Tech Diversity Advocates: Self-Segregation Happens Offline, Too

Since the election, much has been made of the way in which social media filter bubbles reinforce misinformation and ignorance between groups. Today at Fusion's Real Future Fair in Oakland, panelists discussed a different, but related phenomenon: self-segregation among the Silicon Valley tech workers who build and finance the platforms and products that shape our understanding of the world. According to the panelists, tech workers don’t typically socialize with diverse networks offline. But the panelists also acknowledged that diversity advocates can silo themselves off as well.

“A lot of the problem with social networks is that we still don’t have any diversity in coworkers [and] colleagues,” said panelist Candice Morgan, head of diversity at Pinterest. She recounted a recent experience picking up her speaker&039;s badge before getting on stage at another conference. The woman at the counter told her, “I&039;m sorry, she has to come pick up her badge herself,” assuming Morgan, who is black, was not the speaker.

Erica Joy Baker, an engineer at Slack, veteran of Google, and cofounder of the nonprofit Project Include, said that fear impedes a healthy dialogue at tech companies. “People get that frozen moment and they get really scared, of having conservations with people — especially with people of color or people who don’t look like them — in general about anything,” said Baker.

Baker said she wasn&039;t exactly sure how to get beyond that. “There’s going to be some level of really uncomfortable moments that need to be had” in order for people to “understand and look at us like human beings,” she explained. This emotional connection is “very important to building an inclusive workspace.”

Tiffany Price, a panelist from the Kapor Center for Social Impact, a tech-focused organization in Oakland, acknowledged that filter bubbles exist among diversity advocates as well. “We’re realizing that also in that space, we can also be siloed. How often are we opening up ourselves to the broader community of Oakland and the folks who don’t know about tech?”

Price referenced the fact that the panelists all knew one another. “We’re always in meetings together and that in and of itself is a silo.”

The panel included five women of color. Karla Monterroso of Code 2040, another member of the group, offered a couple of statistics to illustrate how these silos play out. According to Monterroso, 75% of all white people only know other white people, and 88% of jobs are gotten through friends and family. “Add the wealth gap and you’ve got the situation we&039;re in,” she said.

Code 2040 is a nonprofit that helps find opportunities for black and Latino engineers in tech. Earlier in the panel Monterroso talked about how tech companies that pride themselves on diversity react “when we walk in with 40 or 50 black and brown people.”

“You’d be amazed at the places we&039;ve gone — staring at the students at lunch, all sorts of security starts to come out to make sure that they go from the lunch area to the bathroom and no other place and just like the culture of that, the things that get said to them.”

The discussion about silos was kicked off by audience member Bianca St.Louis, a former safety specialist at Pinterest and intern at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The panel was conducted as a round-table with two seats left open for anyone in the crowd who wanted to participate. “Most people in tech don’t really know [about the value of diversity] because I doubt they have very diverse networks on the weekend,” St. Louis said on stage. “Genuinely how many folks sit down, break bread with someone who doesn’t look like them?”

St.Louis asked the panel to talk about self-segregation in the tech industry in the light of the way social interaction impacts ideas. “We all know that knowledge networks are so important — who do you feel comfortable sharing your ideas with, who do you value as a voice.”

When St.Louis first joined them, Baker pointed out that everyone on stage already all knew her. “It’s because there are so few people of color in tech we all know each other and we all talk about everything. Everything,” said Baker.

Quelle: <a href="Tech Diversity Advocates: Self-Segregation Happens Offline, Too“>BuzzFeed

Former Speechwriter For Schmidt, Zuckerberg And Musk Pledges To Fight Trumpism

As Silicon Valley grapples with its role in last week&#039;s election and how it plans to move forward, one of its most prominent communicators is working to temper the Nationalist movements that appear to be gathering momentum following Donald Trump&039;s presidential win.

Dex Torricke-Barton, who has served as a speechwriter for Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt and Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is leaving his current post working for Elon Musk at SpaceX to helm an effort intended to bridge what he sees as a disconnect between Silicon Valley and the rest of the country.

In the week since Trump&039;s election, Torricke-Barton has assembled a collection of employees at Silicon Valley companies charged with addressing what he describes as a “growing gulf in understanding, empathy and policy; between coastal elites and communities left behind by globalization, between those who seek greater diversity and those who are fearful of it, between the “winners” and “losers” in a changing world.” The grassroots project is yet-unnamed, but can be found at onwards.world.

“Tuesday&039;s election result is yet another huge setback.”

“Tuesday&039;s election result is yet another huge setback,” Torricke-Barton wrote in a blog post announcing his decision. “This has been an election marked by repeated attacks on immigrants, minorities, women, and many other communities. I have always believed in an America that is confident, outward-looking and works hard to drive the world to action on what matters most.”

Torricke-Barton&039;s move comes at an especially precarious time for Silicon Valley and some of its biggest companies. Facebook, Twitter, and Google all are struggling with perceptions of their roles in our current political and media ecosystems. Employees at Facebook and Twitter have publicly expressed concern about their platforms&039; responsibility to combat filter bubbles, fake news, harassment, and even their ability to generate large sums of money for candidates through fundraising ads. Meanwhile, its executives like Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey have been reluctant to shoulder any blame. Torricke-Barton told BuzzFeed News he&039;s not interested in pointing fingers, but in finding results.

“Silicon Valley has always spoken about this vision of a world defined by openness, compassion and advancing the interests of humanity,” he said. “And right now all those things are at stake in the world. We have to decide whether we want to continue solving the same old problems in the same old way or whether we want to engage in more communities outside of our own.”

Torrick-Barton told BuzzFeed News he will soon travel to areas of the country like the rustbelt that depend on the technology built by Silicon Valley, but that are rarely thought of as core users. He plans to gather data through interviews and surveys to try and learn how everything from manufacturing automation to basic social media are shaping communities beyond the coastal bubbles.

“I think it&039;s easy to send your outrage over social media and wring your hands for a few days and then live life the way you did and hope others sort it out,” Torrick-Barton said. “I don&039;t condemn that at all. I know this is a luxury to go and try to make an impact. But if you think you can make the most impact by doing something big and taking a stand in a grassroots movement, then now is the moment.”

Quelle: <a href="Former Speechwriter For Schmidt, Zuckerberg And Musk Pledges To Fight Trumpism“>BuzzFeed

Twitter Rolls Out New And Long-Awaited Anti-Harassment Tools

Twitter

Today, after months of criticism from users, activist groups, and former employees, Twitter is rolling out new product and policy updates in an attempt to combat the harassment, hate speech, and trolling that has plagued the platform for a decade.

On the product end, Twitter has augmented its mute feature to allow users to filter specific phrases, keywords, and hashtags, similar to what&#039;s found on Instagram, which added a keyword filter this September. The feature was widely believed to be close to completion late last month after Twitter temporarily rolled out a test of the mute filter to select users.

But while the test resembled a standard keyword filter, Twitter’s new mute tool will go a step further, allowing users to mute entire conversation threads. This will allow users to stop receiving notifications from a specific Twitter thread without removing the thread from your timeline or blocking any users. And according to Twitter, you’ll only be able to mute conversations that relate to a tweet you’re included in (where your handle is mentioned).

Twitter

For now, the product update appears to be centered on the notification experience, which has been a minefield for victims of serial harassment on the platform. While a mute feature has long-been called for by those targeted by Twitter’s brutish underbelly, it&039;s also largely cosmetic — it hides abuse instead of fixing it. Although expanded mute tools will attempt to shield users from a deluge of unwanted interactions, the feature will do little to stop the underlying harassment itself.

As such, Twitter also announced it will add a new “hateful conduct” reporting option (when users report an “abusive or harmful” tweet they’ll now see an option for “directing hate against a race, religion, gender, or orientation”). Similarly, the company is adding new “extensive” internal training for its support teams that deal with hateful harassment. According to the company, its Safety team support staff will undergo “special sessions on cultural and historical contextualization of hateful conduct” as well as refresher programs that will track how hate speech and abuse evolve on the platform (a necessary step as many trolls have begun to create their own hateful code language with which to bypass traditional censors and filters) .

For victims of abuse, the new reporting flow will allow bystanders to report abuse on behalf of other users. More importantly, it will provide context — and perhaps urgency — to the safety personnel reviewing the abuse report.

For Twitter, these reporting changes come after a rash of criticism from many of its most devoted users who feel marginalized and by Twitter’s failure to respond to reports. Throughout its first decade, Twitter’s protocols for addressing abuse have been largely opaque and targets of harassment are frequently in the dark about whether their appeals for help were heard. In September a BuzzFeed News survey of over 2700 users found that 90% of respondents said that Twitter didn’t do anything when they reported abuse, despite allegedly violating Twitter’s rules, which prohibit tweets involving violent threats, harassment, and hateful conduct. As one victim of serial harassment told BuzzFeed News following the survey, “It only adds to the humiliation when you pour your heart out and you get an automated message saying, ‘We don’t consider this offensive enough.’”

BuzzFeed News

The company has also been criticized for being slow to respond to cases, unless they go viral or are flagged by celebrities, public figures, or journalists. In August the company told Kelly Ellis, a software engineer from California, that the 70 tweets calling her a “psychotic man hating ‘feminist.’” and wishing that she’d be raped did not violate company rules. They were were subsequently taken down shortly after a BuzzFeed News report.

And as recently as last week, the company was slow to block attempts by well known alt-right trolls to suppress minority voter turnout by photoshopping fake Clinton campaign ads that encouraged users to “vote from home.” In response, Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey told BuzzFeed News that he was “not sure how this slipped past us, but now it’s fixed.” Four days later, BuzzFeed News found dozens of examples of similar Trump troll tweets across the site.

But the new tools for users to proactively shield themselves — coupled with a staff equipped to deal with the volume and complexity of indefatigable, constantly evolving trolls — may be a heartening sign that the company is at last serious about taking on the problems of abuse and harassment that have plagued its platform.

The new updates come at a critical time for Twitter; for months, the company has fought against stagnant growth, declining stock, and an exodus of leadership, including, just last week, COO Adam Bain. The company’s failure to curb abuse has turned the platform into a primary destination for trolls and hate groups — a reputation that reportedly drove away potential buyers, including Salesforce and Disney this summer. Throughout the 2016 presidential race, Twitter’s role as the social network of choice for the alt-right has left the platform increasingly toxic to women and minority groups. Last month the Anti-Defamation League released a report citing a “significant uptick” in anti-Semitic harassment toward journalists. The study showed roughly 2.6 million anti-Semitic tweets, creating more than 10 billion impressions across the web between August 2015 and July 2016; the words most frequently found in the bios of the users sending those tweets? “‘Trump,’ ‘nationalist,’ ‘conservative,’ ‘American,’ and ‘white.’”

Now, facing a deeply divisive presidency, Twitter’s safety team may face an unprecedented test and heavy scrutiny. Just days into Trump&039;s victory, alt-right trolls across the internet are gearing up for an ideological war, foughtwith false information and aggressive harassment on Twitter.

The question now is whether Twitter can still reverse the damage done by trolls to save the platform that was arguably the most significant and vital platform to news and of this recent election cycle. In a blog post on the new abuse changes, the company affirmed its “commit to rapidly improving Twitter based on everything we observe and learn,” a credo that, if it holds true, could begin to earn back trust. But perhaps just as illustrative is the caveat in the sentence before: “We don&039;t expect these announcements to suddenly remove abusive conduct from Twitter. No single action by us would do that.”

Quelle: <a href="Twitter Rolls Out New And Long-Awaited Anti-Harassment Tools“>BuzzFeed

Trump Digital Director: Twitter Killed Ad Buy Critical Of Hillary Clinton

John Locher / AP

President-elect Donald Trump&#039;s campaign had a major Twitter ad buy paid for and ready to go this fall. But a day before it was set to go live, Twitter pulled the plug.

Brad Parscale, Trump&039;s digital director, relayed this story in an interview Monday after he and another member of Trump&039;s digital team publicly criticized Twitter for being “restrictive” during the campaign. Both used Twitter to air their grievances.

The ad buy in question was a sponsored emoji package that criticized Hillary Clinton and was scheduled to run on a debate day during the campaign. Parscale said he believed the ad buy, for which he claimed the campaign paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, was killed because Twitter “thought the emoji would be too damaging to Hillary.”

Twitter, for its part, told BuzzFeed News it decided against running any politically branded emoji ad campaigns.

Social media&039;s role in the 2016 presidential election has drawn increasingly probing scrutiny following Trump&039;s surprise-to-some win. Facebook in particular has been criticized heavily for failing to rein in a flood of partisan fake news that some fear may have influenced public sentiment toward the candidates. The notion that such news swayed the election was referred to by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a “pretty crazy idea,” last week. But not all Facebook employees feel that way. As BuzzFeed News reported Monday, a group of renegade Facebook employees have formed a secret task force to address the issue.

Some details of the Trump campaign&039;s run in with Twitter emerged last month in a story in the Washington Examiner. Reached by BuzzFeed News, a Twitter spokesperson pointed to the following statement, shared at the time. “We have had specific discussions with several political organizations, including the Trump campaign, regarding branded emojis as part of broad advertising campaigns on Twitter,” the statement reads. “We believe that political advertising merits a level of disclosure and transparency that branded political emojis do not meet, and we ultimately decided not to permit this particular format for any political advertising.”

Parscale said he found Twitter&039;s approach towards the emoji campaign frustrating. “Why sell it to us,” he asked.

According to Parscale, Twitter was one of a few big digital platforms that made his life difficult during the campaign. “Companies just didn’t like how we were using their platforms in a way that might be negative to [Clinton] or show messaging that they didn’t like,” he said.

That said, Parscale also emphasized that Google, Facebook and Twitter were otherwise “good supporters” of Trump&039;s campaign. “I feel like those platforms helped us win the campaign,” he said. “Twitter was obviously crucial, Facebook was crucial, Google was crucial. Those were the three main mediums that help us digitally to win the election.”

In an interview with 60 Minutes last night, President-Elect Trump praised Twitter when asked about his use of the platform. “It’s a great form of communication,” he said. “I think I picked up yesterday 100,000 people. I’m not saying I love it, but it does get the word out.”

Quelle: <a href="Trump Digital Director: Twitter Killed Ad Buy Critical Of Hillary Clinton“>BuzzFeed

The Future Of Organized Labor Could Be This Artificially Intelligent Bot

A worker pushes shopping carts in front of a Wal-Mart store in La Habra, Calif.

Jae C. Hong / AP

OUR Walmart, a digital labor network of more than 100,000 Walmart employees, is using an artificially intelligent chatbot called WorkIt to spread information among workers ahead of the holiday shopping season.

According to Walmart workers asked to speak on an OUR Walmart press call, employees are only able to access information on company policies at work if they use a manager’s computer using a system called “the wire.” As a result, they said it was sometimes difficult to research company policy on issues like sexual harassment and sick time. The WorkIt app, which includes discussion forums as well as a Watson-powered AI chatbot, is intended to address this problem by allowing employees to seek out answers to HR questions via their smartphones. Currently, the app is available only on Android devices, but OUR Walmart plans to bring it to iOS later this year.

“Being unable to access policy online when you are at work makes difficult to know when you are breaking policy — or understand how managers are using policies against you,” said Mississippi Walmart worker Joanna Chambers. “Through the WorkIt app, we’re amplifying the strength of OUR Walmart networks.”

Initially funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers union and managed by labor organizers Andrea Dehlendorf and Dan Schlademan, OUR Walmart subsequently broke off on its own. It now manages a 44,000 plus member Facebook page that isn’t controlled by a traditional labor organization. But if Walmart employees embrace WorkIt, the app could supplant Facebook as a nexus of worker communication, putting control more squarely in the hands of those running the OUR Walmart organization.

“What we’ve seen with discussion happening online — on Facebook and on Reddit — are conversations that are jumbled and disorganized,” Dehlendorf said on the press call today. “They don&#039;t allow people to get the answer quickly and efficiently, and from someone they trust.”

In contrast, WorkIt’s algorithm is designed to draw from hundreds of pages of company policies and employee guidelines to deliver accurate and reliable answers to worker questions. The tool is being trained by “experts,” employees who volunteered to teach WorkIt how to provide the most accurate and useful questions to employee queries.

Walmart disputed the notion that its workers do not have unfettered access to the employment documentation they need. “Our associates already have anytime-access online to the company’s most current and accurate Paid Time Off policies and there is no way to know if the details this group is pushing are correct,” Walmart spokesperson Kory Lundberg wrote in a statement provided to BuzzFeed News. “Our people are smart and see this for what it is, an attempt by an outside group to collect as much personal and private information as possible.” OUR Walmart told Bloomberg that it doesn’t collect location-based data and won’t sell user information to third parties.

Catherine Huang, OUR Walmart’s chief technology officer, said the group is currently using Watson&039;s natural language processing abilities to match employee queries with material in an existing training database. Going forward, she said she&039;d like to expand those capabilities and is considering a Spanish language version for early 2017.

OUR Walmart will be taking WorkIt on the road over the next two weeks, visiting stores in over a dozen cities in an effort to get workers to sign up. Traditional unions require things like membership and fees, but OUR Walmart is defined by a looser structure. That makes WorkIt — an app that’s a central hub for communication and independent silo of user data, including contact info and most frequent questions and complaints — especially valuable if it works.

Though OUR Walmart created the app, Walmart workers are only a test case for the technology (albeit a major one — Walmart is the second largest employer in the United States). For a price, WorkIt can be repurposed by any organization looking to connect workers to each other and information. Troy Burton, a labor organizer in Australia who said unions there are looking forward to using WorkIt, suggested that some data gathered in the app could even be used at the bargaining table when it comes time for workers to negotiate new contracts.

For Burton, the project is a blend of the mechanics of collective bargaining that undergird the “philosophy of unions” and “the long held promise of the internet to democratize information and overcome the barriers of geography and cultural separation that people face.”

Quelle: <a href="The Future Of Organized Labor Could Be This Artificially Intelligent Bot“>BuzzFeed