Campaign launched from Mexico against racism and discriminatory biases on digital platforms and services

Mexico City, February 20th. On the World Day of Social Justice and ahead of the UNESCO World Conference: "Internet for Trust", Racismo MX and UNESCO Mexico launched a campaign #RevolucionaElAlgoritmo that calls to change algorithms, starting with the presentation of a video documentary entitled "Revolution vs. the algorithm", at the Digital Cultural Centre in Mexico City.

The documentary "Revolution vs. the algorithm" showed how different groups, identities, people, and bodies continue to be stigmatized by the way they are represented in spaces and platforms that are used every day, such as internet search engines, while other groups are completely invisible, hindering the eradication of prejudices and inequalities.

The campaign was launched in a context where recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) from machine learning and deep learning have raised concerns in the public dialogue, such as the future of jobs, copyright, to its impact on criminal practices. However, there are still issues that need to be addressed and require an interdisciplinary and intersectional dimension, such as misinformation, racism, discrimination and hate speech in the daily use of technologies, communication platforms and simplified AI, which is used daily in workplaces, schools, and homes, such as virtual assistants and internet search engines.

The initiative exposes different types of discrimination, such as persistent racism and racial bias in a country where 80% of the population is dark-skinned. The documentary proposes an exercise that recorded the multimedia experience of different public figures who resorted to the world's most widely used image search engine and were confronted with the results of concepts such as happy man, beautiful woman, successful woman, and poverty, among others.

The activity was part of the second UNESCO Global Forum against Racism and Discrimination, hosted by Mexico at the end of November 2022. The multimedia experience and installation were created by advertising creative Manuel Vega and his team from the communication agency Bombay, directed by filmmaker Mario Sandoval, and with photography and camera of Edgar Bahena.

The exercise showed that indigenous people were not present in "positive" categories, such as happy man or woman, successful man or woman, while the search for poverty yielded mainly brown and black people. This triggered reflections and emotions as experienced by personalities including the actor, Tenoch Huerta; the actress, Maya Zapata; co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Jordan Giger; director and legal advisor to the Inter-Parliamentary Forum on Emerging Technologies, Emma Wright; Ford Foundation Director Darren Walker, MTV MIAW Transform 2022 winner Natalia Lane, among many other leading voices in art, creativity, activism, politics and media calling for a revolution in thinking and an urgent open discussion.