A new book argues that the algorithms which dominate our lives can be racist and harmful to minorities. Here’s how the author suggests we change that.
It sounds ridiculous, but that’s exactly the argument sociologist Langdon Winner makes in “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” — a classic essay in which he examines several bridges built over roadways in Long Island, New York.
Many of these bridges were extremely low, with just nine feet of clearance from the curb. While most people would be unlikely to attach any special meaning to their design, Winner suggested that they were actually an embodiment of the social and racist prejudices of designer Robert Moses, a man who was responsible for building many of the roads, parks, bridges, and other public works in New York between the 1920s and 1970s.
With the low bridges, Winner wrote that Moses’ intention was to allow only whites of “upper” and “comfortable middle” classes access to the public park, since these were largely the only demographics able to afford cars at the time. Because poorer individuals (which included many people of color) relied on taller public buses, they were denied access to the park, as these buses were unable to handle the low overpasses and were therefore forced to find alternative routes.
As New York town planner Lee Koppleman later recalled, “The old son of a gun… made sure that buses would never be able to use his goddamned parkways.”
Jump forward the best party of 40 years and Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble, part of the faculty at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School of Communication, has written a book that updates Langdon Winner’s critique for the digital age.
Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression makes the argument that many of the algorithms driving today’s digital revolution (she focuses particularly on those created by Google) are helping to marginalize minorities through the way that they structure and encode the world around us. They are, quite literally, a part of systemic racism.
Before she earned her PhD, Noble was in the advertising industry where, she told Digital Trends, one of the big discussions was about “how to game Google for our clients, because we knew that if we could get content about our clients on the first page, that’s what mattered.”
A few years later, she received a different glimpse into this world of search engine optimization and prioritization from another angle when a friend mentioned the search results presented when a person looks for the term “black girls.”
“The first page was almost exclusively pornography or highly sexualized content,” she said. “I thought maybe it was a fluke, but over the next year I did the same for other identities, such as Asian girls and Latinas.”
The same thing held true: frequent pornographic results, even when the search terms didn’t include suffixes like “sex” or “porn.” “That’s when I started taking seriously that this wasn’t just happening in a random way, and thought that it was time for a more systemized study.”
Noble isn’t the first person to spot worrying discrimination embedded into tools that many of us still believe are objective. Several years ago, the African-American Harvard University PhD Latanya Sweeney noticed that her search results were accompanied by ads asking, “Have you ever been arrested?” These ads did not appear for her white colleagues.
Sweeney began a study which ultimately demonstrated that the machine-learning tools behind Google’s search were being inadvertently racist, by linking names more commonly given to black people to ads relating to arrest records.
It’s not only racial discrimination, either. Google Play’s automated recommender system has previously been found to suggest users who download Grindr, a location-based social-networking tool for gay men, also download a sex offender location-tracking app.
In both cases, the issue wasn’t necessarily that there was a racist programmer responsible for the algorithm, but rather that the algorithms were picking up on frequent discriminatory cultural associations between black people and criminal behavior and homosexuality and predatory behavior.
The point that Noble makes in her book is that companies like Google are now so influential that they can help shape public attitudes as well as reflecting them.
“We are increasingly being acculturated to the notion that digital technologies, particularly search engines, can give us better information than other human beings can,” she said.
“The idea is that they are vetting the most important information, and provide us with [objective answers] better than other knowledge spheres. People will often take complex questions to the web and do a Google search rather than going to the library or taking a class on the subject. The idea is that an answer can be found in 0.3 seconds to questions that have been debated for thousands of years.”
To Noble, the answer is that tech giants need to be held accountable for the results that they provide — and the harm they might cause.
“Tech companies have really invested in lobbying in the U. S. that they are simply intermediaries,” she continued. “They [claim that they] are tech companies and not media companies; they’ve designed a platform but they are not responsible for the content that flows through it. In the U. S. they do that because it means they are held to be harmless for trafficking in [things like] anti-semitism, Nazi propaganda, white supremacist literature, child pornography, and all the most hideous dimensions of the things which are out there on the web.”
She has little patience for the suggestion that tech companies like Google are simply reflecting what users search for. This is an argument Google itself made several years ago when it was taken to court in Germany for allegedly defamatory autocomplete results, linking the name Bettina Wulff, wife of the former German president Christian Wulff, with a rumor about prostitution and escorts.
“We believe that Google should not be held liable for terms that appear in autocomplete as these are predicted by computer algorithms based on searches from previous users, not by Google itself,” Google said at the time.
“If your platform has been designed in such a way as to allow this kind of content to flourish, then you’re also responsible for the way that you’ve designed your platform,” Noble said. “You cannot absolve your company from that.”
She also argues that tech companies are not as far removed from other, more traditional companies as they might like.
“When we’re talking about corporations and their impact on society,” she said. “I don’t think there are many industries that we can trace specific actions to one individual. What typically happens is that a CEO or a board of directors are held accountable if there is harm that hits communities.
