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
Analysis
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
Chicago’s “Race-Neutral” Traffic Cameras Ticket Black and Latino Drivers the Most | ProPublica
When then-Mayor Richard M. Daley ushered in Chicago’s red-light cameras nearly two decades ago, he said they would help the city curb dangerous driving. “This is all about safety, safety of pedestrians, safety of other drivers, passengers, everyone,” he said. His successors echoed those sentiments as they expanded camera enforcement. “My goal is only one thing, the safety of our kids,” Rahm Emanuel said in 2011, as he lobbied for the introduction of speed cameras. And in 2020, Lori Lightfoot assured residents her expansion of the program was “about making sure that we keep communities safe.” But for all of their safety benefits, the hundreds of cameras that dot the city — and generate tens of millions of dollars a year for City Hall — have come at a steep cost for motorists from the city’s Black and Latino neighborhoods. A ProPublica analysis of millions of citations found that households in majority Black and Hispanic ZIP codes received tickets at around twice the rate of those in white areas between 2015 and 2019. Source: Chicago’s “Race-Neutral” Traffic Cameras Ticket Black and Latino Drivers the Most | ProPublica
How a racialized disinformation campaign ties itself to The 1619 Project | Columbia Journalism Review
Footage of the January 6 Capitol insurrection revealed hundreds of references to 1776—in signs and in speeches, on t-shirts and hats and stickers. “1776” was chanted in the Capitol halls by leading figures within the so-called alt-right, including some who had also participated in the racist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, and by those who believed themselves participants in the dawn of the next American revolution. The Proud Boys, too, cite this date; they sell their merch through a store called 1776. We are researchers of media manipulation and disinformation at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, and we wanted to know more about how “1776” became the battle cry of the insurrection. Our research reveals that the popularity of “1776” owes in part to keyword squatting—a tactic by which right-wing media have dominated the keywords “1619” and “critical race theory” and enabled a racialized disinformation campaign, waged by Trump and his acolytes, against Black civil rights gains. Source: How a racialized disinformation campaign ties itself to The 1619 Project | Columbia Journalism Review
Digital twins improve real-life manufacturing | MIT Technology Review
Real-world data paired with digital simulations of products—digital twins—are providing valuable insights that are helping companies identify and resolve problems before prototypes go into production and manage products in the field, says Alberto Ferrari, senior director of the Model-Based Digital Thread Process Capability Center at Raytheon. “As they say, ‘All the models are wrong, but some of them are useful,’” Ferrari says. “Digital twins, supported with data—as real facts—are a way to identify models that are really useful for decision-making.” Download the full report. Source: Digital twins improve real-life manufacturing | MIT Technology Review
Experts Doubt Ethical AI Design Will Be Broadly Adopted as the Norm Within the Next Decade | Pew Research Center
Artificial intelligence systems “understand” and shape a lot of what happens in people’s lives. AI applications “speak” to people and answer questions when the name of a digital voice assistant is called out. They run the chatbots that handle customer-service issues people have with companies. They help diagnose cancer and other medical conditions. They scour the use of credit cards for signs of fraud, and they determine who could be a credit risk. Corporations and governments are charging evermore expansively into AI development. Increasingly, nonprogrammers can set up off-the-shelf, pre-built AI tools as they prefer. As this unfolds, a number of experts and advocates around the world have become worried about the long-term impact and implications of AI applications. They have concerns about how advances in AI will affect what it means to be human, to be productive and to exercise free will. Dozens of convenings and study groups have issued papers proposing what the tenets of ethical AI design should be, and government working teams have tried to address these issues. In light of this, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center asked experts where they thought efforts aimed at creating ethical artificial intelligence would stand in the year 2030. Some 602 technology innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded to this specific question: By 2030, will most of the AI systems being used by organizations of all sorts employ ethical principles focused primarily on the public good? Source: Experts Doubt Ethical AI Design Will Be Broadly Adopted as the Norm Within the Next Decade | Pew Research Center
Resisting the Menace of Face Recognition | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Face recognition technology is a special menace to privacy, racial justice, free expression, and information security. Our faces are unique identifiers, and most of us expose them everywhere we go. And unlike our passwords and identification numbers, we can’t get a new face. So, governments and businesses, often working in partnership, are increasingly using our faces to track our whereabouts, activities, and associations. Fortunately, people around the world are fighting back. A growing number of communities have banned government use of face recognition. As to business use, many communities are looking to a watershed Illinois statute, which requires businesses to get opt-in consent before extracting a person’s faceprint. In the hands of government and business alike, face recognition technology is a growing menace to our digital rights. But the future is unwritten. EFF is proud of its contributions to the movement to resist abuse of these technologies. Please join us in demanding a ban on government use of face recognition, and laws like Illinois’ BIPA to limit private use. Together, we can end this threat. Source: Resisting the Menace of Face Recognition | Electronic Frontier Foundation