Over the past four years, Christine Su has expanded AI-powered recommendations on eBay and tackled safety issues at Twitter (now X), taking on knotty ethical concerns over generative AI and free speech on social media platforms.
But there was a time when Su found herself drawn to the pastoral life, far removed from the dynamics of social media. In her twenties, after a few years in consulting and private equity, she quit her job. “I burned out pretty quickly,” says Su, who uses she/they pronouns and currently oversees strategy for personalized recommendations at eBay. To recover and reset, they decided to spend a summer working on a dairy farm in Japan. “That actually was a very important, seminal experience to know that I don’t function without mission and purpose in my work,” Su says. “As long as we’re all in this corporate capitalist model, how do we use it—and the power that it can drive—for good?”
After going to business school and completing a master’s degree in land use and agriculture, Su started a software analytics startup called PastureMap to help incentivize farmers to embrace sustainable and regenerative practices by giving them a digital platform to manage their grazing land with. By the time PastureMap became profitable, managing six million acres of grazing land across the world, Su concluded that the company had gone as far as it could without more sweeping legislative changes. “You eventually do need collective action; you do need regulatory intervention,” she says. “The next step change would have [been] to pass laws. And I was like, I don’t know if I want to be a lobbyist for the next 20 years.”
They were also looking to pivot, after seven years of running a climate startup. “If you’ve been in the climate space, especially if you do any climate justice work, the burnout rate is super high,” Su says. Once again, they felt like they needed to take a breather.
So she sold PastureMap and took a job at Twitter, where she was tasked with addressing some of the platform’s most intractable issues related to content moderation and conversational safety. “I think I really am attracted to big, hairy, systemic problems that are likely to take a lifetime and a lot of collective action to untangle,” Su says. In a meta twist, she found herself on the receiving end of harassment on Twitter not long after she joined the company, when the right-wing site Breitbart picked up a story about her appointment to the role.
During their time at Twitter, Su says the company empowered users to exercise more control over their experience on the platform. One such feature gave users the ability to limit replies on tweets. Twitter also rolled out Safety Mode, which enabled users to automatically block accounts that used “potentially harmful language.” Su says their team at Twitter—and now, at eBay—was always grappling with difficult questions about how to balance the competing interests that were inherent to the platform.
“eBay is a marketplace of everything the world has to offer,” Su says. “Twitter is a marketplace of ideas. How do you do that without hatred and misinformation and racism running rogue—things that are repugnant and actually cause real world harm? How do you balance speech and a marketplace of ideas against harm, especially to the most marginalized communities?” As someone who is both Asian and nonbinary, Su also felt their point of view was invaluable, especially given they had experienced that harm firsthand. “It’s absolutely critical for folks with these perspectives to be in the rooms where the product is created,” Su says.