When DoorDash supply driver Livie Rose Henderson posted a video alleging that one among her clients sexually assaulted her in October, it set off a firestorm of reactions.
Henderson’s TikTok claimed that when she was dropping off a supply in Oswego, New York, she discovered a buyer’s entrance door huge open and inside, a person on the sofa together with his pants and underwear pulled right down to his ankles. Henderson was dubbed the “DoorDash Lady,” and her video accrued tens of tens of millions of views, together with some supportive and consoling responses to what she mentioned she had endured on the job as a younger girl. Many others on the platform made commentary movies that referred to as into query Henderson’s alleged victimhood, defended the client, and unfold misinformation, with TikTok’s algorithm seemingly amplifying these “scorching takes.” Then, following Henderson’s November 10 arrest—she has been charged with illegal surveillance and the dissemination of illegal surveillance imagery—a brand new wave of reactions emerged. (Police have dismissed her sexual assault allegation.)
None of those responses got here from Black content material creator and journalist Mirlie Larose.
However Larose opened TikTok sooner or later to search out dozens of messages from associates and supporters alarmed by a video of her responding to the scenario in favor of the client and DoorDash’s determination to terminate Henderson. (Henderson was fired for sharing a buyer’s private info on-line, DoorDash spokesperson Jeff Rosenberg tells WIRED.) As Larose stared on the video in disbelief, for a cut up second she second-guessed herself as she grew to become flushed with nervousness concerning the remark part “tearing her aside.”
“Did I movie this?” she requested. “It is my face, it is my hair.”
“Then, inside three or 4 seconds, I observed one thing’s off. There is not any manner I mentioned this. I did not [want to] speak about this subject,” Larose tells WIRED. The video had been AI-generated.
The scenario highlights an more and more widespread type of digital blackface, buoyed by the rise of generative AI. The time period, popularized by tradition critic Lauren Michele Jackson, describes varied modern forms of “minstrel performances” on the web. This seems just like the overrepresentation of response GIFs, memes, TikToks, and different visible and text-based media that use Black imagery, slang, gestures, and tradition. TikTok’s reliance on attention-grabbing short-form video content material, coupled with apps like Sora 2, has made it far simpler for non-Black creators and bot accounts to undertake racialized stereotypical Black personas utilizing deepfakes. That is also called digital blackfishing.
Within the midst of the DoorDash/Henderson controversy, customers on TikTok started to note two movies specifically: one from a bot account and one other from an precise Black content material creator parroting the identical script. They adopted seemingly DARVO (Deny, Assault, and Reverse Sufferer and Offender) positions, minimizing the allegations Henderson made and justifying her termination: “I noticed the unique video posted by the DoorDash woman, and … I perceive why DoorDash fired you and why you are blocked from the app.” The movies go on to say, “As for the man, I can see why everyone seems to be saying he did it on objective. However if you have a look at the unique video, that sofa will not be in eye view except you angle your self and look over, and in case you actually wish to break it down, he’s inside his home.” In a assertion on Fb, the Oswego Metropolis Police Division mentioned the male was “incapacitated and unconscious on his sofa on account of alcohol consumption” and that the video was taken outdoors his home. Police additionally mentioned they “decided that no sexual assault occurred.”