#it was considering immigration and protest and gender and the dynamics of space | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

theliberaltony · 5 years

Link

via FiveThirtyEight

The New York Times published a story last week about how some Democratic presidential candidates — notably Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris — had said that they are open to the idea of the government paying reparations to black Americans as a restitution for slavery. The two candidates were cautious in their statements on the issue — both to the Times and in a subsequent Washington Post story — primarily emphasizing the history of racial discrimination in the U.S. Neither candidate laid out specific details about how they think a reparations program should work, and I’d be surprised if either of them put out a formal reparations plan — it’s a very unpopular idea. (More on that later.)

But it was notable that neither those two nor several other 2020 candidates contacted by the Times really wanted to firmly oppose reparations either, as past Democratic presidential candidates have. That shift away from outright opposition to reparations is another sign of how the Democratic Party is moving toward more progressive stands on racial issues.1

But the reparations news made me curious: On which issues is the racial liberalism of the Democrats in line with the broader public — and where is it not? So I looked at the polling around different policies and rhetoric on racial issues. This is not a comprehensive examination, but an informal look at public opinion research since President Trump’s election.

Before we dive in, I should emphasize two things. First, it’s not new or surprising that ideas that we consider controversial don’t poll well. That’s kind of the point of bold ideas — they wouldn’t be bold if everyone already agreed with them. And, historically, racial liberalism in particular has often been unpopular — Martin Luther King Jr. may be almost universally revered now, but he was not in the 1960s. Secondly, there’s a difference between “unpopular” and “bad policy” and between “popular” and “good policy.” Some ideas that are unpopular may be right or effective — Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations” is very well-argued. I don’t want to suggest that just because a racial justice idea is unpopular that it shouldn’t be enacted.

I have divided these results into three categories: ideas or rhetoric that is broadly popular (more than 60 percent support from Americans overall), ideas that are unpopular (less than 40 percent support), and those that are somewhere in between.

Popular

This category includes vague notions of multiculturalism, ones that I assume most Americans support and that it would be hard to tell a pollster that you oppose. The policy ideas that are fairly popular, such as allowing felons to vote after they have finished their sentences, tend to be those that split Republican elites, with some opposing the ideas and others embracing them.

Here are the some of the popular ideas:

Racial and religious tolerance: 86 percent of Americans believe a significant part of being “truly American” is accepting people of diverse racial and religious backgrounds, according to a poll released this month by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic.

Acceptance of nonwhite people: 78 percent say that being of Western European heritage is not important to being American, according to that same PRRI survey.

Ending mandatory minimum prison sentences: 75 percent of Americans back this idea, according to the PRRI survey.

The U.S. is a “nation of immigrants”: 73 percent of Americans hold this view, according to a a January 2018 HuffPost/YouGov poll.

Allowing felons to vote after they have finished their sentences: 63 percent of adults “strongly” or “somewhat” support such a policy, according to a March 2018 HuffPost/YouGov survey.

Programs to increase racial diversity on college campuses are a good thing: 71 percent of Americans agree with that notion, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center poll.

Optimism about bridging racial divides: 66 percent of Americans are optimistic that people of different racial and religious backgrounds can work together to solve the country’s problems, according to the February 2019 PRRI report.

Allowing undocumented immigrants to become citizens: 62 percent of Americans support a path to citizenship if undocumented immigrants meet certain requirements, according to that same PRRI survey.

The country has not done enough to give equal rights to blacks: 61 percent of Americans hold this view, according to the 2017 Pew poll.

Muslims have a disadvantage for getting ahead in the U.S.: 60 percent of Americans agree with that statement, according to a 2018 Associated Press-NORC poll.

White people do have some advantage for getting ahead in the U.S.: 60 percent agree, according to that same AP-NORC poll.

Separating children from their parents at the border is a human rights violation: 60 percent of Americans agree with that statement, according to a July 2018 Quinnipiac University poll.

Mixed opinions

This section is generally made up of policies and rhetoric that splits the parties at the elite level — i.e., House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would likely support most of these items, but House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy would oppose them. That elite divide mirrors similar partisan divides in the electorate. Not coincidentally, this section includes more issues and policy questions that have been top-of-mind in U.S. politics over the past several years. (Views of the Black Lives Matter movement are a good example.) Similarly, general expressions of tolerance of all races and religions are popular, but Americans are more divided when you get more specific.

Here are some of these somewhat controversial ideas:

Being Christian is not essential to being American: About 56 percent of Americans say being Christian is not an important part of being truly American, according to the February 2019 PRRI report. (Thirty-nine percent said being Christian is important.)

Trump has emboldened people who hold racist beliefs to express those beliefs publicly: 55 percent of Americans agreed with this notion, according to the Quinnipiac survey that was released in July 2018.

Black and Latino Americans each have some disadvantage for getting ahead in the U.S.: 51 percent of Americans have that view, when asked about each group individually, according to the 2018 AP-NORC poll.

Agree with the views of the Black Lives Matter movement: 50 percent of Americans said they “mostly” agree, according to a 2017 Marist poll.

It should be easier to immigrate to the U.S.: 49 percent of Americans agreed with that idea, compared with 32 percent who said that it should be harder, according to the Quinnipiac poll released in July 2018 .

Trump is a racist: 49 percent of Americans hold this view, according to the Quinnipiac poll.

The U.S. should not define itself as a country of Western European descendants: In the PRRI survey, respondents were asked to put themselves on a scale where one end is the statement that they “would prefer the U.S. to be a nation made up of people from all over the world” and the other end is the statement that they “would prefer the U.S. to be a nation primarily made up of people from Western European heritage.” Forty-seven percent said they mostly agreed with the first statement.

Being born in the U.S. is not important to being American: 46 percent of people in the PPRI survey agreed with this idea. A similar share (50 percent) said being born here is important.

Kneeling as a form of protest during the national anthem: A 2018 Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 42 percent of Americans felt kneeling was appropriate, compared with 53 percent who disagreed.2

Racial discrimination, as opposed to personal actions, is holding back African-Americans who can’t get ahead: 41 percent agreed with this view, according to the 2017 Pew poll, while a plurality said that such Americans were largely responsible for their own condition.

Unpopular

This section is largely made up of ideas that are to the left of the consensus within the Democratic Party. Taking down Confederate monuments in public places, for example, splits Democratic voters, while Republicans are overwhelmingly opposed. This section is shorter than those above in part because pollsters don’t tend to ask about ideas that are not backed strongly by either party, since those have little chance of becoming reality.

Here some very controversial ideas:

Confederate monuments in public spaces should be removed: 39 percent support this view, according to a 2017 Quinnipiac poll.

The number of immigrants in America should increase: 28 percent of Americans hold this view, according to a June 2018 Gallup poll, with 39 percent of Americans wanting immigration levels to stay the same and 29 percent wanting them to decrease.

Reparations: A July 2018 survey from the left-leaning Data for Progress found that 26 percent of Americans supported some kind of compensation or cash benefits for the descendants of slaves. A May 2016 Marist survey also found that 26 percent of Americans said the U.S. should pay reparations as “a way to make up for the harm caused by slavery and other forms of racial discrimination.”3

Abolishing the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency: 25 percent of Americans said they supported this idea, according to a July 2018 Politico/Morning Consult poll; 54 percent wanted the agency to remain.

Reparations, along with abolishing ICE, are very unpopular. This was not surprising to me, which is why I was surprised when I first saw the headline, “2020 Democrats Embrace Race-Conscious Policies, Including Reparations” in the Times. But the candidates’ actual comments were more in the vein of our first two categories — somewhat vague acknowledgements of the inequality that black Americans face. The challenge for Democratic elected officials, as the party leans into its racial liberalism, will be how to translate the public’s general pro-minority proclivities into policy. I suspect that Democratic presidential candidates will end up pushing policies that limit how aggressive ICE can be and that address the wealth gap between black and whites — but fall short of explicit calls for abolishing ICE or giving reparations.

But I think there is another potential outcome — Democratic elites moving Democratic voters and then the broader public toward more racially liberal positions. There are many factors behind the growing support for marijuana legalization, but one may be that liberal activists have successfully convinced the public that aggressive policing of marijuana use has resulted in unfair treatment of black Americans.

#IFTTT #FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

2 notes · View notes

shirlleycoyle · 4 years

Text

We Asked 43 Facial Recognition Companies if They’ll Refuse to Work With Cops

In a letter to Congress Monday, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said the company will no longer offer general purpose facial recognition technology, and that the company would oppose its use—or the use of any technology—for “mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values.”

In the letter, spurred by the Black Lives Matter protests and the police killing of George Floyd, Krishna said now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and in what capacity domestic law enforcement agencies should use facial recognition technology.

And Wednesday evening, Amazon announced a one-year moratorium on police use of its Rekognition face recognition technology.

Bias in artificial intelligence is well documented; predictive policing algorithms disproportionately target majority Black neighborhoods, facial recognition systems often can’t recognize Black people, and the Black community is surveilled at a disproportionate rate, as well.

“Artificial Intelligence is a powerful tool that can help law enforcement keep citizens safe,” Krishna said in the letter. “But vendors and users of Al systems have a shared responsibility to ensure that Al is tested for bias, particularity when used in law enforcement, and that such bias testing is audited and reported.”

To see if any other facial recognition companies agreed with IBM’s suggestion that there’s a “shared responsibility” to use AI responsibly, Motherboard reached out to 43 companies developing facial recognition technology, as compiled by Medium’s OneZero and supplemented with a few additional companies and federal agencies that have a focus on surveillance.

We asked if their facial recognition technology was used by the police, whether they supported Black Lives Matter protests, and if they would make a commitment to stop developing facial recognition technology and commit to not work with the police.

Here are their answers, listed alphabetically:

3DiVi

Did not respond.

Adera Global PTE Ltd.

Did not respond.

AiUnion

Did not respond.

Alchera

Did not respond.

AllGoVision

Did not respond.

Amazon

Did not respond, but issued a statement about Rekognition Wednesday.

AnyVision

Adam Devine, chief marketing officer for AnyVision, offered the following response:

1. Is our facial recognition technology used by the police?

AnyVision's facial recognition technology is not being used by the police, but we believe that it can and should be used by law enforcement to eliminate the bias that is clearly inherent in many organizations.

2. Do we support Black Lives Matter protests?

It would be easy to respond to this question with a careful, generic, PR-approved statement void of any real opinion or meaning. F#ck that. We're a startup with roots in Israel, a country that had to fight its way into existence, faces constant threat, and is populated by a people who have been persecuted for thousands of years. We support every effort—large and small, quiet and loud, peaceful and violent—that demands and earns equality, respect and safety for every race, sexual orientation, gender and religion.

We support the mission of BLM, and we applaud the protests and the significant achievements that have already come from the time, risk and perseverance of every individual who has taken to the streets of cities around the world.

3. Have we seen IBM's decision and will we stop developing facial recognition technology?

We have seen IBM's decision, and we disagree with it.

We believe IBM would have made a bigger, more powerful and frankly more effective statement if it had ceased doing business with law enforcement organizations and dedicated time and budget to legislative efforts to establish accuracy criteria for facial recognition algorithms and set forth guidelines for its ethical use rather than ceasing whatever development it was pursuing.

Their decision fails to recognize a critical point: just as bad people within bad organizations use force unjustly, bad people use technology unjustly. […]

We stand by our technology and the good that can come of its ethical use. We believe that facial recognition with sufficient training is in fact a safer and more effective tool than human perception, because it's easier to train the bias out of a line of code than it is a line of people.

Kevin, it would be easy to say that all facial recognition is bad because inferior versions of the technology are used in bad ways by bad people. But that's a short-sighted, knee-jerk reaction.

Nuclear power can illuminate a city or flatten it. Facial recognition can be biased or it can be used to protect people from threats.

Awidit Systems

Did not respond.

ClearLink

Did not respond.

Cyberextruder

Did not respond.

Cyberlink Corp

As a matter of policy, CyberLink generally does not comment on client relationships, and as a Taiwanese technology company, we also generally refrain from commenting on the local politics of other countries. Facial recognition is capable of providing solutions that go far beyond surveillance purposes, such as highly secure authentication for contactless payments, access control, personnel authentication, and device or account login. FaceMe was designed to deliver solutions such as these, and with privacy protection at the forefront. We feel this discussion is an important exemplification of why regulation is deeply needed around the use of facial recognition technology, specifically when it comes to fulfilling a public safety role, to ensure this technology is employed ethically, is free of algorithmic bias and does not violate any individual’s privacy or personal freedom.

Dahua Technology

Did not respond.

Dynamic Imaging Systems

Did not respond.

FaceFirst

Did not respond.

Federal Bureau of Investigations

Did not respond.

Idemia

Did not respond.

Imagus Technology

Did not respond.

Innovatrics

1. We don't have any projects with any of the US police departments and neither are we planning to.

2. Many of our employees have joined Black Lives Matter support demonstrations here in Bratislava, Slovakia, and we fully endorse that.

3. It's difficult to comment on the decision of IBM, since we don't know anything about the quality of their algorithms. Unlike most face recognition developers, IBM has not been participating in the independent FRVT (Face Recognition Vendor Tests) done by the US NIST, which are considered industry standards.

The reason is that we provide face recognition services in many countries in Africa, Asia and South America (most recently for electoral register in Guinea or provision of consumer loans in the Philippines and Vietnam). We need those algorithms to be accurate and reliable and therefore we use a very comprehensive training dataset that doesn't prefer one region or skin complexion over others.

We don't plan to stop developing face recognition software, since we see and endorse its use for empowering people and making their life more comfortable. There are many positive ways how to use it while upholding basic human rights. In many African countries, for example, biometrics and face recognition enabled many people to actually have a vote in elections.

Intel

Did not respond.

Intellivision

Did not respond.

KanKan Ai

Did not respond.

Luxand Inc.

Did not respond.

MicroFocus

Did not respond.

NEC Global

Did not respond.

Neurotechnology

Did not respond.

Nodeflux

Did not respond.

Palantir

We do not build facial recognition algorithms nor do we work with US law enforcement agencies on facial recognition applications.

Realnetworks Inc.

Did not respond.

Rokid Corporation Ltd.

Did not respond.

Smilart

Did not respond.

Tech5 SA

Did not respond.

Tevian

Did not respond.

Toshiba

Did not respond.

Trueface

1. Is your facial recognition technology used by the police? No, it is not.

2. Do you support Black Lives Matter protests? Yes, we support the First Amendment and the right for citizens to express views through protest.

3. We do not work with any police forces but it is critically important that technology like face recognition works across genders and ethnicities and that companies like Trueface strive to continue to raise the bar. We have made our gender and ethnicity information publicly available and we continue to drive accountability in the space by encouraging the industry to do the same.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection

Did not respond.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

Did not respond.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) use of facial recognition technology is primarily by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agents investigating child exploitation, human trafficking and other types of criminal investigations. HSI’s work to combat online child sexual exploitation and human trafficking has been widely recognized by law enforcement agencies around the world, and facial recognition technology is critical to identifying the perpetrators of these crimes. ICE does not routinely use facial recognition technology for civil immigration enforcement.

Via Technologies Inc.

Did not respond.

Videonetics Technology

Did not respond.

Vigilant Solution

Did not respond.

Vision-Box

Did not respond.

VisionLabs

Did not respond.

Yitu Technology

Did not respond.

We Asked 43 Facial Recognition Companies if They’ll Refuse to Work With Cops syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

0 notes