The movement for humane technology must also address the spread of violent extremism, white nationalism, white supremacy and racism inherent in algorithms and ad filtering. The Color of Change is working on these issues and is launching a campaign to press FB shareholders to press for change. Click here for more details on the campaign.
Here is an excerpt:
"Time and time again, we’ve seen this concentration of power have harmful consequences for Black users and workers. For example:
In 2015, it took Color Of Change and multiple civil rights groups to get Facebook to partially address hate, threats, and doxxing - the posting of private identifying information for the purpose of harassment - of Black activists.
In 2016, Facebook deactivated the livestream of Korryn Gaines — a distraught woman who was filming the police as they confronted her in her apartment. When Facebook cut the livestream, police shot her to death in front of her son.
In March of this year, the live video of the white supremacist massacre at Christchurch mosques in New Zealand spread across Facebook.
News reports from this April confirmed that the Facebook-owned messenger, WhatsApp, is enabling the spread of Nazi imagery in Germany — a country where Nazi imagery is outlawed.
In 2016, journalists found that Facebook was excluding Black and Hispanic users from seeing housing and employment advertisements. It took until 2019 and numerous lawsuits, for Facebook to finally take steps to address the unlawful exclusion of Black people from housing, credit and employment advertisements on the platform.
Despite the recent appointment of the company’s first Black woman board member — who recently worked at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, raising concerns that she is not independent — Black employees continue to report an anti-Black workplace culture, one in which “there is often more diversity in [slide show] presentations than the teams who present them.”2
This is where diversity comes in. Humanetech community contributors should come from various sectors, regions, countries, etc. as much as possible. Because the more diverse we are the more we know the various perspectives and concerns of various groups. And have a holistic view of the problem and solution that we face with regards to tech. This is a global concern that needs global solution. We need to find ways to attract more members that truly represents those peoples affected by the negative effects of tech worldwide.
Yes, I agree. The problem won’t be fixed until there is diversity in the people offering solutions. For people of color experience social media threats in different - and often more severe - ways.
At the Toda Peace Institute, we have commissioned 15 policy briefs and case studies from 15 different countries to document the impact of social media on polarization and conflict dynamics in local communities. I’ll post those policy briefs here on this forum. Past policy briefs can be found here: https://toda.org/policy-briefs-and-resources/social-media-and-peacebuilding.html
Facebook has only accelerated the uprising of conservatives and right-wing forces, but Facebook is not the cause. Historical and political processes in the world are responsible for this. And if Facebook becomes sterile left, this means that pretty soon there will be a another “Facebook” with the right ideology. like CNN and FOX.
TIME TO PREPARE MONEY FOR INVESTMENT IN NEW “Facebook”
There are web sites that promotes white extremism, white supremacist and white nationalism. These sites are incubator of violent acts like what happened in New Zealand. Why the authorities not shutdown these kind of sites? Freedom of speech? People are dying. As long as these sites exist we will see more of the same thing in the future. They are important factor to be addressed in dealing with this sort of extremism. Large platforms like facebook, youtube are at least doing something but having some difficulty in dealing with this issue.
I think it is deeper and more general problem of our modern society. There are plenty of websites that promotes for example Islamic extremism and which helps recruit soldiers for their war. Much more people are dying and a lot of people in Africa live under horrible and for us unimaginable terror of those groups. If you shut down one site today there will be two more tomorrow. Government insane surveillance of every single person like in China can partly solve this problem… but nobody at least on this forum wants this. A lot of people on this forum wants to stay anonymous and act without constant surveillance. Freedom and privacy has dark sides and we have to find reasonable balance. Fight against extremism was abused many times by our governments and it seems that step by step we are loosing our freedom and privacy.
We do not have effective mechanism how to deal with any kind of extremism and internet a digital world just amplifies our issues in real world. Incubators of violent are exist in real world as well, internet just help them be more effective, global and really fast. And I agree with you we have to fight with any kind of extremism and try to find effective way how to deal with that without loosing our freedom and privacy. And of course all of us know that fighting against any kind of extremism is not highest priority for tech companies and certainly is not something what brings profit for tech giants.
Just a reminder to please try to treat all people as equals and not place blame on any one ethnic group.
May I please remind everyone that all people on earth are capable of hatred and discrimination. Maybe if we read the media or textbooks, or listen to politicians, certain groups seems to be creating all the hate but this is all a huge fiction and not at all reality. We are all equal, and all have equal capability to unfortunately have hatred and do bad things.
For example some of the worst hatred I know of these days is probably some of the small-scale religious genocides happening between different South Asian religious groups. Note that Facebook was also used to organise many of these genocides, and they didn’t even understand the language apparently or care to stop them. A second example if that though the highest number of hate crimes in the US are against Africans (“blacks”), a sizeable percentage are against Europeans (“whites”) and of course many other types of people. A third example is that some of the most prejudiced people in the world are South Africans who are discriminating against people from Zimbabwe (oddly enough presumably due to economic immigration caused by misguided racial redistribution). A fourth and perhaps most terrible example is Xinjiang (East Turkestan), where about 1 million Uyghurs are currently being imprisoned just for the desire to eliminate their ethnicity. China is using massive surveillance technology to find and control Uyghurs, and is subjecting 1 million of them to brainwashing in prison.
Also please note there is no such thing as “race”, these posts mention “whites” but there is no scientific basis for any so-called “races”. We are all of the human race, the same race.
White racism which is the main characteristic of white extremism or white nationalism is associated with dehumanization, hostility and angonistic behavior. Historically white racism has been associated with the darkest chapter of human history from colonization, slavery and genocide. The degree of dehumanization to which people dehumanize another group is strongly correlated with the endorsement of hostile policies and their willingness to act with hostility. For example the hungarians and czechs dehumanization of the Roma people is associated with the support of nasty policies such as providing Roma women with birth control that has a high chance of permanent sterilization which happened until the 1990s. Hungarian politician in 2013 even calling the Roma people animals. This is flashback on how the nazi calls the jews and other peoples subhuman. We knew what happened next. Dehumanization is a virulent psychological process. Playing with the language is inviting violence to those perceive associated with the dehumanized. This is what makes white extremism dangerous. Social media are being weaponized by this extremist group like what happened in New Zealand to advertise or promote their extremist views. White racism is thriving in the U.S. and the far right in Europe are on the rise. The main social media should do more to rein in or reduce hate speech coming from this people. I avoid using race as much as possible this is just a social construct and have negative connotation.
There are some gray areas here because so much of our issues with Facebook are that people remain somewhat anonymous with never having eye contact. It’s kind of like driving, people are less inhibited.
One other inhumane part of this subject is that people can lead “secret” lives and run these supremest campaigns.
Two things we can do to combat this is to spread humane practice of internet use with campaigner work to educate people on living humanely. Another is to modeling tolerance- nothing will teach this better than tolerating people that are different than ourselves. The next time you disagree with someone anywhere- try to see one part of what the other person sees. It doesn’t mean you agree but hold out your hand to join some common ground.
Campaigner work here means educating people with ads and shock videos.
I deleted my facebook a few years ago when I complained about a page in arabic advocating running over Jews with the car and facebook told me the content does not violate community standards. I complained that I saw a beheading on a page used to incite and recruit for terror and they said same thing. My friend who is a great friend and means no harm to anyone had too much to drink and idk if his girlfriend had his phone but he was banned for posting a photo of his own scrotum on his own wall / timeline, whatever profile. Not saying I want to see that, but what kind of standards say that’s wrong but beheading and blood libel ok? Then they were breached over and over again and bought Whatsapp and Google or someone else bought Waze and I took a giant step back.
