Standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people

We at the Racism and Technology Center stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people. We condemn the violence enacted against the innocent people in Palestine and Israel, and mourn alongside all who are dead, injured and still missing. Palestinian communities are being subjected to unlawful collective punishment in Gaza and the West Bank, including the ongoing bombings and the blockade of water, food and energy. We call for an end to the blockade and an immediate ceasefire.

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Google does performative identity politics, nonpologises, pauses their efforts, and will invariably move on to its next shitty moneymaking move

In a shallow attempt to do representation for representation’s sake, Google has managed to draw the ire of the right-wing internet by generating historically inaccurate and overly inclusive portraits of historical figures.

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Dutch Higher Education continues to use inequitable proctoring software

In October last year, RTL news showed that Proctorio’s software, used to check if students aren’t cheating during online exams, works less for students of colour. Five months later, RTL asked the twelve Dutch educational institutions on Proctorio’s client list whether they were still using the tool. Eight say they still do.

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On “The Palestine Laboratory”

A large part of Israel’s economy and global influence are dependent on its military-technology complex that not only fuels the ongoing genocide in Gaza but is also exported to facilitate oppression around the world. In this thorough 2023 book, journalist Anthony Loewenstein makes explicit how Israel’s military industrial complex profits exorbitantly from exporting technologies “battle-tested” on occupied Gaza and the West-Bank.

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Racist Technology in Action: Slower internet service for the same price in U.S. lower income areas with fewer White residents

Investigative reporting by The Markup showed how U.S. internet providers offer wildly different internet speeds for the same monthly fee. The neighbourhoods with the worst deals had lower median incomes and were very often the least White.

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“Mowing the lawn”: The weaponisation of water and technology in Palestine

In the most recent issue of Logic(s) Magazine, Edward Ongweso Jr. writes about Israel’s strategy towards Gaza called “mowing the lawn”: bursts of horrifying violence – a collective punishment of Palestinian people – followed by “calmer” periods where survivors are left to bury the dead, and rebuild their infrastructure while Israel continues to deepen its occupation.

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Racist Technology in Action: Meta systemically censors and silences Palestinian content globally

The censorship and silencing of Palestinian voices, and voices of those who support Palestine, is not new. However, since the escalation of Israel’s violence on the Gaza strip since 7 October 2023, the scale of censorship has significantly heightened, particular on social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. In December 2023, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a 51-page report*, stating that Meta has engaged in systematic and global censorship of content related to Palestine since October 7th.

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Automating apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

In this interview, Matt Mahmoudi explains the Amnesty report titled Automating Apartheid, which he contributed to. The report exposes how the Israeli authorities extensively use surveillance tools, facial recognition technologies, and networks of CCTV cameras to support, intensify and entrench their continued domination and oppression of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories (OPT), Hebron and East Jerusalem. Facial recognition software is used by Israeli authorities to consolidate existing practices of discriminatory policing and segregation, violating Palestinians’ basic rights.

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Judgement of the Dutch Institute for Human Rights shows how difficult it is to legally prove algorithmic discrimination

On October 17th, the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights ruled that the VU did not discriminate against bioinformatics student Robin Pocornie on the basis of race by using anti-cheating software. However, according to the institute, the VU has discriminated on the grounds of race in how they handled her complaint.

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Proctoring software uses fudge-factor for dark skinned students to adjust their suspicion score

Respondus, a vendor of online proctoring software, has been granted a patent for their “systems and methods for assessing data collected by automated proctoring.” The patent shows that their example method for calculating a risk score is adjusted on the basis of people’s skin colour.

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Use of machine translation tools exposes already vulnerable asylum seekers to even more risks

The use of and reliance on machine translation tools in asylum seeking procedures has become increasingly common amongst government contractors and organisations working with refugees and migrants. This Guardian article highlights many of the issues documented by Respond Crisis Translation, a network of people who provide urgent interpretation services for migrants and refugees. The problems with machine translation tools occur throughout the asylum process, from border stations to detention centers to immigration courts.

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Al Jazeera asks: Can AI eliminate human bias or does it perpetuate it?

In its online series of digital dilemmas, Al Jazeera takes a look at AI in relation to social inequities. Loyal readers of this newsletter will recognise many of the examples they touch on, like how Stable Diffusion exacerbates and amplifies racial and gender disparities or the Dutch childcare benefits scandal.

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Dutch police used algorithm to predict violent behaviour without any safeguards

For many years the Dutch police has used a risk modeling algorithm to predict the chance that an individual suspect will commit a violent crime. Follow the Money exposed the total lack of a moral, legal, and statistical justification for its use, and now the police has stopped using the system.

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Racist Technology in Action: The World Bank’s Poverty Targeting Algorithms Deprives People of Social Security

A system funded by the World Bank to assess who is most in need of support, is reported to not only be faulty but also discriminatory and depriving many of their right to social security. In a recent report titled “Automated Neglect: How The World Bank’s Push to Allocate Cash Assistance Using Algorithms Threatens Rights” Human Rights Watch outlines how specifically the system used in Joran should be abandoned.

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Women of colour are leading the charge against racist AI

In this Dutch-language piece for De Groene Amsterdammer, Marieke Rotman offers an accessible introduction of the main voices, both internationally and in the Netherlands, tirelessly fighting against racism and discrimination in AI-systems. Not coincidentally, most of the people doing this labour are women of colour. The piece guides you through their impressive work and leading perspectives on the dynamics of racism and technology.

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Racist Technology in Action: How Pokéman Go inherited existing racial inequities

When Aura Bogado was playing Pokémon Go in a much Whiter neighbourhood than the one where she lived, she noticed how many more PokéStops were suddenly available. She then crowdsourced locations of these stops and found out, with the Urban Institute think tank, that there were on average 55 PokéStops in majority White neighbourhoods and 19 in neighbourhoods that were majority Black.

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France wants to legalise mass surveillance for the Paris Olympics 2024: “Safety” and “security”, for whom?

Many governments are using mass surveillance to support law enforcement for the purposes of safety and security. In France, the French Parliament (and before, the French Senate) have approved the use of automated behavioural video surveillance at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Simply put, France wants to legalise mass surveillance at the national level which can violate many rights, such as the freedom of assembly and association, privacy, and non-discrimination.

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Racist Technology in Action: Stable Diffusion exacerbates and amplifies racial and gender disparities

Bloomberg’s researchers used Stable Diffusion to gauge the magnitude of biases in generative AI. Through an analysis of more than 5,000 images created by Stable Diffusion, they have found that it takes racial and gender disparities to extremes. The results are worse than those found in the real world.

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Attempts to eliminate bias through diversifying datasets? A distraction from the root of the problem

In this eloquent and haunting piece by Hito Steyerl, she weaves the ongoing narratives of the eugenicist history of statistics with its integration into machine learning. She elaborates why the attempts to eliminate bias in facial recognition technology through diversifying datasets obscures the root of the problem: machine learning and automation are fundamentally reliant on extracting and exploiting human labour.

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Racist Technology in Action: Image recognition is still not capable of differentiating gorillas from Black people

If this title feels like a deja-vu it is because you most likely have, in fact, seen this before (perhaps even in our newsletter). It was back in 2015 that the controversy first arose when Google released image recognition software that kept mislabelling Black people as gorillas (read here and here).

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Racist Technology in Action: You look similar to someone we didn’t like → Dutch visa denied

Ignoring earlier Dutch failures in automated decision making, and ignoring advice from its own experts, the Dutch ministry of Foreign Affairs has decided to cut costs and cut corners through implementing a discriminatory profiling system to process visa applications.

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