AlgoRace campaign against algorithmic racial discrimination in Spain (2021–ongoing)

Founded in 2021, AlgoRace launched Spain's first sustained civil-society campaign explicitly focused on the racial dimensions of algorithmic and AI governance — a multi-front effort combining accessible research, coalition-building with anti-racist social movements, public-policy intervention in Spanish national AI institutions, and escalating parliamentary engagement. The campaign's animating diagnosis is that AI and automated decision-making systems "are applied under a hierarchy of power: from top to bottom, from rich to poor, from privileged to marginalized, from white to racialized subjects" — and that democratic accountability of these systems requires equipping the communities most exposed to them with the empirical evidence and conceptual vocabulary to participate in the debate on their own terms. No comparable sustained campaign existed in Spanish civil society before AlgoRace's launch.

Origins and public launch (2021–2022)

AlgoRace was established in late 2021 by an interdisciplinary team of six — three racialized and three white members combining expertise in AI, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and communications — with initial development funded by the Open Society Initiative for Europe (OSIFE). The project publicly launched on 18 January 2022 with a stated mandate to "vincular el movimiento antirracista y anticolonial con el debate sobre la inteligencia artificial" — to link the anti-racist and anti-colonial movement with the debate on AI, conducting the debate in Spanish and from a Spanish position rather than translating existing English-language framings.

The five harm domains the campaign placed at its centre from the outset — predictive policing and racial profiling, facial recognition, biometric data at the southern border, discriminatory welfare algorithms, and structural racial amplification — were chosen specifically because they describe AI deployments that the Spanish state and private actors were already operating or procuring against racialized and migrant communities before any civil-society accountability infrastructure existed to contest them.

Accessible research publications

AlgoRace's first major research output was Una introducción a la IA y la discriminación algorítmica para movimientos sociales (November 2022), an accessible explainer authored by Youssef M. Ouled, intentionally written for social-movement and anti-racist audiences who had not previously engaged with AI governance debates. The report introduced AI and automated decision-making in lay terms, documented specific cases of racial discrimination in deployed systems in Spain — the Ingreso Mínimo Vital eligibility algorithm, the bono eléctrico, predictive policing, facial recognition error rates for non-white faces, and biometric data collection at Ceuta and Melilla's "smart borders" — and named forms of civil-society resistance emerging in Spain and elsewhere. It launched at events in Madrid (26 November 2022) and Barcelona (30 November 2022); a second AlgoRace research report, extending the technology focus, appeared in October 2023.

In October 2024, AlgoRace co-authored with EuroMed Rights a dedicated report on the border harm domain: Tecnologías digitales para el control migratorio en la frontera sur de España: A journey to the cross-cutting edge of digital automation in Ceuta and Melilla and the Canary Islands. The report's central finding was that Spain's expanding digital surveillance infrastructure at its southern border — fingerprint collection, biometric data gathering, drone monitoring — was deployed primarily to detect and expel migrants rather than for rescue and protection operations, forcing people toward more dangerous routes and complicating asylum access. The report was presented to the European Parliament on 16 October 2024, extending the campaign's reach from Spanish institutional targets to the European level.

Policy interventions: organic law consultation, AESIA, and SEDIA

AlgoRace's most concrete public-policy work in its first years was a three-part intervention into Spain's AI regulatory architecture.

Ministry of Equality consultation (2022). When the Spanish Ministry of Equality opened a public consultation on a proposed organic law against racism and racial discrimination in March 2022, AlgoRace led a coalition of approximately 20 anti-racist organisations in submitting joint proposals addressing AI-specific discrimination. The coalition demanded that AI be used only where it does not violate the rights of oppressed groups or perpetuate structural violence; that algorithmic systems be "traceable, intelligent and checkable" with civil society participation; prohibition of predictive and profiling AI deployed by police as systems that "strengthen structural discrimination of marginalised groups"; a ban on biometric data collection at borders; and repeal of facial recognition authorisations in EU law.

AESIA open letter (September 2022). AlgoRace was among seven drafting organisations on an open letter to the Spanish government regarding the proposed Agencia Española de Supervisión de la Inteligencia Artificial (AESIA), coordinated during Spain's upcoming EU Council presidency. The letter was signed by 60 organisations including European Digital Rights (EDRi), the Panoptykon Foundation, Access Info Europe, Fair Trials, and Digitalcourage. It argued for civil-society involvement in designing AESIA and demanded "a clear and defined civil society participation strategy in the processes and policy development related to artificial intelligence" — framing the AESIA design process as an accountability gap requiring democratic correction.

SEDIA open letter (March 2023). AlgoRace co-drafted a second intervention with Algorights, lafede.cat, and DigitalFems addressing the projects of the Secretaría de Estado de Digitalización e Inteligencia Artificial (SEDIA). The letter demanded a civil-society meeting on fundamental-rights guarantees, published accounts of how €5 million within a €13 million SEDIA-ADIA-Lab investment would be spent, and a signed scientific and ethical-integrity document from SEDIA and participating research staff. Together, the two letters established AlgoRace as the principal Spanish civil-society interlocutor on national AI-supervision architecture from outside the digital-rights professional field — a position the AESIA and SEDIA letters together with Algorights, lafede.cat, and DigitalFems constitute as the IA Ciudadana coalition.

Grupo Semilla and parliamentary escalation (2024–2026)

The campaign's 2024 phase marked an escalation in both institutional access and coalition breadth. In September 2024, AlgoRace organised a civil-society day on digital-environment rights inside the Congreso de los Diputados, bringing its anti-algorithmic-racism analysis directly to Spanish parliamentarians and marking a shift from open-letter advocacy into direct parliamentary engagement.

For the November 2024 action, AlgoRace drew on the Grupo Semilla network — a coalition of 15 anti-racist and migrant-rights organisations including Afrocoletiva, Riders por Derechos, SOS Racismo Madrid, SOS Racisme Catalunya, Frente Migrante, and ExMENAS — which AlgoRace founded and coordinates. On 28 November 2024, Grupo Semilla submitted a formal document of demands to Congress President Francina Armengol, calling for: forums and dialogue spaces between civil society and decision-makers on AI and digital rights; greater visibility of AI risks and harms not covered by the EU AI Act (which entered into force in August 2024); and attention to the extraction of digital infrastructure from Global South countries. The submission framed digital transition as inherently a racial justice question: "the digitalization of society does not inherently improve public services, but transfers traditional barriers to a digital environment."

On 26 March 2026, AlgoRace coordinator Youssef M. Ouled appeared before the Spanish Committee on Economy, Trade and Digital Transformation as part of the Commission's work on the economic and social impact of digitalisation and AI — the first time an organisation dedicated specifically to algorithmic racial justice gave testimony before a Spanish parliamentary committee in this context.

Significance in the corpus

The AlgoRace campaign closes the corpus's Southern Europe gap on the racial-profiling and algorithmic-discrimination movement area. It is structurally distinct from the corpus's other European AI accountability campaigns — EDRi's EU AI Act work, Access Now's #BanBS coalition, the Panoptykon-led campaigns in Poland — in anchoring its demand in an explicitly anti-racist and decolonial register rather than a digital-rights or fundamental-rights register, and in directing its primary audience not at EU institutions or English-language policy fora but at Spanish-language anti-racist social movements and the migrant communities most exposed to algorithmic harm. Its community-building work — the Grupo Semilla network of 15 organisations — distinguishes it as a campaign that treats the capacity of racialized communities to engage in AI governance debates as itself a structural outcome, alongside any legislative or regulatory win.