i'm furious at all of the attacks that people have been sending @timnitGebru's way this past week. ya'll have seen me tweet about this nonstop, but go see her account and all the techbros in the replies. they're wasting tf out of her time, we can't stay silent to this

not to mention they're just being downright invalidating and harassing. prior to this i've replied / responded to folks without tagging, but i'm gonna start cause people gotta be directly told wtf is up. they got time to waste? well i got time to talk back

for those who aren't in the loop, a machine learning researcher with a huge platform went on a tantrum last week and ended up subtweeting and then directly attacking timnit. here's a thread with some more context on it: https://twitter.com/WellsLucasSanto/status/1275372359436795904

this article talks more about it, but it's frustrating that it even had to be written. these sorts of things shouldn't just be teachable moments, they cause actual harm & it's tiring to just see folks like yann causing harm and then saying "i'll learn" https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/26/ai-weekly-a-deep-learning-pioneers-teachable-moment-on-ai-bias/

the harm is done. and yann apologized (to an extent), but only after saying all that he said and leading leagues of folks to come after timnit and other black AI researchers. and only after switching platforms and posting shit like this to his facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10156978264582143&id=722677142

not to mention folks like deb also having to deal with harassment from a ton of anons as well who've been endlessly terrible, and still continue to be. i can't imagine the shit they've had to see and deal with this past week. https://twitter.com/rajiinio/status/1276638925281509378

when all of this was breaking out, devin also wrote on this (which i re-shared a few times), and it's frustrating that he had to spend time to have to say this. it's an incredible and necessary read, but this is the extra work that black researchers do https://twitter.com/databoydg/status/1275236482190434304

i also had some really angry subtweets in the past week, and this was one of the tweets that i was calling out. just faceless folks trying to use this language in absolutely meaningless ways to try to defend their nonsense. i'm furious https://twitter.com/dguardian12/status/1276213428273778688

anyways, across all of these tweets and threads i've linked, you'll see some truly frustrating, harmful, and irritating things, and this is the stuff that folks have been dealing with for so long. even if you're not in AI/ML, you gotta see what's happening here.

there's so much more i haven't linked, but i'm definitely not letting up in terms of calling folks out. thanks to those who read through this & care. big good-bye to the ~20 followers who just unfollowed after this thread. good riddance to ya'll, cause i'm not stopping