Jessica J. González
Jessica leads efforts to change our media system so that it can support a just and multiracial democracy. A public-policy lawyer by training, Jessica knows that the biggest problems in our media can be solved only by organizing and building power with ordinary people. Jessica cut her teeth representing civil-rights and pro-democracy groups in regulatory proceedings and appellate court cases as a staff attorney and teaching fellow in a Georgetown Law clinic. She then ran the federal policy shop and coordinated campaigns against racist and xenophobic media programming at the National Hispanic Media Coalition. In her two decades in the field, Jessica has advanced policy efforts at the intersection of media, tech, racial justice and democracy. She regularly appears as an expert witness before Congress and in the media, with press appearances on the BBC, CBS, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, NPR, The Washington Post and more.
Jessica co-led Stop Hate for Profit’s Facebook advertising boycott, which pushed over 1,000 advertisers to drop Facebook in protest of its lax enforcement of rules to stop hate and protect democracy ahead of the 2020 election. The effort forced Facebook to deplatform Q-Anon and showed the tech industry that it will be held accountable for destabilizing democracy. Recently she co-led the Stop Toxic Twitter campaign in response to Elon Musk’s reckless leadership, pushing more than half of Twitter’s main advertisers to leave the platform over his re-platforming of white supremacists and Big Lie conspiracists.
Jessica grew up in a working-class union family in Los Angeles. She’s been a grocery-store clerk, a public-school teacher, a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard Law School and a Ricardo Salinas Scholar at the Aspen Institute. She sits on the Big Tech Oversight Board and the board of directors of America’s Voice and the Latino Media Collaborative, and is a former board member of the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda and the Media and Democracy Coalition. When Jessica isn’t at work, you can find her running, paddling and boarding through nature, reading fiction and seeking adventure and relaxation with her spouse and their kids.