Unplugging Hitler's Radio: A.I. and Historical Solutions to Bias Acceleration

Polarization remains an unresolved, existential threat in the A.I. Age. However, history shows us that new, relatively unregulated technologies have a history of being used to accelerate strategic divisions. In the 1930s and early 40s, Nazi Germany quietly blanketed North America with subtle, pro-German propaganda. A wealth of scholarship shows us that Axis forces used media formats that could fly under the radar in North America, including musicals, romantic comedies, and “cultural” programming in radio and film. Their goal was to sew division and prevent Canadians and Americans from entering into a war against Hitler.

History also shows us that our forebearers established innovative new ways of dealing with the social media crisis of their own day. Could some of the answers to the modern crisis around polarization and bias acceleration be found in the past? This talk shows how a small group of North American officials developed an innovative system to fight back. By embracing new media, they built groundbreaking, early anti-racist and anti-polarization campaigns that targeted the existing biases and divisions in North American populations that were being exploited by the Third Reich. More than contributing to the end of the war, evidence suggests that these often overlooked campaigns also helped pave the way for major anti-racist and human rights legal victories in the following decade.

Could we retool the strategies of historical anti-polarization campaigns for our own age? Drawing from the anonymous open history classroom for social media built with this model (55m views), L.K. Bertram discusses how algorithmic tools and critical, humanities-engaged algorithmic literacy can help us build and scale more engaging, public facing academic knowledge mobilization campaigns.

L.K. Bertram
https://www.history.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/lk-bertram
Associate Professor
Department of History
University of Toronto

About the Speaker:

L.K. Bertram is a faculty member in the Department of History at the University of Toronto specializing in the delivery of critical historical data through social media algorithms and the history of migration, gender, sexuality, and colonialism in the 19th century North American West. She is the author of The Viking Immigrants: Icelandic North Americans (Winner CHA Clio Prize / UTP 2020) and is currently finishing a book on the financial lives of sex workers in the 19th century West. Bertram's newest work focuses on how scholars can more effectively combat digital disinformation campaigns. As the anonymous curator of a large-scale public history campaign that hit 9 million views, she focuses on high-yield data packaging strategies for larger scale publics using video-based algorithms (TikTok and Instagram). This new SSHRC-funded project asks: “how do we make good data go viral in the disinformation age?” Follow the project on her new account @socialforscholars.

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This is a talk with audience Q&A presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics that is free to attend and open to the public. The talk will also be streamed online with live chat here.

About the Centre for Ethics (http://ethics.utoronto.ca):

The Centre for Ethics is an interdisciplinary centre aimed at advancing research and teaching in the field of ethics, broadly defined. The Centre seeks to bring together the theoretical and practical knowledge of diverse scholars, students, public servants and social leaders in order to increase understanding of the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life.

In pursuit of its interdisciplinary mission, the Centre fosters lines of inquiry such as (1) foundations of ethics, which encompasses the history of ethics and core concepts in the philosophical study of ethics; (2) ethics in action, which relates theory to practice in key domains of social life, including bioethics, business ethics, and ethics in the public sphere; and (3) ethics in translation, which draws upon the rich multiculturalism of the City of Toronto and addresses the ethics of multicultural societies, ethical discourse across religious and cultural boundaries, and the ethics of international society.

The Ethics of A.I. Lab at the Centre For Ethics recently appeared on a list of 10 organizations leading the way in ethical A.I.: https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/10-organizations-leading-the-way-in-ethical-ai