Tag: RACISM

On Wednesday, British writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown appeared on a morning television show to discuss human rights in China. For whatever reason, the liberal columnist's words raised the ire of a local politician named Gareth Compton, who promptly called for her death on Twitter. Now, he's been arrested. Shortly after the broadcast, Compton tweeted: "Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown ...

When it comes to unfriending people on Facebook, most of us don't think twice. Much like removing a Band-Aid or throwing out a banana peel, dumping dead weight from our friends lists nowadays doesn't seem like a psychologically complex decision. University of Colorado Ph.D. candidate Christopher Sibona, however, decided to take a closer look at the social dynamics governing the unfriending ...

Last week, Facebook accidentally deleted Sarah Palin's rant at/plea to Muslims (depending on your side of the fence) to oppose the construction of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque. On Sunday, a group called The Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet tried to make a Facebook fan page for its supporters, but wasn't allowed because a glitch in the system blocked the world "Palestinian" from page titles. ...

Share What began as a noble British endeavor has just come down in an inglorious blaze of abuse. As Reuters reports, the U.K.'s Treasury has decided to pull its interactive 'Spending Challenge' website, after users smeared the site with weird suggestions and tirades against ethnic minorities. The challenge, which was put in place by finance minister George Osborne, was created with the intent of ...

The global fascination with sports thrusts professional competitors into an inescapable communal spotlight, a lesson learned long ago by the first tweeting athletes. Players and owners from both the NBA and NFL continue to draw the ire of league officials for sexual, bigoted and inopportune Twitter updates. While patronizing and condescending European "football" clubs may dismiss U.S. soccer, the ...

Transactions on Craigslist might begin anonymously, with both users safely shielded by the warm comfort of their computer screens, but when it comes time to actually make the deal, human contact -- and the anxiety it entails -- invariably come into the equation. You may do your best to sniff out the person on the other end of the deal -- and try your hardest to convince them that you're not a ...

There's a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can't cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. For those of you sick to death of hearing about the iPad, here's your daily Apple schadenfreude: Owen JJ Stone claims that when he recently tried to purchase a Macbook ...

After a video (after the break) that demonstrates a problem with Hewlett-Packard's (HP) webcams exploded on YouTube, the manufacturer is reexamining its software while handling a PR nightmare. In a video posted on December 10th, a black male and a white female show how an HP computer's facial-tracking software fails to recognize the black man's movements. Yeah, you know where this is headed. ...

Despite its staid and strict stance against nudity and racy apps, Apple is continuing its unofficial practice of turning perfectly harmless words into demeaning slurs. Apple's censoring depends on a program that scans the iTunes database for dirty words, replacing the offending letters with asterisks. The problem with this auto-censorship is that it doesn't recognize context. As a result, ...

Warning: Due to the nature of the subject, this post contains offensive language. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a watchdog and civil rights advocacy group, released a report identifying members of the U.S. military proudly displaying their racial extremist views online. The report outlines a disturbing trend of recruiting efforts by right wing extremists within the military, and the ...

An elite group of Facebook employees, tasked with identifying content that violates the site's nebulous terms-of-service, is sitting at the heart of a free speech battle that could have far-reaching consequences across the whole of the Internet. This week, Facebook banned two Holocaust denial groups, but it took an overwhelming flood of criticism to get the site to take action. According to the ...

According to Facebook's oft-criticized Terms of Service (TOS), members are not allowed to "post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence." After changing its original TOS in February, and then quickly switching back after a mild public uproar, Facebook means to prove that its new-old TOS are to be taken seriously. According to ...

A German man has been fined the equivalent of $2,300 for sending a text message, Reuters reported Friday. The 28-year-old man, who was unnamed in the article, was found to have sent a text message reading, "By opening this SMS, you have killed a Turk." The message, which was sent last June in the midst of Europe's heated Euro 2008 soccer tournament, continued to call for a "clean" tournament, ...

In the wake of racist comments about Barack Obama circulating in e-mails among Alaskan state employees, state officials are launching an investigation, according to an AP report in CBS News. Apparently, until the AP became privy to five of these e-mails, the state government was unaware. After performing a search, officials at the Department of Administration confirmed the presence of three of ...

Well, this story has developed quicker than we can draft articles. On Friday, we picked up a story about Ashley Todd, a campaign worker for John McCain, who claimed to have been attacked and disfigured by an Obama supporter at an ATM in Pittsburgh. Before we could even finish the editing process, new details emerged about inconsistencies in her story, and we began reworking our initial report. ...