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Voting

Virginia election shows key issues may trump scandals

Anastasia Mason
December 04, 2023
Virginia elections signs for Susanna Gibson, David Owen and Dan Schmitt

Campaign signs stand along the parking lot of Virginia's Echo Lake Elementary School on Election Day (Nov. 8).

Esther Frances/Medill on the Hill

Mason is a graduate student for Medill on the Hill, a program of Northwestern University in which students serve as mobile journalists reporting on events in and around Washington, D.C.

Seven-year-old Colton Owens laid on the ground outside his elementary school and played with his mother’s shoelaces. It had been a long day of errands, flu shots and now, voting.

When his mother, Stephanie Owens, began to answer a question, he chimed in with a list of names, the candidates he learned from television ads: Susanna Gibson, Siobhan Dunnavant and David Owen. Although Colton isn’t old enough to vote, he seemed to have given the advertisements more attention than many in Virginia’s 57th Delegate District, a suburban area northwest of Richmond.

“Honestly, a lot of it, I just kind of scroll past and then I go do my own research rather than looking at a lot of ads. I see the ads just to know who is running pretty much, but that's about it. I don’t pay attention to the rest of that stuff,” Owens said.

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Innovation & Incubation

The danger of technology discrimination

Nakeema Stefflbauer
December 04, 2023
technology discrimination
Two technology balancing acts
d3sign/Getty Images

Stefflbauer is a Middle East expert and the founder and CEO of FrauenLoop , a computer programming school for resident, immigrant and refugee women in Germany. She is a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project.

If you’re tired of hearing individuals weakly apologize for racism, then you’re probably exasperated by technology companies that do the same thing. The latest technology bias story has Instagram apologizing for adding “terrorist” to some Palestinian user profiles. That news provides another example of how tech companies regularly amplify social discrimination . Rather than being an alleviator of racial bias and a tool of racial justice, online technologies have the power to super-charge the dissemination of dehumanizing stereotypes and racist, sexist labels. Whereas, previously, you might have risked facing one person’s biased opinions off-line, online technologies can now reduce millions of people to stereotypes and caricatures that its victims are powerless to fight.

Black people already know that technology can be discriminatory, whether it identifies a person as an ape or fails to work altogether when dark-skinned people use it. Women have been raising alarms about bias in tech for years, as was the case when a secret Amazon hiring algorithm was found to discriminate against women. Or when Apple Pay’s credit algorithm awarded women lower credit scores than men. But women and Black people aren’t alone: In 2017, Chinese customers received refunds from Apple after claiming that the iPhone X face recognition couldn’t tell them apart. These examples show that technology is able to replicate human biases, in part, because discrimination by humans is restricted by law, while discrimination via computerized technologies oftentimes is not.

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