Advocates for racial justice have powerfully and creatively used social media to raise awareness and mobilize for collective action. However, the platforms activists use were not typically produced for liberatory goals. Under monopolistic digital capitalism, social media platforms are designed for profit rather than people. This talk explores the ways that social media companies exploit the labor of marginalized people while failing to protect them from online harassment and epistemic appropriation. I argue that we need to collectively imagine and build online spaces that support, rather than obstruct and exploit, the labor of marginalized people.
Website: karenfrost-arnold.com
Twitter: @kfrostarnold
Mastodon: @kfrostarnold@aoir.social
Karen Frost-Arnold is a Professor of Philosophy at Hobart & William Smith Colleges and a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Johannesburg. Her research focuses on the philosophy of the internet, the epistemology and ethics of trust, social epistemology, philosophy of science, and feminist philosophy. Her book Who Should We Be Online? A Social Epistemology for the Internet was published by Oxford University Press in 2023.
Website: http://www.law.ou.edu/content/thai-joseph
Joseph Thai is the Watson Centennial Chair and Associate Dean for Research at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, where he teaches and writes about constitutional law and the Supreme Court. Prof. Thai received an A.B. from Harvard College, where he studied English, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Following law school, he served as a law clerk to Justices John Paul Stevens and Byron White. He frequently engages in civil rights litigation and served on the legal team that successfully challenged Oklahoma’s same-sex marriage ban a year before the Supreme Court upheld marriage equality nationwide. Prof. Thai has often been named outstanding professor by law students and is consistently named outstanding dad by his goldendoodle.
