Movement Building Landscape Analysis: Acting on Shared Purpose

Mozilla is working to encourage Trustworthy AI, to leverage its resources to strategically tug the tech industry toward producing humane products and services. The Creating Trustworthy AI white paper presents a vision of machine decision making that supports individual and collective well-being, and a theory of change for getting there. Mozilla Foundation commissioned this research at the end of 2020 to explore issues at the intersection of AI in the consumer space and activist movements and map digital rights actors and other actors working at these intersections to inform the implementation of the theory of change.

The question — for us — however, is not what the intersections are between AI’s impact on society in the consumer space and social movements, but rather, what are the key social justice issues of our time, and how do AI and digital technologies intersect? This is key to understanding that we are dealing with human questions that require human solutions; a tech-solutionist approach will not suffice. An intersectional approach is key to implementing frameworks necessary to create equitable technology and AI. This foregrounds a systems approach to social change that will guide Mozilla in ultimately interrogating its own power and role within wider social and technological change, and will help to guide decisions about which partnerships with social movement actors can be most impactful. By centering systems of justice (initially climate, gender, racial, economic, community health, and later, human rights), we introduced a framework through which to respond to the potential breadth of scope of this analysis. That allowed us to foreground the intersections between the individual justice areas and between the justice areas and AI or digital technologies. It was also a way to organize and provide some boundaries for both the research and the mapping. That being said, the work mapped both organized efforts that might be understood as part of traditional social movements, as well as activist movements such as “tech workers organizing” or “consumer rights” movements as they respond to respective injustices.

With these considerations in mind, we have mapped early intersections between AI’s harms in the consumer space and social justice. We present these alongside frameworks for developing and nurturing deep and collaborative partnerships in the hopes of making the way forward a little clearer.