Category: Twitter

Racist Technology in Action: Grok’s total lack of safeguards against generating racist content

Grok logo

Grok is the chatbot made by xAI, a startup founded by Elon Musk, and is the generative AI solution that is powering X (née Twitter). It has recently gained a new power to generate photorealistic images, including those of celebrities. This is a problem as its ‘guardrails’ are lacking: it willingly generates racist and other deeply problematic images.

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Digital Apartheid in Gaza: Unjust Content Moderation at the Request of Israel’s Cyber Unit

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

‘Stoppen met Twitter doet niets tegen racisme’

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

What’s at stake with losing (Black) Twitter and moving to (white) Mastodon?

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.

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I’m @Sinders on Mastodon but I’m not giving up on Twitter, yet

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

The Whiteness of Mastodon

A conversation with Dr. Johnathan Flowers about Elon Musk’s changes at Twitter and the dynamics on Mastodon, the decentralized alternative.

By Johnathan Flowers and Justin Hendrix for Tech Policy Press on November 23, 2022

Disinformation and anti-Blackness

In this issue of Logic, issue editor, J. Khadijah Abdurahman and André Brock Jr., associate professor of Black Digital Studies at Georgia Institute of Technology and the author of Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures converse about the history of disinformation from reconstruction to the present, and discuss “the unholy trinity of whiteness, modernity, and capitalism”.

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Are We Automating Racism?

Many of us assume that tech is neutral, and we have turned to tech as a way to root out racism, sexism, or other “isms” plaguing human decision-making. But as data-driven systems become a bigger and bigger part of our lives, we also notice more and more when they fail, and, more importantly, that they don’t fail on everyone equally. Glad You Asked host Joss Fong wants to know: Why do we think tech is neutral? How do algorithms become biased? And how can we fix these algorithms before they cause harm?

From YouTube on March 31, 2021

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