OpenAI’s contractor workforce helps power ChatGPT through simple interactions. They don’t get benefits, but some say the work is rewarding.
By David Ingram for NBC News on May 6, 2023
A report validated Palestinian experiences of social media censorship in May 2021, but missed how those policies are biased by design.
By Marwa Fatafta for +972 Magazine on October 9, 2022
This is the third time a case has been filed against Meta and sheds light on the harsh reality of content moderation.
By Odanga Madung for Nation on March 20, 2023
Revised online safety bill proposes fines of 10% of revenue but drops harmful communications offence.
By Dan Milmo for The Guardian on November 28, 2022
Galactica language model generated convincing text about fact and nonsense alike.
By Benj Edwards for Ars Technica on November 18, 2022
I asked it to write about linguistic prejudice.
By Rikker Dockum for Twitter on November 16, 2022
Galactica was supposed to help scientists. Instead, it mindlessly spat out biased and incorrect nonsense.
By Will Douglas Heaven for MIT Technology Review on November 18, 2022
In his New York Times article, Mike Isaac describes how Meta is implementing a new system to automatically check whether the housing, employment and credit ads it hosts are shown to people equally. This is a move following a 111,054 US dollar fine the US Justice Department has issued Meta because its ad systems have been shown to discriminate its users by, amongst other things, excluding black people from seeing certain housing ads in predominately white neighbourhoods. This is the outcome of a long process, which we have written about previously.
Continue reading “Meta forced to change its advertisement algorithm to address algorithmic discrimination”
In 2019, a Facebook content moderator in Nairobi, Daniel Motaung, who was paid USD 2.20 per hour, was fired. He was working for one of Meta’s largest outsourcing partners in Africa, Sama, which brands itself as an “ethical AI” outsourcing company, and is headquartered in California. Motaung led a unionisation attempt with more than 100 colleagues, fighting for better wages and working conditions.
Continue reading “Exploited and silenced: Meta’s Black whistleblower in Nairobi”
A Facebook lawyer called on a judge to “crack the whip” against a whistleblower who accuses the company of forced labor and human trafficking.
By Billy Perrigo for Time on July 1, 2022
The Justice Department had accused Meta’s housing advertising system of discriminating against Facebook users based on their race, gender, religion and other characteristics.
By Mike Isaac for The New York Times on June 21, 2022
Around 2016 Facebook was still proud of its ability to target to “Black affinity” and “White affinity” adiences for the ads of their customers. I then wrote an op-ed decrying this form of racial profiling that was enabled by Facebook’s data lust.
Continue reading “Facebook has finally stopped enabling racial profiling for targeted advertising”
Online ad-targeting practices often reflect and replicate existing disparities, effectively locking out marginalized groups from housing, job, and credit opportunities.
By Linda Morris and Olga Akselrod for American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on January 27, 2022
Hiring sociocultural workers to correct bias overlooks the limitations of these underappreciated fields.
By Elena Maris for WIRED on January 12, 2022
We must curb the power of Silicon Valley and protect those who speak up about the harms of AI.
By Timnit Gebru for The Guardian on December 6, 2021
Over the past months a slew of leaks from the Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, has exposed how the company was aware of the disparate and harmful impact of its content moderation practices. Most damning is that in the majority of instances, Facebook failed to address these harms. In this Washington Post piece, one of the latest of such revelations is discussed in detail: Even though Facebook knew it would come at the expense of Black users, its algorithm to detect and remove hate speech was programmed to be ‘race-blind’.
Continue reading “‘Race-blind’ content moderation disadvantages Black users”
Despite Biden’s announced commitment to advancing racial justice, not a single appointee to the task force has focused experience on civil rights and liberties in the development and use of AI. That has to change. Artificial intelligence, invisible but pervasive, affects vast swaths of American society and will affect many more. Biden must ensure that racial equity is prioritized in AI development.
By ReNika Moore for Washington Post on August 9, 2021
Researchers proposed a fix to the biased algorithm, but one internal document predicted pushback from ‘conservative partners’.
By Craig Timberg, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Nitasha Tiku for Washington Post on November 21, 2021
Facebook Inc said on Tuesday it plans to remove detailed ad-targeting options that refer to “sensitive” topics, such as ads based on interactions with content around race, health, religious practices, political beliefs or sexual orientation.
By Elizabeth Culliford for Reuters on November 9, 2021
In the reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement in summer 2020, a video that featured black men in altercation with the police and white civilians was posted by the Daily Mail, a British tabloid. In the New York Times, Ryan Mac reports how Facebook users who watched that video, saw an automated prompt that asked if they would like to “keep seeing videos about Primates,” despite there being no relatedness to primates or monkeys.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Facebook labels black men as ‘primates’”
For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt the duty of being that woman who sits in a meeting room in London, Geneva, New York, Berlin and Paris and talks about what digital rights mean for not just people of colour in Europe and North America, but across the rest of the world. Approximately 84% of the world’s poor live in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and the digital divide remains steep but that’s only part of the story. These aren’t passive consumers of the web. They’re active prosumers. TikTok has been downloaded over 360 million times in South East Asia, a region of 658 million people. With social platforms, anyone with a phone can become a star, make money, connect with others, build a family of choice and acceptance, fall in love, and live a life they may not be allowed otherwise.
By Hera Hussain for Who Writes The Rules on August 23, 2021
Behind the promise of automation, advances of machine learning and AI, often paraded by tech companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Tesla, lies a deeply exploitative industry of cheap, human labour. In an excerpt published on Rest of the World from his forthcoming book, “Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism,” Phil Jones illustrates how the hidden labour of automation is outsourced to marginalised, racialised and disenfranchised populations within the Global North, as well as in the Global South.
Continue reading “Big Tech is propped up by a globally exploited workforce”
Papa, mag ik die huidskleur?’ Verbaasd keek ik op van de kleurplaat die ik aan het inkleuren was, om mijn dochter te zien wijzen naar een stift met een perzikachtige kleur. Of misschien had die meer de kleur van een abrikoos. Afijn, de stift had in ieder geval niet háár huidskleur. Mijn dochter mag dan wel twee tinten lichter van kleur zijn dan ik, toch is zij overduidelijk bruin.
By Ilyaz Nasrulla for Trouw on September 23, 2021
Facebook called it “an unacceptable error.” The company has struggled with other issues related to race.
By Ryan Mac for The New York Times on September 3, 2021
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok failing to act on most reported anti-Jewish posts, says study.
By Maya Wolfe-Robinson for The Guardian on August 1, 2021
The Plug and Fast Company looked at what happened to the 3.8 billion dollars that US-based tech companies committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion as their response to the Black Lives Matter protests.
Continue reading “Tech companies poured 3.8 billion USD into racial justice, but to what avail?”
Surveillance expert Chris Gilliard reflects on 2020’s racial justice protests, the hypocrisy of tech companies’ commitments, and where we are one year later.
By Chris Gilliard and Katharine Schwab for Fast Company on June 16, 2021
Group publishing archival photos claims images showing traditional dress or ceremonies were deleted for allegedly containing nudity.
By Mostafa Rachwani for The Guardian on May 27, 2021
How has activism evolved in our digital society? In this episode of Sudhir Breaks the Internet, Sudhir talks to Jade Magnus Ogunnaike about the intersection of big tech and civil rights. She is a senior campaign director for Color of Change. It’s a racial justice organization that blends traditional organizing efforts with an updated playbook for how to make change.
By Jade Magnus Ogunnaike and Sudhir Venkatesh for Freakonomics on May 17, 2021
The Oversight Board has upheld Facebook’s decision to remove specific content that violated the express prohibition on posting caricatures of Black people in the form of blackface, contained in its Hate Speech Community Standard.
From Oversight Board on April 13, 2021
Het weren van beelden van Zwarte Piet past in het beleid van Facebook om racistische blackface-stereotypen op zijn platforms tegen te gaan. Dat oordeelt een externe raad bij wie gebruikers en Facebook zelf kunnen toetsen of iets terecht wordt verwijderd of niet.
By Pieter Sabel for Volkskrant on April 13, 2021
According to data from The Markup’s Citizen Browser project, there are major disparities in who is shown public health information about the pandemic.
By Corin Faife and Dara Kerr for The Markup on March 4, 2021
The human-centered approach that can combat algorithmic bias.
By Jessie Daniels for Quartz on April 3, 2019
Facebook placed a number of leftwing organizers on a restricted list during Biden’s inauguration. It’s part of a much bigger problem.
By Akin Olla for The Guardian on January 29, 2021
Philosopher Dr. Natalie Ashton delves into the epistemic pitfalls of Facebook and the epistemic merits of Twitter.
By Natalie Ashton for Logically on November 26, 2020
The platform is overrun with hate speech and disinformation. Does it actually want to solve the problem?
By Andrew Marantz for The New Yorker on October 12, 2020
Lilian Stolk interviews internet policy consultant Joe McNamee on Facebook’s content moderation
By Lilian Stolk for The Hmm on November 16, 2020
Facebook amends code after deletion of black users’ photos sparks outrage.
By Nosheen Iqbal for The Guardian on October 25, 2020
Typhoon werd als zwarte rapper in een mooie auto aangehouden. Sindsdien is de discussie over etnisch profileren terecht losgebarsten. Er is daarbij zelden aandacht voor het feit dat de businessmodellen van diensten uit Silicon Valley grotendeels zijn gebaseerd op profilering, en dat etnisch profileren daarbij als innovatief marketinginstrument wordt aangeprezen.
By Hans de Zwart for Bits of Freedom on June 23, 2016
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