#HumanRights

"Social justice claims, and the human rights movement in particular, are entering a new phase. Social media, algorithms, and artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping the practices of advocacy and compliance. In this new era, technicians, lawmakers and advocates, sometimes in collaboration with the private sector, have increasingly gravitated toward the possibilities and dangers inherent in the non-human. Algorithms and automated data processing are unpredictable and opaque. The use of algorithms and artificial intelligence may be advancing the protection of human rights in some ways, but new technologically-enhanced forms of human rights abuse have emerged alongside these new protections. Ronald Niezen entreats readers not to be distracted by the shiny new innovations, and to instead consider how new tech interacts with the older models of rights claiming and communication, arguing that the key to understanding the new era of social justice is not in an exclusive focus on sophisticated, expert-driven forms of data management, but in considering how these technologies are interacting with other forms of communication to produce new avenues of expression, public sympathy, redress of grievances, and sources of the self. To do this, Niezen investigates various case studies of the pursuit of justice via technology, including Twitter-faciliated mobilizations, WhatsApp activist networks, and the news prioritization or "filter bubbles" fed through Google and Facebook algorithms to uncover how emerging technologies of data management and social media influence the ways that human rights claimants and their allies pursue justice, and the "new victimology" that prioritizes and represents strategic lives and types of violence over others"--