Don’t Donate To Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF Is Not Serious That Black Lives Matter With Tech
ONN – Electronic Frontier Foundation
Don’t Donate To Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF Is Not Serious That Black Lives Matter With Tech
Hey everybody. The Electronic Frontier Foundation – the non-profit that says that it’s trying to protect your rights online and protect those who are disenfranchised from those who would violate their digital rights – is asking you to donate in celebration of their 30th anniversary. Well, I ask that you don’t – and i don’t do this with glee, but i do this with a great deal of sadness.
On a number of occasions, I’ve personally asked the Electronic Frontier Foundation to investigate organizations – tech organizations, large tech organizations – most notably, most recently Twitter for racism. For simply taking actions to eliminate (in this instance) my voice, but also other black voices from view. Something that has gone on pretty much since African Americans started putting content online, and really in earnest after the emergence of social media. And not only that, the emergence of a number of different techniques – programming languages, processes.
This is a rampant problem a problem that, from the media perspective, was given a spotlight by then ValleyWag Editor Owen Thomas, when he lampooned the New York Times for basically mistaking me (or so they say) for two different African-American men, and two consecutive paragraphs regarding the CNN / YouTube Democratic Debates (of 2007), instead of just finding out who i was, and mentioning me by name, or and even by video, since they were referring to the video.
The person that did it was NY Times Reporter Kate Seelye, who emailed me saying that she was sorry because she was tired. Really, she didn’t expect that anyone would care – she didn’t care. And then there are more insidious examples, where Twitter has removed account after account after account, because an african-american person (in this instance not me or in that instance not me) called for an investigation of the FBI because of african-american men who had not committed a crime, but were accused of committing a crime. I can go on, and on, and on.
And in my case, Twitter didn’t give a reason, they just did it, and then accused me of “platform manipulation”. If you go through each step of platform manipulation description
In Twitter there is not one example that describes anything that I have done on Twitter, and i dare Twitter to prove otherwise. They have never sent me any anything, nothing!
The only cause-and-effect that I can point to is a tweet that was based on a video that i made rightly expressing concern that Ivanka Trump was going to come to CES 2019 and speak while her father was basically declaring war against Iran.
Thus, making it a pretty tight dicey situation if you wanted to go and hear her speak at the Consumer Electronics Show, and you’re one of almost 200,000 people.
Guess what? I was still in the front row! I went! She killed it. She did a great job. But look: anyone who would tell you that they were not concerned at all was lying – they were.
It was just before CES that Twitter suspended my Zennie62 account, and not only that they’ve been pretty much tracking me – pretty horrible stuff. Again, I’m not the only black person to complain about an effort to basically take my voice away – to arrange, essentially, such that they “don’t see us” as it said.
But the Electronic Frontier Foundation has done nothing to address seriously address my complaint, or any other problem blacks in tech face. In fact, when I called about Twitter, I got a very nasty interrogation, as if i didn’t know i was talking about. Some sort of crackpot calling them – that’s how i was treated.
Stay tuned.
Note from Zennie62Media and Oakland News Now: this video-blog post demonstrates the full and live operation of the latest updated version of an experimental Zennie62Media , Inc. mobile media video-blogging system network that was launched June 2018. This is a major part of Zennie62Media , Inc.’s new and innovative approach to the production of news media. What we call “The Third Wave of Media”. The uploaded video is from a vlogger with the Zennie62 on YouTube Partner Channel, then uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Oakland News Now site and Zennie62-created and owned social media pages. The overall objective is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours. Now, news is reported with a smartphone: no heavy and expensive cameras or even a laptop are necessary. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media content news production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and seeks interested content and media technology partners.