Purple Code: Recent Episodes
Purple Code Team
A conversation with Sakin and Aida about the situation of content moderation and migrant workers in Germany, the high control on their work and even repression, and about institutional resources and trade unions.
Aida Eyvazzadeh and Sakin M. Bozorg are former content moderators in Berlin who worked for a global social media platform. The are both from Iran and in this episode, they talk about why and how migrant workers in Germany constitute as a crucial labor supply to the global platform economy. They explain what content moderation is, how it is labor intensive work and requires several skills. Instead of being valued, content moderators face high control on their work and even repression, a kind of corporate authoritarianism that reminds them of the authoritarian regime in Iran. They go on to recount their experiences of challenging these power asymmetries through the German institutional resources and trade unions, and the difficulties they have faced in doing so. Talking about these experiences, they suggest ways for unions to reflect and make certain changes. Beyond these institutions, they also find hope in networking with different communities in Berlin and internationally for sharing resources and finding possibilities to organize. Aida currently works in the civil society sector and Sakin is an independent researcher and essayist. She is also part of the Data Workers Inquiry project (https://data-workers.org/) that is supported by the Distributed AI Research Institute and the Weizenbaum Institute and is launching on the 8th of July this year.
To know more about content moderation work in Germany, you can access this article here: https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/wge/2/2/article-p176.xml
To access Sakin’s talk at the Transnational Forum of Alternatives to Uberisation at the European Parliament, please click here: https://left.eu/events/transnational-forum-of-alternatives-to-uberisation-4/
In this episode, we speak with Basma Mostafa, a journalist from Egypt living in exile in Germany. We speak about the role of journalism and the use of digital technologies including social media during and following the Egyptian revolution. We learn about the increasing threats to press freedom and military violence against journalists, lawyers and activists in the country, and hopes of fighting the Egyptian regime from exile. Basma’s story is reflective of the struggles faced by exiled diaspora in Germany and what it means to miss ‘home’ when the home of one’s memory and imagination no longer exists. We ask Basma about what different movements can learn from the Egyptian revolution that started more than 13 years ago and if there is potential in building international diasporic movements in Germany.
Shownotes
‘Bleibefreiheit’ (freedom to stay) mentioned in the episode
https://www.fischerverlage.de/buch/eva-von-redecker-bleibefreiheit-9783103974997
More information about Basma Mostafa
Basma Mostafa, is an award-winning Egyptian journalist with over a decade of experience investigating the human rights abuses in Egypt.
Mostafa’s fearless reporting has led to her imprisonment 3 times. She is a fellow with Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and was nominated for the global True Story Award 2024.
Links to some of her work
Escape from Egypt: How I fled the media crackdown
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/egypt-journalist-freedom-asylum-somaya-abdelrahman
Acts of violence against demonstrators in Bahri and Al Steen in November 2021
https://sudanesearchive.org/en/investigations/acts-of-violence-against-demonstrators-in-bahri-and-al-siteen-in-nov-2021
Der Preis, den wir zahlen müssen
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/medien/der-preis-den-wir-zahlen-mussen-4330150.html
Präsidentschaftswahlen in Ägypten
https://taz.de/Praesidentschaftswahlen-in-Aegypten/!5976026/
Family of murdered coptic man forced to leave North Sinai after continued therats
https://www.madamasr.com/en/2021/05/26/news/politics/family-of-murdered-coptic-man-forced-to-leave-north-sinai-after-continued-threats/
Our guest Armaghan Naghipour is a lawyer specializing in migration and anti-discrimination law and the deputy chairwoman of DeutschPlus (https://www.deutsch-plus.de). Most recently, she was State Secretary for Science, Research and Equality in the State of Berlin. Prior to that, she held various advisory positions in Berlin state politics, including helping to draft Berlin’s state anti-discrimination law.
In the wonderful atmosphere of the Grüner Salon at the Volksbühne Berlin, we talk about Armaghan’s experiences as a political advisor and State Secretary, about what it is like to take on responsibility as State Secretary and to shape society in these specific political structures, but also about the hesitation and the feeling of being an impostor, and what it is like to jump in at the deep end. We talk about the responsibility that comes with such an appointment, about discrimination characteristics of AI from a legal perspective and how legal frameworks shape our everyday lives. We touch upon the anti-discrimination law in Germany and specifically the Berlin anti-discrimination law, upon how Armaghan’s parents fled Iran in the 1980s when she was 1 year old, and how the topic of migration is a recurring theme in her professional work as well as in this podcast. Last but not least, we talk about the power that comes from these kinds of conversations.
Many thanks to Johanna Hampf and the Weizenbaum Institute, the Berlin Design Week and the Grüner Salon. Many thanks to the audience and to all our listeners.
Armaghan on Twitter/X: @armaghipour
What is participatory research, and how hard is it to navigate disciplines like sociology and computer science at the same time? Dr. Milagros Miceli – a sociologist and a computer scientist – is from Argentina and currently based in Berlin. Her research on data work is widely known to provide rich empirical evidence on the abysmal working conditions of click workers and content moderators in Germany, Argentina, Syria, Kenya and Bulgaria. Milagros leads the research group ‘Data, Algorithmic Systems, and Ethics’ at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society. She is also a research fellow at the DAIR Institute, where she is currently investigating ways to engage communities of data workers in AI research.
This episode with Milagros takes us on a journey of her love for her work, but also the struggles that it brings along. She goes on to talk about issues like credibility, acceptance and recognition as a pioneering researcher in a field that is finally getting the attention it deserves, but at the cost of balancing it as a woman, migrant, and mother of two.
Milagros on Twitter
Our summer break episode is a special one: Helena Mihaljević, mathematician and professor for computer science, talks about her fascination for math, chess and boxing; about her migration history; about training data that are so deeply rooted in our culture and history. Helena elaborates why math is not neutral, how she experiences improvements in the tech industry, and her involvement in an ongoing study of the gender gap in different sciences and regions. Listen to our conversation on how to empower young women to be confident in tech jobs, and how we should have tech companies and technology audits that are contextual and participative, carried out together with advocacy organizations and researchers.
Helena on Twitter @h_mihaljevic
Meera Ghani is a digital rights and climate activist from Pakistan, based in Belgium. In this episode we talk about many forms of violence against feminist, environmental and digital rights activists in Pakistan and in the West, which are often amplified by digital technologies. Meera shares with us her a vision of a culture of care as an antidote to online and offline violence. Meera explains why it is important that organizations take measures that go beyond merely preserving the functioning of their members and employees; and that organizations instead should strive for care in a serious way. However, cultures of care demand transparency about power relations and a redistribution of power – which finds much resistance in practice, in Meera’s and our experience.
We talk about Renata’s experiences as a human rights lawyer and her work with regards to massive human rights violations of indigenous people in Latin America. She elaborates on the potentials of technology when in the hands of people and how she dealt with testimony material and archives, with hours and hours of testimonies. The impermanence of the human rights internet and the lack of support of archives when we discuss human rights violations is one central moment in this episode: many of the websites are gone, many of the documentation about human rights abuses and the battle for accountability vanished. Renata elaborates on the accessibility of relevant material for the public interest and the anachronic copyright laws and restrictions due to geo-location and geographic restrictions.
Renata Ávila on Twitter: @avilarenata
Dr. Nakeema Stefflbauer is a Brooklyn native and a long-term Berlin resident with a background in digital transformation and social entrepreneurship. In this episode, Nakeema shares many insights into decades of experience in the tech sector. Her work spans from years of research in North Africa and the Middle East to operating in the tech sector in New York, Toronto and Boston. In Berlin, she founded “FrauenLoop”, an NGO that trains women-identified persons in computer programming and offers a diverse network for women from all different backgrounds to build a lasting career in tech. Nakeema takes us back to the beginnings of FrauenLoop and elaborates why she started this program. In her work as a decolonial researcher, questions of women and diversity in tech and how to address the marginalization of especially female immigrants and refugees in the tech industry are central. This conversation raises many new questions and informs our very discussions on systems of oppression and digital technologies.
Nakeema Stefflbauer on Twitter: @DocStefflbauer
Rukhsana* is a queer software developer and poet who recently moved to Berlin. In this episode, Rukhsana talks about her journey in designing software, coming from South Asia and the particularities of power during the migration process. She talks about how she has managed to take space - both by chance and by the efforts of her family - in the tech field that has been dominated by a narrow section of people. We also discuss if diversity in high positions in the tech space can change things from within or if there are structural conditions that need larger solutions. On poetry, Rukhsana elucidates, "I have grown to see poetry beyond a language; for me poetry has transcended language, so I often feel that I carry poetry with me just walking on the streets, by observing beautiful things, by having lovely conversations, that is also poetic for me. So, for me poetry does not need to be in a language, on a piece of paper, or to be expressed always. But when I feel the need to express, I write. It also gives me the freedom to write when I want to."
*Name has been changed to protect the identity of the guest.
In this episode, our conversation with Leil-Zahra Mortada draws from their expertise on digital rights, online security, and open source investigations from anticolonial, feminist and queer perspectives. Their work spans across the fields of art/ filmmaking, activism and research, and includes the archival project “Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution”; the awarded “Breakup in 9 Scenes”, and the decolonial-feminist music research project Sound Frontier focusing on marginalized music and sound art. Apart from their work with different organizations Indymedia, Mozilla Foundation and Tactical Tech, Leil-Zahra has also been part of forming several political collectives and alternative media groups in Lebanon, Egypt, Spain and elsewhere. By working on the intersections of human rights and digital technologies, Leil-Zahra brings forth several pertinent questions in this episode: who produces digital technologies and whose rights are included? How do marginalized communities engage with them? And what are the alternatives to present day technologies? The interdisciplinary nature of their work further facilitates our discussions on the structural frames for studying digital technologies.
In this episode, we are talking to Mona Sloane, a New York University (NYU) based sociologist working on design and inequality, specifically in the context of AI design and policy. Mona talks with us about her many struggles and her engagement as a feminist tech researcher and activist who strives for more justice in the digital world. One of her many projects is the Terra Incognita NYC project, an investigation of New York City’s digital public spaces in the pandemic, a project that showed the escalated impact of well-known issues that exist within digital space—such as the digital divide, harassment, disproportionately impacted communities. In 2020, Mona was added to the “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics Hall of Fame”. Mona is a Senior Research Scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible AI, and an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, as well as a Fellow with NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK).
This conversation with Eliana Quiroz, digital rights activist and author from Bolivia and temporary fellow at the Hans-Bredow-Institute in Hamburg, delves into the many implications of digital media for women. Eliana has co-founded the Bolivian digital rights collective and has fought for decades to improve digital rights in Bolivia. As she explains, this entails to maneuver a highly polarized political context, and to maintain a stubborn persistency. She has engaged in fostering free software, in drafting and lobbying a data protection bill, and to support self-defense strategies against online violence directed towards women and indigenous communities. She furthermore elaborates on how being a woman in male dominated tech and political communities affects her work - a situation to which Sana, Bianca, and Lena can relate very well, as becomes clear in the conversation.
Eliana Quiroz on Twitter : @e_liana
This first episode introduces the hosts of the podcast, who are Berlin based researchers from the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society. They introduce themselves and explain why they look at digitalized societies through an intersectional feminist perspective. They see the podcast as a way to listen to voices that are often silenced when talking about the digital transformation of societies, and to take seriously the personal views and experiences of their future guests in order to challenge the aura of objectivity of digital technologies that is dominant in public and academic discourse.