Bother telling us what it is that you stated and what happened as a result?
Person A (black-woman) tweets that 'Google DeepMind gave a lecture in topic X, and they did not cite my paper despite that I did it while I was doing an internship there. This is only because I am a Black Woman. The paper has only 5 citations, would this have happened if I was a white male?' (I did not do a verbatim quote)
The tweet gets hundreds of likes. Including from some very influential people I know, and one whom I work with (though not under her directions, but the same company and she has a lot of influence). Everyone is tweeting on her support, saying how racists Google are, how she has been mistreated etc.
Person B tweets that he has read her paper, and there was nothing spectacular about it, and the results were poor (disclaimer: I checked the paper too, it looked okay while the results were poor). Obviously he gets attacked from everyone calling him a racist, and gets character-assassinated without anyone mentioning why his comment was wrong, except one who sais that the results were IMPRESSIVE (honestly, they were not).
I tweet to her that maybe the reason why the paper has not been cited in that lecture is that the paper is not peer-reviewed yet. I also mention that in that topic there are a few hundred published papers in top venues (including one from me, and well, I am a white man) who did not get cited. There are also several thousand unpublished (arxiv-only, same category as hers) papers that did not make the lecture for obvious reasons. In fact, there were only around 35 cited papers (a few from the authors). Considering that the lecture covered 6 years of arguably the hottest topic on machine learning, I say that any paper could have not been cited, and the likelihood of an unpublished paper getting cited was extremely low, without needing racism and sexism motivation.
A few people like my tweets, but more criticize me and/or like the tweets that criticize me. I get attacked for doing gaslighting from someone influential on the field (though her technical contribution on the field is very low - similar to mine actually - but she founded an organization about black people on AI which made her in words of many 'one of AI leading researchers' and even made a late-night TV show). I repeat she has two top-tier papers (same as me). Someone who is considered one of the leading scholars has from dozens to hundreds.
Essentially it was a mess. Later she tweeted that the duo who made the lecture, called her to apologize. Essentially, she bullied people to admit that they were racists/sexists with the only crime they did was not citing one of the thousands random papers which has yet to be accepted in a venue despite having been online for almost a year. As I said, they did not cite thousands unpublished and hundreds published (including mine and many people I know).
I don't mind someone using the current wave to progress her career. It is scummy, but it is the way it is, and has happened always. What I do mind though, is the people actually supporting this behavior. Not the idiots who are not even in the field and who were competing who is the most woke person there (one of them said that he was having problems on life, and then read her paper and so it became clear what is he is gonna do in the future). Whom I cannot stand are the high-influential people who are actively supporting this shameless political agenda. A few cases:
- The person I work with who liked all her tweets. She has 2 papers this year in the same topic. They do not cite that particular paper (why? because they shouldn't).
- Head of Google Research tweets on support of her.
- Very high person in Google Research posts on Facebook about how that post opened his eyes about the problems people like her has. An influential professor from Berkeley (who did not know circumstances) posts that Machine Learning community cites less papers than Computer Vision community, so this problems are caused cause of that. Of course, he gets immediately attacked, telling him how his community is even worse, and how this is a specific problem for black and women. He backtracks, cause you know, people have a career to keep.
- Influential professor of Cambridge has a series of tweets on support of that paper, and how awesome it is and how people should cite papers of black women.
- Influential DeepMind scientist (and Oxford university) tweets about diversity and mentions this case.
Now, someone might think that you know, it is okay. She might be a discriminated person and given her some advantage might help someone like her. Except that:
a) actually she is not. She is at the end of her PhD at a top 10 university in US.
b) her advisor (white guy) is a top 10 person on the field, and he was in that paper too.
c) She had done 4 internships in Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
d) She has a pretty good career so far, with multiple highly-cited other papers.
By every definition, she is a privileged person (though I think that she is smart too from her papers). However what she did was a shameless act of using politics to advance her scientific career, and she was supported from people who matter, with anyone else being attacked.
Not long ago, Chief Scientist of Facebook had to leave Twitter cause of the attacks he was getting for the crime that he had a different scientific opinion to someone (same someone who attacked me). It has gone beyond any control and is getting worse.
