To successfully govern our information society in the years to come, a solid understanding of technological developments is crucial. The Masterclass Net Politics is a series of meetings with speakers from Amnesty International, Bits of Freedom, Internet Society Netherlands, Open State Foundation, PublicSpaces, SetUp, Waag Futurelab, and yours truly: The Racism and Technology Center.
Continue reading “Join the (Dutch) Masterclass Net Politics!”
AlgorithmWatch wants to shine a light on where and how algorithmic discrimination can take place. Do you have reason to believe that algorithmic discrimination may have taken place? Then we ask you to report this to us to help us better understand the extent of the issue and the havoc algorithmic systems can wreak on our lives. Your hints can help us make algorithmic discrimination more visible and strengthen our advocacy for appropriate guardrails.
From AlgorithmWatch on May 19, 2025
The Dutch Institute for Human Rights has published an evaluation framework for risk profiling intending to prevent discrimination based on race or nationality.
Continue reading “Dutch Institute for Human Rights creates an evaluation framework for risk profiling and urges organisations to do more to prevent discrimination based on race and nationality”
A machine learning system that predicts where white collar crimes will occur throughout the US.
From White Collare Crime Risk Zones on March 1, 2017
For a while, when iPhone users dictated the word ‘racist’ to their phone, they shortly saw the word ‘Trump’ being written before it changed back to ‘racist’.
Continue reading “The phonetic overlap between ‘Trump’ and ‘racist’”
If you want to send money to help the Palestinian cause, there is a high chance your payment might get blocked somewhere. Same thing if you want to make a game about the Palestine experience and are trying to get it published in the app stores.
Continue reading “In reaction to censorship and the genocide in Gaza, the Muslim community creates its own technological infrastructure”
With firms such as Makani and Boycat, founders answer a growing demand: help their users support Palestinians.
By Johana Bhuiyan for The Guardian on January 2, 2025
A massive volunteer-led effort to collect training data in more languages, from people of more ages and genders, could help make the next generation of voice AI more inclusive and less exploitative.
By Melissa Heikkilä for MIT Technology Review on November 15, 2024
An article in Nature shows how an AI approach can explain racial disparities in the experience of pain that standard radiographic measures of the severity of pain couldn’t see.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Deep learning algorithm shows the pain is in the knee after all”
Let us explain. With cats
By Aaron Sankin and Natasha Uzcátegui-Liggett for The Markup on July 18, 2024
Encode Justice is the world’s first and largest youth movement for safe, equitable AI. Powered by 1,000 young people across every inhabited continent, we believe AI must be steered in a direction that benefits society.
From Encode Justice
A loose coalition of 4,000+ founders, engineers, product marketers, community builders, investors, and other tech folks working towards Palestinian freedom. We aim to end the dehumanisation of Palestinians within the tech community, and to bring voice to those who speak up.
From Tech For Palestine
There is now a single point to report cases of discrimination. In a simple web form, you can make a report for yourself or somebody else, and you can do this anonymously if you want to.
Continue reading “Anti-discrimination agencies have launched a single point of contact for reporting discrimination in the Netherlands”
A Markup investigation in 2022 found households in L.A.’s poorest neighborhoods were disproportionately asked to pay high prices for slow internet service.
By Aaron Sankin for The Markup on February 1, 2024
Heb jij of iemand uit je omgeving wel eens met discriminatie te maken? Meld het wél. Jouw ervaring telt. Wij luisteren naar jouw verhaal en helpen je. Je staat er niet alleen voor!
From Landelijk meldpunt discriminatie
Systemic Justice has designed a series of resources to help answer this question and build the knowledge and power of communities and movements fighting for justice: ‘Strategic litigation: A guide for legal action’, ‘Words for justice: A glossary of essential legal terms’, and ‘How can we use the courts: A conversation starter’.
From Systemic Justice on November 13, 2023
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”
Two new papers from Sony and Meta describe novel methods to make bias detection fairer.
By Melissa Heikkilä for MIT Technology Review on September 25, 2023
As EU institutions start decisive meetings on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, a broad civil society coalition is urging them to prioritise people and fundamental rights.
From European Digital Rights (EDRi) on July 12, 2023
Younger voices are using technology to respond to the needs of marginalized communities and nurture Black healing and liberation.
By Kenia Hale, Nate File and Payton Croskey for Boston Review on June 2, 2022
Introducing the Monk Skin Tone (MST) Scale, one of the ways we are moving AI forward with more inclusive computer vision tools.
From Skin Tone at Google
Skin tone is an observable characteristic that is subjective, perceived differently by individuals (e.g., depending on their location or culture) and thus is complicated to annotate. That said, the ability to reliably and accurately annotate skin tone is highly important in computer vision. This became apparent in 2018, when the Gender Shades study highlighted that computer vision systems struggled to detect people with darker skin tones, and performed particularly poorly for women with darker skin tones. The study highlights the importance for computer researchers and practitioners to evaluate their technologies across the full range of skin tones and at intersections of identities. Beyond evaluating model performance on skin tone, skin tone annotations enable researchers to measure diversity and representation in image retrieval systems, dataset collection, and image generation. For all of these applications, a collection of meaningful and inclusive skin tone annotations is key.
By Candice Schumann and Gbolahan O. Olanubi for Google AI Blog on May 15, 2023
Lab will advance assessments of AI systems in the public interest.
From Data & Society on May 10, 2023
This collection by the Data & Society Research Institute sheds an intimate and grounded light on what impact AI-systems can have. The guiding question that connects all of the 13 non-fiction pieces in Parables of AI in/from the Majority world: An Anthology is what stories can be told about a world in which solving societal issues is more and more dependent on AI-based and data-driven technologies? The book, edited by Rigoberto Lara Guzmán, Ranjit Singh and Patrick Davison, through narrating ordinary, everyday experiences in the majority world, slowly disentangles the global and unequally distributed impact of digital technologies.
Continue reading “Stories of everyday life with AI in the global majority”
Nakeema Stefflbauer is bringing women from underrepresented backgrounds into the Berlin tech scene.
By Gouri Sharma and Nakeema Stefflbauer for MIT Technology Review on February 21, 2023
Social media app, Spill, designed by former Twitter employees, Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell and DeVaris Brown, is becoming the chosen alternative for many.
By Kumba Kpakima for POCIT on December 21, 2022
We show that statistics have human consequences.
From Human Rights Data Analysis Group
We are a non-profit creating more realistic and inclusive images of artificial intelligence. Visit our growing repository available for anyone to use for free under CC licences, or just to use as inspiration for more helpful and diverse representations of AI.
From Better Images of AI
DoNotPay is a ‘robot lawyer’ service, allowing its customers (regular citizens) to automatically do things like fighting parking tickets, getting refunds on flight tickets, or auto-cancelling their free trials. Earlier this year, it expanded its service to include finding and helping remove racist language in housing documents.
Continue reading “Auto-detecting racist language in housing documents”
Sennay Ghebreab, head of the Civic AI Lab which aims to develop AI in a socially inclusive manner, was interviewed by Kustaw Bessems for the Volkskrant podcast Stuurloos (in Dutch).
Continue reading “Listen to Sennay Ghebreab for clarity about what AI should and shouldn’t do”
Je kunt al snel denken dat kunstmatige intelligentie alleen maar iets is om voor op te passen. Een machtig wapen in handen van de overheid of van techbedrijven die zich schuldig maken aan privacyschending, discriminatie of onterechte straffen. Maar we kunnen met algoritmen juist problemen oplossen en werken aan een rechtvaardiger wereld, zegt informaticus Sennay Ghebreab van het Civic AI Lab tegen Kustaw Bessems. Dan moeten we wel de basis een beetje snappen én er meer over te zeggen hebben.
By Kustaw Bessems and Sennay Ghebreab for Volkskrant on September 11, 2022
Understanding causes, recognizing cases, supporting those affected: documents for implementing a workshop.
By Waldemar Kesler for AlgorithmWatch on September 7, 2022
DoNotPay, which bills itself as a “robot lawyer,” has developed an automated way for people to remove racist language from real estate documents.
By Maxwell Strachan for VICE on July 28, 2022
What is algorithmic discrimination, how is it caused and what can be done about it? These are the questions that are addressed in AlgorithmWatch’s newly published report Automated Decision-Making Systems and Discrimination.
Continue reading “A guidebook on how to combat algorithmic discrimination”
We are faced with automated decision-making systems almost every day and they might be discriminating, without us even knowing about it. A new guidebook helps to better recognize such cases and support those affected.
From AlgorithmWatch on June 21, 2022
The KNVB (Royal Dutch Football Association) is taking a tech approach at tackling racist fan behaviour during matches, an approach that stands a great risk of falling in the techno solutionism trap.
Continue reading “‘Smart’ techologies to detect racist chants at Dutch football matches”
In this interview with OneWorld, Nani Jansen Reventlow reflects on the harmful uses of technology, perpetuated by private and public actors. Ranging from the Dutch child benefits scandal, to the use of proctoring in education and to ‘super SyRI’ in public services.
Continue reading “Centring communities in the fight against injustice”
Met als doel discriminerende spreekkoren in stadions te bestrijden, is een pilot van start gegaan met slimme technologie. Tot nu toe schoten bijvoorbeeld beschikbare videobeelden in combinatie met geluidsopnames te vaak tekort als bewijsmateriaal. In het kader van ‘Ons voetbal is van iedereen’, een gezamenlijk plan van de Rijksoverheid en het voetbal, is het bedrijfsleven uitgedaagd om in samenwerking met Betaald Voetbal Organisaties (BVO) met concrete oplossingen te komen. Met de pilot gaat deze challenge een nieuwe fase in.
From KNVB.nl on June 1, 2022
The MIT Technology Review has written a four-part series on how the impact of AI is “repeating the patterns of colonial history.” The Review is careful not to directly compare the current situation with the colonialist capturing of land, extraction of resources, and exploitation of people. Yet, they clearly show that AI does further enrich the wealthy at the tremendous expense of the poor.
Continue reading “Don’t miss this 4-part journalism series on ‘AI Colonialism’”
The Racism and Technology Center organised a panel titled Centering social injustice, de-centering tech: The case of the Dutch child benefits scandal and beyond at Privacy Camp 2022, a conference that brings together digital rights advocates, activists, academics and policymakers. Together with Merel Koning (Amnesty International), Nadia Benaissa (Bits of Freedom) and Sanne Stevens (Justice, Equity and Technology Table), the discussion used the Dutch child benefits scandal as an example to highlight issues of deeply rooted racism and discrimination in the public sector. The fixation on algorithms and automated decision-making systems tends to obscure these fundamental problems. Often, the use of technology by governments functions to normalise and rationalise existing racist and classist practices.
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