“It’s perfectly consistent to advocate for a policy of ‘No one is allowed to do x,’ but then if that policy fails and everyone else does X, to reluctantly do x ourselves.” 🤔 X=help dictators www.wired.com/story/anthro...

thanks a lot to mira for covering our protest!

Subscribe to support more independent, anarchist journalism like this - few outlets are willing to report on this protest, and even fewer are willing to call out what Israel is doing to Gaza as a blatant genocide. Liberation for all, or liberation for none.

Readers are advised to support Gazans directly as they go through relentless struggles. Information on how to support individual Gazans are in the following threads: bsky.app/profile/momm... bsky.app/profile/momm... Also see Vegans for Gaza: 4fund.com/xdh9gr

Vikram Subramanian, No Tech for Apartheid organizer and former Google employee, was another speaker who spoke out against these companies. His speech was reported on by Free Radical yesterday here: bsky.app/profile/thef...

Others were part of a broad, BDS-led protest at the summit. AI researcher Adeba Birhane was a speaker at the event, and directly called out Israel's genocide. She was, however, censored for this, as discussed in her thread here - bsky.app/profile/abeb...

Fortunately crimew and Freya were both released within hours. “We are out, safe and alive,” crimew wrote on BlueSky hours later. Both activists were also promoting a larger protest outside the summit led by pro-Palestinian action group BDS, at which they also spoke, as revealed in Fae’s thread.

A recording of this protest can be seen posted by independent journalist Ryan Fae here - bsky.app/profile/ryan...

An independent survey found that at least over 80,000 Gazans have been murdered, with many more injured. These estimates do not account for the hundreds of thousands of displaced refugees, deaths this year and Gazans subject to starvation and disease owing to Israel’s blockade on aid.

Companies named as complicit include Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, and Google. These companies have been called out repeatedly for helping the IDF develop technologies used to directly assault Palestinians. “We will not be silent in a genocide. You cannot be neutral in a genocide.”

“While the US and Europe provide the financial backing, Big Tech infrastructure actively enables the surveillance, the targeting and strategic erasure of the Palestinian people. This would not be possible without their assistance,” Freya says in the video.

BREAKING - Queer Swiss activists maia arson crimew @crimew.gay and No Tech for Apartheid organizer Freya were arrested at the United Nations' AI for Good conference, which praised companies that aided the Gazan genocide. Ty @davidforbes.bsky.social for editing thefreeradical.org/no-ai-for-ge...

"These companies sold these technologies to the most abhorrent military in the world without our consent" - Subramanian flew out from the United Kingdom to attend this event, opposing the blatant genocide enabled by his former employer.

EXCLUSIVE: Former Google employee and current organizer with No Tech for Apartheid Vikram Subramanian delivers a powerful speech at a protest of the United Nations' AI for Good conference -- the very same @crimew.gay was arrested at last week. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGLG...

big fan of this photo of UN ITU secretary Doreen Bogdan-Martin looking at our protest like it's a car crash she has to watch in slo-mo with no way to stop it

While UN falls at BigTech's feet this is what their billionaire owners think of the UN. These are the "good" guys ?? www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

The doublespeak in calling a conference #AiForGood and then censoring invited speakers for talking about ... *doing good* is kind of breathtaking.

surreal day, very happy with the impact we managed to have

This is unacceptable behaviour by ITU and the "AI for Good" organisers, not only as an aggressive action to inhibit academic freedom against Abeba, but specifically in service of an ongoing genocide where 'AI' is very much not being used 'for Good' by many of the summit funders and participants.

free palestine

No tech for genocide protestors took the stage at the #AIForGood conference. “No Tech For Genocide: you are all complicit. Free, free, Palestine.” “The first AI powered genocide.” I don’t really think that the hosts of the event were prepared for this, (which does surprise me).

(I think both the protest and the platform were appropriate. There is no argument that AI isn’t playing a part in the current genocidal conflict being enacted by the nation of Israel in the Gaza war. Hopefully some people who have not thought about their role in enabling this will do so.)

photo via blick

Human rights activists storm the stage and disrupt the UN’s “AI for Good” summit to call out big tech’s complicity in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. #NoTechForGenocide #NoAIForGenocide

great vibe right outside the ITU HQ

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/

we are out, safe and alive