When technology platforms craft “colorblind” policies on hate speech, political advertising, and ad targeting, they fail to address real-world power imbalances and jeopardize the inclusion of marginalized groups. In a new piece for Tech Policy Press, Daniel Kreiss, Bridget Barrett, and Madhavi Reddi propose the concept of race-conscious policies and evaluate how effectively current platform rules acknowledge vulnerable populations.
Pointing to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the authors recommend an extra scrutiny standard to guide how policies are both crafted and applied to content affecting historically marginalized groups, based on historical patterns of discrimination and power.
“In our definition, race-conscious policies account not only for race and ethnicity, they go beyond abstract principles to specifically account for unequal social power. In other words, being race-conscious means accounting for the fact that some groups are at risk for the greatest harms given historical and structural forms of power, and prioritizing explicit protections and enforcement on this basis.”
They find that while several platforms have adopted race-conscious policies for handling hate speech and political advertising content, none have yet framed their civic integrity or political advertising targeting policies in a race-conscious way:
Recent publications and appearances
Daniel Kreiss and Shannon McGregor spoke with UNC’s The Well about Facebook, Meta, and the potential for regulation: “Facebook has pursued two strategies for expansion: The first is growth at all costs, which means they want to push into as many new markets as possible as quickly as possible. And the second strategy is monetizing new users through their data. What’s clear from the whistleblower’s testimony is that growth far outstretched Facebook’s ability to monitor its platforms.”
In response to news that Congressman Devin Nunes would step down to run a media and technology company for Donald Trump, Francesca Tripodi shared her 2019 article “Devin Nunes and the Power of Keyword Signaling,” exploring his role in “exploit[ing] data voids to create ideological information silos.”
Tressie McMillan Cottom previewed an upcoming New York Times Opinion series exploring scam culture: “A scam culture is one in which scamming has not only lost its stigma but is also valorized. We rebrand scamming as “hustle,” or the willingness to commodify all social ties, and this is because the “legitimate” economy and the political system simply do not work for millions of Americans.”
Alice Marwick’s 2015 article “Instafame: Luxury Selfies in the Attention Economy” topped Duke University Press’s Most Read Articles of 2021 list and will be open-access through the end of January 2022. As she notes: “This piece has everything: Rihanna selfies, Fat Joe lyrics, profanity, the parasocial, duckface, Rich Kids of Instagram and a pic of my own nails.”
Coming soon
January 6 & 7: With GWU’s Institute of Data, Democracy, and Politics, we’re co-hosting “The Capital Coup One Year Later: How Research Can Assess and Counter Threats to Democracy.” With keynotes from Emily Van Duyn, Khadijah Costley White, and Francesca Tripodi. Don’t miss it! Register now.
January 21: Save the date for “Election Speech and the First Amendment,” co-hosted by the Center for Media Law and Policy and the First Amendment Law Review with support from CITAP.
Submission deadline Feb 18: Daniel Kreiss and Rachel Kuo are co-organizers of the ICA pre-conference “What comes after disinformation studies?”
March 17: We’ll be attending the NC News & Information summit, presented by the NC Local News Workshop and NC Open Gov.
Rest of Web
CITAP researchers commemorated bell hooks on the news of her death. Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote “The entirety of my intellectual and creative project is this: ‘marginality [is] much more than a site of deprivation; in fact I was saying just the opposite, that it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance.’ Indebted, as we all are to bell hooks.”
Daniel Kreiss shared a favorite piece: “I always loved the essay "Remembered Rapture" and assigned it in my theory course the last few years (jstor.org/stable/20866297) - especially the directness on the craft of writing and the political clarity.” Alice Marwick described hooks’s influence on her own scholarship: “I first read bell hooks as an undergraduate. Her work deeply shaped my own understanding of what it means to be a scholar, a feminist, and a woman. In my writing I aspire to her deep commitment to accessible language and public scholarship. I learned from hooks that if I can’t explain my ideas clearly then I haven’t thought them through thoroughly.”
From Project Information Literacy, “Information Literacy for Mere Mortals” by Mike Caulfield.
And from NYU, a new report on just how bad Facebook is at catching un-disclosed political ads.