Some things happen that make you go, “whoa!” And as shocking as those things may be, they also don’t come as a genuine surprise. Specific actions from certain people are just expected. With the news swirling with damaging language from some influential people, the world is now faced with the ever-tumultuous leadership of Elon Musk as the head of Twitter. With the world’s richest man now at the head of the social media company, the use of the N-word has also taken a top seat along with him. via GIPHY  

Moderating online content is important, especially in a political climate where acts of violence are explicitly linked to hate speech online. Unfortunately, recent studies have found that leading algorithms responsible for detecting hate speech harbor biases of their own. Researchers at the University of Washington conducted a study titled “The Risk of Racial Bias in Hate Speech Detection.” The researchers decided to focus on Twitter because it is a “particularly important space for Black activism.” The study found that tweets by Black people were 1.5 times more likely to be flagged as “offensive.” If a tweet was written using African American English (AAE), then they were 2.2 more times likely to be flagged . This research is backed up by an additional study that found racial bias against Black speech in five academic datasets used for studying hate speech. In their conclusion, the researchers wrote:   “We find evidence of substantial racial bias in all of the datasets tested. This...

Last month, the Christchurch shooting — and its subsequent viral status — revealed just how common white nationalism is online. Many people already knew that platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube harbored hateful rhetoric, but poor responses to the shooting put them in the government’s sights. Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing questioning both Google and Facebook on the rise of white nationalism online. During YouTube’s livestream of the hearing, things got so ugly that YouTube eventually disabled the comments. Screenshots from Buzzfeed News reporter Ryan Broderick on Twitter show comments such as “White haters!” and “Jews make their own problems”. Not that the comments on the official House Judiciary Committee Hearings channel are any better… pic.twitter.com/7GjpTZFu1Z — Ryan Broderick (@broderick) April 9, 2019 YouTube comments filling up with racist and hateful remarks during a Congressional hearing on white nationalism isn’t actually surprising,...