End user
Corporate support for social justice movements doesn’t always check out
“It’s hardly “brave” or “controversial” for major corporations to pledge support for a popular movement, especially one as unambiguously moral: it’s a great branding exercise and will probably prove profitable.”
Following the May 25 murder of Minneapolis man George Floyd by former police officer Derek Chauvin, demonstrations have surged in the United States and throughout the world to protest racial injustice. In addition to the massive public demonstrations, most corporations have taken the opportunity to pledge support for the movement.
In the weeks (and months) following the May 25 flashpoint, every brand from Apple through to Starbucks has thrown its weight behind the Black Lives Matter movement in some manner or other. Indeed, it’s basically a prerequisite: any major company that dares refrain is eventually castigated online; such was the case with Valve.
It’s hardly “brave” or “controversial” for major corporations to pledge support for a popular movement, especially one as unambiguously moral: it’s a great branding exercise and will probably prove profitable. But make no mistake: if it was unambiguously moral, but not a great branding exercise, the corporations would not pledge support for it. Many have offered material support in the form of massive payloads of cash; others have promised to address employment practises to favour inclusion.
Take Amazon for instance: CEO Jeff Bezos, whose net worth is 165 billion dollars, expressed his support for the movement on Instagram in May. The company has also donated a total of $10 million to organisations including the National Urban League, NAACP, UNCF and more. It’s a safe, uncontroversial and inexpensive move that helps position Amazon as a “moral” company while it is arguably anything but.
A large part of the 2020 protests call for police reform, which is complicated for Amazon, which sells its facial recognition software, Rekognition, to police forces. A 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found that the software was perilously inaccurate when it came to black people. In late June, the New York Times reported on a Michigan man who had been arrested for a crime he did not commit due to faulty facial recognition.
While Amazon’s Rekognition is hardly a household name, enough pressure mounted last month that the company announced a one year ban on the use of the software by police forces. “We’ve advocated that governments should put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology, and in recent days, Congress appears ready to take on this challenge,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “We hope this one-year moratorium might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if requested.”
Under the circumstances, and given how unreliable the software has proven to be, it doesn’t seem “moral” to keep selling software that can lead to false imprisonment. While Microsoft is hardly a paragon of virtue, it has opted to entirely ban the use of its own facial recognition software by law enforcement.
So after a year’s moratorium on its use by police, Amazon is still keen to sell its facial recognition software to police – so long as someone else sorts out the legal details. In other words, the company’s pledge of support to a movement that has at its very bedrock police reform, has not extracted itself from a surveillance technology used by police that is fundamentally flawed and ethically dubious, to say the least.
Corporations do not show support for mass social justice movements because they’re inherently “good”: they do it because it’s good for the corporation. It may seem needlessly sceptical, even cynical, but let’s check back in, in twelve months time, and see what has changed at the hands of big business.