Group Black has announced the acquisition of Galore Media Inc., a digital culture magazine that reaches 15 million users monthly. The Black-owned media company is also expanding its media influence with the launch of the “She’s Good [For Real]” Black women’s health platform and new data technologies. The Galore Acquisition Galore is known for spotlighting cultural icons such as Zendaya, Bad Bunny, and Kylie Jenner on their covers and its collaborations with major brands like Samsung, Apple, and Estee Lauder. “Galore is on the cutting edge of culture and I
TikTok rapper Dantreal Clark-Rainbolt, known by his stage name Trefuego, has been ordered to pay Sony Music Entertainment $802,997.23 in damages for using a copyrighted sample without permission. U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman delivered the ruling, saying the fine would teach him a six-figure “lesson” about “carefully selecting the materials included in his raps.” Trefuego’s Copyright Clash Trefuego’s track “90mh” became a viral sensation on TikTok, featured in over 155,000 videos and gaining more than 100 million streams on Spotify. Despite the song’s success and nearly $700,000 in earnings, the rapper’s victory was short-lived.
In a controversial incident, DBrand, a Canadian tech accessory company known for its social media persona, faced severe backlash after making a racist remark about a customer’s last name. A Joke Taken Too Far? The comment, which was intended to be humorous, was directed at Bhuwan Chitransh, a customer who had complained about the discoloration of a product he had purchased. Chitransh’s initial tweet to DBrand was about a computer skin that changed color only two months after purchase. In a response that was seen as offensive, DBrand tweeted, “Your
Nearly 60% of Black small- and mid-sized business (SMB) owners on TikTok say that the app is critical to their business’ existence, a new Oxford Economics report has found. TikTok’s Value For Small businesses Oxford Economics, in collaboration with TikTok, sought to understand the app’s economic value for local communities across the US. It surveyed 1,050 SMBs and 7,500 users in 2023 to gauge interactions and benefits derived from the app. Small and medium businesses generated $14.7 billion in revenues and supported 224,000 jobs on TikTok supported 224,000 jobs, the
The type of advice AI chatbots give people varies based on whether they have Black-sounding names, researchers at Stanford Law School have found. The researchers discovered that chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google AI’s PaLM-2 showed biases based on race and gender when giving advice in a range of scenarios. Chatbots: Biased Advisors? The study “What’s in a Name?” revealed that AI chatbots give less favorable advice to people with names that are typically associated with Black people or women compared to their counterparts. This bias spans across various scenarios such as job
Meta’s AI-powered image generator has recently been scrutinized for its difficulty in generating images of interracial couples and friends. Meta’s AI Fails To Generate Interracial Couples The AI tool, introduced in December, revealed its shortcomings when CNN tested its ability to create pictures of people from different racial backgrounds. The requests for images of interracial relationships consistently resulted in the AI producing images of same-race couples or friends, contradicting the diversity seen in real-world relationships. For instance, a request for a Black woman with a white husband yielded images of Black couples. This pattern was broken
A recent study has revealed that Black patients may be less likely than their white counterparts to receive responses from doctors to their online queries. The study in JAMA Network Open is based on examining medical advice request messages sent in 2021 to Boston Medical Center, a major safety-net provider. As the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with substantial growth in patient portal messaging, the researchers scrutinized over 39,000 messages from primary care patients during this time. Black Patients Less Likely To Get A Response Of the patients included in the sample, 2006 were Asian, 21600
AI’s inability to detect signs of depression in social media posts by Black Americans was revealed in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). This disparity raises concerns about the implications of using AI in healthcare, especially when these models lack data from diverse racial and ethnic groups. The Study The study, conducted by researchers from Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and its School of Engineering and Applied Science, employed an “off the shelf” AI tool to analyze language in posts from 868 volunteers. These participants, comprising equal
April Fools’ Day is known for its jokes, but in the tech world, it can be challenging to tell what’s real and what’s not, even on regular days. A lot is happening in tech, from ingenious deceits to blatant scams. We’ve got stories about everything from a Black tech pro who made up a fake assistant to earn more respect to the wrong use of AI in politics and huge money tricks in the crypto world. Here are 9 POCIT stories to check out this April Fools’ Day. 1. The
Meta Platforms Incorporated recently announced that it will enable content creators in Nigeria and Kenya to monetize their content on Instagram and Facebook starting June 2024. Monetizing Instagram Content Spearheaded by Nick Clegg, President of Global Affairs at Meta, this initiative aligns with the growing recognition of Africa’s digital potential. Meta will introduce a feature on its Instagram app in June, allowing Nigerian creators to monetize their content and earn a living using it. Creators can run ads in-stream and engage with an international audience. “Nigerian creators have global reach,” Nick Clegg, the company’s President of
