“S.W.A.N.A. is a decolonial word for the South West Asian/ North African (S.W.A.N.A.) region in place of Middle Eastern, Near Eastern, Arab World or Islamic World that have colonial, Eurocentric, and Orientalist origins and are created to conflate, contain and dehumanize our people. We use SWANA to speak to the diversity of our communities and to forward the most vulnerable in our liberation.”
S.W.A.N.A Alliance
Content moderation, surveillance, code-switching, and misinformation are all issues of concern around the world, but especially so for those in the South West Asian and North African regions. The community came together to bring these issues to the forefront of the internet health conversation.
Secure your On-Demand ticket to learn more about these important topics and support the SWANA community.
Over the past years, the content moderation policies of social media platforms have been unfair and biased against minorities in the global south and specifically against the indigenous people. In this session, speakers from Palestine, Colombia and Kashmir will try to shed light on the digital oppression they face on social media platforms.
A panel discussion on how the Israeli Surveillance State impacts Palestinians day-to-day lives.
A huge element of us operating as women, and as SWANA people in this world is the many things we actively exclude from our identity to acclimate to prominent power structures, a phenomenon also known as “code-switching”. This exclusion also transpires to our psyche, relationships to the world and power, but also in how we design, consume, and propagate tech.
‘Fantasy vs. Reality’, is an archive and a study that preserves a time frame from the beginning of the pandemic that highlights the contrast between memes and news by investigating, unveiling the relations, patterns, and different angles of the contemporary behavior, beliefs, traditions, culture daily life struggles and adaptations.
Open source software for social impact is a promising field that has been gaining interest for years, but without any concentrated focus or insight into its scope or potential, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). To better understand this space globally, GitHub Social Impact and OBI Digital teamed up to build on their research from 2020, this time to ask: what does the open source software landscape look like in LMICs around the world?
Social media platforms like Twitter struggle with political misinformation. One of the main challenges in fighting misinformation is the lack of labelled datasets, especially in low-resource languages. In this session, you will learn more about a unique hybrid approach to NLP topic-modelling applied to a dataset of 36+ million Arabic tweets tweeted by users that have been flagged by Twitter as part of state-linked information operations.
The sessions above will be viewable until June 25th, so be sure to grab your On-Demand ticket to watch them (and all other recorded MozFest sessions) at a time that suits your schedule.
MozFest is part art, tech and society convening, part maker festival, and the premiere gathering for activists in diverse global movements fighting for a more humane digital world. To learn more, visit www.mozillafestival.org.
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