Last week I had the honor of speaking to 100+ data storytellers from all over the world at the Computation+Journalism conference in Miami, Florida.

The conference theme was "data journalism under authoritarianism" — and it featured a wealth of interesting perspectives on ethics, tools, and tactics.

Shoutout to excellent presentations from Rahul Bhargava and Andres Snitcofsky on using in-person engagement to make data more accessible through physical media, and to Cherry Salazar for talking about how investigative journalists in the Philippines used creative data sourcing to get around their government's obstructive data release practices — two of my favorite talks. I was also fascinated by the work of my fellow keynote speakers, especially Texty.org.ua’s work to document the manipulation of Ukrainian public perception through pro-Russian social media narratives.

I gave a keynote on trans and LGBTQ+ data, which has recently been removed and manipulated by the U.S. government. (Thank you to Alberto Cairo and the University of Miami for placing this topic on equal footing with important discussions about data-driven work around authoritarianism in Hungary, radicalization via social media, and Russian info-ops.)

Gender — and restrictive gender roles — are core to authoritarian projects. Society uses concepts of gender to sort people. Data both reflects and imposes these social definitions. As data practitioners, it isn't just our responsibility to question the accuracy and completeness of what's in a dataset. It's also our duty to question: Why are institutions creating this data? Why are they using this definition? How do these categories create a specific vision of the world, and who does that vision serve?

A few key points:

• In the wake of hundreds of new anti-trans laws, journalists can and should do more work to trace the consequences that these laws have for the public and the institutions that are supposed to serve the people.

• The government has removed data that even mentions the word "gender." It has censored datasets that contain information about transgender people.

• Data journalism has been misused to further disinformation about transgender people; we need to understand that this helps the authoritarian project to undermine trans people's existence and codify a rigid concept of gender

• The project to redefine "gender" and "sex" in the United States mirrors similar efforts globally and accompanies a widespread regression among countries that have passed laws to protect LGBTQ+ people. It is also tied to attempts to undermine racial progress and foster anti-immigrant sentiment. Judith Butler documents this in their recent book, but it's also visible in the news, as organizations in the U.S. and U.K. directly fund anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in other countries, and groups hostile to LGBTQ+ people share language and tactics at international conferences.

• The Trans News Initiative from the Trans Journalists Association, University of Miami, and Polygraph is one tool designed to help journalists, researchers, and the public understand what stories the U.S. media is telling about transgender communities. What sort of stories are we missing because we rely on official, governmental visions on how to measure people? What sorts of stories can we tell if we think more creatively about sourcing and creating our own data?

There is immense opportunity for data journalists to contextualize and challenge these phenomena. In fact, misrepresented data is such a key tool to attack transgender communities, that it is our obligation to counter it. But to do that, we can't just accept what's in official data. We have to increasingly ask questions about what data is and isn't collected, the ways that information and data are used against the public without any sort of legal regulation or protection, and what's happening in the data gaps.

I want to build networks for people who want to do this work.