Activism has always been the center piece for Color Of Change President Rashad Robinson. Advocacy Was In His DNA Within his family home during his upbringing, his parents would often discuss issues faced by their eastern Long Island community. The family even once skipped out on a family trip to Six Flags in New Jersey due to his parents allocating the funds to support Jesse Jackson’s second run for presidency in 1988. “I remember really early on getting involved in protests and activism and knocking on doors with candidates well before I could even vote,” he told AFROTECH™. “So it’s always been part of my DNA… There was something about that I was always drawn to about social change and about the idea that I could be part of making the world a better place, making things better for my family, making things better for my people, making things better for myself.” To no surprise, Robinson’s community work also take root in Long Island, an area which he says had a small population of...

Julie Wenah doesn’t necessarily want to address the elephant in the room about Facebook, but she knows she has to. “When it comes to the product, itself, I know there’s a lot of work to be done,” she told AfroTech. “Leaving aside the privacy concerns, there is also no shortage of safety concerns, as well. The trust in our brand is lost amongst a certain segment of the population — we understand that, and we appreciate that. But more than anything, we’re doing everything we can to re-establish the trust in the brand, in the product — and we thank people, in advance, for their patience.” The shattered trust in the Facebook brand, of course, comes from a combination of sources. Black people in general — and Black women, in particular — don’t feel safe in the space; according to Pew Research, almost 60 percent of all Black Internet users say they have experienced a form of online harassment — and social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram could be incubators for such...

A recent study by the National Institute of Standards of Technology revealed that facial recognition software delivers flawed results when assessing minority populations. The study has sparked yet another debate about the controversial technology, given its frequent use in the apprehension of suspects. The NIST study tested nearly 200 facial recognition algorithms. The results illustrated a higher rate of misidentification and other errors among subjects who identified as people of color. “ With mug shot images, the highest false positives are in American Indians, with elevated rates in African American and Asian populations ,” according to the study. False positives refer to the instances in which the software identified an incorrect match; false negatives refer to situations in which the software failed to recognize a match. The report also showed greater instances of false positives among African American women . The study has given advocacy groups and politicians more ammunition...