The United Church of Christ has a long-standing commitment to economic justice and communications rights.   We envision a world where education and economic opportunity is open to everyone. The Internet is the tool today that many Americans use to successfully learn, find jobs, and engage in their communities, and yet one-third of U.S. households do not subscribe to broadband Internet at home. These families are left further and further behind while more fortunate people have better tools to succeed. Statistics show these burdens fall heavily on communities of color.

In pursuit of greater economic justice, UCC OC Inc., the UCC's media justice and communications rights ministry has been working with a large coalition of civil rights and public interest colleagues to increase low-income people's access to broadband. This morning the Federal Communications Commission announced it is moving ahead to take action in a vote at the end of this month. After this vote, we expect the FCC's Lifeline program will offer support for broadband Internet for low-income people in a meaningful way for the first time. Not only this, but we understand the draft circulated today adopts aggressive service standards for these products, meaning that low-income people will gain access to robust services that will fully meet their needs. The FCC has promised it will monitor carefully this new era to ensure that low-income people will be well-served by this program. The FCC will also take important steps to insure the program's integrity and increase the number of companies offering services through the program. 

We look forward to engaging with the FCC Commissioners and staff as they move forward on a most important step to address the broadband adoption gap, bringing the most vulnerable communities into the modern technological age.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a partial stay this morning preventing the full force of the FCC's inmate calling caps from going into effect. The following can be attributed to Cheryl Leanza, policy advisor to the United Church of Christ, OC Inc.:

The court's decision today is limited, it upholds the interim rates of 21 and 25 cents per minute. It will also permit the vast majority of the FCC's new limits on predatory fees surrounding prison phone calls, including limits on the cost of calls for deaf and hard of hearing inmates. It will defer until the end of the current law suit the new rates that would cap rates as low as 11 cents per minute for local and long-distance calling.

Families of incarcerated people have been waiting for decades to pay just and reasonable rates as mandated by the Communications Act--to enjoy the same rights as everyone else in this country. Their fight will ultimately prevail, but for now they will benefit from some extremely important improvements while they wait, yet again, for their interests to be vindicated in court. Seemingly there is no limit to the lengths prison phone companies and sheriffs will go to keep their ill-gotten gains no matter the impact on these families, clergy, and lawyer-client communications.

Over the last year, we've had a couple of great FCC rulings.  We were pleased to see the FCC, last year, take a step toward rules that will promote more media diversity.  The FCC eliminated loopholes that allow companies to own more stations than permitted by FCC rules.  This resulted right away in more stations being sold off to women and people of color and increasing media ownership diversity for the first time in years. 

In addition, of course we're all excited about the FCC's strong net neutrality ruling this year, supported by our fantastic Faithful Internet campaign.

But unfortunately each of these rulings are at risk during the budget process, when members of Congress attach "policy riders" to the budget.  Essentially even if Congress can't blog the FCC through legislation, it can put limits on how the FCC spends its money and that means Congress can block the FCC's decisions through sneaky back-door maneuvers. 

In the last month we've been working with our allies in the civil rights and faith communities to urge Congress to let the FCC's decisions stand.  You can see the Leadership Conference substantive letter on media diversity, their letter opposing policy riders, and our faith letter opposing both media diversity and net neutrality policy riders. 

We were saddened to learn of the passing of this year's McGannon Award recipient, Wally Bowen, last night after his long battle with ALS.  We at UCC OC Inc. are gratified that we got a chance to demonstrate to him how important his work was nationally as well as in his home community of rural western North Carolina. 

His friend Monroe Gilmour was able to attend the ceremony in Washington DC in October to receive the award on his behalf, and then present it to him at home in North Carolina, as captured in this picture.  Upon learning of his death, Cheryl Leanza, OC Inc.'s policy advisor said, "Wally's lifelong dedication to the cause of media justice was inspirational to me for as long as I knew him.  Wally took policy opportunities created in Washington and made them into real opportunities for his neighbors in western North Carolina.  All the victories in Washington will be for naught without people like Wally to translate them into action on the ground." 

Wally Bowen was recognized for his leadership in building the Mountain Area Information Network in western North Carolina, and then working to bring a low-power FM station, local cable access channels and broadband access to his community.

Bowen's acceptance remarks highlighted his dedication to his home community,  and noted that his work had been inspired and supported by his own faith community, Jubilee!, in Asheville, NC.  He quoted the words of theologian Frederick Buechner: “Your true vocation is found in that place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.”  He continued, "It has been my good fortune to have found that place of true vocation in my work through the Mountain Area Information Network these past 20 years. On behalf of the rural citizens for whom we advocated, thank you again for this award affirming this work."

Thank you, Wally, for doing the work.

The description of Wally's achievements and press release, as well as additional photos of the Parker Awards and of Wally receiving his award are available online.

The 33rd Annual Everett C. Parker Ethics in Telecommunications Lecture and Awards Breakfast was successfully held on October 20, 2015.  2015. Read about honorees and sponsors, read the press release.  Photos from the event are available on our Flickr stream. Please feel free to download any photo you want using the Flickr download button (the down arrow icon on the bottom right hand side of the photo). Video highlights of the event are also available on the UCC Media Justice YouTube Page.

We were thrilled to have so many guests join us to celebrate our honorees, Wally Bowen, co-founder and executive director of the Mountain Area Information Network, and Joseph Torres, senior external affairs director for Free Press, as well as hear from danah boyd, founder of Data & Society Research Institute.  Although he could not attend in person, after the event, Wally received the award in North Carolina.

In anticipation of the Federal Communications Commission vote tomorrow on inmate calling, the United Church of Christ's media justice ministry issued its strong support of the Federal Communications Commission vote tomorrow capping local prison phone rates.

"The vote tomorrow is a victory, no questions asked," said Cheryl Leanza, policy advisor for the historic ministry.  "The FCC is not only capping the rates paid by families but cracking down on fees that could otherwise have been a source of abuse."

Because of the limits on both rates and fees, the commissions previously paid by phone companies to jails, prisons and detention centers will be severely curtailed.  "I can see why Global Tel Link and some prison phone companies might want the FCC to stop commissions in addition to capping rates," continued Leanza, "those companies would like to keep all of the revenue and pass none of it on to correctional facilities.  But make no mistake, the only entities harmed by tomorrow's vote are the phone companies that have been gouging families and pastors for so long."

UCC OC Inc. and many civil rights and criminal justice organizations signed a letter just before the record closed, laying out their strong support for the FCC's planned vote. 

UCC OC Inc. has been working with a long list of allies, including The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Center for Media Justice, Prison Policy Initiative, many faith leaders, and the Prison Phone Justice campaign and all of its members.  A rally celebrating the FCC's order is planned for Thursday morning at 9:30 am outside the FCC.

boyd, Torres and Bowen Honored at 33rd Annual Everett C. Parker Lecture

Leading media reform advocates were honored today as a media executives, faith leaders and media justice advocates gathered at First Congregational United Church of Christ in Washington for the 33rd Annual Everett C. Parker Ethics in Telecommunications Lecture.

danah boyd, founder of the Data & Society Research Institute, delivered the 2015 Parker Lecture, asserting that “one of the things that I’ve learned is that, unchecked, new [technology] tools are almost always empowering to the privileged at the expense of those who are not.”

    Also honored at the event were Joseph Torres, senior external affairs director of Free Press, who received the Everett C. Parker Award in recognition of his work embodying the principles and values of the public interest in telecommunications, and Wally Bowen, co-founder and executive director of the Mountain Area Information Network (MAIN), who received the Donald H. McGannon Award for his dedication to bringing modern telecommunications to low-income people in rural areas.

    In her address, boyd described how “digital white flight” from certain technology platforms had mirrored the problem in the traditional world, and how predictive data technologies, if not used thoughtfully, had the potential to exacerbate stereotyping. “More and more,” she concluded, “technology is going to play a central role in every sector, every community, and every interaction. It’s easy to screech in fear or dream of a world in which every problem magically gets solved.  But to actually make the world a better place, we need to start paying attention to the different tools that are emerging and learn to ask hard questions about how they should be put into use to improve the lives of everyday people. Now, more than ever, we need those who are thinking about social justice to understand technology and those who understand technology to have a theory of fairness.”

    The United Church of Christ’s Office of Communication, Inc. (OC Inc.), the media justice ministry of the Protestant denomination of 5,700 local congregations, established the Parker Lectureship in 1983 to recognize Rev. Dr. Everett C. Parker’s pioneering work as an advocate for the public’s rights in broadcasting.  In 1963, Parker filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission that ultimately stripped WLBT-TV in Jackson, Mississippi, of its broadcast license and established the principle that the public could participate in matters before the agency. This year’s event included special remembrances of Parker, who died on September 17, 2015, at the age of 102.

    In her remarks, boyd said, “We are here today because Dr. Parker spent much of his life fighting for the rights of others--notably the poor and people of color, recognizing that the ability to get access to new technologies to communicate and learn weren’t simply privileges, but rights.  He challenged people to ask hard questions and ignore the seemingly insurmountable nature of complex problems. In the process, he paved a road that enables a whole new generation of activists to rally for media rights.” Click here for the full text of boyd’s remarks.

    In his acceptance speech, Torres, co-author of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, said: “The struggle for racial justice is very much dependent on access to the media so we can tell our own stories. But this is hard to do when you’re dependent on corporate gatekeepers to tell your story, when people of color own few broadcast stations and cable outlets, when our nation’s media policies are shaped by structural racism.

    “This is why the fight over the future of the open Internet, over Net Neutrality, is so central to this struggle for racial justice.  It’s provided the digital oxygen that has helped breathe life into the movement that cries out ‘Black Lives Matter,’ ‘Not One More’ and ‘Say Her Name’.”  Click here for the full text of Torres’s remarks.

    Bowen was recognized for his leadership in building the Mountain Area Information Network in western North Carolina, and then working to bring a low-power FM station, local cable access channels and broadband access to his community. Monroe Gilmour, coordinator of Western North Carolina Citizens Ending Institutional Bigotry, accepted the award on behalf of Bowen, who suffers from ALS.  In a statement that Gilmour read on his behalf. Bowen noted that his work had been inspired and supported by his own faith community, Jubilee, in Asheville, NC, and quoted the words of theologian Frederick Buechner: “Your true vocation is found in that place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.”  Click here for the full text of Bowen’s remarks.

    The Rev. Dr. John Dorhauer, president and general minister of the United Church of Christ, recalled the legacy of Everett Parker in his remarks: “Unlike others for whom strong rhetoric was enough, Everett always looked for action that mattered. He was one who got things done--and his commitment to  ensuring that every marginal voice would have access to the airwaves not only mattered . . . not only matters still . . . but was something almost every other justice advocate missed. He didn't.”

    The Rev. Truman Parker, son of Everett Parker, detailed his father’s long list of accomplishments beyond the WLBT case, including creating educational shows for children and preparing reports on the early days of religious broadcasting. Parker recalled a childhood home that was filled with props for the shows his father produced and boxes of filings on the hiring practices of television and radio stations to which his father had demanded access.

    In a review of OC Inc’s successes of the past year, Board Chairman Earl Williams Jr. praised the FCC’s plans to move forward this week on further capping predatory prison telephone rates. He also commended the agency for its Open Internet Order and for moving forward on making broadband Internet access more affordable for low-income households.

    Since its founding in 1959, the United Church of Christ’s Office of Communication, Inc., has worked to create just and equitable media structures that give a meaningful voice to diverse peoples, cultures and ideas. The Parker Lecture is the only lecture in the country to examine telecommunications in the digital age from an ethical perspective. More information is available at www.uccmediajustice.org/parker.

I want to say how incredibly honored I am to receive this award named after Dr. Parker.

I had the honor of meeting Dr. Parker on a couple of occasions, and I feel so grateful to be a part of the struggle that he and so many others spent their lives fighting.

People of color have always struggled and fought to make sure their voices are heard in the media. It’s why we created our own newspapers 200 years ago and why we go online today.

But it has never been in the interest of those in power to allow our voices to speak or be heard.

It wasn’t in Jackson, Mississippi, during the 1960s when Dr. Parker and Black local civil rights leaders challenged the TV license of WLBT, a racist station that used the public airwaves to prevent integration and preserve a separate and unequal society. 

At the time, U.S. residents didn’t have the legal right to challenge a broadcast license, even one run by a white supremacist. But the UCC lawsuit changed history when a federal court ruled that everyday people could challenge FCC policy.

This unleashed a new era of media activism.  Black and Brown civil rights leaders demanded that broadcasters hire people of color and air programming that informed rather than demonize their communities.

From 1971–1973, more than 340 license challenges were filed, mainly by civil rights groups. This uprising forced the industry to hire the first wave of journalists of color to integrate its newsrooms.

But 40 years later, it’s easy to be discouraged by the lack of progress. There are too few journalists of color working in newsrooms today and still too much media coverage that marginalizes our community.

Because throughout history, people of color have been covered as a threat to society.

Back in the early 1700s, the colonial Boston News Letter wrote that Blacks were addicted to stealing and lying.

In 2011, a Pew report on the Pittsburgh media market found that “Of the nearly 5,000 stories studied in both print and broadcast, less than 4 percent featured an African American male engaged in a subject other than crime or sports.”

As the journalist Stacey Patton recently said, “The American mainstream media is working exactly the way it should. A racist society requires media bias. A racist society requires coverage of people of color that aligns and overlaps with broader racist sentiments and stereotypes.”

The struggle for racial justice is very much dependent on access to the media so we can tell our own stories. But this is hard to do when you’re dependent on corporate gatekeepers to tell your story, when people of color own few broadcast stations and cable outlets, when our nation’s media policies are shaped by structural racism.

This is why the fight over the future of the open Internet, over Net Neutrality, is so central to this struggle for racial justice.  It’s provided the digital oxygen that has helped breathe life into the movement that cries out Black Lives Matter, Not One More and Say Her Name.

But while the Internet can be a tool for liberation, we know it can also be used as a tool for our oppression through mass government and corporate surveillance.

But we’re able to fight back today because Dr. Parker and Black leaders fought in Jackson to ensure our voices weren’t silenced.

We’re able to fight because Al Kramer of the Citizens Communications Center worked with the community to force broadcasters to hire people of color.

We’re able to fight because William Wright of Black Efforts for Soul in Television organized the Black community to stand up to institutional racism in the media.

We’re able to fight because Emma Bowen was troubled by the impact of the media on the Black community and founded Black Citizens for a Fair Media.

We’re able to fight because journalists like Juan González and Charlie Ericksen (two close friends and mentors of mine) have exposed the media bias that is harming the Latino community.

And we’re able to fight today because a new generation of activists is demanding a just media system that ensures broadband is an affordable lifeline, that fights predatory prison-phone rates, that fights the targeted surveillance of communities of color, that fights for an open Internet that allows our voices to be heard and never silenced, and that fights for journalism that seeks to expose institutional racism rather than protect it.

This is why I’m honored to receive this award. It validates that we are on the right path that so many have fought so hard for us to walk on.

I want to thank my Free Press family for giving me the opportunity to be a part of this noble struggle, especially Craig Aaron, Kimberly Longey, Matt Wood and Misty Perez Truedson.

I also want to thank my media justice and civil rights family: Malkia Cyril, Steven Renderos, Brandi Collins, Rashad Robinson, James Rucker, Jessica Gonzalez, Michael Scurato, Alex Nogales and so many others for allowing to me to lock arms with them in service to this struggle, because in order to achieve racial justice, we must have a just media system.

I also want to thank my family, my wife, for all of their support. I especially want to thank my wonderful daughter Charis who is with me today.

I am also so proud to stand alongside Wally Bowen, who has fought to ensure people have access to modern telecommunications regardless of where they live or how much they make.

Finally, I want to thank Chance Williams for flying to be here today and Cheryl Leanza, the United Church of Christ and the selection committee for believing I am worthy of this recognition.

Rest in power, Everett Parker.

I'm so honored to receive this award from the United Church of Christ, a faith community I have long admired for its commitment to social justice and for its pioneering work in the field of media reform. I am especially grateful that the McGannon Award, for the first time, is recognizing rural folk as a class of citizens underrepresented in mainstream media . This award also has special meaning for me because my work has been supported and inspired by my own faith community, Jubilee, in Asheville, North Carolina. One of the inspirational lessons from Jubilee I have carried with me for the last 25 years is this guidance on finding your true calling from the theologian Frederick Buechner: "Your true vocation is found in that place where your deep gladness meets the world 's deep hunger." It has been my good fortune to have found that place of true vocation in my work through the Mountain Area Information Network these past 20 years. On behalf of the rural citizens for whom we advocated, thank you again for this award affirming this work.

-Wally Bowen

WHAT WORLD ARE WE BUILDING?
danah boyd


I am both honored and humbled to be with you today.  Today is a day of celebration and mourning, a reminder that life and death are deeply connected and that what we do with our time on this earth matters. We are here today because Dr. Parker spent much of his life fighting for the rights of others - notably the poor and people of color, recognizing that the ability to get access to new technologies to communicate and learn weren’t simply privileges, but rights.  He challenged people to ask hard questions and ignore the seemingly insurmountable nature of complex problems. In the process, he paved a road that enables a whole new generation of activists to rally for media rights.

I’m here today to talk with you about battles underway around new internet-based technologies.  I’m an ethnographer, which means that I’ve spent the bulk of my professional life trying to map cultural practices at the intersection between technology and society.  It’s easy to love or hate technology, to blame it for social ills or to imagine that it will fix what people cannot. But technology is made by people. In a society.  And it has a tendency to mirror and magnify the issues that affect everyday life. The good, bad, and ugly.

…..

I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, where I struggled to fit in. As a geeky queer kid, I rebelled against the hypocritical dynamics in my community. When I first got access to the internet - before the “World Wide Web” existed - I was like a kid in a candy store. Through early online communities, I met people who opened my eyes to social issues and helped me appreciate things that I didn’t even understand.  Transgender activists who helped me understand gender.  Soldiers who helped me understand war. Etc.  Looking back, I often think of the internet as my saving grace because the people that I met - the *strangers* that I met - helped me take the path that I’m on today. I fell in love with the internet, as a portal to the complex, interconnected society that we live in.

I studied computer science, wanting to build systems that connected people and broke down societal barriers. As my world got bigger, I quickly realized that the internet was a platform and that what people did with that platform ran the full spectrum. I watched activists leverage technology to connect people in unprecedented ways while marketers used the same tools to manipulate people for capitalist gain. I stopped believing that technology alone could produce enlightenment.

In the late 90s, the hype around the internet became bubbalicious and it was painfully clear that economic agendas could shape technology in powerful ways.  After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, I was a part of a network of people determined to build systems that would enable people to connect, share, and communicate. By then, I was also a researcher trained by anthropologists, curious to know what people would do with this new set of tools called social media.

In the early days of social network sites, it was exhilarating watching people understand that they were part of a large global network. Many of my utopian minded friends started dreaming again of how this structure could be used to breakdown social and cultural barriers. Yet, as these tools became more popular and widespread, what unfolded was not a realization of the idyllic desires of many of the early developers, but a complexity of practices that resembled the mess of everyday life.

INEQUITY GETS BAKED IN

Let’s talk youth for a second. As social media was being embraced, I was doing research, driving around the country talking with teenagers about how they understood technology in light of everything else taking place in their lives. I watched teens struggle to make sense of everyday life and their place in it. And I watched as privileged parents projected their anxieties onto the tools that made visible the lives of less-privileged youth.

Not surprisingly to many people in this room, as social media exploded, our country’s struggle with class and race get entwined with technology.  I will never forget sitting in small town Massachusetts in 2007 with a 15-year-old white woman I call Kat talking about her life when she made a passing reference to why her friends all quickly abandoned MySpace and moved to Facebook because it was safer and MySpace was boring. Whatever look I gave her at that moment made her squirm. She looked down and said, “It’s not really racist, but I guess you could say that. I’m not really into racism, but I think that MySpace now is more like ghetto or whatever.”

I was taken aback and started probing to learn more, to understand her perspective. “The people who use MySpace—again, not in a racist way—but are usually more like ghetto and hip-hop rap lovers group.”  As we continued talking, she became more blunt and told me that black people use MySpace and white people use Facebook.

Fascinated by Kat’s explanation and discomfort, I went back to my fieldnotes. Sure enough, numerous teens had made remarks that, when read with Kat’s story in mind, made it very clear that a social division had unfolded between these two sites during the 2006-2007 school year.  I started asking teens about these issues and heard many more accounts of how race affected engagement. After I posted an analysis online, I got a response from a privileged white boy named Craig.

“The higher castes of high school moved to Facebook. It was more cultured, and less cheesy. The lower class usually were content to stick to MySpace. Any high school student who has a Facebook will tell you that MySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious. Like Peet’s is more cultured than Starbucks, and Jazz is more cultured than bubblegum pop, and like Macs are more cultured than PC’s, Facebook is of a cooler caliber than MySpace.”

A white girl from Westchester in NY, explained: “My school is divided into the “honors kids,” (I think that is self explanatory), the “good not-so-honors kids,” “wangstas,” (they pretend to be tough and black but when you live in a suburb in Westchester you can’t claim much hood), the “latinos/hispanics,” (they tend to band together even though they could fit into any other groups) and the “emo kids” (whose lives are allllllways filled with woe). We were all in MySpace with our own little social networks but when Facebook opened its doors to high schoolers, guess who moved and guess who stayed behind.”

This was not the first time that racial divisions became visible in my research. I had mapped networks of teens using MySpace from single schools only to find that, in supposedly “integrated” schools, friendship patterns were divided by race. And I’d witnessed and heard countless examples of the ways in which race configured everyday social dynamics which bubbled up through social media. In our supposedly post-racial society, social relations and dynamics were still configured by race.  But today’s youth don’t know how to talk about race or make sense of what they see.

And so, in 2006-2007, I watched a historic practice reproduce itself online.  I watched a digital white flight. Like US cities in the 1970s, MySpace got painted as a dangerous place filled with unsavory characters while Facebook was portrayed as clean and respectable. And with money, media, and privileged users behind Facebook, it became the dominant player that attracted everyone.  And racial divisions just shifted technology.  Instagram and Vine, for example.

Teenagers weren’t creating the racialized dynamics of social media; they were reproducing what they saw everywhere else and projecting them onto their tools. And they weren’t alone. Journalists, parents, politicians, and pundits gave them the racist language that they reiterated. And today’s technology is valued - culturally and financially - based on how much it’s used by the most privileged members of our society.

STATISTICAL PREJUDICE

Let’s now shift focus.

Thirteen years ago, when a group of us were sitting around a table trying to imagine how to build tools that would support rich social dynamics, none of us could’ve imagined being where we are now. Sure, there were those who wanted to be rich and famous, but no one thought that a social network site would be used by over a billion people and valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars. No one thought that every major company would have a “social media strategy” within a few years or that the technologies we were architecting would reconfigure the political and cultural landscape.  None of us were focused on what we now know as “big data.”

“Big data” is a fuzzy amorphous concept, referencing a set of technologies and practices for analyzing large amounts of data.  These days, though, it’s primarily a phenomenon, promising that if we just have more data, we can solve all of the world’s problems. Of course, the problem with “big data” isn’t whether or not we have the data, but whether or not we have the ability to make meaning from and produce valuable insights with data. And this is often trickier than one might imagine.

One of the perennial problems with the statistical and machine learning techniques that underpin “big data” analytics is that they rely on data entered as input.  And when the data you input is biased, what you get out is just as biased. These systems learn the biases in our society. And they spit them back out at us.

Consider the work done by Latanya Sweeney, a brilliant computer scientist. One day, she was searching for herself on Google when she noticed that the ads displayed were for companies offering criminal record background checks with titles like: “Latanya Sweeney, Arrested?”, thereby implying that she may indeed have a criminal record. Suspicious, she started searching for other, more white-sounding names, only to find that the advertisements offered in association with those names were quite different. She set about to more formally test the system finding that, indeed, searching for black names were much more likely to produce ads for criminal justice products and services.

This story attracted a lot of media attention. What the public failed to understand was that Google wasn’t intentionally discriminating or selling ads based on race. Google was unaware of the content of the ad. All it knew is that people clicked on those ads for some searches but not others and so it was better to serve them up when the search queries had a statistical property similar to queries where a click happen. In other words, because racist viewers were more likely to click on these ads when searching for black names, Google’s algorithm quickly learned to serve up these ads for names that are understood as black. In other words, Google was trained to be racist by its very racist users.

Our cultural prejudices are deeply embedded into countless datasets, the very datasets that our systems are trained to learn on. Students of color are much more likely to have disciplinary school records than white students. Black men are far more likely to be stopped and frisked, arrested of drug possession, or charged with felonies even when their white counterparts engage in the same behaviors. Poor people are far more likely to have health problems, live further away from work, and struggle to make rent. Yet all of these data are used to fuel personalized learning algorithms, risk-assessment tools for judicial decision-making, and credit and insurance scores. And so the system “predicts” that people who are already marginalized are higher risks, thereby constraining their options and making sure they are, indeed, higher risks.

This was not what my peers set out to create when we imagined building tools that allowed you to map who you knew or enabled you to display interests and tastes. We didn’t architect for prejudice, but we didn’t design systems to combat it either.

Lest you think that I fear and despise “big data”, let me take a moment to highlight the potential. I’m on the board of Crisis Text Line, a phenomenal service that allows youth in crisis to communicate with counselors via text message. We’ve handled millions of conversations with youth who are struggling with depression, disordered eating, suicidal ideation, and sexuality confusion. The practice of counseling is not new, but the potential shifts dramatically when you have millions of messages about crises that can help train a system designed to help people. Because of analytics that we do, counselors are encouraged to take specific paths to suss out how they can best help the texter. Natural language processing allows us to automatically bring up resources that might help a counselor or encourage a counselor to pass the conversation onto a different counselor who may be better suited to help this particular texter. In other words, we’re using data to empower counselors to better help youth who desperately need our help. And we’ve done more active rescues during suicide attempts than I like to count. So many youth lack access to basic mental health services.

But the techniques we use at CTL are the exact same techniques that are used in marketing. Or personalized learning. Or predictive policing. Let’s examine the latter for a moment.  Predictive policing involves taking prior information about police encounters and using that to make a statistical assessment about the likelihood of crime happening in a particular place or involving a particular person. In a very controversial move, Chicago has used such analytics to make a list of people most likely to be a victim of violence. In an effort to prevent crime, police officers approached those individuals and used this information in an effort to scare them to stay out of trouble.  Surveillance by powerful actors doesn’t build trust; it erodes it. Imagine that same information being given to a social worker. Even better, to a community liaison. Sometimes, it’s not the data that’s disturbing, but how it’s used. And by whom.

THE WORLD WE’RE CREATING

Knowing how to use the data isn’t easy. One of my colleagues at Microsoft Research - Eric Horvitz - can predict with startling accuracy whether someone will be hospitalized based on what they search for.  What should he do with that information? Reach out to people? That’s pretty creepy. Do nothing. Is that ethical? No matter how good our predictions are, figuring out how to use them is a complex social and cultural issue that technology doesn’t solve for us. In fact, as it stands, technology is just making it harder for us to have a reasonable conversation about agency and dignity, responsibility and ethics.

Data is power. And, increasingly, we’re seeing data being used to assert power over people. It doesn’t have to be this way, but one of the things that I’ve learned is that, unchecked, new tools are almost always empowering to the privileged at the expense of those who are not.

Dr. Parker understood that. He understood that if we wanted less privileged people to be informed and empowered, they needed access to the same types of quality information and communication technologies as those who were privileged.  Today, we’re standing on a new precipice.  For most media activists, unfettered internet access is at the center of the conversation. And that is critically important. But I would like to challenge you to think a few steps ahead of the current fight.

We are moving into a world of prediction. A world where more people are going to be able to make judgments about others based on data.  Data analysis that can mark the value of people as worthy workers, parents, borrowers, learners, and citizens. Data analysis that has been underway for decades but is increasingly salient in decision-making across numerous sectors. Data analysis that most people don’t understand.

Many activists will be looking to fight the ecosystem of prediction, regulate when and where it can be used.  This is all fine and well, when we’re talking about how these technologies are designed to do harm. But more often than not, these tools will be designed to be helpful, to increase efficiency, to identify people who need help. And they will be used for good alongside uses that are terrifying.  How can we learn to use this information to empower?

One of the most obvious issues is that the diversity of people who are building and using these tools to imagine our future is extraordinarily narrow. Statistical and technical literacy isn’t even part of the curriculum in most American schools. In our society where technology jobs are high-paying and technical literacy is needed for citizenry, less than 5% of high schools even offer AP computer science courses.  Needless to say, black and brown youth are much less likely to have access let alone opportunities. If people don’t understand what these systems are doing, how do we expect people to challenge them?

We must learn how to ask hard questions of technology and those making decisions based on their analysis. It wasn’t long ago when financial systems were total black boxes and we fought for fiduciary accountability to combat corruption and abuse. Transparency of data, algorithms, and technology isn’t enough; we need to make certain assessment is built into any system that we roll-out.  You can’t just put millions of dollars of surveillance equipment into the hands of the police in the hope of creating police accountability.  Yet, with police-worn body cameras, that’s exactly what we’re doing. And we’re not even trying to assess the implications. This is probably the fastest roll-out of a technology out of hope, but it won’t be the last. So how do we get people to look beyond their hopes and fears and actively interrogate the trade-offs?

More and more, technology is going to play a central role in every sector, every community, and every interaction. It’s easy to screech in fear or dream of a world in which every problem magically gets solved.  But to actually make the world a better place, we need to start paying attention to the different tools that are emerging and learn to ask hard questions about how they should be put into use to improve the lives of everyday people. Now, more than ever, we need those who are thinking about social justice to understand technology and those who understand technology to commit to social justice.

Thank you!