Protests renew scrutiny of tech company's ties to law enforcement, as company officials issue statements in support of protesters
Amazon executives tweeted support for protesters. But the company sells a surveillance tool to police that studies say misidentifies darker-skinned people.
Activists are now calling out the gap between Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM's solidarity messaging and their police contracts, demanding each company reassess its law-enforcement work — and as of the related coverage, none has committed to doing so.
Second-order effects
With the contradiction now public-facing rather than internal, Rekognition sales to police departments face renewed pressure at the moment cities are reexamining vendor relationships, forcing each company to choose between contract revenue and the credibility of its diversity commitments.
Third-order effects
If the pattern of statement-then-contract collisions repeats across future protest cycles, corporate law-enforcement AI deals will likely need formal governance — audits, bias testing, or municipal bans — rather than being settled case by case by public pressure.
The trend: Public-safety AI is becoming a reputational liability for big tech, where civil-rights commitments and police surveillance contracts can no longer coexist quietly.
I am obligated to call you out: You should have shut down the_donald instead of amplifying it and its hate, racism, and violence. So much of what is happening now lies at your feet. You don't get to say BLM when reddit nurtures and monetizes white supremacy and hate all day long …
“As Snoos, we do not tolerate hate, racism, and violence, and while we have work to do to fight these on our platform, our values are clear.” A letter from CEO Steve Huffman. https://redditblog.com/...
Black lives matter. You are not alone. Everyone should feel safe in their neighborhood. Reach out. Listen. Take action. https://twitter.com/...
Reddit is literally synonymous with the worst racists and sexists of the Internet only SLIGHTLY less than 4chan. I don't know who they think they're fooling. TD is still there, only quarantined. Worse has taken its place. Reddit doesn't care at all. https://twitter.com/...
“Thus to the venerable traditions of corporate pink-washing, greenwashing, and ethics-washing their deplorable practices, we can now add another: Black Power-washing” -@hypervisible https://www.fastcompany.com/ ...
“Companies seem to think that tweeting ‘BLM’ will wash away the fact that they derive massive wealth from the exploitation of black labor, the promotion of white anxiety about blackness, and the amplification of extremism and white supremacy.” get! them! https://twitter.com/...
Outside of 8chan, there is almost no other platform that has tolerated hate, racism and violence MORE than @reddit. This is some Grade-A hypocrisy in a world that's already filled with it. 🖕🏻🖕🏼 🖕🏽🖕🏾 🖕🏿 https://twitter.com/...
I love reddit and use it every day, but I have to agree that the cesspool at the bottom of the site is disgusting on every single level and there is no reasonable, obvious way to figure out how to moderate it. https://twitter.com/...
I had to leave Nextdoor because of all the racism on it. While I think the idea of Nextdoor is great, I think in reality it has helped racists find each other and is stoking their hatred by being able to complain about “other” people outside their immediate neighborhood. https://…
Former @reddit CEO, who was way ahead of her time in banning subreddits that were encouraging harassment off of the platform, on current CEO's stunningly hypocritical BLM post: https://twitter.com/...
She was CEO of Reddit for a while and was forced out after Reddit banned a couple of wildly offensive subreddits like “fatpeoplehate.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/... https://twitter.com/...