Australian Human Rights Commission has called for a digital duty of care to prevent social media algorithms from incentivising ‘racist’ content.
By Douglas Smith and Sarah Collard for The Guardian on June 12, 2026
Site takes no action over hate posts against UK politicians including Kemi Badenoch, Shabana Mahmood and Zia Yusuf.
By Chris Osuh for The Guardian on June 14, 2026
The aim of this paper is to introduce the phrase ‘digital banter’ to describe a highly localised typology of English-language speech that acts to veil xenophobia, misogyny, and other forms of extremism. Via an analysis of various videos on the sacking of British Foreign Secretary Suella Braverman, uploaded to the fringe social media platform Bitchute, this paper reveals certain aspects of the state of British politics and culture vis-à-vis platform norms and sociotechnical Internet subcultures. First, digital banter is a mode of anti-fandom that relies on a vocal dislike for non-white and non-male, seeking to dehumanise and delegitimise the identities and experiences of black and brown female politicians. While the principal point of attention for fan/anti-fan communities has historically been celebrities, politicians are increasingly becoming the focus of digital banter in Internet subcultures. Second, those profiting from political anti-fandom are called “banter merchants”, pointing towards mercantile imperatives that motivate social media creators to accrue influence through political anti-fandom. On Bitchute, serious political discussion is reduced to memetic ecologies of viral trends, rage, and shitposting, whilst signposting users toward a cascade of other platforms, paid subscriptions, and merchandise purchases. This research makes the case, however, that the extreme attitudes and behaviours witnessed on Bitchute are endlessly reproduced and reflected — albeit perhaps more softly and, therefore, more insidiously — throughout the British media ecosystem.
By Craig Ryder for First Monday on May 28, 2026
In Gaza, survival unfolds alongside a fight to be seen in a digital world increasingly shaped and manipulated by algorithms.
By Laura Albast for WIRED on May 13, 2026
Google has apologized after a news notification about the 2026 BAFTAs contained a racial slur, sparking backlash online.
By Taylor Ardrey for USA Today (EU) on February 25, 2026
From TikTok deepfakes to smears put out by the White House, fake videos modeled on Black archetypes are running rampant – putting Black users at risk.
By Andrew Lawrence for The Guardian on February 19, 2026
World’s richest person wanted to ‘purge’ propaganda from Wikipedia, so he created a compendium of racist disinformation.
By Jason Wilson for The Guardian on November 17, 2025
We wrote about the I am not a typo campaign before. They have shared good news with us: “Responding to feedback from customers and working with members of the I Am Not A Typo campaign, Microsoft has implemented product updates to ensure its dictionary better reflects the names of people living in modern, multicultural Britain, using official Office for National Statistics (ONS) baby name data as a guide.”
Continue reading “Microsoft will update its English (UK) dictionaries with a more inclusive name database”
The Guardian reports that OpenAI’s new AI video generator, Sora 2, launched with a social feed feature that allows users to share their generated videos on social media platforms easily. Predictably, within hours, violent and racist videos generated through Sora flooded these platforms. Despite OpenAI claiming to have implemented safeguards and mitigating measures, the app generated videos depicting mass shootings, bomb scares, and fabricated war footage from Gaza and Myanmar, showing AI-generated children.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: OpenAI’s Sora Launch: Yet another racist generative AI”
Last June, researchers quantitatively proved the racist, misogynistic and appalling practices by TikTok. Comparing TikTok’s different metrics of the popular beauty filter, Bold Glamour, and cross-referencing the results with the social media company’s own “inclusivity policies”.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Scientists show that TikTok is racist, sexist, and disgusting”
A sweeping crackdown on posts on Instagram and Facebook that are critical of Israel—or even vaguely supportive of Palestinians—was directly orchestrated by the government of Israel, according to internal Meta data obtained by Drop Site News.
By Murtaza Hussain, Nicholas Rodelo, Ryan Grim, and Waqas Ahmed for Drop Site News on April 11, 2025
Amid reports of creation of fake racist images, Signify warns problem will get ‘so much worse’ over the next year.
By Raphael Boyd for The Guardian on January 13, 2025
The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media has released a new report titled, “Delete the Issue: Tech Worker Testimonies on Palestinian Advocacy and Workplace Suppression.” The report, the first of its kind, shares testimonies gathered from current and former employees in major technology companies, including Meta, Google, PayPal, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Cisco. It highlights their experiences supporting Palestinian rights in the workplace and the companies’ efforts to restrict freedom of expression on the matter.
From 7amleh on November 11, 2024
As I write this piece, an Israeli airstrike has hit makeshift tents near Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al Balah, burning tents and people alive. The Israeli military bombed an aid distribution point in Jabalia, wounding 50 casualties who were waiting for flour. The entire north of Gaza has been besieged by the Israeli Occupying Forces for the past 10 days, trapping 400,000 Palestinians without food, drink, and medical supplies. Every day since last October, Israel, with the help of its western allies, intensifies its assault on Palestine, each time pushing the boundaries of what is comprehensible. There are no moral or legal boundaries Israel, and its allies, will not cross. The systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which has been the basis of the settler-colonial Zionist project since its inception, has accelerated since 7th October 2023. From Palestine to Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, Israel and its allies continue their violence with impunity. Meanwhile, mainstream western news media are either silent in their reporting or complicit in abetting the ongoing destruction of the Palestinian people and the resistance.
Continue reading “Tech companies’ complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza and Palestine”
Government involvement in content moderation raises serious human rights concerns in every context. Since October 7, social media platforms have been challenged for the unjustified takedowns of pro-Palestinian content—sometimes at the request of the Israeli government—and a simultaneous failure to remove hate speech towards Palestinians. More specifically, social media platforms have worked with the Israeli Cyber Unit—a government office set up to issue takedown requests to platforms—to remove content considered as incitement to violence and terrorism, as well as any promotion of groups widely designated as terrorists.
By Jillian C. York and Paige Collings for Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on July 26, 2024
MyLife.com is one of those immoral American companies that collect personal information to sell onwards as profiles on the one hand, while at the same suggesting to the people that are being profiled that incriminating information about them exists online that they can get removed by buying a subscription (that then does nothing and auto-renews in perpetuity).
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: MyLife.com and discriminatory predation”
The “I am not a typo” campaign is asking the tech giants to update their name dictionaries and stop autocorrecting the 41% of names given to babies in England and Wales.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Autocorrect is Western- and White-focused”
‘I am not a typo’ campaign is calling for technology companies to make autocorrect less ‘western- and white-focused’.
By Robert Booth for The Guardian on May 22, 2024
African Americans online face three distinguishable but related categories of vulnerability to bias and discrimination that I dub the “Black Opticon”: discriminatory oversurveillance, discriminatory exclusion, and discriminatory predation. Escaping the Black Opticon is unlikely without acknowledgement of privacy’s unequal distribution and privacy law’s outmoded and unduly race-neutral façade. African Americans could benefit from race-conscious efforts to shape a more equitable digital public sphere through improved laws and legal institutions. This Essay critically elaborates the Black Opticon triad and considers whether the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (2021), the federal Data Protection Act (2021), and new resources for the Federal Trade Commission proposed in 2021 possibly meet imperatives of a race-conscious African American Online Equity Agenda, specifically designed to help dismantle the Black Opticon. The path forward requires jumping those hurdles, regulating platforms, and indeed all of the digital economy, in the interests of nondiscrimination, antiracism, and antisubordination. Toward escaping the Black Opticon’s pernicious gaze, African Americans and their allies will continue the pursuit of viable strategies for justice and equity in the digital economy.
By Anita L. Allen for The Yale Law Journal on February 20, 2022
Jalon Hall was featured on Google’s corporate social media accounts “for making #LifeAtGoogle more inclusive!” She says the company discriminated against her on the basis of her disability and race.
By Paresh Dave for WIRED on March 7, 2024
Policy not just as in the state but as a set of guidelines or how we plan for Black life.
By J. Khadijah Abdurahman and Safiya Noble for Logic on December 13, 2023
A conversation about the #PlayVicious Mastodon instance.
By Marcia X and Ra’il I’Nasah Kiam for Logic on December 13, 2023
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.
Continue reading “Google does performative identity politics, nonpologises, pauses their efforts, and will invariably move on to its next shitty moneymaking move”
Veel media en journalisten die de haat op X tegen Slimste mens-deelnemer Akwasi zo ferm veroordelen, spreken met dubbele tong, vindt OneWorld-hoofdredacteur Seada Nourhussen. Jarenlang droegen ze bij aan die haat, zonder het racisme te erkennen dat eraan ten grondslag ligt.
By Seada Nourhussen for OneWorld on January 12, 2024
Board describes the two videos as important for ‘informing the world about human suffering on both sides’.
By Blake Montgomery for The Guardian on December 19, 2023
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.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Meta systemically censors and silences Palestinian content globally”
By now we know that generative image AI reproduces and amplifies sexism, racism, and other social systems of oppression. The latest example is of AI-generated stickers in WhatsApp that systematically depict Palestinian men and boys with rifles and guns.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Generative/ing AI Bias”This paper explores the mechanisms of white supremacy within digital spaces in relation to the body/embodiment, social justice movements, and the nature and expression of contemporary feminism. New digital political economies work through social media such as Instagram to colonise, disempower and obscure the work of Black feminists in the sphere of fat liberation (re-framed as ‘body positivity’), and in terms of imperatives for self-care, which have been co-opted by an emerging online wellness industry. I call to account the pervasiveness of neoliberal logics which are re-shaping (post)feminism and re-inscribing white supremacy onto bodies online and offline through ‘disciplined whiteness’.
By Sinéad O’Connor for RGS-IBG Publications Hub on September 28, 2023
A report commission by Meta — Facebook and Instagram’s parent company — found bias against Palestinians during an Israeli assault last May.
By Sam Biddle for The Intercept on September 21, 2022
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.
Continue reading “Standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people”
In a world where swiping left or right is the main route to love, whose profiles dating apps show you can change the course of your life.
Continue reading “Equal love: Dating App Breeze seeks to address Algorithmic Discrimination”
Black Twitter is vital as a space for Black folk to create, maintain, and discuss the Black everyday in a way that reaffirms connection, and often joy.
From MSNBC News on July 17, 2023
Chinese social media, like Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou, and Douyin, are full of hundreds of users with American cop profile photos with the aim of taunting Black users.
By Viola Zhou for Rest of World on May 23, 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
Raising funds from investors is unfavorable for marginalized founders, who face racial bias in the world of venture capital.
By Miranda Perez for The Guardian on March 12, 2023
A profound exploration of how the ceaseless extraction of information about our intimate lives is remaking both global markets and our very selves. The Costs of Connection represents an enormous step forward in our collective understanding of capitalism’s current stage, a stage in which the final colonial input is the raw data of human life. Challenging, urgent and bracingly original.
By Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias for Colonized by Data
The immanent demise of Twitter after Elon Musk’s takeover sparked an exodus of people leaving the platform, which is only expected to increase. The significant increase in hate speech, and general hostile atmosphere created by the erratic decrees by it’s owner (such as Trump’s reinstatement) made, in the New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb’s words, “remaining completely untenable”. This, often vocal, movement of people from the platform has sparked a debate on what people stand to loose and what the alternative is.
Continue reading “What’s at stake with losing (Black) Twitter and moving to (white) Mastodon?”
Tiera Tanksley’s work seeks to better understand how forms of digitally mediated traumas, such as seeing images of Black people dead and dying on social media, are impacting Black girls’ mental and emotional wellness in the U.S. and Canada. Her fears were confirmed in her findings: Black girls report unprecedented levels of fear, depression, anxiety and chronic stress. Viewing Black people being killed by the state was deeply traumatic, with mental, emotional and physiological effects.
Continue reading “Profiting off Black bodies”
Two Black academics discuss the rationale behind leaving Twitter or going down with the ship.
By Chris Gilliard and Kishonna Gray for WIRED on December 13, 2022
I’m sure you’ve seen the tweets, and the think pieces about how much worse Twitter is gonna get. My friend Justin Hendrix mentioned losing a few hundred followers in a case of a few hours, after Elon brought a sink into Twitter headquarters (which is the lamest bit I’ve ever seen- massive fail of a dad joke). A huge chunk of people I follow now have their Mastodon handles in their Twitter names. It’s a chunk of the influencers, academics, activists, and civil society folks- the researchers who I follow, who are actively mourning, and hand wringing, about the destruction that is to come, already in the throes of grief of the twitter that was. But the thing is- all of these folks are white.
By Caroline Sinders for Medium on October 31, 2022
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