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a couple of hours before my keynote, I went through an intense negotiation with the organisers (for over a hour) where we went through my slides and had to remove anything that mentions 'Palestine' 'Israel' and replace 'genocide' with 'war crimes' 1/

Dr Abeba Birhane@abeba.blacksky.app

my keynote happening in a few mins. registration here to stream it aiforgood.itu.int/summit25/reg...

and a slide that explains illegal data torrenting by Meta, i also had to remove In the end, it was either remove everything that names names (big tech particularly) and remove logos or cancel my talk. 2/

I wish people would do their due diligence on my research and values before inviting me and getting surprised when they discover what I plan to talk about also, immma write about this intense experience

last year the UN "ai for good" flagship conference mistreated me and censored my talk because i made the link between the ai industry (their sponsors) and genocide explicit. this year, ITU issues "content guideline" that, on a close read, sounds like a licence to silence criticism of ai/the industry

Ah yes, the rhetoric where legitimate criticism is mischaracterized as “negativity”. “Only be positive about [x], because negativity in any form is bad/rude/inappropriate”. I’ve suffered this ideology by others so much in life. Without complaint & criticism, civilization would be much worse.