This week's founder highlight is on the mission to help users manage online harassment and giving them more control of what they see, tackling Twitter first. 
 

‍Tracy Chou personally experienced online abuse beginning around high school years and had slowly escalated as she started to work as an employee at Quora and then at Pinterest. With this deeply personal experience that had taken a huge weight on her mental health, she founded and is the CEO of Block Party in 2018 and launched early in 2021 this year. She is deeply passionate to solve and help users to combat online abuse and harassment. She believes that the problem should be solved by those who have experienced it first-hand. What Block Party does is letting users take control to filter accounts and messages that are deemed to be dedicated for harassing into a "Locked Folder". You can visit this folder at any time if you need to document abuse. It also has a "Helper View" where your friends can manage the folder if you do not want to engage in it at all. 

However, Tracy is facing many challenges. One of them is the struggle to raise funds as a woman of color in the industry. Furthermore, a direct competition company, Sentropy, has received more funding. Sentropy was also founded in 2018 and are more focused on helping Enterprises to manage online abuse and harassment using machine learning. But, they also released a consumer tool, Sentropy Protect, that launched around the same time as Block Party in early 2021, and is offering the tool for free. This sparked some conflicts between the two companies as Tracy tweeted of Sentropy's consumer tool that has a similar concept, implementation, and starting with Twitter first too.