#better orgs to fight for you and that those orgs receive more attention and support than these fucks ever will

[feluka]

i hope that i'm only just hearing so much about that stopantisemitism twitter account because recent events have made zionists desperate. i hope they're no actually that prominent and i hope so so badly that jewish people have better organizations to represent them and fight for them

[a3veen]

The News Byte, July 23

The News Byte, Vol. 6

Welcome to the News Byte, a smaller piece of the News Beat that lets us hone in on one single important story about the internet. This week...

Athletes and Anti-Black Racism Online

Hey everyone, my name is Xavier and I (with lots of help) put together the News Beat each week. You know all the times you've read a bad pun in this newsletter and thought "who writes this nonsense?" It me. I write this nonsense.

By now you know the News Beat premise — every week I choose 8 tech stories that I think you should know. And every once in a while I highlight one single story in our News Byte. I know we just did a Byte but there's a trend gaining traction that deserves more attention: the anti-Black racism toward athletes on social media.

You've probably heard most of what's happened. England's Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka have been on the receiving end of a tidal wave of racist comments after England's soccer team lost in this year's Euros. Racists were out in force against the three Black players, online and off. Rashford's mural was de-faced. The same Rashford who's helped feed millions. 

Saka called for better social platform moderation so others don't ever have to endure a flood of monkey emoji. Saka is literally a teenager. It doesn’t stop there. More recently, there's the abuse on social media toward Lewis Hamilton, Formula 1 driver and winner of this year's British Grand Prix. Like Rashford, Sacho and Saka, his mentions were filled with tiny monkey emoji. Win or lose, someone always has something to say.

We can't ignore the positive comments athletes like Naomi Osaka and Sha'Carri Richardson have received from fans for sparking conversations about mental health and banned substances. We also can't ignore the negative comments athletes like Hamilton or England's Black footballers have received which, when we tweet in the heat of the moment, can often be more revealing.

The TL;DR — Racists gonna racist. My UK coworkers echoed Saka's sentiments — that they knew instantly the kind of hate the players would receive once they'd missed those penalty shots. We'll never know if social platforms had the same inkling. We can only hope they put measures in place in advance of the next time monkey emoji flood a teen athlete's inbox.

Orgs To Learn More About:

This isn't an exhaustive list, but if you're interested in getting involved here's a starting point:

Black Lives Matter — Surely you've heard the phrase. BLM is international, with chapters in the U.S., U.K. and Canada and seeks to eradicate white supremacy. Learn more about them here.

Glitch — When it comes to U.K. specific, online abuse specific charities, Glitch comes to mind. The group works to spotlight and combat online abuse targeted at women and marginalized groups. You can find more about them here.

Know Your Rights Camp — When you see your favorite footballers take a knee to remind you there’s no room for racism, you can thank Colin Kaepernick for kicking off that trend. In 2016 he founded Know Your Rights Camp. According to their site, the program centers around the advancement of Black and brown youth through education and empowerment. Get involved here.

Media Justice — Media Justice is fighting to address many of the issues we often talk about in the News Beat — abuse of facial recognition tech, keeping the internet affordable and holding the big tech companies accountable. The group has a number of campaigns that you can support, check them out here.

Show Racism The Red Card — First established in 1996, Show Racism The Red Card helped get its start thanks to goalkeeper Shaka Hislop. You can get involved here.

#EndChildFoodPoverty — We mentioned this earlier. As some have put it, "Marcus Rashford again steps in where the state will not." Do Rashford proud and help feed hungry children. Here's how you can get involved.

Mozilla is a non-profit organization — so our campaigns for your privacy and security online, and to keep the web open, healthy and accessible to all as a global public resource ... depend on contributions from subscribers like you. If you haven't already contributed this year, could you please chip in a small donation today? Thanks!

The News Byte Written By Xavier Harding Edited By Ashley Boyd Social By Xavier Harding Art Direction Nancy Tran Email Production Alexander Zimmerman

Want more? See stories that just missed making the News Beat on our Pocket

Thanks for reading!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Boing Boing Charitable Giving Guide 2017 /Pls RT!

Here's a guide to the charities the Boingers support in our own annual giving. Please add the causes and charities you give to in the forums!

The Tor Project The Tor anonymity and privacy tools are vital to resistance struggles around the world, a cooperative network that provides a high degree of security from scrutiny for people who have reasons to fear the powers that be. From our early hominid ancestors until about ten years ago, humans didn't leave behind an exhaust-trail of personally identifying information as they navigated the world -- Tor restores that balance. —CD

Planned Parenthood Because we deserve health care, including reproductive, gender, and sexual health care. Because access to birth control and safe abortion is a human right. Because Trump's regime wants to destroy all of this. —XJ

Software Freedom Conservancy Software Freedom Conservancy does the important, boring, esoteric work of keeping the internet from tearing itself to pieces, playing host organization to free software projects like Git, Selenium and Samba (to name just three). The Conservancy keeps these projects legally sound and gives them a scaffold to hang their institutional structures on them. Without the Conservancy, the software you love and depend on would be in dire peril

Electronic Frontier Foundation I have been proudly associated with EFF for a decade an a half now and have watched, half-awed, as it grew from a scrappy, brilliant little organization to a powerhouse of enormous scale and power. Every cause, every fight enumerated on this page and in your life and mine will be lost or won on the internet. EFF is the best hope we have of keeping that internet free, fair and open. —CD, MF

Creative Commons Creative Commons is best known as a tool for sharing-friendly artists, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Since the beginning, and all over the world, CC has provided governments, agencies, research and scholarly institutions and NGOs with the tools to easily share across borders and the bewildering array of copyright laws. We can't beat trumpism without collaboration tools, and that includes legal tools. —CD

Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia) For 15 years, Wikipedia has been figuring out how to negotiate truth among diverse and even warring points of view. It's not always pretty and it's not always nice, but no one's yet found a better way to let ideas bash against each other until something everyone agrees upon emerges. It's not pretty, but compared to our democracy, it's a beauty queen. —CD

Human Rights Data Analysis Group For more than twenty-five years, the team at the [Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG)](https://hrdag.org/) has held perpetrators of mass violence accountable. They are a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that applies rigorous science to the analysis of human rights violations around the world. They provide unbiased, scientific results that contribute to accurate quantitative arguments. HRDAG's analysis brings clarity to the often confused narratives of human rights violence and support the movement for justice. One of their bigger projects for 2018 examines the growing use of machine-learning techniques in the US criminal justice system. At best, these methods reproduce existing biases in data. More often, machine learning amplifies the biases in the data and thereby exacerbates criminal justice strategies that disproportionately affect marginalized populations. Currently, they are working with partners at the San Francisco Public Defender's office and the New York Legal Aid Society to evaluate risk assessment tools being used in those cities. They are also analyzing how current bail practices may disproportionately disadvantage marginalized populations, in particular, lower-income defendants. Other ongoing HRDAG projects include research on mass violence in Syria, Colombia, Mexico, and more.

Institute for the Future There are no facts about the future, only fictions. As we've learned in this election, nothing is certain about tomorrow. But even as our attention is captured by the present, we can begin to write the story to come. A place to start is the Institute for the Future's Future for Good fellowship.  Institute for the Future, where Mark and David are researchers, is a 50-year-old nonprofit that helps the public think about the future to make better decisions in the present. The Fellowship directly supports inspiring social innovators who are working to make tomorrow a better place. You can help too. Make a donation of $100 and you’ll receive IFTF Distinguished Fellow Bob Johansen's new book "The New Leadership Literacies: Thriving in a Future of Extreme Disruption and Distributed Everything." -DP & MF

The National Wildlife Federation National Wildlife Federation is a voice for wildlife, dedicated to protecting wildlife and habitat and inspiring the future generation of conservationists. Now's the time: the shortlist for our new Secretary of the Interior is reportedly Sarah Palin and Forrest Lucas, an "advocate of trophy hunting and puppy mills ... who never met a case of animal exploitation he wouldn’t defend." — RB

The Marine Mammal Center When seals, sea lion, or many other sea going pals need help, if they get lucky, they may be taken to The Marine Mammal Center, a veterinary hospital just for them. Thousands of heartbreakingly cute, but very wild, animals are rescued, rehabilitated and released on an annual basis. I'm a volunteer. In addition to the hundreds of highly trained volunteers that make the hospital run, the center always needs cash for fish and medicine.   —JW

The Southern Poverty Law Center & the Anti-Defamation League The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defemation League fight hate, teach tolerance, and help secure justice, and fair treatment for all. "There is no 'them' and 'us.' There is only us." --Greg Boyle —JW

Facing History and Ourselves Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational group that helps young people study issues around racism, antisemitism, and prejudice in history, from the Holocaust to today's immigrant experiences to the killing fields of Cambodia. Their aim is to teach young people "to think critically, to empathize, to recognize moral choices, to make their voices heard, we put in their hands the possibility--and the responsibility--to do the serious work demanded of us all as citizens." —DP

Free Software Foundation/Defective By Design The Free Software Foundation's principled litigation, license creation and campaigning is fierce, uncompromising and has changed the world. You interact with code that they made possible a million times a day, and they never stop working to make sure that the code stays free.  —CD

Free Software Foundation Europe Software has eaten the world, and software freedom is increasingly synonymous with human freedom. In Europe, far-right parties and authoritarians are inheriting a constellation of gadgets and devices that are "defective by design," built to allow corporations spy on and control their owners -- and those thugs are contemplating how they can use those companies' extraordinary powers to put whole populations under their thumbs. Free software in Europe, free software everywhere! —CD

The Internet Archive: In an era where the control of information has been weaponized, the Internet Archive's mission -- universal access to all human knowledge -- is a revolutionary manifesto. The Archive isn't screwing around: they're siting a copy of their data in Canada to resist trumpian grabs and spying and redecentralizing the internet to save us all from tyranny.  —CD

Open Rights Group While we were all fighting about Brexit, Theresa May's Tory government passed the most intrusive surveillance bill in the history of modern democracies. It's a longstanding joke that the gnomes of Westminster Village think that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a manual for statecraft, but the joke is getting less funny by the second. ORG is a decade old: spunky, going though a timely growth spurt, and badly needed. —CD

Amnesty International I just looked up Amnesty's founding principles and found tears rolling down my cheeks: "Only when the last prisoner of conscience has been freed, when the last torture chamber has been closed, when the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a reality for the world’s people, will our work be done." These values need our support more than ever. —CD

ACLU On November 9, 2016 ACLU changed its homepage to a picture of Trump superimposed with the words SEE YOU IN COURT. ACLU's deep bench of kick-ass lawyers has been lately augmented by a much-needed group of freedom-fighting technologists, welded into the fighting force we'll need for the next four years and beyond: from voter suppression to free speech, the ACLU is key to the fight.  —CD, MF

Liberty With the UK plunging into surveillance dystopia where human rights are an afterthought and racial profiling is becoming official doctrine, it needs Liberty, an organisation with 80+ years' track record fighting for human rights in many incarnations of the British project. The Tories ran on a platform of repealing the Human Rights Act: when the government is officially anti "human rights," you need someone like Liberty to take the "pro" side. —CD

826 National Born in San Francisco’s Mission District in the back room of a pirate supply store, 826 National teaches young people the art and magic of creative writing through classes, DIY publishing projects, in-school programs, and drop-in tutoring at seven centers around the US. And it’s all free for the kids. Help open more 826 locations around the country! —DP

Fight for the Future Some of the Internet's savviest, hard-working-est activists. Fight for the Future is in all the Internet fights, kicking ass on Net Neutrality -- a fight that's back on in 2017, thanks Trump -- mass surveillance and justice for Chelsea Manning. -CD

Demand Progress Aaron Swartz co-founded Demand Progress, and as you'd expect from that history, they're relentless in reinventing the activist playbook for the 21st century. -CD

MySociety Software in the public interest -- it's a damned good idea. MySociety produces software like Pledgebank ("I will risk arrest by refusing to register for a UK ID card if 100,000 other Britons will also do it") and TheyWorkForYou (every word and deed by every Member of Parliament). It's plumbing for activists and community organizers. —CD

https://boingboing.net/2017/12/10/charitable-giving-guide-2017.html