BOSTON (AP) — America’s first newspaper dedicated to ending slavery is being resurrected and reimagined more than two centuries later as the nation continues to grapple with its legacy of racism. The revived version of The Emancipator is a joint effort by Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research and The Boston Globe’s Opinion team that’s expected to launch in the coming months. Deborah Douglas and Amber Payne, co-editors-in-chief of the new online publication, say it will feature written and video opinion pieces, multimedia series, virtual talks and other content by respected scholars and seasoned journalists. The goal, they say, is to “reframe” the national conversation around racial injustice. “I like to say it’s anti-racism, every day, on purpose,” said Douglas, who joined the project after working as a journalism professor at DePauw University in Indiana. “We are targeting anyone who wants to be a part of the solution to creating an anti-racist society because we think that leads us to our true north, which is democracy.” Source: Abolition newspaper revived for nation grappling with racism | AP News
Visions of the Internet in 2035 | Pew Research Center
This report is the second of two analyzing the insights of hundreds of technology experts who responded in the summer of 2021 to a canvassing of their predictions about the evolution of online public spaces and their role in democracy in the coming years. In response to the primary research question, many said they expect that these forums will be significantly improved by 2035 if reformers, big technology firms, governments and activists tackle the problems created by misinformation, disinformation and toxic discourse. At the same time, they expressed ongoing concerns about the destructive forces in culture and technology that could continue to plague online life and disrupt beneficial change in the coming years. In that canvassing, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center asked a follow-up question inviting these experts to share their vision for what a better digital world could be like in 2035. This report covers scores of those responses. Many envisioned a vastly more hospitable online environment that facilitates socially enriching relationships; the flowering of knowledge-creating communities; growth of truth-seeking group discussions; and new kinds of interactions enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). At best, they imagine tech-aided collaborations – sometimes global in scale – that can tackle the world’s most pressing questions. Source: Visions of the Internet in 2035 | Pew Research Center
The trouble with Roblox, the video game empire built on child labour | The Guardian
Anna* was 10 when she built her first video game on Roblox, a digital platform where young people can make, share and play games together. She used Roblox much like a child from a previous generation might have used cardboard boxes, marker pens and stuffed toys to build a castle or a spaceship and fill it with characters and story. There was one alluring difference: Roblox hosted Anna’s tiny world online, enabling children she had never met and who maybe lived thousands of miles away from her home in Utah to visit and play. Using Roblox’s in-built tools – child-friendly versions of professional software – Anna began to learn the rudiments of music composition, computer programming and 3D modelling. Game-making became an obsession. When she wasn’t at school Anna was rarely off her computer. As she became more proficient, Anna’s work caught the attention of some experienced users on Roblox, game-makers in their 20s who messaged her with a proposition to collaborate on a more ambitious project. Flattered by their interest, Anna became the fifth member of the nascent team, contributing art, design and programming to the game. She did not sign up to make money, but during a Skype call the game-makers offered the teenager 10% of any profits the game made in the future. It turned out to be a generous offer. Within a few months, the game had become one of the most played on Roblox. For Anna, success had an unfathomable, life-changing impact. At 16 her monthly income somehow exceeded her parents’ combined salaries. She calculated that she was on course to earn $300,000 in a year, a salary equivalent to that of a highly experienced Google programmer. Anna cancelled her plans to go to college. Source: The trouble with Roblox, the video game empire built…
Posting Back: Exploring Platformed Black Feminist Communities on Twitter and Instagram | Social Media + Society
Black women have historically used unconventional, everyday spaces as sites of Black feminist intellectual production. Today, one of the most common spaces in which Black women produce intellectual thought is social media. However, very little research has broadly examined the dynamics of these online communities for Black feminist theorizing beyond individual hashtag conversation. In this study, I conducted 21 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with individuals who engaged in eight different Black feminist hashtag conversations across Twitter and Instagram to expand our current understanding of how Black feminist intellectual production has developed and broadened through the affordances of social media. Findings suggest that while Black feminist hashtag discussions have allowed Black women to “talk back” to hegemonic mainstream and popular discourses about Black women, these conversations are constantly at stake of appropriation and co-optation replicating historical erasure of Black women’s intellectual production. Source: Posting Back: Exploring Platformed Black Feminist Communities on Twitter and Instagram | Social Media + Society
A Need for Considering Digital Inequality When Studying Social Media Use and Well-Being | Social Media + Society
Abstract Digital inequality scholarship has consistently found that people from varying societal positions experience digital media in their lives in divergent ways. Therefore, the growing body of research examining the relationship of social media use and well-being should account for the role of social inequality. This piece synthesizes key empirical research that has addressed the nexus of digital inequality, social media use, and well-being from one or more angles. Based on this extant scholarship, we develop a framework for research that integrates relevant perspectives from multiple disciplines. Source: A Need for Considering Digital Inequality When Studying Social Media Use and Well-Being | Social Media + Society
The Datafication of #MeToo: Whiteness, Racial Capitalism, and Anti-Violence Technologies | Big Data & Society
This article illustrates how racial capitalism can enhance understandings of data, capital, and inequality through an in-depth study of digital platforms used for intervening in gender-based violence. Specifically, we examine an emergent sociotechnical strategy that uses software platforms and artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots to offer users emergency assistance, education, and a means to report and build evidence against perpetrators. Our analysis details how two reporting apps construct data to support institutionally legible narratives of violence, highlighting overlooked racialised dimensions of the data capital generated through their use. We draw attention to how they reinforce property relations built on extraction and ownership, capital accumulation that reinforces benefits derived through data property relations and ownership, and the commodification of diversity and inclusion. Recognising these patterns are not unique to anti-violence apps, we reflect on how this example aids in understanding how racial capitalism becomes a constitutive element of digital platforms, which more generally extract information from users, rely on complex financial partnerships, and often sustain problematic relationships with the criminal legal system. We conclude with a discussion of how racial capitalism can advance scholarship at the intersections of data and power. Source: The Datafication of #MeToo: Whiteness, Racial Capitalism, and Anti-Violence Technologies | Big Data & Society
As Concerns About Student Activity Monitoring Software Grow, a Recent Supreme Court Decision Reinforces the Importance of Protecting Students’ Privacy | Center for Democracy and Technology
With the expansion of remote learning, schools have increasingly deployed technically sophisticated means of monitoring individual student’s online activity, including student activity monitoring software that rarely limits its data collection to school hours. Student activity monitoring software may permit schools to see what applications students are using, open websites on a student’s laptop, switch tabs, block sites, access communications, or view browsing histories — even when they are away from campus. The monitoring can take place on computers, devices, or applications owned by schools, as well as students’ personal devices, and has raised concerns among parents and students across the country. Last year, the Supreme Court weighed in on the increasingly fuzzy line between students’ lives on and offcampus in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. The Court prohibited a high school from punishing a student for a profanity-laced video about tryouts for the school’s cheerleading squad, made off-campus with a personal device on Snapchat, a non-school application. Some commentators have worried that the decision in Mahanoy might open the door for widespread surveillance of students, but the principles underlying the decision underscore the importance of protecting student privacy for two reasons: Source: As Concerns About Student Activity Monitoring Software Grow, a Recent Supreme Court Decision Reinforces the Importance of Protecting Students’ Privacy | Center for Democracy and Technology
CDT Comments to OSTP Highlight How Biometrics Impact Disabled People | Center for Democracy and Technology
In late 2021, the White House Office of Science Technology and Policy (OSTP) launched its AI Bill of Rights initiative to address AI systems that enable and worsen discrimination and privacy risks, particularly in the technologies society has grown to depend on most. CDT submitted comments to the OSTP on the impact of biometric technologies on disabled people, discussing how biometrics incorporated into decision-making and surveillance have disproportionately harmed multiply-marginalized disabled people. Our comments focus on applications of biometrics in health, public benefits, assistive technology and Internet of Things (IoT), and hiring. We also discuss the use of biometrics for surveillance in schools, the workplace, and the criminal legal system. CDT will continue advocating for increased attention to AI’s privacy risks and for policy changes that center affected communities. Source: CDT Comments to OSTP Highlight How Biometrics Impact Disabled People | Center for Democracy and Technology
Wearing Many Hats: The Rise of the Professional Security Hacker | Data & Society
Wearing Many Hats: the Rise of the Professional Security Hacker chronicles the largely untold history of the hacker-turned-professional. Through this seminal work, researchers Matt Goerzen and Gabriella Coleman collaborate to chart the movements of the digital underground during the 1990s to reveal what underground technologists or “hackers”, did—technically, linguistically, and culturally—to establish their legitimacy as employable, trustworthy security experts. Over the course of a decade, hackers were able to legitimize their professional place in society by 1) negotiating full-disclosure security research practices in which hackers and technologists openly published security vulnerabilities; and by 2) reconfiguring their image through a combination of PR stunts, media collaborations, and rhetorical interventions that gave rise to the adoption by hackers of imaginary hats (black, white, and gray) that expressed one’s level of willingness to work inside or outside the law. Both efforts proved sufficient in transforming a fringe, underground subculture into a security-minded workforce whose members are now recognized as trustworthy security experts and legitimate employees of governments and corporations. Based on dozens of interviews and expert analyses of archival data, Goerzen and Coleman’s collection of this previously (mostly) untold history of the digital underground during the 1990s not only reveals a transformative period in which hackers transitioned from security risks to security professionals, but also provides insight into how many in the digital underground became outspoken advocates of both computer security and the public interest despite being characterized by government, private enterprise, and the media as anarchists and criminals. Source: Wearing Many Hats: The Rise of the Professional Security Hacker | Data & Society
What Happens When an AI Knows How You Feel? | WIRED
IN MAY 2021, Twitter, a platform notorious for abuse and hot-headedness, rolled out a “prompts” feature that suggests users think twice before sending a tweet. The following month, Facebook announced AI “conflict alerts” for groups, so that admins can take action where there may be “contentious or unhealthy conversations taking place.” Email and messaging smart-replies finish billions of sentences for us every day. Amazon’s Halo, launched in 2020, is a fitness band that monitors the tone of your voice. Wellness is no longer just the tracking of a heartbeat or the counting of steps, but the way we come across to those around us. Algorithmic therapeutic tools are being developed to predict and prevent negative behavior. Source: What Happens When an AI Knows How You Feel? | WIRED