Safiya Noble on Challenging the Algorithms of Oppression c/o PDF 2016
Overview
Safiya Noble is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. In her PDF 2016 talk, Noble explains why we should care about commercial spaces dominating our information landscape.
Key Takeaways
On what happens when black girls look for themselves online:
These were the kinds of results that dominated the first page. I was a black girl, I'm still a black woman. I have black daughters and nieces. I care very much about what happens when black girls go online and look for ourselves. In 2011, sugaryblackpussy.com was the #1 hit when you did a search on black girls. In 2009 it was hotblackpussy.com, I guess sugary displaced them, you know the porn industry it’s up and down. For many years, pornography dominated the first page of search results when you looked for women and girls of color. And for me this is a fundamental example of why we have to care about the role of search engines, in particular, and how they misrepresent women, particularly women and girls of color.
On getting the information that sells vs. getting the information we seek:
Search engines are not informational retrieval algorithms. They’re not concerned with information retrieval in the way that information professionals like librarians and people that are in my field are concerned with. When you’re engaging with search engines, as many of you know, you’re dealing with advertising algorithms. So this is a fundamental difference in the time of information that we get. The kind of results that we get, as you know, are linked to things that are commercially viable and profitable.
On the role of algorithm in shaping historical narratives:
So here’s an interesting search, if you’re looking for ‘Mike Brown’ in Youtube, the first thing that you get led to are things like Mike Brown shooting. Now I can tell you, as the mother of Black son, that if my son is ever murdered...the narrative of my son Nico is not gonna be about his shooting. That’s not the legacy, that’s not the memory that I’m going to want dominating the internet about him. So this is interesting as well to me, the ways in which companies like, in this case, Youtube and CNN, they’re profiting incredibly off of people being led to these types of results first. As opposed to other types of narratives that could in fact dominate the landscape.
On the power of information spaces to constrain or inspire new realities:
We have more data and technology than ever and we have more inequality and injustice to go with it. All of the latest reports on economic inequality show us that globally inequality is on the rise. And i think there’s a very important role that information...you know in our earlier presentation someone said education was so crucial to democracy and to creating the types of society that we want...but our information spaces are so fraught with racial bias, racist bias, sexist bias, that there’s no way that we can parse through that and make sense of the new realities we want to create. I appreciate your time for listening and I hope that you’ll take a look at the kinds of work that many of us are doing to raise the challenges and see what we can do to solve for them.