When Frances Haugen blew the whistle on Facebook, she thrust algorithm—a clunky Silicon Valley buzzword—into mainstream conversation. Facebook’s algorithm, the mathematical map for how the platform works, was intentionally insidious, Haugen said: It boosted divisive content to the top of users’ timelines to ensnare them for as long as possible. Some people understood the social giant’s many ethical compromises, but they weren’t necessarily aware of this component of its influence—that its algorithms were predatory by design. Safiya Noble knew.
She knew from the day in 2011 when she googled “Black girls” to find activities for her daughter and young nieces and the search engine spat back racialized porn. (The disturbing first hit? HotBlackPussy.com.) “I was overtaken by the results,” wrote Noble, then an assistant professor of information studies at the University of Southern California, in the academic manifesto she’d go on to author, 2018’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. “Hit indeed.”
At the heart of Noble’s work is the assertion that racism and sexism are baked into algorithms, from H.R. software that screens out women and candidates of color for jobs to Facebook’s advertising platform, which allegedly enabled landlords to exclude women, people with disabilities, people of color, and other underrepresented communities. (A lawsuit was settled on the matter.)
“The world is becoming more unequal,” Noble, now a professor at UCLA and director of its Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, told me by phone, “and these technologies are implicated in that.”
Noble argues that algorithms are not nameless, faceless bots and results like the ones she was served about Black girls are not glitches. Rather, behind every algorithm are real people who bring their own biases to the inner workings of the web. In the past, Noble writes, Google’s photo application automatically tagged African Americans as apes and animals, and Google Maps searches for the N-word directed users to the White House during the Obama presidency.
From the early days of the internet, “the computing industry came to be dominated and controlled by white men,” Noble said, and “they reconsolidated and reinscribed their power” in it, shaping public opinion and what information is seen as legitimate through technologies like Google search. (She cites Google search engineer James Damore, who notoriously went viral in 2017 for his screed arguing that, in her words, “women are psychologically inferior and incapable of being as good at software engineering as men.”)
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