On February 10, the Critical Media Lab with support from members of Feminist Think Tank and the GI hosted a virtual data jam and discussion on the issues of big data, machine learning, and how discrimination is encoded into our technology.
In the first half of the event, students took part in the data jam where they were organized into break out rooms in gather.town. They were led in discussions centered around news articles that critiqued some aspects of technology or social media. The topics included how TikTok suppresses queer and “fat” content as a misguided attempt to stop cyberbullying, Facebook and its relationship with misinformation, Google’s hiring algorithm, and more.
The second half of the event featured Dr. Wendy Chun (Simon Fraser University) discussing how political polarization is a goal within big data and machine learning. She addressed issues of how algorithms train users to become authentically predictable and how the disrupting systems of data analytics is near impossible because of how these systems are designed.