Guest lecture with Winne Soon

Winnie Soon gave a lecture about Machine Learning and how she uses it in her artistic practice. From what I gathered from talking to the other students, I can only assume she did a great job at imparting and breaking down complex concepts associated with machine learning. With little coding background and a very short history interacting with the digital beyond a short course in html, much of what soon said went over my head. My biggest takeaway from her lecture was regarding censorship in china. My group are interested in how people fashion their digital self in contrast to their real self, including how and if people translate their sociopolitical views from real life to online. For Chinese individual’s freedom of speech/type has been taken away.  In a journal titled ‘Assessing Censorship on Microblogs in China: Discriminatory Keyword Analysis and the Real-Name Registration Policy’ the authors (King-wa Fu, CH Chan, Michael Chau) conduct a study ‘design helped researchers determine a list of Chinese terms that discriminate censored and uncensored posts written by the same microbloggers.’ They used the popular Chinese social networking platform, Weibo which is often referred to as a “free speech platform” by westerners. They concluded that this was far from the case and ‘Chinese authorities’ ubiquitous mechanisms for controlling the public information flow’ scourer through posts and delete what is not in alignment. It is argued that the internet in China plays an ‘overarching’ part in activism and ‘empowering’ citizens to ‘build the public agendas’. They go on to say ‘that Chinese authorities can tolerate posts that write on a wide range of criticism of the Chinese government and its policies, but tend to be more sensitive to censoring the spread of posts that might lead to collective action.’ Another way the Chinese government are censoring voices is through the real-name registration (RnR) system. Bloggers have to divulge information linked to their true identities to get government verification so what is written and how often is policed with fear of ‘arrest and imprisonment’.   Anonymity is both positive and negative depending on context. In china the removal of anonymity stifles freedom of speech in regards to sociopolitical events and happenings. In the west, anonymity has birthed a new phenomenon called ‘Trolling’.  A social media troll is someone who saying controversial things in order to upset or get a rise out of other users. The issue of trolling is an epidemic in the west for many demographics as emotional harm knows no age, money or race boundaries. As a result, YouTube and Google have expressed interest in making their users use their real identifies in order to police trolling. It poses the question how does one decipher freedom of speech and a difference of opinion from purposeful hate? This is an arena I would like to explore further with group. Especially as now more than ever there is money and free advertisement in certain forms organised form of trolling. For example, H&M have been accused multiple times of being either insensitive/ out of touch or just racist. An incident involving a young black boy wearing a hoodie with the words ‘coolest monkey in the jungle’ surface in 2018. Pictures were released and this was hurtful to many but H&M’s advertisement increase regardless of the reason.

President Trump has even been accused of being a troll on numerous occasions, using is platform to perpetuate hate and fear but for political gain.