What Happens When The Machine Has Never Heard of You?
Eddy Smith's essay on AI and St. Vincent hits close to home, literally. As someone born there, with family roots in Bequia, who works in cybersecurity and has spent two decades arguing for the open web, I recognise every word of it.https://islandinthenet.com/what-happens-when-the-machine-has-never-heard-of-you/
The Quietus: Rotting Tape and the Gentrification of African Pop: Why We Must Save the Nollywood Archive. “VHS magnetic tape is incredibly fragile and has a limited lifespan, especially when stacked haphazardly in the un-airconditioned corners of Lagos living rooms or the labyrinthine, corrugated-iron warehouses of Alaba International Market. As I write this, thousands of original films from the […]
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/05/27/rotting-tape-and-the-gentrification-of-african-pop-why-we-must-save-the-nollywood-archive-the-quietus/
The Quietus: Rotting Tape and the Gentrification of African Pop: Why We Must Save the Nollywood Archive. “VHS magnetic tape is incredibly fragile and has a limited lifespan, especially when s…
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media: Social and Political Framing in Search Engine Results. “While prior research has extensively examined various dimensions of search bias—such as content prioritization, indexical bias, political polarization, and sources of bias—an important question remains underexplored: how do search engines and […]
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/05/26/proceedings-of-the-international-aaai-conference-social-and-political-framing-in-search-engine-results/
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media: Social and Political Framing in Search Engine Results. “While prior research has extensively examined various dimensi…
Tubefilter: Social media has political divides, but some feeds are more polarized than others. “Researchers set up 323 ‘sock puppet’ accounts on TikTok to measure the political polarization of the For You Page, and they found some apparent disparities between right-leaning and left-leaning feeds.”
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/05/07/tubefilter-social-media-has-political-divides-but-some-feeds-are-more-polarized-than-others/⚖️ When the Math Decides: Algorithms, Liberty & the Fight to Stay Human
Your childcare was cancelled by math. No human saw your file. An algorithm flagged your neighbourhood, a late bill & your roommate's parking ticket — and upended your life.
This is already happening. New episode of Heliox. 🧵
RE: https://fediscience.org/@oatp/116438875358622213
"Maximal transparency is almost certainly not ethically desirable."
Desirable 'for whom'?
For platforms facing regulatory scrutiny, opacity is a feature. For users discriminated against by biased recommendation engines, transparency is survival. For communities targeted by algorithmic manipulation, openness is a civil liberty.
This paper usefully breaks transparency into dimensions and degrees—providing the "choice points" for an ethics of algorithmic openness. But let us be clear: the stakeholders who need transparency most are rarely the ones invited to design these systems.
Our job as advocates for privacy, free software, and civil liberties is not to settle for the "ethically optimal" comfort zone of the powerful. It is to push the needle toward the maximum and let the burden of justification fall on those who demand secrecy.
Let us use it to demand more.
#DigitalJustice #AlgorithmicBias #PrivacyRights #OpenScience #AlgorithmicGovernance #DigitalDemocracy #InfoSec #TechPolicy
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