Submitted by editor on Fri, 2016/11/18 - 12:55pm
How technology today is enabling racism, sexism, and deliberate misinformation, and what we should be doing about it.
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Friday, November 18, 2016
Our recent, intensely divisive election has laid bare many faults in our tech products and services.
In particular, racism, along with sexism and deliberate misinformation, is thriving today, thanks in part to the technology we’ve built, exposing some deep (and in some cases, fundamental) flaws in our digital offspring.
A quick recap:
- Twitter, which has been a home for racist and sexist abuse for years (see: Gamergate, Leslie Jones, Anti-semitism), is now also a home for bots that are polluting our national dialogue.
- Facebook has become a broadcast network for fake news, some of it manufactured overseas with the sheer objective of monetizing our partisan biases through ad revenue.