Showing 11 results for:
white-supremacy
Popular topics
All results
Ice cream company — Ben & Jerry’s — has been extremely vocal in regards to calling out racism and violence in America during the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. After issuing a bold and detailed statement to dismantle white supremacy in America back in June, Ben & Jerry’s quickly earned a reputation of being a valued advocate for change in underserved communities across the U.S. Now they’re taking their actions a step further. In the fight for racial equality, the company has launched a podcast called “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America” — based on Jeffery Robinson’s acclaimed presentation of the same name. They plan to uncover the lesser-known history of racial injustice in America, according to Refinery29 . View this post on Instagram A post shared by Ben & Jerry's (@benandjerrys) According to the captioned Instagram post, the new podcast will be hosted by Carvell Wallace and ACLU legal expert Jeffery Robinson in partnership with Vox Media and The Who We Are Project,...
Since coming into office, President Trump has often claimed that social media companies hold a bias against conservatives. In now-deleted tweets , Trump even went so far as to claim that Google displayed political bias against him, writing, “We are watching Google very closely!” Although there is absolutely no proof of Trump’s claims, the administration launched a “tech bias” sharing tool in May. Now, it seems Trump is taking his fight against social media companies one step further with a new White House proposal. Originally reported by Politico , the “Protecting Americans from Online Censorship” proposal would give the Federal Communications Commission oversight of how companies like Facebook and Twitter monitor their platforms. The administration claims that it received over 15,000 complaints around social media bias from its online tool. Under the proposal, the Federal Trade Commission will be asked to open a public complaint docket, according to CNN , and work with the FTC to...
In August 2017, over 500 white supremacists descended upon Charlottesville, Virginia for a “Unite the Right” rally. There, Neo-Nazi James Fields plowed through a crowd of counterprotesters , leaving dozens injured and killing Heather Heyer. The events of the rally were harrowing, not only because they confirmed what many people of color already knew about white supremacists’ ability to organize and march freely, but also because of how it was planned. To organize the Unite the Right rally, white supremacists utilized the popular, and private platform, Discord. The utilization of discord to plan a white supremacist rally — and the subsequent exposure of just how deep hate on the platform went — speaks to a larger trend of hate on gaming platforms. Initially designed for the gaming community. Discord’s use as a safe space for white supremacists online should spur questions about how and why gaming spaces, in particular, are used to promote and facilitate white supremacist violence....
Over the past few years, hate crimes have steadily increased across the country. Despite being notoriously underreported — or simply not taken seriously when brought to authorities — the FBI still found that between 2016 and 2017, hate crimes rose 17 percent. It’s no stretch to correlate the rise of hate crimes with the United States’ political climate, including the election of President Donald Trump and the subsequent rhetoric that his administration ushered in. With the political climate continuing to worsen, it’s important to be aware of how hate operates online too. According to a survey from the Anti-Defamation League , 2018 turned out to be a record year for online hate speech. Social media platforms ranked especially high, with over half of all respondents (56 percent) saying they experienced hate on Facebook; meanwhile, Twitter and YouTube clocked in at 19 percent and 17 percent, respectively. Often, people separate what happens online from “real life,” as if the digital...
This article was originally published on 07/15/2019 There isn’t an area of your life that technology doesn’t impact. Although people tend to think of digital technology as something that stands alone, the reality is it didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. Generally, like the internet, tech can be used to give people access to things they wouldn’t otherwise have, like the ability to locate new information through search engines. While doing so, it can also reinforce social inequalities without even trying. For instance, how Google’s search engine was found to quietly reinforce racism . While revelations around tech and its impacts on our society are a big part of our public conversation now, they aren’t too surprising since tech is an industry that doesn’t reflect the diversity of the people who use the products companies build. Tech companies first started releasing diversity reports in 2014, and since then they’ve proven what most people already knew: That it’s a white, male...
On Tuesday, Twitter announced updates to its rules against hate speech that would now expand the policy to include language dehumanizing others on the basis of religion. The change was a result of a call Twitter put out last year to help the company rewrite its policies around dehumanizing language in acknowledgment of “how it can lead to real world harm.” Initially, Twitter proposed a policy in 2018 against “content that dehumanizes others based on their membership in an identifiable group.” However, the company received responses from people across the world who criticized the policy for being too broad. It’s a fair point because policies against dehumanization that fail to take into account the power structures behind it — such as xenophobia, anti-Blackness, etc. — further contribute to the problem. By only broadly discussing “identifiable groups,” Twitter failed to consider who is most often being attacked, and who that has direct, real-world consequences for. The company gave...
President Donald Trump generally isn’t too fond of social media –even though he uses it more than any president we’ve had — often accusing platforms of harboring biases against conservatives. However, there’s one site that Trump seems to like, Reddit. This may be due to the subreddit, r/The_Donald, which has not only been referenced by Trump himself but by his team as well. Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, even revealed that he would visit it daily back in 2016 . Trump also hosted an open interview on the forum that same year. However, the subreddit was placed under quarantine on Wednesday, due to repeated “misbehavior,” which included inciting violence. The decision was made only two days after Media Matters for America reported that r/The_Donald forum members had issued calls for violence. This came after Oregon’s governor told law enforcement to bring back Republican state senators who fled the state so a climate change bill wouldn’t pass. It’s important to note that...
Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump has had a lot to say about social media companies, and he’s accused several of censoring conservative voices. Now, it seems the president is escalating his supposed fight for free speech. On Wednesday, the Trump administration launched an online form asking people to share stories regarding tech bias. The form, called the “Tech Bias Story Sharing Tool” opens with the following message: “SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear “violations” of user policies. No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.” The form request that people submit evidence alongside their stories if possible, such as links of Tweets or screenshots of emails from social media companies. There is no clear information on where the data goes. However,...
White supremacy on Twitter is such a common problem that “Jack, ban the Nazis” has became a sort of mantra found beneath almost every tweet by the company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey. The platform has even been referred to as a “Nazi haven” by Techcrunch . Many have wondered why Twitter hasn’t done more to combat white supremacy. After all, the company has gone up against ISIS and other extremists groups, managing to almost completely eradicate them from its platform. But, a recent Motherboard report confirmed what most marginalized populations already know: Twitter can’t take a firm stance against white supremacy, because that would mean banning some Republican politicians, too. Motherboard reported that an employee working on machine learning and artificial intelligence issues at the company said: With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, he explained. When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as...
Facebook currently has a policy banning white supremacy, and also has a policy explicitly allowing white nationalism and white separatism. Critics of this policy have long argued that a meeting of a white nationalist and a white supremacist looks like this: Facebook, on the other hand, has told these critics there's a difference between white supremacists and white nationalists. White supremacists, according to Facebook, are racists, while white nationalists are more like black separatists or Zionists, Motherboard reports . “We don't just think about one particular group engaging in a certain speech, we think about, ‘What if different groups engaged in that same sort of speech?’ If they did, would we want to have a policy that prevented them from doing so?” Facebook's head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, stated earlier this year. “And so, where we've drawn the line right now is, where there is hate, where there is dismissing of other groups or saying that they are...
Twitter made waves when they changed its blue check verification policy and snatched the status away from several white nationalist accounts. Twitter had come under fire for inconsistent rule enforcement, prior to its recent actions. Now, the major social media platform is going one step further and suspending a few white nationalist accounts due to its implementation of new rules, LA Times reports. Accounts with “logos, symbols, or images whose purpose is to promote hostility and malice against others based on their race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin,” will be among the suspended group per Twitter’s new rules. There isn’t a list of examples that fall under that list, but Twitter will review each complaint individually. “In our efforts to be more aggressive here, we may make some mistakes and are working on a robust appeals process,” Twitter wrote in its blog post . Far-right group Britain First as well as well-known white nationalist...