“People being able to feed you into an AI tool and then spew you out with whatever their gross fantasies are has just supercharged a really divisive, hateful space that, unfortunately, seems to have taken over social media” –
says British Labour Party politician Jess Asato, who's fighting xAI and Grok in a groundbreaking legal case.
For Computer Weekly, Cliff Saran explains the details: computerweekly.com/news/366648…
#Racism and #sexism have become normalised in #Britain, says equalities minister | Bridget Phillipson | The Guardian
My view is that the extremists have become more vocal and are not afraid to hide any more.
theguardian.com/politics/2026/…
Exclusive: Bridget Phillipson says politicians have helped fuel hatred and that police are not taking violence against women and girls seriously enoughKiran Stacey (the Guardian)
Today in Labor History August 18, 1920: The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. This guaranteed women's right to vote. Congress first introduced a women's suffrage amendment in 1878. Before 1776, women were allowed to vote in several of the colonies, but by 1807 all the state constitutions had denied them this right. In 1848, the Seneca Falls convention adopted the Declaration of Sentiments, calling for equality between the sexes and the right to vote. The Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised 26 million American women just before the 1920 U.S. presidential election. Newly enfranchised women prioritized a reform agenda, including the Sheppard–Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921, which expanded maternity care during the 1920s. This was the first federal social security law and was huge until Congress let it lapse in 1929.
In 1920, only 36% of eligible women voted (compared with 68% of men). This was due to barriers like literacy tests, long residency requirements, and poll taxes. By 1960, women were voting in greater numbers than men. However, 3 million women south of the Mason–Dixon line remained disenfranchised. Election officials regularly utilized fraud, intimidation, poll taxes, and state violence to block their access to the polls. In 1926, officials in Birmingham, Alabama beat African American women who were trying to register to vote. These practices continued until the 24th Amendment, in 1962, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And they continue today with a host of new voting restrictions being imposed in mostly Republican states.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #suffrage #Vote #sexism #feminism #racism #JimCrow #VotingRights
"working families"
"working families"
"working families"
"working families"
Y'all need to stop letting the far right hoodwink you into their messaging.
People keep getting rejected from #jobs within minutes of applying, without a single human ever seeing the application.
This is happening to thousands of us
#AI now decides who gets a job and who doesn't; it #discriminates. There are reports of older #workers are getting filtered out because their #experience gives away their #age, or #women scoring lower than men
#Burnham has already said hiring "isn't becoming fairer" since AI took over
So I've just learned the other day that curating your timeline/stream according to your personal interests and/or the topic of your account/channel is utterly racist. No matter how specialised your account/channel is.
Everyone in the Fediverse is basically required to follow a substantial amount of Black users, especially Black activists. If you're on Hubzilla or (streams), you must actually follow them, i.e. you must give them full permissions to send you anything and everything unhindered and unlimited. You must not use account/channel-wide or per-contact filters on them. Even if each one of them boosts 100 posts per day, you must not filter or disallow their boosts.
Also, if you're on Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams), all of which count and list unread messages, you must not simply mark what has come in from them as read. You must read it all and be interested in it all. This includes all comments on these posts. And yes, you must re-read everything whenever it tries to catch your attention again, e.g. if someone has liked/faved or boosted/reposted/renoted/repeated it.
But even if you receive thousands of comments along with those hundreds of extra posts, you must not comment on these comments. Not unless either a comment mentions you explicitly, or you're mutually connected to whoever wrote the comment. As you wouldn't even receive that comment on Mastodon, replying to it counts as reply-guying and mansplaining on Mastodon, completely regardless of how you comment. It's highly disrespectful, and if Black people are involved, it's racist.
It doesn't matter if this has allegedly been perfectly normal, the standard and part of the culture since five and a half years before Mastodon was launched. Mastodon rules supreme over the whole Fediverse, and only Mastodon's culture has any validity anywhere in the Fediverse. Any culture that differs from Mastodon's is toxic and evil and must be abolished.
Speaking of which, let's suppose you come across one of these many threads in which Black Mastodon users talk with other Black Mastodon users and Mastodon-using allies about how the Fediverse needs to be made safer. In this case, no matter how blatantly obvious it is that all people involved in this thread have no idea of the Fediverse outside Mastodon, you are not allowed to chime in and tell them about places which are safer due to their technological design and how they work.
First of all, it'd be mansplaining and reply-guying. Second, there's a tendency for Black Mastodon users to trust the rest of the Fediverse even less than Mastodon, what with e.g. Nazi instances on Pleroma. And third, your suggestion is likely to be taken for an attempt at nudging them into moving to one specific place, essentially trying to hoard them in a ghetto and segregate them from the rest of the Fediverse. In short, there's letting them wait for the Mastodon instances they're on to improve, and there's racism.
While we're at it: Even if you're on Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams), and you hate Mastodon with a burning passion for very good reasons, you must support Black-led Mastodon instances. Otherwise you're a racist.
Lastly, while I don't have proof for it, I'm pretty sure that everything that counts as racism towards Black users may also count as
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #FediverseSafety #Mansplaining #ReplyGuy #ReplyGuys #Racist #Racism #Sexist #Sexism #Homophobic #Homophobia #Transphobic #Transphobia #Queerphobic #Queerphobia #Ableist #Ableism #Islamophobic #Islamophobia #AntiSemitic #AntiSemitism #Xenophobic #Xenophobia
