Name: Tiffany Palapo
Social Justice Group: 2022-2023, Technology: Online Radicalization
Date of Fieldwork: January 24, 2023
Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):Denise Zaraya and Andrew King of IAS
Type of Fieldwork: Interview
What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork?[:: :
On the 24th, at 2:00 my group and I interviewed Denise Zaraya and Andrew King of Integral Ad Science. Denise was one of the essential people to the start of the organization. Andrew is one of the main people who build on the monitoring technology, updating it whenever a new problem comes up. We met with them on zoom.
I learned from them that having technology to monitor hate speech online would benefit not only consumers but also companies. With monitors available, social media companies don’t need to resort to tactics that would cause people to loose. For example, went Elon Musk recently obtained Twitter, to lessen the spread of bots, he suggested introducing subscriptions to twitter. While this plan would have worked immensely to lessen the amount of bots, it would have deterred many people who don’t have the finances or resources. They also spoke about the importance of monitors for hate speech because of how in recent times, everything has been online based. Most of the population uses social media as a form entertainment and communication, leaving lots of people vulnerable to be exposed towards violence/hate speech.
Denise and Andrew talked about various different things that will benefit my project with the online/advertising portion. They’re perspective has given me ideas of what to research for the advertising and more general online based hate.
