Author: jon

To Save Tech, #ListentoBlackWomen

To Save Tech, #ListentoBlackWomen

Community voting for the 2019 SXSW conference begins today, so I wanted to let people know about To Save Tech, #ListentoBlackWomen , a panel proposal by Shireen Mitchell of Stop Online Violence Against Women, Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble of USC (author of the excellent Algorithms of Oppression), and me.

Here’s the description:

The disinformation, hacking, harassment, recruiting to extremist causes that we saw online during the 2016 elections highlight patterns Black women have long called attention to. So do the algorithmic biases of search algorithms, facial recognition software, and ad targeting; and the woefully inadequate responses of big tech companies including their tendency to look to AI as a magic tech solution. Listening to Black women is a path for the tech industry to get beyond its history of aiding hate, racists, sexists, nativists, and anti-LGBTQ+ bigots, and move in the direction of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion within the industry.

Please check out our proposal on the SXSW site. If you like it, here’s how you can support it:

  • Vote for it on the SXSW site. You’ll need to create an account to vote; once you do, the VOTE UP button is on the left-hand side.
  • Leave a comment saying why you’re voting for it. To leave a comment, you’ll need to log in separately via Twitter, Facebook, or Disqus… I hate software. Still, comments are doubly helpful: the selection committee takes them into account; and, if other people see that somebody has commented, they’re more likely to comment themselves.
  • Share it with your friends and colleagues who might be interested, in email or on social networks.

SXSW says that community voting counts for about 30% of their decision. Since white guys have historically been overrepresented at SXSW (and Black women historically underrepresented), and most voters are past attendees, there’s a built-in bias against panels like ours. So even though it’s inconvenient, your support is greatly appreciated.

The good news is that once you’ve created the account and logged in, it’s easy to support multiple proposals! There are quite a few others that are interesting (and in many cases great complements to ours). For example:

Having said all that, here’s a bit more background about our proposal.

Sign saying ':isten to black women'

The origin for this specific proposal was a Twitter Moment that Shireen put together a few months ago called Hacking of 2016 would have never happened had folks #ListenedToBW. All three of us have focused on the underlying issues in our presentations and writings. To get an idea of where we’re coming from, as well as the videos on the SXSW page, check out

And while you’re at it, look around the SXSW site for other interesting panels featuring Black women – and vote them up so that SXSW attendees can listen to them as well 🙂

 

Image credit: Jeff Swensen, Getty Images, via Kiratiana Freelon’s March for Black Women Organizers Want to Put Our Issues Front and Center During March for Racial Justice on The Root

Torn Apart / Separados: immigrant detention after “zero tolerance”

Map of the Unitied states with hundreds of orange circles on it

Torn Apart / Separados visualizes the geo-spatial, financial, and infrastructural dimensions of  immigrant detention in in the wake of the Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy.  The map above is just one of their visualizations of the locations of ICE facilities and private detention centers, based on aggregating and cross-referencing publicly available data.

With this information, perhaps our communities will begin to see the magnitude of the threat to human dignity occurring on our watch and the complex machinery driving government policy. Perhaps rather than feeling helpless, we can recognize that we have skills to tread these troubled waters, particularly in collaboration with each other.

— Roopika Risam, in What We Have, What We Can

It’s an important project.   The data’s extremely useful for activists, advocates, and journalists.  If you have the skills and a bit of time to help, Torn Apart / Separados offers a chance to make a huge impact in a humanitarian crisis.  Here’s a few links with more information:

So please consider getting involved.   Sylvia Fernández’ Torn Apart / Separados Call for Contributors and Reviewers, on HASTAC, describes several different ways people can help – as well as surveys for allies, activist and advocacy organizations and lawyers and legal advisors asking how the project’s resources could be useful to their work and whether they have any data or other resources to contribute.

And please also help get the word out – share the links above (or this post), and like and RT key tweets on the #TornApart and #Separados hashtags.

 

 

Algorithmic Glass Ceilings and Gendered Echo Chambers: “Bias Amplification” in Social Networks

A network, illustrated by dots in multiple colors with linkes connecting them and some circlesA pair of recent papers highlights how today’s social networks not only reflect societal biases, but can actually amplify them.

Ana-Andreea Stoica et. al.’s Algorithmic glass ceiling in social networks: the effects of social recommendations on network diversity looks at the effect of “social recommendations” such as friend suggestions and people to follow, both at the theoretical level and empirically on Instagram.   The authors find that “prominent social recommendation algorithms can exacerbate the under-representation of certain demographic groups at the top of the social hierarchy.”  More specifically:

Our mathematical analysis demonstrates the existence of an algorithmic glass ceiling that exhibits all the properties of the metaphorical social barrier that hinders groups like women or people of colour from attaining equal representation.

One would a priori expect similarity metrics, usually the basis of recommender systems, to contribute to sustaining disparities among various groups. We show much more: using empirical evidence from newly collected data on Instagram and a rigorous analysis of mathematical models, we prove that prominent recommender algorithms reinforce the rate at which disparity grows.

The first couple of sections of the paper are a quick read, after which it gets into some heavy-duty math.   Fortunately, Kim Martineau’s How Social Networking Sites May Discriminate Against Women on Columbia News, is a good summary; and Adrian Collyer, on the ACM’s The morning paper, walks through the paper in detail.

The underlying dynamic here of homophily — people’s tendency to prefer to interact with people similar to themselves — isn’t new.  Neither is the idea of a “glass ceiling” in social media,*  or realization that algorithmic recommendations reflect societal biases.**   What’s important about this paper is both the formal model and the experimental results showing bias amplification.

Meanwhile, Nikki Usher et al‘s Twitter Makes It Worse: Political Journalists, looks at “beltway journalists’ peer-to-peer relationships on Twitter—or how journalists use the platform to legitimate, amplify, and engage each other,” and similarly finds substantial evidence of gender bias.  In particular:

Most alarming is that male journalists amplify and engage male peers almost exclusively, while female journalists tend to engage most with each other.  The significant support for claims of gender asymmetry as well as evidence of gender silos are findings that not only underscore the importance of further research but also suggest overarching consequences for the structure of contemporary political communication.

Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here!

 

* see for example Susan Herring et. al.’s classic 2003 paper Women and children last: the discursive construction of Weblogs and Shirin Nilizadeh et. al.’s 2016 Twitter’s Glass Ceiling: The Effect of Perceived Gender on Online Visibility.

** recent books like Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism  and Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality have plenty of examples; here’s a 2011 post from me focusing on TechMeme‘s recommendation algorithms

 

Sex, pleasure, and diversity-friendly software: the article the ACM wouldn’t publish

Sex, pleasure, and diversity-friendly software was originally written as an invited contribution to the Human to Human issue of XRDS: Crossroads, the Association of Computing Machinery’s student magazine.  After a series of presentations on diversity-friendly software, it seemed like an exciting opportunity to bring broaden awareness among budding computer scientists of important topics that are generally overlooked both in university courses and the industry.

Alas, things didn’t work out that way.

Overriding the objections of the student editors, and despite agreeing that the quality of the work was high and the ideas were interesting, the ACM refused to publish the article. The ACM employees involved were all professional and respectful, and agreed on the importance of diversity.  Still, due to concerns about discussions of sex and sexuality offending ACM subscribers and members, they would not even consider publishing a revised version.

The CHI paper What’s at Issue: Sex, Stigma, and Politics in ACM Publishing (authored by Alex Ahmed, Judeth Oden Choi, Teresa Almeida, Kelly Ireland, and me) explores some of the underlying institutional and sociopolitical problems this episode and others involved in editing the Human to Human issue highlights, and proposes starting points for future action for HCI-related research and academic publishing practices.

This revised version of Sex pleasure, and diversity-friendly software is written as a companion piece to What’s at Issue. After a brief background section, it includes extended (and lightly-edited) excerpts from the earlier version of the article, and my reflections on the experience and the opportunities it highlights for software engineering. An appendix includes a brief overview of diversity-friendly software along with links to more detailed discussions.

Continue reading Sex, pleasure, and diversity-friendly software: the article the ACM wouldn’t publish

Listen to Black Women!

Sign saying

Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here …

The Moment by Shireen Mitchell (aka @digitalsista) are both well worth listening to.   Shireen’s been calling attention to this for a while, and this Moment weaves together various threads and articles.  Nicole’s one of the leading voices for intersectional diversity, inclusion, justice, and equaity in the software industry, and the replies include her perspective as a Latinx woman as to why listening to black women is so important in this context. Safiya Umoya Noble’s recent Wired article Social Inequality Will Not Be Solved By an App is also well worth listening to, as is her outstanding book Algorithms of Oppression.

But what I especially want to highlight in this post is the overall theme.

Listen to Black women.

It’s good advice in the workplace.  It’s good advice professionally – collaborating with (and listening to) Shireen, Tammarrian Rogers, and Lynn Cyrin helped me raise my game and took our work on diversity-friendly software to a much higher level.  It’s good advice in politics and activism.  It’s good advice for protecting democracy.  It’s good advice in general.

Of course, I’m far from the first person to say this.  But a lot of white people, and a lot of guys, still act like they haven’t gotten the memo.

Fortunately, this is one of those rare pieces of advice that it’s very easy to act on.  Start by looking at your own behavior: are you hearing Black women’s voices?  Are you really listening to them?

Then get to work on to your friends, family, and colleagues.  Encourage them to listen; amplify Black women’s voices to make it easier for them.

It’s really not that hard.

Listen to Black women.

 

Image credit: Jeff Swensen, Getty Images, via Kiratiana Freelon’s March for Black Women Organizers Want to Put Our Issues Front and Center During March for Racial Justice on The Root

Happy New Year!

2017 was a challenging year – although some good things did happen.  Here’s to a more positive 2018!

One of my intentions for the new year is to do some more writing.  So, stay tuned!

Pictures of lights in the atrium