"Revolution Vs. the Algorithm", the Campaign Against Racism and Discriminatory Bias in Digital Platforms and Services

Feb. 21, 2023

On the World Day of Social Justice and ahead of the UNESCO World Conference: "For a reliable internet", Racismo MX and UNESCO Mexico launched a campaign that calls to revolutionize algorithms, starting with the presentation of a video documentary entitled "Revolution vs. the algorithm", at the Centro de Cultural Digital.

The documentary "Revolution vs. the algorithm" showed how different groups, identities, people, and bodies continue to be stigmatized by the way they are represented in spaces and platforms that are used every day, such as internet search engines, while other groups are completely invisible, hindering the eradication of prejudices and inequalities.

The campaign was launched in a context where recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) from machine learning and deep learning have raised concerns in the public dialogue, such as the future of jobs, copyright, to its impact on criminal practices. However, there are still issues that need to be addressed and require an interdisciplinary and intersectional dimension, such as misinformation, racism, discrimination and hate speech in the daily use of technologies, communication platforms and simplified AI, which is used daily in workplaces, schools, and homes, such as virtual assistants and internet search engines.

The initiative exposes different types of discrimination, such as persistent racism and racial bias in a country where 80% of the population is dark-skinned. The documentary proposes an exercise that recorded the multimedia experience of different public figures who resorted to the world's most widely used image search engine and were confronted with the results of concepts such as happy man, beautiful woman, successful woman, and poverty, among others.

The activity was part of the second UNESCO Global Forum against Racism and Discrimination, hosted by Mexico at the end of November 2022. The multimedia experience and installation were created by advertising creative Manuel Vega and his team from the communication agency Bombay, directed by filmmaker Mario Sandoval, and with photography and camera by Edgar Bahena.

Gonzalo Martinez, from Bombay commented:

"Rarely advertising industry gives you the opportunity to give back to the community all the good you have received. In that sense, Bombay has always been involved in initiatives that help us to change the world, and contribute with justice and positive impact."

 

The exercise showed that indigenous people were not present in "positive" categories, such as happy man or woman, successful man, or woman, while the search for poverty yielded mainly brown and black people. This triggered reflections and emotions as experienced by personalities including actor, Tenoch Huerta; actress, Maya Zapata; co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Jordan Giger; director and legal advisor to the Inter-Parliamentary Forum on Emerging Technologies, Emma Wright; Ford Foundation Director Darren Walker, MTV MIAW Transform 2022 winner Natalia Lane, among many other leading voices in art, creativity, activism, politics and media calling for a revolution in thinking and an urgent open discussion.

The video is available on youtube.com/RacismoMX and its English subtitled version on UNESCO's international channel: youtube.com/UNESCO. In addition, the campaign website can be consulted to join the campaign and for suggestions on how to transform the algorithms.