Hi, I’m Savannah! 👋

About

I’m a policy leader with a focus on building healthy platforms through content policy, responsible product development and product policies, and public policy. I am currently the Senior Director at Discord, where I get to build new, restorative-justice models for content moderation and improve teen safety tools! 💜

I previously worked at Twitter as a Sr. Product Trust Partner in Trust & Safety. The Product Trust works with product managers early in the product development process to assess abuse risks and build new features with health by design. I covered Topics, Home Timeline, Notifications, Communities, and building healthy recommendation systems with the Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability (META) team.

Before Twitter, I worked as a Director at Civic Hall - a collaborative innovation center and nonprofit that advances the use of technology for the public good. In my role, I led the development and implementation of digital skills training programs for non-profits and government agencies. You can read more about my methodologies here. I also taught human-centered design as a faculty instructor with CUNY TechWorks.

I studied at Columbia University’s Institute on the Study of Human Rights M.A. program with a concentration on technology and user-generated content platforms. See more below.

My previous work centered on gender-based violence prevention. I worked at Breakthrough, a human rights organization working to make gender-based violence culturally unacceptable, and NO MORE, a PSA campaign against sexual and domestic violence.

I also founded Bruin Consent Coalition – a White House-recognized sexual assault prevention campaign combining education, arts activism, technology, and advocacy. My activism was featured on CNN, MSNBC, LA Times, and VICE.

Research

My academic research explored the radicalization of white women to organized white supremacy on reddit, Twitter, and YouTube. I focused my investigation on the ways content policies, trust & safety mechanisms, and recommendation algorithms facilitate the radicalization process. My resulting thesis was aptly titled Online Radicalization of White Women to Organized White Supremacy.

The study found white women were radicalized by engaging with posts and joining communities focusing on beauty, anti-feminism or “The Red Pill,” traditionalist gender values or #TradLives, and alt-right politics. White supremacist recruiters leveraged gendered topics and weaponized platform features – likes, sharing, comments, recommendation algorithms, etc. – to cultivate a sense of community. Through involvement with these communities, women were introduced to racialized perspectives on each topic, usually after a catalytic pop culture or newsworthy event, and slowly radicalized to organized white supremacy.