BenSw
Benjamin Hillel Swartz, better known as BenSw, is an American software engineer and tech activist known for the emote NotLikeThis which became an Internet meme in the mid-2010s.

 Early life 
Swartz was born in Highland Park, Illinois to Jewish parents, Robert "Bob" Swartz and Susan Swartz. He is the youngest of three brothers. His oldest brother is the late Aaron Swartz who worked on RSS, Creative Commons, and Reddit. Aaron was already an established person in the tech community, which inspired Ben to join that field. Swartz later graduated from Brandeis University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics.

He worked in Google in early-2010s, where he initially worked on combatting payment fraud in Google Play Store, and after his brother's death he led a team archiving the USENET posts in Google Groups to the Internet Archive as a tribute to him.  He left Google in 2013.

 NotLikeThis 
thumb|Ben reacting to HugS lose.
By 2015, Swartz was working for Twitch as a senior engineer. On July 23, 2015, Twitter user @FishStix posted an image of Swartz at Evolution Championship Series with his head buried in his hands after watching Super Smash Bros. Melee player HugS lose. FishStix suggested it would make a good emote. The name NotLikeThis is a quote from the 1999 movie The Matrix. The image was quickly adopted by Twitch users as an emote by later half of 2015, and on 2016, Twitch posted an interview with Swartz for #TwitchHistory in which he explained the emote's origins.

 After Twitch 
After getting his 15 minutes of fame for NotLikeThis, Ben devoted his later years on Twitch as a tech activist in the company, advocating the company to take a stance in net neutrality in 2017 through gaining consensus with the executives and lawyers there. He left Twitch in early 2019 to work in Washington D.C. to work in tech and politics, and educating senators on issues related to digital platforms, data privacy, and intellectual property. In 2023 he started working as a Senior Technology Advisor in Federal Trade Commission, working on issues like regulating AI.

 References 

Category:American computer programmers
Category:20th-century American Jews
Category:American technology writers
Category:Internet activists
Category:Brandeis University alumni
Category:Open access activists
Category:Open content activists
Category:People from Highland Park, Illinois
Category:21st-century American Jews