DAIR Executive Director Timnit Gebru holds a conversation with Research Fellow Meron Estefanos, in which they talked about Meron’s activism as a refugee advocate who has rescued more than 16,000 victims of trafficking. Meron discusses the extent to which she has faced transnational repression in the course of her work, and how calls to attack her on social media result in violence: for example, after calls to injure her circulated on Facebook and Twitter, she was attacked eight times in a single evening. Timnit concludes with a discussion of how refugees are the first to experience the harms of experimental AI technology on the ground. You can learn more about Meron’s work in the 2013 documentary Sound of Torture and this episode of the podcast This American Life.

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