harder to accept.” Adds Lowe, “So many features of Silicon Valley culture—to be disruptive, challenge the status quo, push back on authority—reward men who show up like that, but are negatives in reviews of women.”
Adria Malcolm“The entire strategy was, ‘Lay low. Don’t weigh in on anything,’” says Ifeoma Ozoma. “And I was like, ‘This is not controversial.’”
Ozoma eventually would find this to be true. She interned two summers at Google before starting in its massive public-policy and government-affairs department in 2015. Three years later, she left for Facebook, where she contributed to anti-hate-speech initiatives and community standards. There she grew comfortable challenging leadership. “There were meetings where Mark [Zuckerberg] would address the whole company,” she says. “After Charlottesville, he said nothing about the [white supremacists] who had organized on the platform. During the Q&A, I asked, ‘Why haven’t you said anything to employees about Nazis marching in the street?’” Zuckerberg commended her bravery in asking the question, and the audience applauded. He admitted he should have spoken up sooner. Ozoma then questioned Sheryl Sandberg about the difficulty in reporting hate speech in the Messenger app; Sandberg said she would escalate a product fix to make it easier. But Ozoma says people looked shocked when Sandberg, appearing to deflect Facebook’s blame, discussed how much Zuckerberg donated to support social-justice causes. She saved the email the head of diversity and inclusion, also a Black woman, sent her after. “When you asked the question of Mark … there was so much energy in the exchange. I’d love to get a solid understanding from you about what you are feeling and expressing.” Still, there was no retaliation. “Facebook is direct,” says former head of content at Facebook, Janett Riebe, who would later be a colleague at Pinterest as its safety policy manager. “Radical candor would be a euphemism to describe it.”
In July 2018, Ozoma became the second employee at Pinterest in public policy and social impact, a new department amid growing calls for tech accountability. (Ten months into her job, in May 2019, she helped recruit Banks, a seasoned veteran from Google and of the Obama Administration, with a master’s from Oxford.) Ozoma believes from her first meeting she ran afoul of leadership when she questioned the company’s decision to keep InfoWars’ Alex Jones on the platform. “The entire strategy was, ‘Lay low. Don’t weigh in on anything,’” says Ozoma. “And I was like, ‘This is not controversial.’ This is someone who is harassing the parents of Sandy Hook.” Shortly after an inquiry from the tech news site Mashable in August 2018, Mashable reported that Pinterest had removed InfoWars from the platform.
Ozoma, like Brougher, kept pushing for change at Pinterest, developing relationships with the World Health Organization and the CDC to manage health misinformation. She also pushed to stop promotion of plantation weddings. “The not-nice way of saying it is, I am a sh-t starter,” she says. “It was, ‘How do we differentiate ourselves not only having the product but also values and matching the two?’” Her six-month performance review, delivered by her manager Charlie Hale, said she “always exceeded expectations.” Ozoma even received a gift from the company acknowledging her “leadership”; the email informing her read, “Look at you, Rising Star!”
But Ozoma, Banks and Brougher separately had unearthed issues with their compensation. (A 2017 study found Black women in tech were paid 21% less than white men for comparable jobs; all women 16% less.) Ozoma was representing Pinterest in media, and before members of Congress and the U.K. Parliament. Upon seeing the company’s hierarchy of “levels”—an organizational practice used in companies to assign pay—she believed her job description would have put her at a Level 6 instead of Level 4. The company argued she didn’t have enough experience to advance levels, though the documentation didn’t specify years of experience as a requirement. She enlisted attorney Rukin, who had represented plaintiffs in a class-action against Wells Fargo and other discrimination cases. Finding her own leveling at 5 instead of 6, Banks also enlisted Rukin. “[My lawyer] was like, ‘I’ve never had a prospective client this organized with this much documentation,’” says Ozoma. “He told me, ‘I don’t anticipate needing to work more than 10 hours on this.’” Ten months later, with matters still unresolved, he filed complaints for both clients with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH). (A Pinterest spokesperson says the company looked thoroughly into Ozoma’s and Banks’s concerns about whether they were properly leveled, and determined that their pay and level were appropriate. Both DFEH complaints were ultimately settled in mediation.)
Meanwhile, Pinterest’s public-policy work kept gaining applause. Banks created a partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau; Ozoma was quoted on the front page of theWall Street Journal,and the U.S. Surgeon General retweeted a tweet that name-checked Ozoma. Proudly, Silbermann, the son of two doctors, put the tweet in the company Slack. “The day that I was on an interview with [NPR’s] Audie Cornish, I was exchanging emails with my lawyer,” says Ozoma. “I wasn’t threatening. They knew that I was so loyal.” But, she says, Hale took a turn. In one performance review, he acknowledged her work in deprioritizing slave-plantation content but said she should have provided “the pros” of promoting slave plantations. She says he would also verbally remark on her “tone” (as Banks said he would later do with her). After her personal information was leaked online by a male colleague, Ozoma says, even though she texted Silbermann screenshots of the threats she was receiving, the company did not help her have the content taken down, and she relied on friends from other tech companies. Riebe says the winds were shifting. “Once she persisted [about pay], it got nasty,” says Riebe. “She was starting to be kept out of loops. She had a fantastic reputation, and then [there was] a slow morphing into, ‘You are too much.’”
Banks was feeling gaslit even before she officially started. Hale told her Pinterest wouldn’t publish a press release announcing her, a customary gesture by tech companies to inform Congress and lobbyists of a new point person. She says a recruiter also asked in a phone call that she not share details of her offer. (Since 2015, it has been illegal for California employers to ask workers to keep compensation confidential.) It all gave her a funny feeling. But Banks already had resigned from Google and felt “between a rock and a hard place.” In her first month, she alerted the general counsel and other senior members of the team about the risk of employee information leaking from a potential attack from Project Veritas. The group claimed to be holding information from Pinterest. Banks says she was brushed off and told not to reply to the email chain again. The information dump ended up including the personal details about Ozoma shared on 8chan and 4chan.
In September 2019, Banks says Hale scolded her for not looping him in before Silbermann signed a “CEOs for Gun Safety” open letter to the U.S. Senate that earned wide praise (Pinterest disputes that account.) Soon after, Hale, Ozoma and Banks would recommend reversing a new Pinterest decision made by senior leadership to eliminate holiday pay for the lowest-paid contractors in food services, sanitation and security, many people of color and some disabled. An internal email suggests that the PR department grew concerned after an employee heard two of the workers bemoaning the cutbacks. Banks, whose mother was a low-wage housekeeper, was tasked with drafting the proposal; she consulted with two of the company’s outside lobbying firms. She sent the proposal to general counsel Christine Flores; a long, painful chain of emails followed where Banks was accused of not following process or being professional. “She told me it wasn’t my place to interfere in business decisions,” recalls Banks. Flores told her the decision was being reversed, but that she had nothing to do with it. Flores later initiated an investigation, claiming Banks lied about buy-in from the lobbying firms. (A Pinterest spokesperson says the company disagrees with this characterization of their exchange.) Banks says one of the firms, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, denied their formal involvement to Flores. Banks, however, kept notes from their meeting, and emails, reviewed by TIME, where Brownstein execs congratulated her on the decision reversal. She and attorney Rukin never learned the outcome of the investigation. In her next review, Hale said a goal should be to “build her credibility.” She continued to represent the company before the Department of Justice and members of Congress. She went on antidepressants for the first time in her life.
Eventually, Rukin would represent both women in their confidential negotiations to separate from the company. Banks was replaced by a white man.
That same year, a routine filing for Pinterest’s IPO disclosed, among other information, compensation of the highest-paid executives, and Brougher learned of her own inequity. Brougher says she had been told that all executives had the same vesting schedule for their stock grants: 10% the first year, escalating to 40% in the fourth. She saw she was the only executive in leadership whose equity vested that slowly. In her first year, she vested 37% of what her closest peer, CFO Morgenfeld, had. She went to Silbermann; HR adjusted the grant. But that seemed to make things worse. She says she was disinvited from board meetings. When 2019’s Q3 revenue targets were missed, she discovered engineering and product issues that contributed to ad serving problems. After raising the issue, she says she was disinvited from product meetings, which Silbermann oversaw. In her next review, she was told she was “not collaborative.”
Spencer Platt—Getty ImagesA Pinterest Inc. banner hangs from the New York Stock Exchange on the morning that Pinterest Inc. makes its initial public offering in New York City, on April 18, 2019.
Morgenfeld gave Brougher a peer evaluation in January 2020 (she was not asked to give one to him). Prompted to provide written remarks about her positive qualities, he came up with just one line: She “seems to be a champion for diversity issues.” “It was very hurtful,” says Brougher. “I’m keen to be recognized for my merit vs. my gender.” Indeed, Brougher rarely wore her gender on her sleeve.The Informationeditor-in-chief Jessica Lessin recalls once proposing a story to Brougher when she was at Square about Dorsey’s female lieutenants. Brougher, recalls Lessin, said to her, “There is no upside; there are so few of us.”
On Silbermann’s advice, Brougher called Morgenfeld to clear the air; she says he called her a liar about her description to Silbermann about their previous conversation and hung up on her. Silbermann shrugged, and according to her legal complaint, told her they were like “an old couple fighting over who would make coffee.” Brougher was aghast. After that, Morgenfeld stopped speaking to her entirely. Brougher wrote Dennis one last time for help. She never answered. A week later, Brougher was fired, offered the standard severance from her employee agreement, asked to sign an NDA and to sign off on an announcement that she “resigned.” She refused. “I said, ‘You just let me go. Please write whatever you want. But write the truth because you are accountable for the truth.’” She called friends including Pichette. “She was angry in the way she can be where she stays calm. Laser guided,” he says. “She knew she was done wrong.”
The fight for fairness
On June 2, Pinterest, like other companies, posted Black Lives Matter messaging after George Floyd was killed. “With everything we do, we will make it clear that our Black employees matter,” wrote Silbermann on the company website. Incredulous, Ozoma and Banks, 13 days later, laid bare details from their Pinterest tenures on Twitter. The women rolled out their words like a policy campaign: writing tweets in advance, deciding what time to post and giving their extensive press contacts a heads-up. They went viral. Lady Gaga posted the news on Instagram.The WashingtonPost,Fast Companyand NPR jumped on the story.Insidertalked to nine more Pinterest employees with similar stories about abusive behavior, lower pay, and medical and psychiatric problems said to have arisen from company toxicity. “People were crying every single day,” one employee toldInsider.
It was the first time Brougher learned about what happened to Ozoma and Banks.
Brougher had been working with her attorney, Lowe, on a settlement. When Lowe’s firm had represented Pao in her 2012 trial against venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins, it had been the highest-profile case alleging gender discrimination in Silicon Valley. During the trial, in something media deemed the “Pao effect,” women at Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft would also sue for gender discrimination, inspired by her actions. “Ellen’s case broke ground not just for Françoise but for others,” says Lowe. Pao was offered a settlement but declined due to its requisite NDA. She lost her jury trial. The opposing counsel at the time, attorney Melinda Reichert (who would also serve as opposing counsel for Pinterest against Ozoma, Banks and Brougher) gave a 2015 interview to Bloomberg Law, where she discredited gender discrimination as a reality: “I just find that kind of hard to believe because I look at women who are successful — like Sheryl Sandberg. She says that women have to do things differently than men do to succeed. If you’re constantly thinking that you’re being treated differently, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Lowe tried bringing Pinterest to the table for a financial settlement for nearly five months. He was ready to file suit, but Brougher wanted to write a blog post in her own words as well. Uber engineer Susan Fowler had done so a few years ago, triggering a chain of events that led to CEO Travis Kalanick’s ousting. “I wanted to explain that there is a build up to [these things], the culture allows behavior,” Brougher says. “The line was crossed when a description of my performance was reduced to my gender. When I complained about the discrimination and was fired four weeks later — that was retaliation.”
On Aug. 11, Françoise Brougher v. Pinterest, Inc. was filed in California superior court. And Brougher—after a family meeting with Bill and their three kids—posted an essay on Medium under the headline, “The Pinterest Paradox: Cupcakes and Toxicity,” detailing in clean, spare language her experience at the company.
Like the tweets earlier, her story caught fire. Jack Dorsey retweeted the story; Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, tweeted: “This story from @FrancoiseBr is important showing discrimination against women in the workplace. Françoise is one of the best execs I’ve worked with so it can happen to anyone.” Three days later, Pinterest employees staged their walkout. Says Ozoma, “It was a visceral reaction from employees at a company where employees don’t have visceral reactions.”The Vergesummed up a view gaining traction: “The nicest company in tech is looking pretty mean.”
Brougher reached out to meet Ozoma for the first time through mutual friends. Both have an understanding of the complicated intersection of their stories, one that ended with a privileged white woman, already a millionaire, receiving even more millions while the two less senior Black women did not (Ozoma got six months of severance, lost her unvested stock, and is paying COBRA for her insurance; Banks won’t disclose her settlement). “I was so proud that my speaking up could lead to the second most powerful person at the company speaking up,” says Ozoma. But, “the way history has always worked is that Black women lead a movement and then get left out usually in the telling of it. Thankfully, the history had already been written.” Ozoma contacted reporters who didn’t acknowledge the intersectionality. “But at the end of the day, my issue has always been with Pinterest and will always be with Pinterest.”
Jared Soares for TIME“Racism and sexism are intertwined,” says Aerica Shimizu Banks, who recalls the impossibility of determining, “is this a racist or sexist thing that happened to me?”
Meanwhile, Pinterest spiraled. In September,the Vergereported that a Pinterest finance employee who reviewed payroll data and discovered that Black people at the company were paid less than white counterparts was reprimanded by HR. (Pinterest denied the employee was reprimanded, and said an investigation revealed that the employee’s comparators were wrong.) A few weeks before Brougher’s settlement announcement, an investor lawsuit was brought by the Employees’ Retirement System of Rhode Island, which oversees $8.5 billion in assets. The suit claimed Pinterest executives and board members breached their fiduciary duty by failing to respond to allegations of workplace discrimination. The complaint alleged that the CEO “repeatedly placed himself before the Company, surrounding himself with yes-men and marginalizing women who dared to challenge Pinterest’s White, male leadership clique.”
That may have been a trigger for the company to finally act. An internal document reviewed by TIME laid out how the company’s chosen public response to a media crisis depends significantly on how severely senior leadership believes a story will impact the stock price.
On Dec. 14, Brougher and Pinterest announced their settlement — minus an NDA.The Information’s Lessin says a certain pragmatism may have been at work: “Companies are competing to be the best place to draw the best talent. It used to be jockeying for engineers with free food. Now they have to compete for culture.” Though theGuardianreported that Ozoma and Banks felt like the settlement was a “slap in the face,” Ozoma clarifies: “Not a slap in the face from Françoise. But a slap from Pinterest because … What is the point of speaking up first and doing all this work, both physical and emotional labor, to then not even be credited properly?” Neither Ozoma nor Banks would receive additional money or hear from Pinterest again.
Pinterest declined to make any executives available for this story. But a spokesperson emailed this statement: “The leadership and employees at Pinterest are committed to a shared goal of building a company we can all be proud of. One that’s diverse, equitable and inclusive, where employees feel included and supported. Over the past year, we’ve made a number of changes to improve our company culture, including revamping our unconscious bias training, more pay and level transparency, developing an employee-led change network, and working to improve representation in our workforce, especially for senior positions.”
Moving forward
Brougher has spent the last couple of months between her California home and her childhood hometown in France, hiking and spending time with her family after separately losing both her mother and her father in early 2021. She isn’t losing sleep over being marked as a troublemaker. (It’s a position she knows she’s privileged to be in; her 2019 compensation at Pinterest was $21.7 million.) Asked whether Silicon Valley companies may be hesitant to hire Brougher in the future, Pichette says, “Not the good ones.” Ultimately, during her tenure annual revenue grew from about $500 million to $1.1 billion, and Pichette believes Brougher was largely responsible for much of Pinterest’s success today. But she’s keeping her options for the future open—whether C-suite or advocacy. Her contributions to /dev/color and the Last Mile Education Fund became the largest individual donation either organization had ever received, and she has created a spreadsheet to study more potential beneficiaries.
Meanwhile, Ozoma and Banks are spearheading a movement. In 2018, in response to the #MeToo movement, California had passed the STAND Act (Stand Together Against Nondisclosure Act) that banned NDAs in cases of sexual harassment, assault and discrimination. But when Ozoma and Banks violated their NDAs, they weren’t protected from talking about racial discrimination. “Racism and sexism are intertwined,” says Banks, who recalls the impossibility in determining from her experience, “Is this a racist or sexist thing that happened to me?” Through Rukin, Ozoma and Banks reached state senator Connie Leyva, and they drafted the Silenced No More Act. The law would “empower survivors to speak out—if they so wish—so they can hold perpetrators accountable and hopefully prevent abusers from continuing to torment and abuse other workers,” Leyva said in a release. If it passes through committee, it will go to the floor for a vote this summer. When asked if Pinterest supports the legislation, a Pinterest spokesperson deflects, emailing that employees, among other internal remedies, can call the company “hotline” to report “inappropriate conduct.”
Both women have since launched their own companies: Ozoma started Earthseed, a consulting firm that advises on public policy and, yes, tech accountability; Banks launched Shiso, an advisory and consultant firm around issues of diversity, equity and inclusion in tech. They were gratified to see Pinterest add two Black women to its board. “Black women, whatever comp is being offered, take it,” Ozoma says, but “I wish they had gotten on the board without the stink of what happened at Pinterest.”
As for the ripple effect, “There is a head on a stake in the middle of the town now,” says Pichette. Referring to ousted Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, he says, “The Travises of the world, the VCs … It’s now like, ‘Travis, you can’t do that.’ Those days are over.” He says boards and bosses now have something to point to. “People can say, ‘We’re not paying $50 million’ because of [your bad behavior].” He believes the Valley’s real change will come from startups, where they have a shot at getting it right from the outset, arguing that the biggest companies are “freaking huge aircraft carriers with all the problems of discrimination and everything else, and 150,000 people … once you’re up to 30,000 engineers and 20% are women, you will never get out of it.” Nextdoor’s Friar says, “It is definitely a flag to every company. It’s not just a cultural thing. There could be massive business ramifications.”
PinterestPinterest’s headquarters in San Francisco.
Problems are easier to identify than solutions of course. Since the Pinterest implosion, several tremors have rocked Silicon Valley. Timnit Gebru, a co-leader of Google’s Ethical AI team and one of its best-known Black female employees, says she was fired after criticizing the company’s lack of progress in hiring women and people of color, something that impacted biases built into AI technology such as facial recognition. A white female AI researcher, Margaret Mitchell, was later fired as well. A colleague in AI tweeted that the company was running a “smear campaign” against the two women. And the U.S. Labor Department recently announced that it was giving up on its class-action suit alleging pay disparities at Oracle withheld $400 million in pay to Black, Asian, Latinx and female workers.
In other words, broken culture remains as ubiquitous as cookies on a computer. “Clearly there’s something wrong with the numbers,” says Friar, “because there’s just no way half the population isn’t showing up in half of the slots.”Brougher says we will know we have equity“when we see mediocre women getting through the executive ranks because I can tell you there are a ton of mediocre men.”
At Pinterest, the stock price recently hit its all-time high.Forbessays Silbermann today is personally worth $4.1 billion. All the managers named in the women’s stories remain at Pinterest except for HR lead Jo Dennis. On Nov. 13, four weeks before Brougher’s settlement was announced, Dennis sent a note to the Pinterest staff saying that “after 24 years of nonstop work” she had decided to spend more time with her family. Banks calls Dennis “the scapegoat.”
“The woman got the blame as usual,” says Ozoma. “They should all be held accountable. But you know what? They can never run away from this even when their kids look their names up online. This will always be tied to them. For that, I will forever be grateful to the Internet.”
—With reporting by Mariah Espada, Simmone Shah and Julia Zorthian
