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   Timnit Gebru (she/her) (timnitgebru@dair-community.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 08:00:50 JST Timnit Gebru (she/her)

   🗣️🗣️🗣️ Announcing new work from DAIR which is very close to my heart, 3 years in the making.

   When #TigrayGenocide, the deadliest genocide of the 21st century thus far, started in November 2020, it was 1 month before I got fired from Google. Unlike Tigrayans whose sisters were being raped & parents murdered, I didn’t know exactly what was happening on the ground & who to believe. But I saw the genocidal speech targeting Tigrayans on social media, particularly from Eritreans, in Tigrinya. 🧵

   • Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Timnit Gebru (she/her) (timnitgebru@dair-community.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 08:00:56 JST Timnit Gebru (she/her)

     in reply to

     I told people at Google about this, and asked them to build language technology and at the very least, have basic moderation, in so-called "under-resourced languages” like Tigrinya. Although we were at Google, any concerns sent to YouTube went into a void never to even be acknowledged. The same VP who sent an “anonymous” letter to HR telling me to retract my paper and setting the stage for my firing, however, commented that plenty of work was being done in that arena.

     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Timnit Gebru (she/her) (timnitgebru@dair-community.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 08:01:17 JST Timnit Gebru (she/her)

     in reply to

     But contrary to his claims and Yann LeCun’s lies saying that “95% of hate speech on facebook is removed by ‘AI’,” all social media is essentially 4chan in these languages and contexts.

     We have now spent 3 years documenting these failures. We had no language technology to do this–not even the equivalent of a spell checker. So we partnered with Lesan founded by Asmelash Teka to create those tools.

     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Timnit Gebru (she/her) (timnitgebru@dair-community.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 08:01:36 JST Timnit Gebru (she/her)

     in reply to

     We collaborated with content moderators like Fasica to understand the horrific working conditions of moderators.

     Imagine your family going through one of the worst sieges in recorded history with nothing going in & out for 2 years, and the longest continuous internet shutdown ever recorded, and moderating genocidal content targeting your people. One of the moderators saw his cousin being murdered because that was a video routed to him. He wasn’t even allowed to take a short mental health break.

     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Timnit Gebru (she/her) (timnitgebru@dair-community.social)'s status on Friday, 18-Apr-2025 08:02:03 JST Timnit Gebru (she/her)

     in reply to

     See Fasica's report at https://data-workers.org/fasica/

     I will never forget the genocidal mania among the Ethiopian intelligentsia. It was a popular genocide, with your “progressive” diaspora falling over themselves to deny and justify it. The least we can do is raise awareness about what has happened and what is about to happen.

     You can find our work thus far on https://www.dair-institute.org/tigray-genocide/.