Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

The implications of such marginalization are profound. The insights about sexist and racist biases... are important because information organizations, from libraries to schools and universities to governmental agencies, are increasingly reliant on being displaced by a variety of web-based "tools" as if there are no political, social, or economic consequences of doing so.

This monopoly of information is a threat to democracy...

...large technologies such as Google need to be broken up and regulated, because their consolidated power and cultural influence make competition largely impossible. This monopoly in the information sector is a threat to democracy...

Google Search is in fact an advertising platform, not intended to solely serve as a public information resource in the way that, say, a library might. Google creates advertising algorithms, not information algorithms.

...artificial intelligence will become a major human rights issue in the twenty-first century.

algorithmic oppression is not just a glitch in the system but, rather, is fundamental to the operating system of the web.

Where men shape technology, they shape it to the exclusion of women, especially Black women.

We need people designing technologies for society to have training and an education on the histories of marginalized people, at a minimum, and we need them working alongside people with rigorous training and preparation from the social sciences and humanities.

I do not think it a coincidence that when women and people of color are finally given opportunity to participate in limited spheres of decision making in society, computers are simultaneously celebrated as a more optimal choice for making social decisions.

The notion that Google/ Alphabet has the potential to be a democratizing force is certainly laudable, but the contradictions inherent in its projects must be contextualized in the historical conditions that both create and are created by it.

From claims of Twitter’s racist trolling that drives people from its platform to charges that Airbnb’s owners openly discriminate against African Americans who rent their homes to racial profiling at Apple stores in Australia and Snapchat’s racist filters, there is no shortage of projects to take on in sophisticated ways by people far more qualified than untrained computer engineers, whom, through no fault of their own, are underexposed to the critical thinking and learning about history and culture afforded by the social sciences and humanities in most colleges of engineering nationwide. The lack of a diverse and critically minded workforce on issues of race and gender in Silicon Valley impacts its intellectual output.

If Google isn’t responsible for its algorithm, then who is?

Rather than prioritize the dominant narratives, Internet search platforms and technology companies could allow for greater expression and serve as a democratizing tool for the public.

some of the very people who are developing search algorithms and architecture are willing to promote sexist and racist attitudes openly at work and beyond, while we are supposed to believe that these same employees are developing “neutral” or “objective” decision-making tools.

The spectacles of zoos, circuses, and world's fairs and expositions are important sites that predate the Internet by more than a century, but it can be argued and is in fact argued here that these traditions of displaying native bodies extend to the information age and are replicated in a host of problematic ways in the indexing, organization, and classification of information about Black and Brown bodies--especially on the commercial web.

Google’s enviable position as the monopoly leader in the provision of information has allowed its organization of information and customization to be driven by its economic imperatives and has influenced broad swaths of society to see it as the creator and keeper of information culture online, which I am arguing is another form of American imperialism that manifests itself as a “gatekeeper”18 on the web.

To review, in the ecosystem, Black people provide the most gruelling labor for blood minerals, and they do the most dangerous, toxic work of dismantling e-waste in places such as Ghana, where huge garbage piles of poisonous waste from discarded electronics from the rest of the world is shipped.

Men, intending to or not, have used their control and monopoly over the domain of technology to further consolidate their social, political, and economic power in society and rarely give up these privileges to create structural shifts in these inheritances. Where men shape technology, they shape it to the exclusion of women, especially Black women.

We must trouble the notion of Google as a public resource, particularly as institutions become more reliant on Google when looking for high-quality, contextualized, and credible information. This shift from public institutions such as libraries and schools as brokers of information to the private sector, in projects such as Google Books, for example, is placing previously public assets in the hands of a multinational corporation for private exploitation. Information is a new commodity, and search engines can function as private enclosures.

From claims of Twitter's racist trolling that drives people from its platform to charges that Airbnb's owners openly discriminate against African Americans who rent their homes to racial profiling at Apples stores in Australia and Snapchat's racist filters, there is no shortage of projects to take on in sophisticated ways by people far more qualified than untrained computer engineers, whom, through no fault of their own, are underexposed to critical thinking and learning about history and culture afforded by the social sciences and humanities in most colleges nationwide. The lack of a diverse and critically minded workforce on issues of race and gender in Silicon Valley impacts its intellectual output.

The near-ubiquitous use of algorithmically driven software, both visible and invisible to everyday people, demands a closer inspection of what values are prioritized in such automated decision-making systems.

There is no algorithm that can replace human dignity. They created a system that simulates a value, based on their own algorithm...

In this case, the clicks of users, coupled with the commercial processes that allow paid advertising to be prioritized in search results, mean that representations of women are ranked on a search engine page in ways that underscore women’s historical and contemporary lack of status in society—a direct mapping of old media traditions into new media architecture.

Michael Omi and Howard Winant, two key scholars of race in the United States, distinguish the ways that racial rule has moved “from dictatorship to democracy” as a means of masking domination over racialized groups in the United States.11 In the context of the web, we see the absolving of workplace practices such as the low level of employment of African Americans in Silicon Valley and the products that stem from it, such as algorithms that organize information for the public, not as matters of domination that persist in these realms but as democratic and fair projects, many of which mask the racism at play.