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Journalists in Haiti demand
protection after reporter killed
By Evens Sanon
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) —
Attacks on journalists in Haiti are escalating,
and the slaying of a radio reporter
prompted media organizations on
Tuesday to renew demands that police
protect them and give them space to
work.
An unidentified gunman shot Rospide
Petion as he drove home late Monday
in a car owned by Radio Sans
Fin. The 45-year-old reporter had just
finished a radio program in which he
talked about corruption allegations
against the administration of President
Jovenel Moise.
“These days are not good for journalists
and media,” Frantz Duval, editor of
the newspaper Le Nouvelliste, tweeted
Tuesday.
Moise issued a statement Tuesday
calling the killing a “heinous act’’ that
weighed heavily on Haiti’s press. “I
vehemently condemn this villainous
crime,’’ said the president, who also
criticized other attacks on local media
organizations.
Petion was married and had three
children.
The shooting came amid days of
sometimes violent street protests calling
for the resignation of Moise, during
which several journalists have been
attacked. Some protesters accuse some
media outlets of being pro-government.
On Sunday, a photographer with Le
Nouvelliste was injured by a rubber
bullet, and protesters tried to attack
a videographer with Radio Television
Nationale D’Haiti. On Monday, reporters
with Radio Tele Ginen were targeted
with rocks as protesters vandalized
their cars.
Haitian media organizations called
on people to stop attacking reporters.
“The press is for everyone. To
inform everyone. In all kinds of situations,’’
they said in a statement,
adding that everyone is free to follow
whatever media they choose.
Reporters Without Borders issued a
statement saying Haitian authorities
must investigate Petion’s killing and
bring those responsible to justice.
“It is also the government’s job to
guarantee the safety of journalists
covering the protests,’’ the organization
said. “They have a key role to play
in the current turmoil.’’
It noted that freelance photographer
Vladjimir Legagneur has been
missing since March while on assignment.
Let’s train humans first …
pean law has ratified this with its General
Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),
which stipulates that individuals using
social media platforms, or any other
social system do indeed retain ownership
of all their personal data.
So, laws are beginning to catch up
with the inhuman uses of human beings,
with our hard-earned skills being used
to train algorithms that then replace
us! The computer algorithm trainers
then employ out of-work people surviving
in the gig economy on Mechanical
Turk and Task Rabbit sites, in minimum,
hourly- paid data entry tasks to train
these algorithms!
Scientist Jaron Lanier in his “Ten
Arguments for Deleting Your Social
Media Accounts Now” (2018) shows how
social media are manipulating us with
algorithms to engineer changes in our
behavior, by engaging our attention with
clickbait and content that arouses our
emotions, fears and rage, playing on
some of the divisions in our society to
keep us on their sites.
This helps drive ad sales and their gargantuan
profits and rapid global growth.
Time to rethink all this, beyond the dire
alarms raised by Bill Gates, Elon Musk
and the late Stephen Hawking that these
algorithms we are teaching will soon
take over and may harm or kill us as did
HAL in the movie “2001”.
Why indeed are we spending all this
money to train machines while shortchanging
our children, our teachers and
schools? Training our children’s brains
must take priority!
Instead of training machines to hijack
our attention and sell our personal data
to marketers for profit — let’s steer funds
into tripling efforts to train and pay our
teachers, upgrade schools and curricula
with courses on civic responsibility, justice,
community values, freedoms under
habeas corpus (women also own their
own bodies!) and how ethics and trust
are the basis of all market and societies.
Why all the expensive efforts to
enhance machine learning to teach algorithms
to recognize human faces, guide
killer drones, falsify video images and
further modify our behavior and capture
our eyeballs with click bait, devising and
spreading content that angers and outrages
— further dividing us and disrupting
democracies?
Let’s rein in the Big Brother ambitions
of the new techno-oligopolists. As
a wise NASA scientist, following Norbert
Weiner’s Human Use of Human Beings
(1950), reminded us in 1965 about the
value of humans: “Man (sic) is the lowestcost,
150 pound, nonlinear all-purpose
computer system which can be massproduced
by un-skilled labor,” quoted in
Foreign Affairs, July-August, 2015, p 11.
Time for common sense!
Continued from Page 10
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