Profile of Christine Su, Twitter's senior PM for conversational safety, who is a queer Asian-American “activist-entrepreneur” with an MBA and MA in agriculture
Context & Ripple Effects
Protocol's profile of Christine Su lands mid-run in the outlet's coverage of the people building platform safety from inside and outside the companies. On the outside sits Tracy Chou's Block Party, launched weeks later, which lets users filter trolling and harassing Tweets for later review — a tool born because in-platform controls weren't enough. On the inside, Facebook had already hired Miranda Sissons as its first human rights chief amid waves of online hate against minorities.
The piece also fits Twitter's own longer arc: the company hired Apple's Jeffrey Siminoff as VP of diversity and inclusion back in 2015, and by 2019 reported a workforce that was 40.2% female, 4.5% black, and 3.9% Latinx. Staffing a senior PM role for conversational safety with someone whose stated identity and background map onto the populations most targeted by abuse is part of that same institutional response.
First-order effects
- As senior PM for conversational safety, Su owns product decisions on how Twitter surfaces and limits abusive conversation — the exact failure surface Block Party was built to patch from the user side.
Second-order effects
- If Twitter ships effective native filtering under owners like Su, demand shifts toward third-party review tools like Block Party, forcing them to differentiate on workflow (batch review, curation) rather than basic blocking.
Third-order effects
- Trust and safety is consolidating into a named executive discipline across platforms — Sissons' human-rights post at Facebook, Twitter's D&I leadership line since Siminoff — meaning moderation outcomes increasingly trace to specific hires and their mandates rather than ad-hoc policy.
The trend: Platform safety is professionalizing on two fronts at once — staffed in-product teams inside the companies and independent user-side filtering tools — with each pressuring the other to improve.