Vanessa Taylor

Democratic hopefuls claim the Countering Violent Extremism program can help stop white supremacist terror. But since 2014, it has been used to spy on innocent Muslims.

A surveillance network has expanded right under our noses in one of the places you may least expect — people's doorbells. Since acquiring smart-doorbell company Ring in February 2018, Amazon's built an extensive network of cameras across the country, and it's sharing the information it gets. Now, 36 civil rights groups demand Amazon's police partnerships end in an open letter released yesterday.

With a history of its own programs literally labeling Black people as animals, Google contractors relying on dehumanizing methods to collect facial data shows that tech has severe problems in how it conceptualizes and interacts with Blackness.

One of the most frightening aspects of technology today is its ability to bend reality. Recently, a study by cyber-security company Deeptrace found that Deepfake videos have nearly doubled in nine months. What's most worrying is the type of deepfake that's beginning to dominate the internet.

However, there's a potentially dangerous undertone to NASA's own description of its mission, further evidenced by the companies involved: space colonization.

Recently, Twitter launched its anti-abuse filter for DMs, but the platform's newest feature seems like yet another bandaid rather than a solution.

Musk claims that he'll be able to send people into orbit within the next year.

Navigating reproductive health services as a Black Muslim often means confronting Islamophobia, xenophobia, and class discrimination within the medical system—problems only amplified by the Hyde Amendment’s ban on federal funding for abortion.

As technology continues to develop, surveillance does too and although it existed long before computers, the digital age has allowed it to rapidly expand, putting communities of color at increased risk.

Describing itself as the “new neighborhood watch,” Neighbors is designed to allow users to receive real-time crime updates from their neighbors. On the surface, it seems like an innocent project. However, Neighbors is a strong example of how surveillance companies like Ring manufacture paranoia to sell back to you.

On the internet — where nothing ever dies — past behaviors are much easier to recollect. Clips like Silverman’s blackface sketch may have been buried if it weren’t for the existence of gifs, blogs, and digital memory. But here’s what’s important to remember about cancel culture: it’s not the enemy.

While the cries for Omar to be “sent back” to Somalia are ugly, they’re unfortunately not a surprise for many Muslims, who have been targeted by politicians and the media before.

Shows like CSI may have tricked you into thinking that DNA testing is a perfect science, but that’s just not the case.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, developers make a lot of bold claims about what their programs can do.

There are a multitude of issues with facial recognition. Like technology in general, artificial intelligence is not autonomous. It does not decide on its own to uphold social biases. However, not only can programs teach themselves — as seen with Amazon’s recruitment tool that learned to prioritize male candidates over women — but they can be deployed in efforts to regulate or even re-define Otherness.