On paper, they would seem to have little in common. Tun Khin is a human rights activist who advocates for the persecuted Rohingya Muslims in his home country of Myanmar. Jessikka Aro is a Finnish journalist who exposed the international influence of Russian propagandists at the Internet Research Agency long before the rest of the world had ever heard of them. Lenny Pozner is an American father who lost his 6-year-old son, Noah, in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. Ethan Lindenberger is almost a kid himself, a high school student who’s become a vaccination proponent despite his parents’ anti-vaccination beliefs.

But all four of them are bound by one unfortunate and common thread: They’ve all seen firsthand just how ugly---and downright dangerous---the spread of fake news and disinformation online can be. Which is why this week, they gathered in Silicon Valley to talk with tech executives about what they’ve been through and what they want tech companies to do about it. The group met with Twitter on Tuesday, and another meeting was planned at Facebook Wednesday afternoon.

The meetings, which were organized by a nonprofit advocacy group called Avaaz, come at a time of fierce debate over what responsibility tech companies have to limit the spread of toxic content on their platforms. Just last week, Facebook announced it was banning seven people, including Infowars conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson, under a policy that prohibits “dangerous individuals” from having any presence on Facebook. The bans prompted President Trump to lash out against tech companies over the weekend, ramping up accusations of censorship that have become a constant drumbeat on the right.

The discussions organized by Avaaz served as a counterpoint to all that pressure, as individual victims of online harassment campaigns came forward to tell tech companies exactly how they’ve been hurt by the hate and hoaxes that have festered on their platforms. “Our job as advocates is to make them stop for a minute and think about the implications of not acting fast enough,” says Oscar Soria, a senior campaigner with Avaaz.

Issie Lapowsky covers the intersection of tech, politics, and national affairs for WIRED.

During Tuesday’s meeting with Twitter, the attendees took turns telling their stories. Aro shared the details of the global smear campaign that was lodged against her, after her reporting outed the Internet Research Agency. She explained the threats that have been made against her life and read a recent direct message she received while traveling in the Czech Republic, in which a stranger threatened to “castrate” her if she ever came back to the country.

Aro says the harassment she’s received violates Finnish defamation laws, and she is in the process of pursuing cases against some of her harassers in court. And yet, she says, the complaints she’s filed to Twitter and Facebook often go unanswered, leaving local investigators to do the work the American companies won't. “I'm basically here, to put it simply, to give a user report live, because they haven't reacted to the ones that I have made online,” Aro says.

Khin described the trauma he’s seen in Rohingya refugee camps and pressed Twitter about why it continues to provide safe haven for Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief of the Myanmar military. The military was behind some of the accounts that notoriously flooded Facebook with anti-Islam rhetoric, and the United Nations called for its leaders to face genocide charges last year. Facebook has since banned Min Aung Hlaing and other accounts and pages that the UN linked to human rights abuses in the country. While the general's Twitter account hasn’t been active since last year, it remains up on the platform today.