Arab American and Muslim voters helped Biden win in 2020. This year, they could sink Harris

Arab American and Muslim voters helped Biden win in 2020. This year, they could sink Harris

Walid Fidama and Abdulhakem Alsadah have been friends for more than a quarter century. They joke about knowing each other’s children since before they were born. They’re both longtime members of the National Association of Yemeni Americans, socially and politically active in their home state of Michigan. 

For months, Fidama didn’t tell Alsadah about his voting plan in the upcoming U.S. presidential election. When Fidama agreed to sit for an interview at the association’s office in Dearborn, Mich., an intrigued Alsadah listened from a rolling office chair in the back of the room.

Fidama, a genial man with eight daughters, confirmed he won’t be voting for a Democratic president this November for the first time since he got his American citizenship in 1994. The party, he says, needs to understand votes from even the most party loyal are not guaranteed — and they’ve lost his ballot this year over the crisis in the Middle East.

“We are Democrats, but the Democrats are not following what humanity needs and for what the people need around the world,” he said.

“If they keep not listening to the right things, which we need and what the people need, they are gonna get hurt.”

From his corner seat, Alsadah nodded.

Voting third-party or not at all

Four years ago, Arab American and Muslim voters helped deliver President Joe Biden to the White House by rallying behind him in Michigan, one of seven critical swing states with power to sway the outcome of the election.

This year, many of those same voters are leaving the Democratic Party behind because they feel betrayed, forgotten and angry over the Biden administration’s handling of the Middle East conflict and the U.S.’s ongoing allyship with Israel.

With this year’s race for Michigan likely to be decided by a thin margin, voter sentiment there could have an outsize impact on determining who becomes the next U.S. president.

“I cannot emphasize my [disgust] with the current administration and their lack of leadership, their lack of empathy toward the Palestinian people, their lack of empathy toward the Lebanese people,” said Alsadah, 62, chair of the Yemeni American Democratic Caucus, who declined to specify how he’ll be voting. 

Most of the roughly two dozen voters in Michigan who spoke with CBC News this month said they’d be voting for a third-party candidate, or not at all. Only a handful emphatically said they’d be backing Harris.

The discontent is palpable in Dearborn, the first Arab-American majority city in the United States. In the city, 15 kilometres west of Detroit, it’s not hard to find people with deeply personal and painful connections to losses in the Middle East over the past year.

“I’m so enraged, it’s no longer hurt. It’s rage. I want the Democrats to lose by any means necessary — and that means voting for Trump,” said Dearborn-based political activist Samraa Luqman, who was once “so far left” she wrote in Bernie Sanders’ name in 2020.

The mother of Yemeni-Palestinian children, Luqman said her decision to vote for Trump is rooted in a strategy to keep Harris out of office.

“I never, never would have imagined that I would sit here at any point in time and tell you that I was endorsing Trump for president. Never in my life. So is it difficult? Yeah, it’s been difficult.”

There isn’t high-quality polling on Arab-American and Muslim voters, and the community is not a monolith — voters can identify with a range of racial or religious groups and differ culturally — but census data shows Michigan is home to more than 300,000 people with Arab American or North African ancestry. 

Biden took the state back from former president Donald Trump in 2020 by a razor-thin margin of just 154,000 votes — in part because of overwhelming support from Arab American and Muslim voters.

“Biden would not have won Michigan without Muslim votes. For sure. He would have not won without the Muslim community being galvanized, organized and overwhelmingly voting for him,” said Dawud Walid, an executive director with Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Sipping an Adeni chai at Yemeni-owned Shibam coffee shop in nearby Canton, Mich., Walid said he doesn’t think Harris can become president without winning Michigan. 

Support thrown behind Greens

Multiple people who were asked about the election in Dearborn said they’d be reluctantly voting for Harris because they see her as the “lesser of two evils.” Others said choosing a candidate felt like being “stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

But some were certain about how they felt.

“The deciding factor behind my vote in November would be the treatment of the genocide of Gaza and as well as what’s going on in Lebanon. So due to that factor, we will be abandoning the Harris campaign,” said Mohammad Younis, 29, noting he plans to vote for a third party. 

Most national polls show roughly one per cent of voters are likely to back Green Party candidate Jill Stein, but that number doubles in Michigan — not an insignificant difference in a state won or lost by a few thousand votes.

Harris, 59, launched her candidacy for president after Biden, 81, dropped out of the race in July. She has been endorsed by Emgage Action, which works to educate and mobilize Muslim American voters. The Uncommitted Movement declined to endorse Harris, but cautioned against a third-party vote over the risk it could lead to another Trump presidency.

The national Abandon Harris campaign, formerly Abandon Biden, endorsed Stein this month. 

Farah Khan, one of the campaign’s organizers, says she feels complicit in the suffering of Palestinians because she voted for Biden and Harris in 2020.

“[Democrats] take our vote … And once they are elected, they will forget all about it. They turn around and stab us in the back,” said Khan, whose long wooden dining table in metro Detroit was piled with flyers and “Abandon Harris” lawn signs.

“It’s time we stand up for what’s right for our people, for us, for our country.”

Harris’s position on the Middle East

Throughout her time in office and on the campaign trail, Harris has maintained that Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas and Hezbollah while calling for a ceasefire and using stronger language than Biden to describe the humanitarian suffering Israel has created in Gaza.

Trump, 78, has supported Israel throughout his campaign, blaming the regional crisis on what he has described as weak leadership from Biden and Harris.

Both candidates campaigned in the battleground state on Friday. Harris was in Grand Rapids, the heart of more conservative western Michigan, before heading to Lansing and Oakland County. Trump spoke in Auburn Hills before an evening rally in Detroit.

Polls suggest the U.S. presidential candidates are essentially tied with a little more than two weeks to go before the vote. There were roughly 206,000 registered Muslim voters in Michigan in 2020, according to Emgage. A little more than 71 per cent of those people cast ballots.

Speaking from his office last Friday, Fidama said he thinks Harris will ultimately win the White House in November because her strength on other election issues like reproductive rights will draw out enough favourable voters to make up for the loss of support from Arab Americans. 

But he warned that the Democrats should be concerned about so many once-faithful voters leaving the party in droves.

“I don’t think they are doing the right thing for us.”

Published at Wed, 31 Jul 2024 21:58:04 +0000

X is the latest social media site letting 3rd parties use your data to train AI models

Elon Musk’s X was already using your data to train its own artificial intelligence. Soon, it’ll let other companies do the same.

Starting Nov. 15, the social media site formerly known as Twitter will share user data — including posts, likes, bookmarks and reposts �— with third-party platforms that may use the information to train AI models.

The company updated its privacy policy on Wednesday to detail the changes. When the policy takes effect, users are automatically opted in until they opt out.

“Depending on your settings, or if you decide to share your data, we may share or disclose your information with third parties,” the updated policy reads. 

“If you do not opt out, in some instances the recipients of the information may use it for their own independent purposes in addition to those stated in X’s Privacy Policy, including, for example, to train their artificial intelligence models, whether generative or otherwise.”

This is the latest arms race. Everyone is working towards AI supremacy.– Ritesh Kotak, cybersecurity expert

As user data becomes an increasingly valuable resource, social media platforms are sitting on a goldmine —and selling that information to artificial intelligence companies is a lucrative business.

“This is the latest arms race. Everyone is working towards AI supremacy,” said Ritesh Kotak, a cybersecurity and technology analyst based in Toronto.

“The more data sets you have, the more people that are involved in that data is collected from, the more accurate your model is going to be.”

Why sites such as Reddit are selling data to AI firms

The change comes just a few months after X quietly shifted its privacy policy, giving itself permission to train the company’s Grok chatbot on user data.

But that led to an investigation by the European Union’s privacy regulator, which ended with X agreeing to stop collecting user data from that region for the purpose of training Grok.

LinkedIn has also given itself permission to train its artificial intelligence models on user data, and Meta used public Instagram and Facebook posts to train its own AI virtual assistant.

Like X, other social platforms have reportedly signed content licensing deals with AI giants, bringing in a new stream of revenue amid tough competition for advertising dollars, noted Ajay Shrestha, a computer science professor at Vancouver Island University.

“The traditional processes that they have used [to] generate revenue, through advertising or through subscription methods, are not working well,” said Shrestha.

The deals include:

• Reddit reportedly closed one such agreement with Google this year, with Reuters reporting that the deal is worth $60 million US per year. 
• Stack Overflow, an online community for developers, started charging AI companies for scraping its data to train their bots last year.
• Tumblr and WordPress reportedly struck a deal with generative AI companies Midjourney and OpenAI to sell user data to train their AI tools.

Some news publishers and stock image companies have made similar deals — Shutterstock’s licensing business generated more than $100 million US last year, for example. Many others have sued AI giants for scraping their content without permission, or warned them against doing so.

And what’s in it for the big tech companies? Social media posts are a valuable form of data because they can convey emotion, reflecting how people actually speak and think, according to Kotak.

“Social media posts may pose very little quality content from a technical perspective or from what’s going on in the world, but [they are] rich in sentimental analysis,” he said.

Can you opt out?

As of Friday, X didn’t appear to have updated its settings with an option to opt-out of the change in advance of the Nov. 15 start date. CBC News has reached out to the company.

“As a user, you may just not want your posts or personal information being used to train algorithms that the rest of the world is going to be able to leverage,” said Kotak.

“These platforms literally making it by default that your data is going to be used to train these algorithms means that you no longer have a choice in the matter. Unless you go in and you prohibit that from happening.”

Normally, users can opt out of such changes by going into settings, privacy and safety, and under the data sharing and personalization heading, toggling the “data sharing with business partners” option.

But opt-outs aren’t always cut and dry, Kotak said, noting that an AI model can’t necessarily unlearn the data it’s been fed if a user opts out after the training has started.

“There’s no way of reversing that and having any of your any of the data that you’ve already put out essentially being taken out of the learning model as well,” he said.

“If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. And in this case, the data is the product.”

Published at Fri, 18 Oct 2024 22:10:19 +0000