Going viral taught me the internet is broken — but fixable | Deja Foxx

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Deja Fox was 16 years old when she went viral online and it turned her life upside down. In her talk, the activist and content creator shares the good and bad sides of online fame and how it led her to recognize the importance of women-owned and led social media platforms. To create a safer, more equitable and more inclusive online world, Deja says we must build the girl internet of the future. After her talk, check out my interview with Deja on this feed.

0:42We sat down while on site at the TED conference in Vancouver in 2025 for our Beyond the Talk interview series to learn more about her work.

1:01I was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona by a single mom. And when I was 15 years old, I moved out because of her struggles with substance abuse. The next year, 2017, while living with my boyfriend and his family, my senator voted to strip the funding that I needed when I walked into a clinic with no money, no insurance and no parents to walk out with the birth control I needed to take control of my body, my future. It was personal, and I told him so at a town hall meeting in Mesa. I asked if birth control was helping me to be successful, reach for higher education, why would he deny me the American dream?

1:47Millions of people saw that video overnight. I had gone viral. My life went from private to public. Requests from CNN rolled in to go live. The Washington Post called me the new face of Planned Parenthood. Social media put me, a 16-year-old girl working at a gas station on even footing in the public discourse with a United States senator. My world has opened up in unimaginable ways because of social media, both good and bad. And in the nearly decades since, it's made possible things I couldn't have even imagined. But I've seen the dark side of insidious algorithms and the ways that companies profit from them.

2:38Like the day in 2021 when a stranger labeled me the enemy. Four days later, hundreds of thousands of impressions, 60 ,000 likes, 4 ,000 retweets, 600 replies later, and this cyber mob had filled my DMs and comments across all social media platforms. And now I need you to be in my shoes for a second. 20 years old, isolated by an ongoing pandemic, and to reach for your phone first thing in the morning, because it's also your alarm, to wake up to threats to your personal safety and information, have a notification center full of comments about how you look and speculation on an identity that you yourself are only just coming to build.

3:32Social media platforms didn't have a solution. for the hate that they facilitated, but young people in my community did. Maya and I met on Instagram through Gen Z Girl Gang. That's the digital collective I founded out of my dorm in 2019, and ever since, we've been committed to redefining the practice of sisterhood in digital spaces. In 2021, we had never met in real life. But when I needed her, she was there. She sent me a text, a lifeline, if I can be honest with you, send me your passwords. She went in and deleted hateful comments and DMs before I could ever even see them, knowing that otherwise I would be forced to open, experience, and clear each and every one alone.

4:29We deserve respect for our rights, privacy and safety by design, not as an afterthought.

4:40And clear protections against hate and harassment that are informed by our experiences, standing up for ourselves and our friends. I've seen countless gestures like this one in my time running this digital collective. In our pandemic support chats, girls who had never met volunteered their stimulus checks to help a long-distance bestie in need. They've shared thousands of internships, job opportunities, fellowships that have become career-making moments, first jobs for women they may never meet. Big tech wasn't coming to save us, but girls like my friends just might. In my experience, it is teenage girls that are the digital strategists of our time.

5:28in an internet not built for us. We have built narrative and political power one viral video at a time.

5:40We've developed survival strategies like Maya to protect ourselves and our friends, and we're not stopping there. We're building a new, better way of being online, no matter your generation or your gender. So let me be the first to welcome you to the girl internet.

6:00Archive of Her Own was founded in 2008. If you ask almost any girl my age about it, she'll respond with the story of her introduction to the internet via its sometimes salacious fan works. But even more subversive is its structure. A non-commercial, non-profit archive, run by an elected board, completely volunteer-powered, supporting a user base of over 8 million, and its legacy brings us new, younger builders like Sarah Nakve, whose experience running One Direction Stan accounts as a teenager has transformed into an AI-powered, VC-backed search engine for the fangirls called Lore. And then there's Sunroom, where the girls get paid to exist.

6:46Think OnlyFans, personalized, monetized content, but for everyone from fitness instructors to career coaches, and yes, obviously, hot girls. But with content moderation done through a woman's lens and zero tolerance for harassment and hate speech. And if you still have questions about the digital world that we're building, there's DM. Founded by an all-women team, it's built to feel like you're asking questions in the girls' restroom at 1 a.m. Founded in 2023, it has a user base of over 100 ,000 and saw an increase by 700 percent in searches in the days following the U.S. presidential inauguration in 2025.

7:32And that's no surprise, because a quarter of their searches are about reproductive health. And they're serious about our privacy, guaranteeing anonymous searching in a moment where major platforms are censoring women's health information. And respect for their consumers and creators is actually built into their business model. They reward conversations that train their algorithm with gems. They work a lot like credit card points. You can use them at your favorite brands or as donations to the causes you care about. I even saw a dad of two little girls coming to DM to ask for advice. He came away with everything from book recommendations to affirmations from fellow users.

8:16So while these apps are built by and for the girls, their benefits go far beyond. They model an internet with respect, control, ownership. And they have more in common than just being built by women. They model a new, better architecture for a digital world that we are building. And this matters. Because in a world where 39 percent of adults under 30 get their news on TikTok, this isn't some frivolous teenage pastime. This is the new public square. And we should not be forced to participate in hate-for-profit business models, just to participate in that public discourse. This year alone, we've seen migrations from TikTok to Red Note, Twitter to Blue Sky.

9:21As entrenched as the current platforms may seem, they're not permanent. These social media platforms that influence the policies of countries, entire economies, are by and large younger than me. And I was born in 2000. Not to mention that many of the men who founded them were younger than me too, and in the case of Facebook, at least, at its origin was more interested in rating their female classmates than democratizing who gets to participate in our political and public discourse. I stand in front of you today because of the internet. The college essay that I wrote on my phone earned me a place at my dream university on a full ride, the first in my family to go to college.

10:17A DM, a direct message on Instagram, led to a job on a history-making presidential campaign. And the following that I have built online has turned into the support I needed to launch my very first run for office.

10:37I believe in the promise of the internet. And I'm asking you to join my generation to fight for it. Let's build our digital future together. Thank you.

10:56That was Deja Fox speaking at TED 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonsika Sungmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faze Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

11:39Thank you.