To produce the level of content that I do and to have no engagement breaks my heart. While I’m not giving up, I am making changes to get the engagement this quality of content deserves.

To that end, if you’re interested in receiving future issues of DINT/The Pushback, please reply to this email. That’s really it. Simply reply. You can share whatever you like:

• your impression of the newsletter (open to both critical and non-critical comments)

• what you would like to read in future issues

I do hope to hear from you and take you with me on the journey to what’s next for me as I cast a critical eye on the tech industry.

After nearly 200 issues of DINT, the newsletter averages one comment per issue and it’s always from the same person, a close family member who I shared my concerns with. There have been the occasional comments from others but the average is about one comment every 25 issues. This is unsustainable. I owe it to myself and to my future audience to produce this content for an audience that both reads and responds to it.

DINT is now … The Pushback, a publication for people who build and ship tech products.

Why does tech need another voice, you may be wondering. I’ve noticed there’s no one piecing critical issues in tech together. Even those so-called curated newsletters leave key insights on the table.

The Pushback is about managing risk in your career and in the company you’re at currently:

Career risks:

• Working on projects that become PR disasters (facial recognition scandals)

• Being on teams that get shut down due to bias issues

• Missing regulatory changes that torpedo product roadmaps

Company risks:

• Discrimination lawsuits from biased algorithms

• Regulatory fines for non-compliance

• Talent flight when ethics practices are bad

The Pushback equips you with the information you need to be the smartest person in the room who synthesizes key information into one, coherent course of action.

We’re living quarter by quarter in hopes we won’t be in the next raft of layoffs to impress The Street or potential investors with how ‘lean’ our company is.

You want to survive in this climate? You’d better get ahead of your peers and spot ways to leverage trends to your advantage. The Pushback is your partner in doing just that. Let’s go.

—------

This Week’s Intelligence

Meta Makes Billion-Dollar Employment Offer to AI Researcher

There’s a war going on in tech and it’s for AI resources. Recently, Meta admits its launching an all-out raid on its competitors’ AI talent. This initiative culminated in a billion-dollar employment package filled with incentives to be distributed over five years for a highly sought-after AI researcher.

What matters for tech workers

Layoffs continue to loom yet tech companies throw hundreds of millions, and in this case billions, of dollars at AI researchers. If the layoff frenzy that started in 2022 didn’t signal a harbinger of things to come then this billion-dollar offer certainly will. Tie accomplishments to AI and you may live to fight another day in the tech industry.

Business impact

Large tech firms entered the AI talent wars and smaller enterprises may just follow, if they see AI as a key factor in company valuation.

More insights

'No names': A brief moment in an interview with OpenAI engineers highlights the state of the AI talent wars

Sam Altman says the AI talent war is a bet that a ‘medium-sized handful of people’ will make superintelligence breakthroughs

xAI has hired 14 Meta employees this year as the AI talent war rages on

Meta Reportedly Acquires AI Audio Startup WaveForms Amid Ongoing Talent War | Technology News

—-

AI Copyright Litigation: From Ethics to Existential Business Risk

This week Anthropic pushed back against the certification of a class action lawsuit that could potentially cost them - and the AI industry as a whole - billions of dollars in copyright fines.

Garrison Lovely of Obsolete summarizes the case in this way:

William Alsup, a federal judge in San Francisco, certified a class action lawsuit against Anthropic on behalf of nearly every US book author whose works were copied to build the company’s AI models. This is the first time a US court has allowed a class action of this kind to proceed in the context of generative AI training, putting Anthropic on a path toward paying damages that could ruin the company.

(Source: Anthropic Faces Potentially “Business-Ending” Copyright Lawsuit)

The math ain’t mathin’: By law, the damages require copyright infringers to pay $150,000 per pirated work, which could amount to $100 billion in penalties. Anthropic, and others in AI such as OpenAI, have trained their large language models on millions of books from shadow online libraries.

Think of the early days of online music and digital music rights. Remember Napster? That’s where we are now. Those fines were real, companies and individuals who downloaded pirated works had to pay.

Meta, on the other hand, escaped having to pay Sarah Silverman and others in her class action lawsuit, because the claimants didn’t expressly show how pirating their works hurt them financially, according to presiding judge Vince Chhabria’s ruling.

The Bottom Line

Algorithmic bias isn't a "nice to have" ethics concern anymore—it's business risk. Companies that proactively address bias gain competitive advantage. Those that don't face litigation, regulation, and talent flight.

The Pushback tracks who's winning and losing this transition.

The Pushback synthesizes algorithmic bias intelligence for tech professionals. Forward this to colleagues who need to stay informed.

Subscribe for premium intelligence on tech accountability

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Last week recording artist SZA called out xAI for placing its data center in a low-income Black neighborhood in Memphis. SZA was one of many vocal opponents of the plan to place an AI data center in an Black neighborhood. Here’s why:

• AI data centers drive up demand for electricity and cause prices to soar.
  According to the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), the facility draws enough electricity to power 100,000 homes.

• They also need water to cool the computing equipment. There is much more computing hardware in an AI data center than non-AI data centers.
  These facilities consume up to 1.5 million gallons of water daily. This water comes from local supplies that could serve the community.

• Generators that ensure the AI data center remains online in the event of a power shortage emit diesel gas fumes which add more pollutants to the air.
  Also, the site’s methane gas turbines increase Memphis's smog by 30-60% as they release nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde around the clock. The facility operates 35 gas turbines in southwest Memphis without legal permits.

AI has super-charged the challenges associated with data centers since their inception. Many affluent communities have launched Not in My Back Yard (NIMBY) protests to stop the placement of data centers in their area. In very few cases are they successful.

Take Prince William County, Virginia for instance. In a rare convergence of wealthy landowners, Black and Native American opposition, county commissioners voted 5-2 in favor of greenlighting a “Digital Gateway” project. It converts 2,100 acres of rural land into a data center campus. In the past the community has fought off attempts to turn this area into a Disney theme park, auto racetrack, and megamall.

But when it came to data centers, the community didn’t win … at least, not yet. Construction on the project has yet to begin, despite the approval from county commissioners. A homeowners association is suing to halt the project.

So what are the chances of a low-income, Black neighborhood being spared the extra burden of a resource-guzzling behemoth on the block? Slim to none. That is, unless people organize around a common goal of preventing the harms of AI data centers. Creator Sigin Ojulu (@nubia.the.creator) has some amazing points about dealing with these encroachments.

1. Demand transparency on how data centers are powered, in your area.

2. Support lawful resistance. Black residents are organizing protests against xAI’s gas plants.

3. Create regenerative tech by founding AI companies that keep community health and wellness at the center of operations.

Related Content:

Are you moving to the Commonwealth of Amazon?

Local VA officials ignore public concerns over Big Tech data centers … again

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Grammarly’s New Partnership Is Making AI Writing Assistance More Inclusive

Latimer AI, the first inclusive Large Language Model (LLM), and Grammarly are collaborating to help students improve their writing skills and cultural awareness. Grammarly for Education customers will now have access to both services, enabling institutions to enhance students’ academic success and improve learning outcomes.

Source: People of Color in Tech

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At the intersection of tech, race, and gender a tech CEO did the unthinkable for someone in the industry. He failed to realize the widespread usage of tech to record and track people.

Andy Byron attended a concert with a colleague in Boston. Two days later, he resigned from his position as CEO of Astronomer, a workflow and data management company based in New York.

We know how it goes in tech, we’ve all attended concerts with colleagues before. What we, most likely, haven’t done is wrap our arms around the waist of the company’s chief human resources officer and rock slowly behind her mouthing the words to your favorite song.

Byron did that. And he’is no longer CEO.

Clearly he was found out, but many executives caught in compromising positions remain in their roles, get a divorce, and keep it moving.

A key difference is that Byron was indiscreet in the betrayal of his wedding vows. He attended a concert of one of the world’s most popular bands, Coldplay, and got into an intimate position with someone in his direct line of report.

As tech would have it, concert producers panned the crowd during Coldplay’s song “Jumbotron.” Andy Byron and the woman he was cuddling with were filmed and broadcast live on Foxborough Stadium’s jumbotron. Immediately they split apart and hid.

Chris Martin, lead singer of Coldplay, didn’t let the moment go to waste. In the middle of the song he mentioned the couple was either having an affair or were incredibly shy. He got it right the first time.

Byron underestimated the power of his very own industry. After Chris Martin’s prompting, the Internet took action, within minutes the couple was outed with sleuths exposing their first and last names, the company they work for and the roles they held at said company.

The incident earned so much scrutiny by the public, Byron had no other option but to resign and hopefully pull attention away from the company and maybe himself.

This story underlines the power of research in the public sphere. When in public, assume you’re being recorded.

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Thought You Should Know …

Microsoft was letting Chinese engineers work on U.S. Department of Defense projects - until …

Propublica blew the whistle on Microsoft’s practice of having U.S. supervisors manage Chinese engineers for DoD projects. Propublica exposed that the “digital escorts” from the U.S. didn’t have the technical knowledge to weed out any misdeeds. Microsoft did a 180 and responded to the expose by stating no Chinese engineers would be allowed on DoD projects. (TechCrunch)

U.S. indicts Chinese hackers in sweeping cyber espionage case

Seven Hackers Associated with Chinese Government Charged with Computer Intrusions Targeting Perceived Critics of China and U.S. Businesses and Politicians

China’s Hacking Reached Deep Into U.S. Telecoms - The New York Times

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Video game designers have just announce the pre-release of a game that gamifies the return of looted African art from European and American countries.

During colonial times, say academic researchers, Britain, Belgium, the United States, and France stole thousands of pieces of art from the African continent. When confronted with the issue, only France and the U.S. have made progress in returning the looted artifacts.

The colonial era witnessed a significant plundering of cultural artifacts from Africa, leading to their dispersal across museums, private collections, and institutions worldwide. As awareness grows regarding the historical and cultural significance of these artworks, there has been an increasing global recognition of the importance of repatriating them to their countries of origin. (Source: African Art Heritage: Repatriation Strategies, its Challenges, Impact on Cultural Preservation and Best Practices)

Belgium refuses to return any looted African art but instead they've created a museum housing solely the stolen treasures.

The developers at Nyamakop, a South Africa-based game studio, decided to shine a spotlight on this problem by creating Relooted. It's an Xbox game featuring a team of Africans determined to repatriate stolen art to Africa. The game has a Mission Impossible theme with a key difference. Instead of Tom Cruise, the Relooted team is led by an African woman.

Many of the artifacts in the game are real. Creators note a drum used by Kenyans to call people to events as a stolen artifact currently residing in the British Museum.

“This is the most spiritually important artifact to them,” Relooted creative director Ben Myers said to Epic Games. “They thought it was destroyed. It turns out that it’s been in the British Museum storage for the last 100 years. The first Kenyan people to see it in the last 100 years were in the 2010s. It was taken in 1870.

“The person who saw the drum was a descendant of the king it was taken from originally. So these aren't artifacts that were just found in the dust and excavated by archaeologists. These were still active cultures.”

Countries retaining the stolen art say African's don't know how to display their own art so to preserve the items they should remain in the country of the thieves who took said artifacts.

Amber Ruffin gives a solid roundup of the issue here:

Here's Trevor Noah's take:

This game is in pre-release but Xbox users can wishlist Relooted in the Epic Games Store.

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New Competition Invites Young Women To Teach AI What Black Beauty Looks Like

Black Girls Code and haircare brand The Doux have partnered to launch a competition for girls and young women to use AI to create original videos that reflect their self-perception. The Black Beauty AI Challenge is the first of its kind, and competition entries will help shape how AI understands the nuances of Black identity. (Read full article on POCIT)

DINT’s Take

This competition provides much-needed representation in AI models for Black and Brown women. In the rush to ship innovations, tech firms ignored a diversity of views around development. Here’s a shortlist of the most recent missteps:

America's largest power grid is struggling to meet demand from AI

HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania July 9 (Reuters) - America's largest power grid is under strain as data centers and AI chatbots consume power faster than new plants can be built.

Electricity bills are projected to surge by more than 20% this summer in some parts of PJM Interconnection's territory, which covers 13 states - from Illinois to Tennessee, Virginia to New Jersey - serving 67 million customers in a region with the most data centers in the world.

DINT’s Take

There aren’t enough power plants to fuel the growth in AI. An example would be supermarkets in a neighborhood where the population is growing but old supermarkets aren’t being updated and new ones aren’t being built.

• Large power plants, with enough energy to power 46 million homes) are ageing out of the power system (Up to 58 GW faces retirement in PJM by 2030 without replacement capacity in sight: market monitor)

• Residential and data center energy consumers in some parts of Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and New Jersey face a 20% increase in energy costs this summer. (PJM capacity prices hit record highs, sending build signal to generators - Utility Dive)

• This shortage of power plants means there’s less electricity available, making demand outstrip supply. Energy providers can then increase costs, which is what’s happening right now. It’s a problem exacerbated by the explosion of growth in data centers that power our ever-increasing obsession with chatbots like ChatGPT, LLaMa, and Claude.

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Judge to creators: ‘Come back when you’ve got proof AI swiping hurts your pockets’

It looks like creators have a tough road ahead when it comes to AI systems swiping their content to train the large language models that make up the foundation of the technology.

Meta, which is Facebook’s parent company, won a landmark legal ruling this past week against Sarah Silverman and other authors/creators who sued the company for feeding its LLM, LLaMa with their copyrighted material.

Judge Vince Chhabria, a federal judge out the US District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, ruled Meta was not right to swipe the materials but the authors didn’t establish that such swiping hurt their bottom line earnings/sales.

That happened on Tuesday, June 25. And on Monday Anthropic, the makers of the Claude chatbot, also won a decisive victory against creators looking for compensation for Anthropic’s use of their copyrighted works.

The judge in that case, William Alsup, ruled that Claude transformed the original works in a way that is acceptable under current copyright law.

These two cases present mixed messages to creators of original works, which include authors, musicians, comedians, and artists of all kinds, of both digital and non-digital work.

Future cases brought by creators may refer to Judge Chhabria’s ruling and point directly to financial threats resulting from what they deem piracy on the part of tech companies running chatbots such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and the like.

Related Content

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Pics from People of Color in Tech’s New York Tech Week event

Wrongful arrest in US linked to facial recognition error leads to $200K settlement

Jefferson Parish Louisiana Sheriff Joe Lopinto’s office has agreed to pay $200,000 to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit brought by a Georgia man who was wrongly jailed for nearly a week after being misidentified by facial recognition technology.

Source: Biometric Update

Related Coverage

DINT

DINT 115 - Detroit Police to Pay Local Father $300K for False Arrest via Facial Recognition

It’s widely known, studied, and documented that facial recognition systems don’t recognize Black people’s faces…

Read more

2 years ago · 2 likes · Lisa D. Sparks

DINT

DINT #26 - Arrested by AI: Police Used Facial Recognition More Than 1M Times Says BBC

Read more

3 years ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Lisa D. Sparks

Anthropic launches new effort to study AI’s economic impact

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is launching an effort to address the economic consequences of rapidly advancing AI technology, after CEO Dario Amodei made dire predictions about job losses and a massive spike in unemployment.

Source: Semafor

Italy joins Germany and other European countries in using data center heating for the local grid

Italian utility A2A (A2.MI), opens new tab and French tech firm Qarnot on Wednesday inaugurated a data centre in Italy that aims to capture waste heat from computer servers and channel it directly into a local heating grid.

Located in the city of Brescia, in northern Italy, the facility uses liquid-cooling technology.

Source: Reuters

Using chatbots instead of search engines makes users less intelligent: Wharton study

ChatGPT and other “large language models” promise to make learning easier than ever. But new research suggests that lessons learned so easily are less likely to stick.

LLMs are a form of generative artificial intelligence that communicate like humans, using language. But in a series of experiments involving more than 4,500 participants at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, people who used LLMs to research everyday topics demonstrated weaker understanding of those topics afterward and produced less original insights than people who looked up the same topics using Google.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Google’s AI search summaries are so good, they’re stealing business … from Google

Google has some explaining to do as the AI-generated summaries that populate search engine results give so much information, users are less likely to click on search result ads, which make up a substantial part of Google’s business. To address the issue, Google launched Offerwall this week, a tool that expands the ways publishers can gain the attention of readers.

Source: TechCrunch

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Meta will release its newest product with Oakley next month and it’s set to replace smart phones according to Yahoo Finance tech editor Dan Howley.

Called the Oakley Meta HSTN, it’s a set of sunglasses that produce sound for your ears only, they take photos and record video, they also work using Meta AI’s voice commands. Meta invested in a marketing campaign featuring soccer star Kylian Mbappé and Super Bowl champ footballer Patrick Mahomes.

All the promotional items show physical activities: surfing, skateboarding, basketball. Users can post images and videos of their experiences right to Instagram, as well.

This development aligns with Sinead Bovell’s latest article predicting smartphones will go the way of the fax machine, to be replaced by an AI-first device.

OpenAI is said to be developing an AI-first product, putting a fire under industry peers to ship their latest AI-driven innovations.

Related Coverage:

While this announcement marks a turning point for Meta, and possibly for the tech industry as a whole, there’s still no public mention of the ways these glasses can be misused. We covered a story about researchers who turned AI glasses into surveillance devices that pulled in the personal data of the people the user was looking at that moment.

Will these devices infringe on privacy? Or, will they help with accountability in government, law enforcement, with legal matters, and more?

The Meta Oakley HSTN performance glasses start at $499 and will be available July 11.

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Who gets hired when AI makes the first decision?

Many people have no idea their resume is being evaluated by an algorithm. Yet AI is present at nearly every step of the hiring funnel: screening, personality assessments, video interviews, even background checks that evaluate social media activity.

Source: Digital Journal

Understanding Subgroup Fairness in Machine Learning ML

Subgroup-level performance analysis helps reveal unintended biases that may be embedded in the data or model design. Understanding this requires careful interpretation because fairness isn’t just about statistical parity—it’s also about ensuring that predictions lead to equitable outcomes when deployed in real-world systems.

Source: Market Post

How AI Perpetuates Gender Bias

Representation matters in AI because machine learning processes are often encoded with programmers’ own biases, even if inadvertently. Something as simple as using a skewed dataset in which female speakers are underrepresented could make a machine learning model less accurate when working with women..

Source: Women’s Media Center

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AI chip maker Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang touted a new programming language during London Tech Week on June 9. It’s called ‘human.’ AI has ushered in the age of democratizing engagement with technology. You don’t need to know a programming language to get expanded results from tech anymore.

Huang sees this as a great thing.

“You say: You are an incredible poet ... And I would like you to write a poem to describe today’s keynote. And without very much effort, this AI would help you generate such a wonderful poem,” he said.

“And when it answers ... you could say: I feel like you could do even better. And it would go off and think about it, and it’ll come back and say, in fact, I can do better, and it does do a better job.”

Yet, human remain subjective. One person’s version of humanity conflicts with that of another person’s. The general idea that humanity exhibits kindness doesn’t ring true. Humans remain complicated creatures with shifting priorities and values based on their own operating principles.

Technology continues to expand and morph in fits and starts … which is great. But seeing AI as trainable as a human misses important considerations. How do we teach AI systems to be fair and free of bias, hatred, and jealousy?

Should we be teaching AI to be better than us humans? Well, yes.

AI presents a great opportunity for us to do better, to be better.

Related coverage:

Nvidia Sees No Threat to Taiwan’s Sovereignty, Pushes Forward with Fabs in the Country

The Feds Are Coming for Your Favorite AI Companies

Intel’s Influence Shrinks with Yet Another POsteponement of Cutting-Edge Tech

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New apps help immigrants navigate Trump’s deportation crackdown

With tightening immigration policies and rising fears of deportation, new apps provide migrants with resources to stay prepared and connected.

Source: Rest of World

Making Moves: A Black co-founder’s startup just raised $50 million in funding

Legal tech platform Definely raises $30M Series B to make contract reviewing more efficient

Source: Tech Crunch

Google names the leader of its newly created chief AI architect role: Koray Kavukcuoglu

Kavukcuoglu holds responsibility for AI- powered product development, which is a tall order given Google’s myriad missteps in AI product development. Its flagship AI product Gemini appears to be doing well among its AI peers in some performance metrics.

Source: Semafor

Minnesota lawmakers approve social media mental health warning measure

Minnesota lawmakers have approved a measure requiring social media platforms to display a warning label, cautioning about the negative impacts of its use on mental health.

Source: The Hill

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Let’s take a quick look at the most popular stories in tech, race, and gender in the first half of 2025. Spoiler alert: AI false arrests and unlawful surveillance dominate the list. Check it out:

6. Detroit records more false arrests from misuse of facial recognition

5. New study on AI, race, and gender excludes data on Black women

4. Zuckerberg and Chan pull the plug on schools for disadvantaged youth

3. Amazon loses credibility in diversity reporting

2. Overzealous policing, lazy policing, and a binary justice system in a digital age

The Most Viewed Article in First Half of 2025

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Will AI Agents Sabotage Black People? - DINT 154

• AI futurist says to prepare for a human-less Internet

• Digital agents will search the Internet for us and customize info to meet our specifications

• Apple and Meta and other tech companies are moving away from handheld devices and towards search-enabled eyeglasses

• Will tech companies copy and paste the same systems that gave rise to a slew of racist incidents from AI technology?

One of my favorite AI futurists is Sinead Bovell. You may have seen her in previous editions of DINT, sharing her insights on teaching and AI in classrooms. Today she published an article that gave rise to several questions for me.

@sineadbovellWhy smartphones and the internet (as we know it) will go away pt. 2 I wrote all about what’s happening and where we could be going in my latest Substack

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The main points of her article are that:

1. AI agents will conduct much of the work we now do online to search for things and

2. Smartphones will soon be a thing of the past, replaced possibly by AI-enabled glasses.

These two predictions, while completely plausible, give me pause. Since they are likely to happen, I wonder just how far we’ve come with AI technology. Has our humanity caught up to AI development or will we repeat the same ugly incidents that marked the early days of mass-adoption of AI tech?

In case you forgot, here’s a quick rundown of the more egregious things that took place in the last 10 years:

2009 - HP Blames Faulty Facial Recognition on Standard Algorithm

2015 - Google Photo's Algorithm Tags Black People as Gorillas

2019 - Google Cuts Corners to Trick People of Color into Giving Up Biometric Data

Facial recognition needs a category of its own:

2024 - Detroit Police Department and ACLU reach agreement over use of facial recognition technology

2024 - City Police to Pay Detroit Father $300k for Facial Recognition False Arrest

2025 - Detroit woman suing police, claiming faulty facial recognition technology led to unjust arrest

The two advances Bovell points out, human-less Internet searches and AI-enabled glasses instead of smartphones could expand the damage previous missteps have caused.

Due to faulty programming, will an AI agent refuse to book me on a luxury getaway because no one else in my demographic has booked before? Will AI-enabled glasses misidentify me as a suspect of interest in a crime? Or worse yet, will the AI glasses identify me as another person, or not as a person at all, as in the case of Google Photos identifying Black people as gorillas in its algorithm?

This paints a bleak picture but one we must be prepared for. Let’s continue to call out tech development that negatively affects us. It’s the only way to ensure humanity somehow catches up to technological development.

Here’s the article by Sinead Bovell:

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In a world first, Brazilians will soon be able to sell their digital data

Brazil is testing a digital wallet program that allows users to monetize their data. A federal bill, when passed, would turn data into commercial assets for citizens — the first such proposal in the world. The pilot, a partnership between the public and private sectors, is ahead of similar initiatives in some U.S. states.

Source: Rest of World

ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows

Flock's automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras are in more than 5,000 communities around the U.S. Local police are doing lookups in the nationwide system for ICE.

Source: 404 Media

DOGE Is Building a Master Database to Surveil and Track Immigrants

DOGE is knitting together data from the Department of Homeland Security, Social Security Administration, and IRS that could create a surveillance tool of unprecedented scope.

Source: Wired

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In the months after George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police officers in Minnesota, tech leaders joined many around the world in denouncing the violence and the racialized systems that gave birth to the tragedy.

Here, we look at what tech executives of the top five tech companies said back then and what they are saying and doing now to break barriers of race and gender in tech.

Amazon

CEO: Jeff Bezos

Statement Date: June 5, 2020

“We believe black lives matter. We stand in solidarity with our black employees, customers and partners, and are committed to helping build a country and a world where everyone can live with dignity and free from fear."

5 Years Later

CEO: Andy Jassy

Executive Chair: Jeff Bezos

January 10, 2025

Amazon removed all statements of support for Black people and its Black employees from its website.

Apple

CEO: Tim Cook

Statement Date: May 31, 2020

“George Floyd’s death is shocking and tragic proof that we must aim far higher than a 'normal' future, and build one that lives up to the highest ideals of equality and justice.”

Source: Apple Speaking up on racism

5 Years Later

"strength has always come from hiring the very best people and then providing a culture of collaboration, one where people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives come together to innovate."

Meta

CEO: Mark Zuckerberg

Statement Date: June 1, 2020

“The pain of the last week reminds us how far our country has to go to give every person the freedom to live with dignity and peace. We stand with the black community — and all those working towards justice in honor of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and far too many others whose names will not be forgotten.”

Source: Facebook

5 Years Later

Zuckerberg has said nothing about race relations in the last 12 months. We look to the activities of his company for indications of his mindset around racial justice.

January 7, 2025 - Zuckerberg rids all Meta platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) of fact-checking

January 8, 2025 - Meta removed restrictions on hate speech from its platforms.

January 10, 2025 - Meta ends all diversity programs for hiring, retaining, and developing diverse talent in its organization.

–

While Zuckerberg made no direct statements, he did make indirect ones about DEI. Here’s what he said, as reported by HR Grapevine:

“Historically, we’ve had a handful of specific programs that were very focused on certain underrepresented groups,” he said.

“The policy and legal direction on a lot of this is that you can’t do things that advantage specific groups, even if you’re trying to make up for other things.”

–

Also, there’s this:

"Priscilla and I are committed to this work, and we expect to be in this fight for many years to come. This week has made it clear how much more there is to do."

Google

CEO: Sundar Pichai

Statement Date: June 3, 2020

“We’ll work closely with our Black community to develop initiatives and product ideas that support long-term solutions—and we’ll keep you updated.”

Source: Google Blog

5 Years Later

Google scraps DEI programs

Google removes equity commitments from any official documents, public-facing websites.

Microsoft

CEO: Satya Nadella

Statement Date: June 5, 2020

“I take accountability for my own continued learning on the realities of privilege, inequity and race and modeling the behavior I want to see in the world.”

5 Years Later

In 2020, we committed to a five-year focus to address racial injustice in the United States and helping to improve the lived experiences of our employees and the communities in which we live and work. As the initiative reaches its planned conclusion, we will apply the lessons learned to our enterprise-wide business strategy to further fuel innovation. We will continue to focus on creating career opportunities, attracting and retaining top talent, strengthening our supplier and partner ecosystem and making an impact through local partnerships in education, justice systems, connectivity, AI skilling and business growth.

"63 percent of the way to our goal for Black and African American people managers (below director level) and 128.7 percent the way for Black and African American directors+"

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Google to pay $50M to Black employees affected by discrimination

• Black employees faced false accusations, lower pay, no promotions, and fewer opportunities to advance

• Former Google recruiter April Curley launched the class action lawsuit in 2022 along with other Black women affected by Google’s unfair practices

• Google takes no responsibility but agrees to pay $50 million to 4,000 current and former employees

• Google also agree to non-monetary terms designed to increase fairness in their employment practices

• The company will be monitored and evaluated for compliance three years after courts finalize the settlement agreement, which could take place in July 2025.

This week Google agreed to settle a racial discrimination lawsuit against its Black (and Black+) employees for $50 million. April Curley, a former Google recruiter specializing in filling the tech company’s hiring pipeline with Black and brown talent, first brought the legal action in March 2022.

Curley states she was fired from Google in September 2020 for a litany of reasons ranging from her being perceived as intimidating due to her Baltimore accent to calling out discrimination.

Google, for its part, refuses to disclose the reason for Curley’s firing, telling media outlet The Daily Dot, “...it’s not appropriate for us to provide a commentary about her claims.”

Curley’s claims met with validation on May 9 when Google agreed to the $50 million settlement with Curley and a class of 4,000 other present or former Googlers denied opportunities because they are Black (or in Google parlance “Black+”).

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Quick timeline of events

September 2020
Google fires Curley, HBCU recruiter who held the company accountable for not living up to stated claims of equality and fairness

April Christina Curley spoke out against racism at Google. Her story points to the struggles Black women face in tech (Technical.ly)

December 2020
Google fires Timnit Gebru, AI ethicist who accurately predicted challenges the world currently faces with AI and human engagement.

We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says. The company’s star ethics researcher highlighted the risks of large language models, which are key to Google’s business (MIT Technology Review)

December 2021
California Civil Rights Department opens investigation into Google’s treatment of Black women in the wake of several incidents of harassment

Exclusive: California probes Google's treatment of Black female workers (Reuters)

February 2022
Google reports high rates of Black women leaving the company in 2021

More Black women leaving Google’s workforce (Moonshot)

Note: Google has taken down the link to its 2021 diversity report. We found it for you here.

March 2022
Curley files class action lawsuit against Google for discriminatory payment and promotion practices

Lawsuit accuses Google of Systemic Bias Against Black Employees (Law Commentary)

March 2025
Google settles $28 million lawsuit for favoring white and Asian workers over Latinx, Indigenous, and Pacific Islander employees

Google to pay $28 million to settle claims it favored white and Asian employees (Reuters)

May 2025
Google agrees to pay 4,000 Black Google workers $50 million to settle discrimination lawsuit

Google to pay $50M to settle Black racial bias suit (KTVU Fox 2)

Black employees weren’t the only ones bearing the brunt of Google’s racism. In March, the company settled a lawsuit for $28 million with a group of 6,600 Latinx, Indigenous, and Pacific Islander employees denied equitable pay and promotions to their white and Asian counterparts. The math gets complicated and is based on job type, tenure, and leveling within Google.

For Black employees, the math gets even trickier. There’s no formula involved, which can lead to subjective estimates of proper compensation. We’ll know more details in the future.

But we do know Google also agreed to non-monetary settlement actions which include:

• Not considering previous salary during salary negotiations and offers

• Analyzing pay to identify and eliminate disparities based on race before finalizing pay raises

• Allowing employees to voice concerns about pay differences, investigating the claims and making corrections when warranted.

They’re also suspending mandatory arbitration until mid 2026 which is good for employees because any future lawsuits will be more public and could have a favorable outcome for the person bringing the claim. This isn’t usually the case in arbitration cases since the company, in this case Google, is usually the entity paying for the legal proceedings.

Google will be under supervision of a settlement administrator and submit to a review of their compliance with the non-monetary settlement agreement three years after the agreement is finalized.

Google refuses to admit it did anything wrong.

For the $28 million settlement in March, Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini said:

"We continue to disagree with the allegations that we treated anyone differently, and remain committed to paying, hiring and leveling all employees fairly."

After this week’s $50 million settlement, Mencini shared similar comments on behalf of Google:

“We’ve reached an agreement that involves no admission of wrongdoing. We strongly disagree with the allegations that we treated anyone improperly and we remain committed to paying, hiring, and leveling all employees consistently.”

That’s par for the course in settlement proceedings. As a result of this recent spate of settlements, will life get better for Black and brown employees at Google?

“Google chose to ignore and ultimately attack Black employees brave enough to speak up about Google's embedded racism that actively harmed Black employees on a daily basis,” Curley said in a public statement announcing the lawsuit in 2022.

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The Erasure of Black Women in Tech

I’ve noticed as I’ve read my LinkedIn feed I see posts from my peers, Black women in professional environments who experience daily attacks on our credibility, our beauty, our capacity to simply exist.

The feed has started to become one-note and I feel trapped in the echo chamber of my own experiences reflected in the lives of others, staring back at me through what has now become a mirror.

To look at these issues takes strength. I believe mine is waning. As I ventured to write another post about the intersection of tech, race, and gender, I ran into yet another example of erasure of Black women in tech.

For the first time I found myself questioning whether to publish another story in this vein. It makes me wonder why I do this at all. Then I remember, I’m here to bear witness. I’m here to document. I’m here to shine light on what some would wish to keep in darkness.

With that said, here is this week’s story:

A study of 900 U.S.-based adults ignored Black women in its data set. The topic of the study? Perceptions of freelance writers who use AI. The study concentrated on three areas: perceptions based on gender, perceptions based on race, and perceptions based on nationality.

Each of the three sets of questions included photos, a key factor in forming perceptions. The study creators chose not to include a Black woman in the gender or the race portion of the study. I would expect more diligence from Cornell University and University of Pennsylvania researchers.

The authors of the “Generative AI and Perceptual Harms: Who’s Suspected of Using LLMs?” study presented their findings at the Conference on Human Factors in Computational Design in Yokohama, Japan on April 29.

During their 12-minute session the researchers put forward what they call a new category of AI harms centered on perception. Here is their theory in their own words:

“In this work, we define a new category of potential AI harms: perceptual harms,” the authors wrote. “Perceptual harms, we argue, occur when the appearance (or perception) of AI use—regardless of whether AI was actually used—results in differential treatment between social groups.”

They then go on to say perception isn’t affected by the design of AI models (also known as large language models or LLMs).

“Because perceptual harms are not caused by the model’s outputs, they can be categorized as a potential societal harm.”

Here’s are the images used in each experiment:

You’ll notice white men are the baseline of the study, appearing in all three experiments. Black women appeared in zero.

Were Black women eliminated from the study images because of the intersection of race and gender here? Is there no room for intersectionality in tech? Is tech pushing out the possibility to be more than one thing at the same time?

DINT posed these questions to PhD. candidate and study co-author Kowe Kadoma but had yet to hear back from her by the time of publication.

Kadoma had this to say about the reason for the study to the Cornell Chronicle.

“In casual conversations with friends and family, someone would mention that they suspected an email or message to be AI-generated. I then became curious about when people suspect AI writing and if some people are praised for using AI tools while others are penalized for it,” said Kadoma. “As more people adopt AI technologies, we need to consider who might benefit and who might be disadvantaged. The technology is changing rapidly, and so are the norms around its use.”

White men are shown in all three of the study sets. Black women are shown in 0.

The study authors concluded that white men and east Asian people are seen as users of AI.

The implied bias is that women, Black women, Black men, Asian women and everyone in between, isn’t using AI and they aren’t tech savvy enough to even consider their trustworthiness.

That said, this study stands out to me because it is co-authored by an African woman. Kowe Kadoma’s colleagues Dr. Danae Metaxa and Dr. Mor Naaman collaborate with her often. Kadoma is a PhD. candidate at Cornell University and has co–authored several papers on the topic of AI and human-computer interactions.

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What Meta’s dispute in Nigeria means for its millions of users

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This image / video progression made the rounds in AI news this week and not one person, that I’ve seen, has stated the obvious. AI clearly believes we’ll all become Black if you ask it to re-create an image for you enough times.

An AI experimenter asked ChatGPT to make an exact replica of an image of her friend. She asked the system 74 times. The first r…

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There’s quite a bit going on in the Metaverse around race this week.

• Meta’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are shutting down the school for underprivileged children they started in 2016.
  

• The utility serving Meta’s latest mega data center wants to pass on the energy bill to its customer base, 50% of whom are low-income, Black, and Latino residents of their coverage area.
  

• Meta hires workers in Africa to handle tedious work for AI but they’re keeping it hush-hush by using third-party vendors to hire and manage workers.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) will close operations of two San Francisco-area schools in 2026.

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, run CZI as a for profit charity to organize funding of groups they support.

Chan and Zuckerberg chose to start The Primary School in 2016 in an area of Northern California that has mostly Black and brown residents. Many of the Latino residents come from undocumented households.

This video shares more on the impact of the closing:

Parents point to the timing of the closings as a possible reason for CZI’s decision to wind down its direct educational program. They’re doing this because CZI provided no reason of its own as to why it’s closing The Primary School.

The New York Times reports the school invited parents to a bagel breakfast and made the announcement of the closings, without explanation. They did, however, outline a transition plan that would see students receive educational savings plans with seed funding of up to $10,000. That’s part of CZI’s $50 million plan to help students further their education away from the soon-to-be-defunct Primary School.

The Guardian revealed that employees of CZI were troubled when Meta rolled back its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

CZI leadership reaffirmed the organization’s commitments to DEI and that its operations are separate of those at Meta.

Next up: Meta may leave low-income residents with a $5 billion bill for powering its new data center in Northeast Louisiana.

According to Business Insider, Entergy, the company that will provide power for the new Meta data center, wants to saddle its customers with the cost of building power plants big enough to keep the new data center humming.

While the data center, slated to open in 2030, will provide Northeast Louisiana with up to 500 high-paying jobs, Entergy’s customers may not see enough of a benefit from the three new power plants to cover the cost of their increased power bills. Here’s why:

By its own admission, half of Entergy’s customers are low-income, elderly, and disabled.

They live in economically challenged, rural areas (in many cases except for New Orleans). Here’s their coverage map from their 2024 report:

The average income of residents in these areas is $60,728. Only two of the 13 counties and parishes Entergy covers have an annual income above the national average (which is $77,719).

Here’s a link to the sources of data for this chart.

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