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Payton Iheme’s broad career has taken her from intelligence gathering in the military to advising the White House on science and technology. Working for a dating app wasn’t the most obvious next step.
But as Bumble’s head of public policy for America, Ms. Iheme, 43, has found a cause that synthesizes her past experiences, as varied as they are. She is leading an effort in several states to pass legislation that punishes “cyberflashing.”
The term refers to sending unwanted sexual images to another person through digital means – on a dating app or social media platform, as well as through text or other file sharing service, such as AirDrop. (Apple, the maker of AirDrop, has not responded to requests for comment.) For many people of a certain age, especially women, cyber flashing has become another cost of living on the Internet.
This winter, while walking through a speculative Smithsonian exhibit called “Futures,” Ms. Iheme said the goal of her work is to challenge the norms of online interaction.
“How do we want people to communicate on the Internet?” she said. “Should you have a section of the population whose experience is this kind of despicable harassment?” About one-third of women under the age of 35 in the United States have experienced sexual harassment online, according to a Pew Research Center survey. This legislative work, Ms Iheme said, “is that we draw a line in the sand and be able to stand up and push back against all negativity and intimidation.†
Viktorya Vilk, the digital security and free speech program director at PEN America, said cyberflashing and other online abuse tactics “are part of a deliberate effort to push women and marginalized voices off the internet and make people feel unsafe in public.” , at home, on their phone, on their laptop.”
A YouGov survey in Britain found that 40 percent of millennial women have received an unsolicited photo of male genitalia. For girls aged 12 to 18, that proportion is even higher, according to an academic report funded by several universities and organizations in Britain. Three quarters of the girls surveyed said they had received lewd photos from men, and the majority described them as unwanted.
“Everyone understands how inappropriate it would be if I were out in public and someone dropped their pants in front of me,” said Carrie Coyner, a Republican member of the Virginia House of Delegates. “But for some reason we haven’t recognized that the same behavior is no different when it’s sent to you on your device.” In partnership with Bumble, Virginia recently passed a law that entitles a recipient of an unwanted lewd image to $500 in damages.
Ms Iheme said that in terms of privacy and security, digital spaces are comparable to public spaces in the physical world, especially for people who have been using the Internet since childhood.
“The damage that happens online is just as real as it is offline,” Ms Iheme said. “Older people go online for a few things. For the younger generation, the internet is ‘the things’.”
In Wisconsin, Senator Melissa Agard, a Democrat, teamed up with Bumble in January to introduce a bill against cyber-flashes. It was not voted on during this session, but she said she will push the bill again in January. Bills like these aren’t just about punishing offenders, she said. “They give people the opportunity to talk about consent,” she said.
Ms. Vilk, of PEN America, said that cyberflashing legislation is important, but it should not be used as an excuse by tech companies to shift responsibility for user security. She noted that Bumble has linked its policy work to other efforts, including installing artificial intelligence software that detects and blurs lewd photos. (Those who share such photos without permission may be blocked from the app.)
Bumble, a dating app where women should make the first move, began pushing for anti-cyberflashing laws in Texas in 2019, where the company’s efforts helped pass a bill banning the sending of lewd photos without permission. made the recipient a class-C felony.
“The lesson learned is that it’s not an easy task to pass on things like this,” said Ms Iheme, who joined Bumble in 2021. Since then, Bumble has been working with politicians in California, New York and Pennsylvania who are writing their own bills that are at various stages of the legislative process.
Getting support for anti-cyberflashing legislation was an uphill battle. With every state that Bumble enters, Ms. Iheme and her team must re-introduce the concept of cyberflashing, explain what it means, find stakeholders to work with, and figure out how to shape legislation for local voters.
Nima Elmi, who oversees public policy for Bumble in Europe, said the United States presents a particular challenge in getting laws passed. “The personalities of policymakers, the political affiliations, all that means they might as well be individual countries in their own right,” she said of the various states. Negotiating those differences, she said, requires a person who is sensitive to nuance, tenacious and agile.
Over lunch at Old Ebbitt Grill, one of her favorite Washington restaurants and a watering hole for the city’s rulers, Ms. Iheme explained how working for the military had helped her hone those skills.
“Military personnel have certain cues and signs of a person’s seniority, what their position is in the environment, whether they are friend or foe,” she said. “When you walk into a room or drive into a place, it is better to immediately assess what that situation is. Now it’s people in blazers and suits, but it’s the same exercise.”
Mrs. Iheme — whose first name is Nkechi; Payton is her middle name – she enlisted in the military at 17 and stayed there for two years before enrolling at the University of Texas at Arlington. Not long before her expected graduation, the United States invaded Iraq.
“They got my boot size and my uniform size when I was still in college,” she said. “It was something that no one could really help you through. Only certain generations have gone to war. It wasn’t something that we could look to our parents and other people in the community to really have answers for us.”
As an intelligence officer, Ms. Iheme was put in charge of dozens of people and managed millions of dollars in equipment and budgets. By the time she was 29, she had made two combat trips.
She stayed with the Department of Defense for 21 years, serving in humanitarian aid in Guyana and being part of the relief effort in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. She eventually joined America’s corridors of power as a congressman.
She spent two years working on Capitol Hill while earning her master’s degree in legislative affairs from George Washington University. She later joined the Pentagon and then moved to President Barack Obama’s White House, where she was a senior policy advisor on science and technology. A highlight of her time there was meeting Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician who inspired the movie “Hidden Figures,” and showing her around the White House. Ms. Iheme’s last job before Bumble was in public policy at Facebook.
Throughout her career, she was often the only black woman in the room. “I have to be in a lot of organizations where people are not like me,” she said. “A lot of time you can internalize it and question yourself.” Because she was in those spaces, she would sometimes “shaping shift,” she said.
“Where I am now as a leader, I don’t change form anymore,” she said.
And she goes out of her way to defend others who may not be able to stand up for themselves.
“The internet I want to see in the future is the same as the kind of world I want to see in the future,” said Ms. Iheme. “And that’s one where people have freedom and can exercise their own rights in a way that doesn’t harm anyone else’s.”
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis†
