Yesterday, President Trump revoked a six-decade-old executive order that prohibited workplace discrimination by federal contractors. President Lyndon Baine Johnson had signed the executive order just one year after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and months after the Voting Rights Act. Trump revokes Executive Order 11246 Executive Order 11246 stopped federal contractors from discriminating against employees on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity. This law applied to federal contractors and was implemented just two years after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave
Over 100 scholars, advocates, and human rights organizations have signed an urgent open letter demanding the Venezuelan government cease its technological repression and ensure unfettered access to the internet. This call to action comes amidst escalating political violence following the South American country’s controversial presidential elections on July 28. The open letter’s signatories include the Center on Race & Digital Justice, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) and its founder Timnit Gebru. Escalation of Surveillance Post-Elections In the wake of the recent elections, Venezuela has
Last month, Kenya’s ICT Minister announced that it had no plans to ban Facebook or shut down the Internet despite reports emerging that the platform is failing to combat hate speech that could lead to election violence. The statement came after Global Witness, an advocacy group, and Foxglove, a non-profit legal firm, released a report stating that Facebook “appallingly failed to detect hate speech ads in the two official languages of the country: Swahili and English.” Although Facebook released a blog post on July 20th that detailed its plans to combat
