Algorithms of Oppression: Faculty Focus: Safiya Umoja Noble

Back in 2009, when Safiya Noble conducted a Google search using keywords "black girls," "latina girls," and "asian girls," the first page of results were invariably linked to pornography.

In her book, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Noble delves into the ways search engines misrepresent a variety of people, concepts, types of information and knowledge. Her aim: to get people thinking and talking about the prominent role technology plays in shaping our lives and our future.

This video explores her journey into researching this topic and what it means to us.

Hi, my name is Safiya Umoja Noble,
and I'm an assistant professor

in the Annenberg School
of Communication and Journalism.

My research looks at racist
and sexist algorithmic bias

and the way in which people
are marginalized and oppressed

by digital media platforms.

I spent 15 years in corporate
marketing and advertising,

working for some of
the largest Fortune 100 brands

in the United States.

We were starting to redirect
significant portions

of our advertising media
buying dollars online

and thinking about, in fact,
how to game Google search

and Yahoo! to elevate the brands
and amplify the messages.

And so at the moment that
I was leaving corporate America

and moving into academia,
the public was increasingly

falling in love with Google.

And this lead me to thinking
that this was a space and a place

that needed to be looked at more closely.

It was interesting to see
this total diversion

of public goods,

public knowledge,

and libraries being shifted into

a corporate, privately-held company.

When we go to places like Google search,

the public generally thinks
that what they'll find there

will be credible and fairly representing
different kinds of ideas, people,

and spheres of knowledge.

And so this is what really prompted
a 6 year inquiry into this phenomenon

of thinking about misrepresentation
on the internet, particularly

when people are using search engines,
and that culminated in my new book,

Algorithms of Oppression:
How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.

People think of algorithms
as simply a mathematical formulation.

But in fact algorithms
are really about automated decisions.

In 2009, I was kind of joking around,
in fact, with a colleague,

and I was telling him
that I was really interested

in what's happening with Google.

And just kind of offhand he said to me,

"Oh yeah, you should see what happens
when you google 'Black girls'."

Of course I immediately did the search,
found that pornography was the primary way

that Black girls, Latina girls,
Asian girls were represented.

That started a whole
deeper line of inquiry

about the way in which
misrepresentation happens

for women of color on the internet

and what some of the broader
social consequences of that are.

In my work, I look at the way
that these platforms are designed

to amplify certain voices
and silence other voices.

How does that come about?

What is that phenomena about?

What's the role of capital
or advertising dollars

in driving certain results
to the first page?

What do the results mean
in kind of a broader social,

historical, economic context?

So I contextualize the results
that I find to show

how incredibly problematic this is
because it further marginalizes

people who are already living in a margin,

people who are already suffering
from systemic oppression,

and yet again, these results
show up in these platforms

as if they are credible, fair,
objective, neutral ideas.

In the end, I call for alternatives.

And I argue strongly that we need

to have things like public interest search

that are not driven by commercial biases.

And I put out some ideas about
what it means to imagine

and create alternatives
in our public information sphere

that are based on
a different set of ethics.

If anything, I think that this book
is the kind of book that will help us

re-frame the idea that,
"We should just google it"

and everything will be fine.

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