Fasica is an incredibly gifted writer and storyteller, and it’s been such a joy and privilege to watch her vision come to life.

Congrats, @fasica.bsky.social! So well deserved! ❤️

🎉✨ Huge congrats to @fasica.bsky.social for being shortlisted for the True Story Award!
Her brilliant piece on content moderation stood out among over 1000 submissions from around the world, placing in the top 3%.

truestoryaward.org/story/508

A small, vibrant green bird with a sleek body and dark eyes perches on a moss-covered branch, with a blurred background of soft, golden-green light.

The spectacular Glistening-Green Tanager at Doña Dora #Colombia

#birds #nature 🌿

What a New Study Reveals About Content Moderation in Tigray | TechPolicy.Press Prithvi Iyer looks at new research into the failures of content moderation in the context of the conflict in Tigray.

Thank you to @prithvi97.bsky.social for covering our research on the failures of content moderation in the context of #TigrayGenocide and how to prevent genocidal speech from being proliferated by social media platforms.

www.techpolicy.press/what-a-new-s...

Pogo is standing in the swamp collecting littler, and saying “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Walt Kelly’s Pogo poster for the inaugural #EarthDay on April 22, 1970.

My painting TROUT WATER

I would choose the bear too 😆

I've decided to capture more images like this & upload it to my brain memory. Hopefully, it might help me erase the gory images and videos I cultivated for years due to my former job. I know this may sound silly, but it's working well for my mental health #connectwithnature😊 #happyEarthday

The Earth provides enough for every living being. Same flower, both the bee and butterfly ate from it without putting a fight. I think something humans should learn from.
I'm spending more time in nature, & I'm happy to experience this 😊

And if you do nothing else, please watch this short video narrated by Fasica, the lead author of the CHI paper, Nuredin Ali, and exiled Ethiopian journalist @zekuzelalem.bsky.social:

peertube.dair-institute.org/w/wTpAFSQkB2...

Please send it over to anyone who will listen and can do something about it. Our people can’t afford another war.

Our first academic paper on the topic will be presented at CHI in May: drive.google.com/file/d/1gPcU....

➡️ Find our work thus far on www.dair-institute.org/tigray-genoc....

➡️ More importantly, we have a statement describing the unbridled war mongering currently spreading on ALL social media platforms, setting the stage for all out war between Ethiopia & Eritrea:
www.dair-institute.org/blog/tigray-...

"The war is with those you grew up with, your neighbors. If you can rid your forest of these thorns...victory will be yours!" Screenshot of facebook post in Amharic and its translation.

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.

The Human Cost Of Our AI-Driven Future | NOEMA Behind AI’s rapid advance and our sanitized feeds, an invisible global workforce endures unimaginable trauma.

and the longest continuous internet shutdown ever recorded & 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.
www.noemamag.com/the-human-co...

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,

data-workers.org/fasica/

The AI startup outperforming Google Translate in Ethiopian languages "Chatbots like ChatGPT are utterly broken or useless for these languages."

all social media is 4chan in these languages & contexts.

We've 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.

restofworld.org/2023/3-minut...

Yann LeCun At the end of 2017, the % of hate speech on FB taken down preemptively by AI was around 24%. Since early 2020, it's been above 94%. The rest is flagged by users and taken down "manually." How did the numbers get better? By using large language models!

Yann LeCun @ylecon Social media would be guilty if it amplified hate speech and calls to violence.

The VP who sent an “anonymous” letter to HR telling me to retract my paper & setting the stage for my firing commented that plenty of work was being done in that arena. But contrary to his claims & Yann LeCun’s lies saying that “95% of hate speech on Facebook is removed by ‘AI’,”

Why Facebook keeps failing in Ethiopia Leaked documents show the company can't keep up with the volume of hate speech on the platform, which is leading to real-world violence.

I told people @ Google about this & asked them to build language technology & have human moderation, in so-called "under-resourced languages” like Tigrinya. Even though we were at Google, any concerns sent to YouTube went into a void never to even be acknowledged.
restofworld.org/2021/why-fac...

In Plain Sight: 2nd Edition: Seeking justice for sexual… "A searing, distressing and graphic account of probably…

Unlike Tigrayans in the diaspora whose sisters were being raped & parents murdered, I didn’t know what was happening on the ground & who to believe. But I did see the genocidal speech targeting them on social media, particularly from Eritreans, in Tigrinya.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/21...

Ethiopia’s forgotten war is the deadliest of the 21st century, with around 600,000 civilian deaths Estimates by European institutions and academics say over half a million non-combatants have died during the Tigray conflict as a result of a government blockade that kept out humanitarian aid

🔇🔇🔇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. 🧵

english.elpais.com/internationa...

Effective moderation requires linguistic, political, and legal expertise but platforms often rely on inadequate AI and uninformed vulnerable moderators. Read the paper here to find out how can we improve and the way forward.

Our paper for ACM CHI 2025 is out, I'm super proud to collaborate with multidisciplinary scholars and researchers assessing social media's role in spreading genocidal content during the Tigray war.
www.dair-institute.org/tigray-genoc...

Imagine that! #Teachers #Education #Students #the future #Technology #modernsoulutions #Peopleover processes

www.dair-institute.org/blog/a-futur...

22nd February 2025 07.43

22nd February 2025 07.43

And who they didn't like

Golden Sun setting reflected in gold light on sand, gold reflections on waves.

Golden hour, Pacific time.

Sunset on Whitley Bay beach in the UK.

The sun bows low in crimson grace, kissing waves in soft embrace. Shadows dance on golden shore, whispering tales of days before. The ocean hums a lullaby, as stars awaken in the sky. Night arrives on painted seas, carried home by the twilight’s breeze.

Reading this book 📕 for the third time, might be a blueprint for how Marc Cuban can help build a news 📰 network with journalists like Jim Acosta, who can tell the TRUTH to POWER 💪💪💪 and lead the RESISTANCE 🙏🙏🙏

Even if it's only the backyard, sometimes the sky is so beautiful you just gotta take a picture. #okwx

Write new worlds. Write beautiful places. Write angry people. Write imaginary beasts, futile quests, broken hearts, lifelong injustices, mysteries, love affairs, lost children, newfound purpose. Write anything that allows you to escape or heal or vent or rage or explore or reconcile. Write 🖤