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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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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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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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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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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Racist Technology in Action: Racial disparities in the scoring system used for housing allocation in L.A.

In another investigation by The Markup, significant racial disparities were found in the assessment system used by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), the body responsible for coordinating homelessness services in Los Angeles. This assessment system is reliant on a tool, called the Vulnerability Index-Service Prioritisation Decision Assistance Tool, or VI-SPDAT, to score and assess whether people can qualify for subsidised permanent housing.

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Racist Technology in Action: The “underdiagnosis bias” in AI algorithms for health: Chest radiographs

This study builds upon work in algorithmic bias, and bias in healthcare. The use of AI-based diagnostic tools has been motivated by a shortage of radiologists globally, and research which shows that AI algorithms can match specialist performance (particularly in medical imaging). Yet, the topic of AI-driven underdiagnosis has been relatively unexplored.

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Racist Technology in Action: Let’s make an avatar! Of sexy women and tough men of course

Just upload a selfie in the “AI avatar app” Lensa and it will generate a digital portrait of you. Think, for example, of a slightly more fit or beautiful version of yourself as an astronaut or the lead singer in a band. If you are a man that is. As it turns out, for women, and especially women with Asian heritage, Lensa churns out pornified, sexy and skimpily clothed avatars.

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Racist Technology in Action: AI-generated image tools amplify harmful stereotypes

Deep learning models that allow you to make images from simple textual ‘prompts’ have recently become available for the general public. Having been trained on a world full of visual representations of social stereotypes, it comes as no surprise that these tools perpetuate a lot of biased and harmful imagery.

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Racist Technology in Action: How hiring tools can be sexist and racist

One of the classic examples of how AI systems can reinforce social injustice is Amazon’s A.I. hiring tool. In 2014, Amazon built an ´A.I. powered´ tool to assess resumes and recommend the top candidates that would go on to be interviewed. However, the tool turned out to be very biased, systematically preferring men over women.

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Racist Technology in Action: Turning a Black person, White

An example of racial bias in machine learning strikes again, this time by a program called PULSE, as reported by The Verge. Input a low resolution image of Barack Obama – or another person of colour such as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez or Lucy Liu – and the resulting AI-generated output of a high resolution image, is distinctively a white person.

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Racist Techology in Action: Beauty is in the eye of the AI

Where people’s notion of beauty is often steeped in cultural preferences or plain prejudice, the objectivity of an AI-system would surely allow it to access a more universal conception of beauty – or so thought the developers of Beauty.AI. Alex Zhavoronkov, who consulted in the development of the Beaut.AI-system, described the dystopian motivation behind the system clearly: “Humans are generally biased and there needs to be a robot to provide an impartial opinion. Beauty.AI is the first step in a much larger story, in which a mobile app trained to evaluate perception of human appearance will evolve into a caring personal assistant to help users look their best and retain their youthful looks.”

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Racist Technology in Action: “Race-neutral” traffic cameras have a racially disparate impact

Traffic cameras that are used to automatically hand out speeding tickets don’t look at the colour of the person driving the speeding car. Yet, ProPublica has convincingly shown how cameras that don’t have a racial bias can still have a disparate racial impact.

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Racist Technology in Action: U.S. universities using race in their risk algorithms as a predictor for student success

An investigation by The Markup in March 2021, revealed that some universities in the U.S. are using a software and risk algorithm that uses the race of student as one of the factors to predict and evaluate how successful a student may be. Several universities have described race as a “high impact predictor”. The investigation found large disparities in how the software treated students of different races, with Black students deemed a four times higher risk than their White peers.

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Racist Technology in Action: Uber’s racially discriminatory facial recognition system firing workers

This example of racist technology in action combines racist facial recognition systems with exploitative working conditions and algorithmic management to produce a perfect example of how technology can exacarbate both economic precarity and racial discrimination.

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Racist Technology in Action: Facebook labels black men as ‘primates’

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.

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Racist Technology in Action: White preference in mortage-approval algorithms

A very clear example of racist technology was exposed by Emmanuel Martinez and Lauren Kirchner in an article for the Markup. Algorithms used by a variety of American banks and lenders to automatically assess or advice on mortgages display clear racial disparity. In national data from the United States in 2019 they found that “loan applicants of color were 40%–80% more likely to be denied than their White counterparts. In certain metro areas, the disparity was greater than 250%.”

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Racist Technology in Action: Proctoring software disadvantaging students of colour in the Netherlands

In an opinion piece in Parool, The Racism and Technology Center wrote about how Dutch universities use proctoring software that uses facial recognition technology that systematically disadvantages students of colour (see the English translation of the opinion piece). Earlier the center has written on the racial bias of these systems, leading to black students being excluded from exams or being labeled as frauds because the software did not properly recognise their faces as a face. Despite the clear proof that Procorio disadvantages students of colour, the University of Amsterdam has still used Proctorio extensively in this June’s exam weeks.

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Racist Technology in Action: Predicting future criminals with a bias against Black people

In 2016, ProPublica investigated the fairness of COMPAS, a system used by the courts in the United States to assess the likelihood of a defendant committing another crime. COMPAS uses a risk assessment form to assess this risk of a defendant offending again. Judges are expected to take this risk prediction into account when they decide on sentencing.

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Racist Technology in Action: Amazon’s racist facial ‘Rekognition’

An already infamous example of racist technology is Amazon’s facial recognition system ‘Rekognition’ that had an enormous racial and gender bias. Researcher and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League Joy Buolawini (the ‘poet of code‘), together with Deborah Raji, meticulously reconstructed how accurate Rekognition was in identifying different types of faces. Buolawini and Raji’s study has been extremely consequencial in laying bare the racism and sexism in these facial recognition systems and was featured in the popular Coded Bias documentary.

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Racist technology in action: Gun, or electronic device?

The answer to that question depends on your skin colour, apparently. An AlgorithmWatch reporter, Nicholas Kayser-Bril, conducted an experiment that went viral on Twitter, showing that Google Vision Cloud (a service which is based on a subset of AI known as “computer vision” that focuses on automated image labelling), labelled an image of a dark-skinned individual holding a thermometer with the word “gun”, whilst a lighter skinned individual was labelled holding an “electronic device”.

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