00:01:13.720I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files.
00:01:17.400Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable,
00:01:21.100abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:01:24.740These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:01:28.800Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:40.600There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.
00:01:48.720I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.
00:01:54.740So we all know the Internet loves a viral story.
00:01:57.760It loves outrage, suspense, villains, drama, all of it.
00:02:01.600But what happens when the story is about a real woman who says that she has been the victim of a sex crime and the platforms that ostensibly should be protecting her punish her instead?
00:02:13.540That is what happened to this woman called Livy, a DoorDash driver in New York State whose story recently went viral on TikTok.
00:02:19.740I wanted to talk about this on the news roundup, but honestly, I had so much to say about it that I thought this needs to be its own episode because I think it shows us so much about where we're at right now when it comes to the state of women speaking up online.
00:02:35.680Mike, when we were talking about potentially doing an episode about this situation in the beginning, when I first started researching it, I was just curious about this story.
00:02:44.520I was seeing this story all over my TikTok feed and I wanted to understand it better.
00:02:48.500But by the end of putting together my research and really doing a deep dive into what's going on here, I went from curious to pissed off and also quite worried about what this situation means for all of us.
00:03:02.340So I'm going to get into the logistics of what's going on here with this viral DoorDash story on TikTok, how AI is fueling how we got to this place and what it all means.
00:03:12.920It seems like a complicated story, an interesting one.
00:05:15.120All of their lights were on and they were sleeping on the couch within eyesight of the front door with their pants and underwear pulled down to their ankles.
00:05:23.300This person's name is Austin and their last initial is N.
00:05:26.700I reported this to DoorDash and the police and DoorDash luckily banned the customer, but the police are doing nothing.
00:05:33.880I also posted the video that I have of the proof to TikTok, and after a day and a half of it going completely viral, TikTok took down the video for suggestive content and gave my account a strike.
00:05:47.300They've also denied my appeal to have it reinstated.
00:05:50.360I'm absolutely reposting the video again, but with a little censor blur so it can't be removed for the same reason, because this is literally the only justice I'm getting.
00:05:58.940In the wake of my victimhood, the police are doing nothing to prevent or stop this man from doing it again.
00:06:05.220And they're not doing anything to punish him for already having done it.
00:06:09.420So if the only justice I'm going to get is the fact that he's banned off the platform and that video went viral and now he can live with that shame and embarrassment, then that's what it's going to have to be.
00:08:41.080that they're investigating to make sure
00:08:42.340that Libby gets whatever full payments she's owed
00:08:44.980from the work she had done from DoorDash.0.55
00:08:46.860because she had not been able to cash out before her account was deactivated.
00:08:50.940Though, I have no idea if they're going to make good on this.
00:08:53.740It's just what they said in their statement.
00:08:55.480So DoorDash is basically saying, you know,
00:08:57.620hey, we didn't deactivate Libby's account because she reported a sex crime.
00:09:01.140We deactivated her account because she posted a video of a DoorDash customer.
00:09:05.940I'll say it would have been nice if DoorDash told Libby this directly
00:09:09.220rather than simply deactivating her account with money in it.
00:09:13.040But as we'll talk about in a moment, the whole dynamic of gig work is that companies like DoorDash don't really have to do shit because they don't have employees, they have contractors.
00:09:23.820And so I get where Livy is coming from, but that is sort of the nature of the beast here.
00:09:28.740So a big question that is coming up online is whether or not Livy should have made this video in the first place.
00:09:34.840Livvy says that she had wanted video evidence of what happened. And I will say, had she come to the Internet without video evidence of what she says happened, I'm sure the conversation would have been entirely different.
00:09:47.100yeah and you know there's something about this story that really makes one want to like i don't
00:09:54.780know like like weigh in or like pulls you in to want to say like what she you know was she in the
00:10:00.940right was she in the wrong should she have done this or that or uh something about the story
00:10:06.100really pulls a person in i think and i think you're totally right that without that video
00:10:11.380So it's hard to even imagine that there would even be any story there beyond, you know, just what what she's going through.
00:10:19.120Exactly. And a lot of people are saying, oh, well, I wouldn't have an issue with what she did if she just sent that video directly to DoorDash and left it at that.
00:10:27.400Like, why did she have to post it to TikTok? And I get that.
00:10:30.260Livvy says that she called the non-emergency police line to report this to the police after she reported it to DoorDash.
00:10:37.500She says a police officer actually came out to speak with her about what she wanted to do.
00:10:42.120She said that she wanted to press charges, if possible, to make sure that this guy was not able to do this to another person.
00:10:48.620In one of her videos, she actually points out that this guy lives in a duplex.
00:10:52.460And she says, what if there had been a kid out on the porch on the other shared unit?
00:10:57.560And so she said that she wanted to report this to the police just to make sure that this wasn't going to be a recurring thing with this guy.
00:11:04.560But she says the police told her that she couldn't really press charges in this state because this man was in his own house and that it wasn't like he got up to lunge toward her or anything like that.
00:11:15.960So Livvy says that she posted it because the police essentially weren't doing anything about it, weren't taking it seriously.
00:11:22.320But her posting that video to TikTok is what DoorDash says is the reason for her being deactivated from the platform.
00:11:29.220Honestly, I can't act like I don't see where DoorDash is coming from here, that they probably
00:11:33.600can't have DoorDashers posting videos of their customers like this on TikTok.
00:11:39.260Now, would I have done this if I were Libby?
00:11:42.660Probably not, because personally, at this point in my life, I almost never think that
00:11:47.580bringing something to the internet is going to make a situation better.
00:11:50.720These days, I have only seen the internet getting involved, making things worse, but
00:11:56.440But I also think we really crave perfect victims, right? Victims who would act and behave exactly like we think that we would act and behave in whatever situation. So the fact that Livy is doing something that I personally would not do doesn't mean anything, right? I think that we really have this idea when we hear something like this, we think, well, what would I do? And if this person didn't do things like I think I would do things, something must be up. She must be lying. That's a red flag.
00:12:25.380I also think the fact that Livvy is on TikTok talking very loudly about this thing that happened to her, I just think people don't like that.
00:12:36.000Like, I'm sad to see that people have taken one specific bit from one of Livvy's many videos about this where she's very upset, and they've turned it into a really hurtful meme on TikTok.0.93
00:12:49.460A man's world! I'm the victim! Remember?
00:12:54.220So they've taken a screenshot, which is a close up of her face, while Livvy is pleading with people to remember that she is the victim in this situation.
00:13:03.580And it's been making the rounds on TikTok.
00:13:05.200If you check the comments of Livvy's other posts on TikTok, people are putting that screenshot of that image of her face, very pained while speaking about this situation, in the comments to make fun of her.
00:13:18.640Her face in this image is tortured and pained because she is very upset.
00:13:25.240And it reminds me, if you've seen that image of it's kind of if you Googled liberal feminist1.00
00:13:31.700triggered, it's a picture that makes her look like she is screaming.0.93
00:13:35.460And it's an image that's become a meme when people want to reference sort of triggered,0.98
00:13:42.220But when you actually look at the real full video that that image was taken from, it's0.90
00:13:47.980a it's a feminist woman in a campus debate and she's just having a fairly normal conversation1.00
00:13:56.080with somebody it's a conversation that's like somewhat hostile because she's citing rape0.69
00:14:00.660statistics or something but she's not screaming she barely even raises her voice in that video
00:14:06.060the only issue is is that she has an expressive face and so in this image she looks like she is1.00
00:14:13.800screaming or having some sort of a triggered feminist meltdown. But really, she's just having1.00
00:14:18.960a pretty normal conversation with someone. I would say even like a fairly civil conversation with
00:14:23.560somebody. And yet online, she has become the face of triggered lying feminists everywhere.1.00
00:14:30.820Never mind that men like Alex Jones and Andrew Breitbart, like, do you remember seeing what they1.00
00:14:36.720looked like when they would talk? They would be frothing at the mouth and screaming and veins
00:14:43.160popping out of their necks and foreheads and fans loved it so the rules are simply different for men
00:14:49.820you know andrew breitbart did not become the face of triggered men everywhere when he would have
00:14:56.680legit freakouts on camera yeah the the outrage and the performative like energy i think was a big
00:15:04.760part of it for those guys absolutely so i think this image and clip of livy speaking with a pained
00:15:12.200face, having a big emotion, says a lot about how we want and expect women to behave after
00:15:18.220experiencing something traumatic and how much stigma there is around labeling oneself as a
00:15:23.100victim. I also think we want victims who are quiet about what they've experienced. When someone is
00:15:28.300screaming about it, even if whatever happened to them is worth screaming about, I think for a lot
00:15:33.720of people, they automatically assume that that person screaming is in the wrong because what we
00:15:39.040actually want is a society where women who are harmed also just shut up about it. So people are
00:15:44.760also taking issue with the fact that Livvy says that she was, quote, sexually assaulted in her
00:15:49.880TikTok, saying, how could someone sexually assault you if they didn't touch you, if you never had
00:15:55.300physical contact? This is a little bit in the weeds, but according to the Office on Violence
00:15:59.480Against Women, the term sexual assault means any non-consensual sexual act prescribed by federal,
00:16:05.600tribal, or state law, including when the victim lacks capacity to consent. But in a legal sense,
00:16:11.440state laws can vary, so can the definitions used for sexual assault. So flashing or indecent
00:16:17.580exposure may be a sexual offense and a sex crime, but it is not always classified legally as sexual
00:16:25.360assault in a strict legal sense because that depends on the state. It really strikes me as an
00:16:30.800odd thing to get hung up on, this specific legal designation the way that a lot of people
00:16:35.660have on TikTok to call Libby a liar, but I did want to mention it. And I guess I wish that all
00:16:41.960of this discourse about the technical definitions of sexual assault versus sexual offense versus
00:16:46.320sex crime was happening in an effort to educate people rather than belittle this woman who says0.88
00:16:52.040that she was forced to look at a stranger's penis while just trying to do her job, but here we are.0.61
00:16:57.040Like I've seen a lot of people say Libby is lying about saying that she was sexually assaulted and that minimizes actual sexual assault and makes it harder for actual victims.0.70
00:17:07.700But indecent exposure is very much a sex crime, even if it is not specifically legally categorized as sexual assault.
00:17:15.400It's very clear to me that people who are bringing this up are trying to use it to parse Libby's words, to make her look like an unreliable narrator and a liar.
00:17:25.000They're not doing it in an effort to actually advocate for victims of sexualized violence, because even if this is not legally a sexual assault, the way that Libby says it is, it is still a sex crime.
00:17:37.080Yeah, I think a good sort of test for that sort of thing is like, why don't you try it at work?
00:17:42.480Like, if it's not actually any sort of a problem, just go ahead and do it at work and see what happens.
00:17:47.060Yeah, I want all of these guys who are saying it's not actually a crime.
00:17:52.280Yeah, do it to your HR lady and see what she says.
00:19:29.280Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable.0.98
00:19:33.700I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.
00:19:38.160I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:19:45.240They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:19:49.680But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:19:53.120They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:19:56.760Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:20:05.200If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:20:11.140This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:20:23.620I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:20:30.720I'm going to have to look up this story.
00:20:33.860From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:20:40.260It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
00:20:48.180Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.
00:20:57.340Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:21:13.200So Livvy posts this video to TikTok and says that TikTok took action against her for uploading this video.
00:21:20.300She says the app initially removed her video and issued a strike against her account when she initially posted it with the man with his pants down visible.
00:21:28.560She uploaded it again, obscuring the man's junk from the video, but that video was also removed and she got a second strike.
00:21:36.980Now, if it sounds like I'm being super careful and specific about how I'm describing the situation,
00:21:43.460it is because the entire internet, okay, well not the entire internet,
00:21:47.020but a whole hell of a lot of people have decided that Livy is lying about what happened.
00:21:52.520Because at first, it seemed like people were supporting Libby, and then something turned.
00:21:58.960And to me, it seemed like one of the many examples that we have of a woman being smeared by millions of people online for speaking up about something that she says happened to her, right?
00:22:11.160There's a whole shade of something that we talk about a lot on the podcast when people appoint themselves as investigators to litigate the details of other people's personal lives.
00:22:21.260I think there's a lot of true crime brain rot out there that happens where people online decide that they know the real story that the rest of us aren't being told about what's happening with these strangers.
00:22:34.320And it's one of the reasons why when these stories come up, which they often do online, I am the, you know, wet blanket voice that says maybe it's not good to have millions of people jumping into the business of strangers in this way.
00:22:48.100I totally get that it is exhilarating. Who doesn't love going down a rabbit hole of somebody else's drama? But it's one thing when we're talking about a fictional character. It's another thing when we're talking about a real everyday person.
00:23:03.020We saw it with West Elm Caleb, the guy who worked at West Elm, who met a bunch of women on a dating app and was making them all personalized playlists on Spotify to woo them.
00:23:13.760We saw it with that TikTok woman who, surprise, visited her long distance boyfriend and he gives her kind of a weird, chilly reception and the entire Internet decided that he was cheating on her because they all became body language experts.
00:23:26.000We saw it with that Coldplay concert couple, you know, that couple who made a very weird kind of caught reaction when they were on the Jumbotron canoodling at a Coldplay concert and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin wondered out loud, like, oh, they must be having an affair, which, by the way, I have no idea if this is true.
00:23:45.020But after the hubbub died down, I read that at least one of the couples in that situation said that, yeah, I'm still legally married, but I've been separated from my spouse for a while when that Coldplay concert happened.
00:24:03.260But when these big moments happen that light the internet on fire, everybody is talking about somebody else's life. I think they truly illustrate how deeply surveilled we are socially as a society, how we are doing the surveilling and we are the surveilled.
00:24:19.900And I think this is especially bad for women because when the internet turns on women, even famous women who are the victims of abuse, people like Meg Thee Stallion or Amber Heard, it's not just speculation. It is the reliable misogyny of the internet being so easily weaponized against her to smear her and silence her.
00:24:40.800All the old tropes around gender that we all know, women lie for attention, women can't be trusted, good innocent men are having their lives ruined over nothing by lying bitches.0.96
00:24:53.740All of these tired old tropes that permeate how we talk about and understand gender get dialed up to 11 on social media because misogyny will always find an audience online just by the nature of how social media is designed.0.97
00:26:22.880So one is just sort of logistical.0.89
00:26:24.780Because Libby had to remove the original footage that she uploaded to TikTok from the platform,
00:26:29.520it has become somewhat difficult, though not impossible,
00:26:32.160to find the original video that she uploaded about the situation.
00:26:35.680And that has allowed people to really fill the gap in with their own idea of what must have happened.
00:26:41.020So if you search TikTok for DoorDash lady, DoorDash situation, whatever, you will find people saying with certainty that, yes, they know that Libby pushed this closed door open.
00:26:52.740That has just become accepted as fact in this situation.
00:26:56.500When I was just doing research, somebody on a different platform, Threads, said, oh, why is everybody, what's going on with this DoorDash situation?
00:27:04.160And somebody else replied, she opened a closed door and is acting like she's a victim because of it.
00:27:16.340Everyone's just saying they've seen proof, but there is no proof.
00:27:19.520There are even people making jokey TikToks purporting to recreate Livvy's POV where she pushes open a closed door and then whines like,
00:27:30.080Oh no, I'm being assaulted by a naked man in his own home.
00:27:34.160I have to say some of these videos being made to make fun of Livy do seem to be AI generated.
00:27:44.900They're using AI generators like Sora. But I'm sad to say that a lot of them that I've seen are real people, real women taking the TikTok to make fun of Livy for saying this happened to her.
00:27:58.900So it's just sort of become understood as the facts of what happened without any proof at all that it's actually true.
00:28:07.720And importantly, there are people saying that there is another angle or that the man in this situation uploaded ring camera footage proving that Livy actually opened a closed door without his permission and was the one violating him.
00:28:24.880I kind of went down the rabbit hole on this one.
00:28:28.280You know, we talked a little bit about how with the Taylor Swift conversation, how you can just really sniff it out when a conversation happening online is not happening in a normal, authentic way.
00:28:41.460You can just tell where there are real people jumping on a bandwagon.
00:28:46.920And then also some of it is not authentic conversation.
00:28:51.180Mike, I know that when we were having a pitch meeting, I was trying to explain what was going on with what I had seen on TikTok.
00:28:57.520And I felt like when we were speaking, I felt compelled to keep reiterating to you that I was 100% stone cold sober while I was speaking about this because I felt like the way that I was talking about it made me seem like I was not sober.
00:29:13.800Yeah, I remember you showing me a couple of videos back to back where totally different people were saying the exact same thing, like word for word, the exact same script about like I woke up and I saw this story and I had to get into it.
00:29:31.440but like word for word and it it was weird it was like felt like uh like living in the truman show
00:29:38.980or something like the algorithm was these videos were created just to like convince you of something
00:29:46.800yes so it is not totally uncommon for a human creator to recreate a tiktok that another human
00:29:55.960creator has made like i've seen that i know that happens but that wasn't this this was
00:30:00.140the same identical cadence the same idea it was it was yeah it was as if they were reading a script
00:30:05.980and then i realized one of these is ai like genuinely i thought i was going crazy until i
00:30:13.380saw this tiktok that broke it down everybody's talking about the doordash girl i was looking
00:30:17.560at certain videos and i came across this one i saw the original video of the doordash girl and
00:30:22.400i'm a little bit confused now that i woke up and see everything that's happening when i saw it i
00:30:26.200I said, hey, I understand why DoorDash.
00:30:28.560Well, I guess fired you and why you're a block from the app.
00:31:24.620If I'm just swipe, swipe, swiping, I don't think I would have clocked that this is AI if I had not also come across this woman saying, hey, this isn't me.
00:31:31.900It's an AI clone of me that somebody has made.
00:31:35.000So you can really see how the proliferation of AI can turbocharge manipulated, inauthentic conversation about a hot button charge topic, even when it's not about a big celebrity like Taylor Swift, but a regular person like Livy.
00:31:51.960I really think slash hope that there will be a time in the future when we look back at this era when it's totally legal and fine for whoever to be creating all these AI generated videos that just like steal people's likenesses, purport to be real people, even though they're not.
00:32:14.400and just like flooding the information ecosystem that we all have to live in just flooding that
00:32:22.240with these fake accounts that are not fake but like inauthentic that are purporting to be
00:32:27.220real humans when they are not and it's just it's just like fine like the platforms don't really
00:32:33.720care it's totally legal it's not sustainable and so i i really think at some point in the future
00:32:39.940we're going to look back at this time and just like shake our heads. And I can't wait to get
00:32:44.820to that future. Yes. And what's so interesting to me is the woman who was cloned, the real woman,
00:32:51.240really put it well that this is a credibility issue. If you are a big TikToker and you make0.94
00:32:57.600your living, like I'm a podcaster, I make my living putting my ideas out into the world,
00:33:03.580expressing myself, using my voice. If somebody cloned me, which please don't do that if you're
00:33:08.660listening and you're thinking, I'm going to make a Bridget Claude. Please don't. But if somebody
00:33:11.740did, that could materially harm me as somebody whose credibility and body of work depends on
00:33:18.740people being able to trust me, people being able to take what I say as something they should be
00:33:24.840listening to, to help them understand the world. If somebody steals my voice and my likeness to
00:33:29.300just say whatever, to weigh in on things that I would never weigh in on, or put ideas out into
00:33:34.340the world that i would never express that could materially harm me in a real way yeah that's not
00:33:40.620like some new concept like we've had laws about that sort of thing for many many years right you
00:33:47.180can't just like impersonate someone else like obviously there are laws against that in the
00:33:52.420offline world but somehow with this new technology people are acting like it's fine
00:33:57.740Even though it's like the exact same dynamic and the exact same risk.
00:34:03.640But what if you could impersonate somebody else and make a little change doing it?
00:39:58.620They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:40:03.080But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:40:06.540They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:40:10.140Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:40:18.600If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:40:23.580This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:40:37.000I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:40:43.980I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.
00:40:47.240from best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments
00:40:52.140nothing is off the table it's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters
00:40:59.340and that is the trojan horse whether you're looking for literary deep dives smart pop culture
00:41:04.500conversations or a community of readers who love to think a little too much you're in the right
00:41:09.660place listen to pro society on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts
00:41:29.700It is entirely possible that Livy did push that door open and then whip out her phone and start filming to make a video that backs up her version of events.
00:41:41.420It's entirely possible that that happened.
00:41:45.480I am a mere spectator here, just like everybody in this situation. But to me, that makes absolutely no sense. It just doesn't pass muster.
00:41:54.940Earlier in this episode, you talked about how this whole story, one of the things that shows is how surveilled we all are. And I think that's a good insight. And part of that fact of life these days is that there's an expectation of surveillance that, of course, there's going to be multiple camera angles and there's like more footage from somewhere else.
00:42:20.360And, you know, I have to wonder if that maybe is part of why people are so eager to believe that the other footage is out there because, you know, this thing happened and there's a lot of interest about it.
00:42:33.560And so, of course, there has to be more footage when, in fact, most things that happen in the world do not get recorded on video.
00:42:39.820Yeah, but again, I think it goes back to that true crime brain rot where people assume everything is going to happen the way it would happen in a fictional movie or a fictional series.
00:42:53.020And in reality, there probably isn't going to be any, you know, extended footage that she didn't know was being recorded that comes out.
00:43:02.120It could happen, but I feel like if it was going to happen, it would have happened already. Right.
00:43:06.980The footage that we have is the footage that we have.
00:43:09.720And, you know, this claim that Livy pushed the door open herself, you know that my forever problematic fave is Judge Judy.
00:43:21.480She has this thing that she says where she says, if something doesn't make sense, it's because it's not true.
00:43:27.100And to believe that Livy pushed that door open herself, you would have to believe a lot of things that just to me don't make any sense.
00:43:34.220So the door was either open or the door was closed. If it was open, then Livy's story and the results that followed all make sense. Checks out. Got it.
00:43:43.620But if the door was closed, like people on the Internet would have you believe to exonerate this man, that means that Livy, as a door dasher, walked up to a closed door with an order.
00:43:54.400rather than leaving the order on the porch as she was instructed to do for some reason opened this
00:44:01.180closed door without permission on the off chance that there might be a man exposing himself in
00:44:07.380there and jackpot could you believe it there was what are the odds then took out her phone started
00:44:13.220recording recorded it in such a way that made it seem like that door had just been open posted it0.99
00:44:18.600the internet just to get hordes and hordes of negative attention that led to her losing her
00:44:24.200only source of income. Why? What would be the end game? Like, it just does not make sense.0.61
00:44:30.620And when you add in the fact that we know that women lying about things like sexual violence0.85
00:44:35.260is statistically very uncommon. I think that most studies estimate that false report rates
00:44:40.340are something between 2% and 8%. The overwhelming majority of reports of sexual violence or
00:44:46.060misconduct are true. But when you already have a narrative in your head that women lie about0.92
00:44:52.820sexual abuse for attention, which the internet definitely adds to, none of that reality makes
00:44:58.760any sense. It all just goes right out the window. And I think it illustrates how people will believe
00:45:03.960absolutely anything without proof to validate this worldview about women and support a worldview
00:45:10.480where people don't speak up when something like this happens to them. If the entire internet is1.00
00:45:15.140going to come together and use this arsenal of AI tools to discredit a survivor of sexualized
00:45:20.420violence, less and less people are going to come forward. And I have to think that is the point of
00:45:25.020all of this. And here is something that I just have to add and have to say. A lot of people on
00:45:33.540TikTok are saying, hey, this guy was just drunk or high, passed out in his own home. Even if he
00:45:40.160did have the door open, he didn't really do anything wrong. So obviously, as I said,
00:45:46.580I don't know any more about this situation than anybody else does. I'm just watching it from the
00:45:50.640sidelines. But come on. Women know when a man is trying to expose himself to get his sexual kicks.
00:46:02.120We know. I have had strangers expose themselves to me twice in my life. The first one happened
00:46:09.200when I was maybe 15, a man, I was walking down the street outside of my high school and a man
00:46:15.180called me over and was like, I'm in his car and was like, I'm, can you help me? I'm lost looking
00:46:19.400for directions. He had a map unfolded out on his lap. And when I came over, he moved the map and
00:46:27.020exposed himself to me. And it wasn't a misunderstanding. It wasn't ambiguous. I didn't
00:46:35.100like misunderstand something. I knew exactly what was going on instantly right away. Women know when
00:46:42.920a man is trying to do this. The fact that people are rushing in to give this man the benefit of the0.98
00:46:48.280doubt, I think is really discounting the reality that women live in where this kind of thing
00:46:53.160happens. I have to wonder if the men who are saying, oh, this is totally normal behavior,
00:46:58.860even if he did leave the door open and have his self-exposed, it's not that big of a deal.
00:47:02.440I think that they are trying to create the conditions where if they did that or something similar, it wouldn't be a big deal.
00:47:08.160That's the only reason I could think why you would jump to normalize what I think we all can sort of see is like not normal behavior.
00:47:15.600So, again, this is just my opinion, but you're not going to be able to convince me that somebody who summoned a door dasher to their home just happened to be waiting adjacent from the porch that they summoned them to with their pants down.
00:47:27.180I'm unwilling to believe this was not purposeful.
00:47:29.260This is my opinion, but it is backed up by so much research about what we know women experience who are doing gig work.0.59
00:47:39.620Because gig work, things like Lyft, Uber, Uber Eats, DoorDash, it's just like this for women.
00:47:45.960A study by University of British Columbia interviewed 20 women gig workers in home services, food delivery, and rideshare in the U.S. and Canada0.99
00:47:53.860and found that women often experience harassment,
00:48:22.720That same research highlights that platforms often have gender agnostic design in that the systems do not account for women's specific vulnerabilities.1.00
00:48:32.280And that gender agnostic design just leads to women workers opting out of riskier time.
00:48:38.060So saying, I'm not going to go to this. I'm not going to I'm going to not take this order if it's dark out or if it's in a bad neighborhood or something like that, which then worsens income gaps.
00:48:46.880A separate study by The Markup found that among app-based drivers in Chicago, a high percentage felt unsafe and that female drivers reported higher rates of sexual harassment.
00:48:58.220Another UK-based study found that while app-based couriers who are mostly male faced harassment and assault, female couriers had particular difficulties accessing reporting mechanisms and felt less supported.
00:49:10.140So the research about women in gig work pretty much backs up what most of us anecdotally probably already knew, that this kind of sexualized harassment and abuse of women gig workers is not rare.
00:49:22.940It's actually an occupational hazard recognized by scores of research.
00:49:27.700That's why I didn't want to say Libby was fired from DoorDash, really, because in a gig economy, it just comes with a lot less support for workers, especially workers who are women who are victims of sexualized abuse while working.0.96
00:49:41.260That's kind of the nature of the beast with the gig economy.0.95
00:49:44.680There's a lot less support structures, things like reporting and deactivation protections and retaliation protections.
00:49:50.580And when they do have these things, they're pretty inconsistent. The design of the gig economy, you have people who these companies say are independent contractors, not employees. Things like app rating systems and algorithmic dispatch often puts workers in vulnerable positions where they have less insight and don't have access to things like formal HR.
00:50:09.660Or, you know, humans, we know, can be pretty variable in these uncontrolled environments.
00:50:15.940On top of that, you have this power asymmetry baked in, right, where the worker risks losing access to the platform or getting bad ratings if they complain, where they might get kicked off of this app that is a source of income for them that they need.
00:50:30.640And so all of this makes it a perfect environment for the kind of thing that Livy says that she experienced while doing DoorDash.
00:50:38.760And so while all these big creators on TikTok are arguing that Livy pushed this door open without permission to engineer this whole thing to make herself an online victim, my question is, what is more likely that Livy manipulated this whole situation just to get attention online and make herself sound like a victim online?
00:50:58.720or that this guy was sexually harassing a woman gig worker in a way the research could not make
00:51:05.960clear is incredibly commonplace for women who do this kind of work. And so my question is,
00:51:12.180why are we not talking about what we know about the risks and lack of support for women in the
00:51:18.300gig economy like Livy? In a different social media landscape, that would be the conversation we will
00:51:23.800be having. But I think it's a lot more lucrative to instead talk about how Livy is a liar who is0.94
00:51:30.380lying for attention on the internet. And the man who exposed himself to a gig worker did nothing
00:51:36.560wrong. Because if there's one thing that this moment with Livy has showed me about the internet,
00:51:42.200especially big accounts on platforms like TikTok, and honestly, across every platform,
00:51:47.340is that they will straight up lie about a woman who says that she was a victim of sexual abuse
00:51:53.160if it gets them clicks and that is a problem these people are materially benefiting from
00:52:00.300lying about livy there is money in outrage there's clout in being the first one to jump on a story
00:52:06.380whether or not it's true i saw somebody with lots and lots and lots of followers say that livy had
00:52:12.440been arrested for a false report for falsely calling 9-1-1 to report this man to the authorities
00:52:18.880Keep in mind, Libby herself said that she called a non-emergency line and that a police officer actually showed up to have a conversation with her about it.
00:52:25.920So why would she have been arrested for that?