Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 86
2020 when Twitter announced it was banning former
KKK Grand Wizard David Duke from its platform for
violating the company’s policies on hateful conduct.32
was (and continues to be) that these decisions establish
terrible precedent for others to emulate.”30
MediaJustice Executive Director Steven Renderos believes
that history will judge Zuckerberg harshly due to the
decisions he’s made.
Despite this move forward, “the company still has a long
way to go to rid racism and bigotry from its network,” said
Free Press Co-CEO Jessica J. González, who co-founded
Change the Terms.33
“In the long through line of history, I think there have
been moments in which there are these kinds of forks
in the road of the right thing to do and the wrong thing
to do,” Renderos told Mother Jones. “This will be one of
those moments where you look back and you say Mark
Zuckerberg was on the wrong side of history here, just like
we look back and we say Bull Connor as that sheriff out in
Birmingham was wrong.”31
Meanwhile, Duke’s social-media pages and posts still
remain up on Facebook, which has failed to take its own
auditors’ recommendations to prohibit content featuring
white-nationalist or separatist ideology.34
“The world’s largest tech companies have become
propagators of deadly information, while they
simultaneously profit from it,” wrote UCLA Professor
Safiya Noble. “They have long treated the world as their
private research lab while off-loading risk onto the public
and refusing to be held accountable for their business
practices.”35
Like Facebook, Twitter has long failed to crack down on
hate and protect marginalized communities. But in recent
months, activists’ efforts to hold Twitter accountable have
pushed the company to take action.
In 2019, the Change the Terms coalition — which has
denounced the company for allowing hate speech and
harassment to thrive on its platform — launched a
#StopRacistTwitter campaign calling on Twitter to ban
white supremacists. The coalition scored a victory in July
“We are at another pivotal moment of reckoning about
the immorality of our systems,” Noble continued, “and
it’s a good time to reimagine regulation, restoration and
reparation from Big Tech too.”36
“
As internet platforms provide more opportunities for people around the
world to connect, they have also provided a forum for certain groups to
spread hate, fear, and abusive behavior. The deadly neo-Nazi march in
Charlottesville, Virginia, was organized with the use of Facebook, PayPal,
and Discord. The violent Proud Boys group vets new applicants through
Facebook, and have seen an uptick in applications since summer 2018.
Some technology companies have made steps in the right direction to
reduce hateful activities online, but more work needs to be done.
—ChangeTheTerms.org
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