Tod MaffinCanadian Commentator, From Far and Wide · Emotional Support Canadian

#onthisday

3 Aug 2025 · 1 min

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A Sounder and Urban One study shows brand-safety AI flags African-American vernacular like "the bomb" as extremist content, demonetizing episodes. The tools eliminated about 90% of Urban One's podcast inventory, devastating a network of Black creators who lose income while white creators using the same language face no penalties.

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Well, this is stupid. Brand safety tools are not sexy, but they do a good job of keeping advertisers safe from nasty things like white supremacists on Twitter or X or whatever the fuck we're calling it at this point. But these tools also look at podcasts by transcribing them. And guess what? They're a little Caucasian. This is a study that just came out from Sounder, which is a tech company, Urban One, which is a podcast network mostly of Black creators. It found that a lot of the vernacular used in African-American culture is not really understood. The context isn't really understood by these tools. One example they gave was the word bomb, which you might use positively, right? Yeah, this track is the bomb. Obviously it's also an explosive device, and that could be bad. So a lot of these brand safety tools are like, bomb equals bad, which means that podcast episode is marked as not safe for advertising, which means that episode can't be monetized. And the AI eliminated 90% of Urban One's podcasts.