Are you there Twitter? It’s me, Nina.

Nina Lutz
10 min readFeb 26, 2020

This was originally done for an assignment for Ethan Zuckerman’s class Fixing Social Media.

Hi, I’m Nina. I was born and raised in Arizona, USA. I am a cisgender, white passing woman in her twenties who primarily dates men. I speak English and Spanish and have a smart phone. I have no visible disability and at a US ladies size 12 I am not actively discriminated against for my size. I have no children and I am a graduate student at MIT.

Basically, I am very privileged and especially from a data and media collection standpoint — modern media is basically catered towards me.

I can look on almost any mainstream social network and see people who look like me. If you are in the United States, I encourage you to look at your Instagram Discovery. I bet you can find plenty of white girls my age on there. Look at the trends on Twitter. There are a lot of white and hypereducated trends and voices on the national level (after all, it is election season and Elizabeth Warren is affiliated with Harvard). Listen to Tik Tok — you’re going to hear English and Spanish quite often.

In entertainment I can count on actors and actresses that look like me and have similar conveyed values and aesthetics to me. In music I have a huge variety of artists that are singing narratives I could be a part of.

And while representation has improved, we are far from any sort of level playing field. More representative and diverse images are still not the default in a lot of cases.

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Nina Lutz
Nina Lutz

Written by Nina Lutz

Instead of making computers think like people, I want to use them to make us think about other people.