Mora-Blanco’s team - 10 people in total - was dubbed The SQUAD (Safety, Quality, and User Advocacy Department). Mora-Blanco was one of 60-odd twenty-somethings who’d come to work at the still-unprofitable website. It was a warm, sunny morning, and she was sitting at her desk in the company’s office, located above a pizza shop in San Mateo, an idyllic and affluent suburb of San Francisco. This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute Maybe, she figured, she could pull in enough money to pursue her lifelong dream: to become a hair stylist. Struggling to make rent and working a post-production job at Current TV, she’d jumped at the chance to work at an internet startup called YouTube. A recent grad of California State University, Chico, Mora-Blanco had majored in art, minored in women’s studies, and spent much of her free time making sculptures from found objects and blown-glass. Julie Mora-Blanco remembers the day, in the summer of 2006, when the reality of her new job sunk in.
