Trump says he's firing top cyber official who debunked claims of voter fraud

Donald Trump campaign must pay $7.9 million for Wisconsin recount — and the deadline is Wednesday: report
Photo via the White House.
Cody Fenwick
November 18, 2020

On Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump announced that he is firing Chris Krebs, the top official overseeing cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, for openly disputing his claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Krebs, echoing many independent experts as well as state and local officials, has been clear that there was not widespread voter fraud or technical glitches affecting the results of the 2020 presidential election, as Trump has claimed. Without calling out the president directly, Krebs' assessment of the situation from within the administration stood as a notable rebuke to Trump's disinformation campaign.

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Google This: Algorithmic Oppression

Imagine you've forgotten once again the difference between a gorilla and a chimpanzee, so you do a quick Google image search of “gorilla." But instead of finding images of adorable animals, photos of a Black couple pop up.

Is this just a glitch in the algorithm? Or, is Google an ad company, not an information company, that's replicating the discrimination of the world it operates in? How can this discrimination be addressed and who is accountable for it?

“These platforms are encoded with racism," says UCLA professor and best-selling author of Algorithms of Oppression, Dr. Safiya Noble. “The logic is racist and sexist because it would allow for these kinds of false, misleading, kinds of results to come to the fore…There are unfortunately thousands of examples now of harm that comes from algorithmic discrimination."

On At Liberty this week, Dr. Noble joined us to discuss what she calls “algorithmic oppression," and what needs to be done to end this kind of bias and dismantle systemic racism in software, predictive analytics, search platforms, surveillance systems, and other technologies.

What you can do:
Take the pledge: Systemic Equality Agenda
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