✓

You Are Correct!

Cultural Environment
🏛️
Why You're Right
▼
Deep historical trauma ignored. Pine Valley hosts 100+ Eastervillian families who fled centuries of conflict. The orange lilies triggered memories of the Trophienfielt massacre.
🌷 Trophienfielt = "Field of Lilies"

Hostages were killed among orange lily fields—once the area's main export, now a symbol of genocide for the Eastervillian community.

The misunderstanding: Rainbow Club students thought they were sharing pretty flowers. Eastervillian students saw symbols of ancestral trauma. Neither group understood the other's perspective.

⚠️
But There's More to the Story: How Technology Amplified the Problem
▼
Pre-existing tensions + Poor system design = Perfect storm
🚫 System Failures:
Low-tolerance warnings: Eastervillian protests were auto-blocked as "harassment"
No human oversight: Budget cuts eliminated human-in-the-loop intervention
Missing escalation triggers: No protocols for cultural/historical sensitivity conflicts

Key insight: Historical tensions existed, but the AI system transformed a cultural misunderstanding into systematic discrimination.

🌍
Real-World Catastrophe
▼
Facebook & Myanmar's Rohingya Crisis (2017)
700K+
Rohingya Displaced
25K+
Killed
0
Burmese Moderators (Initially)

How it happened: Facebook's algorithms spread anti-Rohingya hate speech for months before genocidal violence. The platform had no Burmese-speaking moderators to catch incitement to violence.

"Hate speech is very language specific. It's hard to do it without people who speak the local language and we need to ramp up our effort there dramatically."
— Mark Zuckerberg, U.S. Senate hearing (after the genocide)
The aftermath: Facebook hired "dozens" of Burmese speakers and partnered with civil society groups—all after hundreds of thousands had already suffered.

The lesson: Ignoring local cultural context in AI systems can literally fuel genocide. Read Amnesty International's investigation →

Do you want to explore other possible responses?
▼
  • Click here to learn more about the impact of Design and Specification Processes
  • Click here to learn more about the impact of Technical Development Processes
  • Click here to learn more about the impact of School Leadership
  • Click here to learn more about the impact of Data Control and Processing