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Safiya Umoja Noble, known for her best-selling book, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, as well as her scholarship in Information Studies and African American studies at UCLA, visited Pitt the week of January 24. She spoke with participants in the Sawyer Seminar, gave a public talk and spoke with me in an interview for the Info Ecosystems Podcast. In Algorithms of Oppression, Dr. Noble described her experiences searching for terms related to race, women, and girls, such as “black girls” and encountering pornographic or racist content. These initial searches led her to years of study in information science, using the first page of Google search results as data. Coming from an advertising background before obtaining her Ph.D. in Library and Information Sciences, Dr. Noble was uniquely situated in the early 2010s to recognize Google for the advertising company it really is, while working in a field where many scholars around her viewed it as a source with exciting potential. Noble’s book examines what is present and absent in that first page of search results, and what those results say about the underlying mechanisms of organizing information and corporate decisions that enable those searches to occur. To open her public talk, Dr. Noble discussed several events that have occurred since her book was published in 2018. They notably included the exposure of Facebook’s privacy violations from 2017–2018 and the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement and in public housing, despite research from Dr. Joy Buolamwini indicating that facial recognition and analysis algorithms are inaccurate and can be discriminatory when applied to people of color. Over Read More

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Happy Black History Month! (originally published February 2020) by S.E. Hackney On Thursday, January 23rd, Dr. Safiya Noble spoke to an overflowing room of students, faculty, and community members about her best-selling book Algorithms of Oppression. The thesis of the book, and of Dr. Noble’s talk, is that not only racism is actually built in to the search algorithms which we use to navigate the internet, but that the big players of the internet (Google specifically) actually profit off of that racism by tokenizing the identities of people of color. It does this by associating identity phrases such as “black girls” or “phillipina” with the sites with the most streamlined (aka profitable) SEO, which is often pornography. This is a system of classification explicitly based on the centering of the white experience and and othering of Black people and other people of color. However, as Dr. Noble spoke about in her talk, tweaking a search result or two to avoid offense doesn’t actually solve a systemic problem — one where white voices are treated as the norm, and others eventually become reduced to SEO tags to be bought and sold. This idea played out recently in Barnes & Noble’s miss guided Black History Month project, where public domain books where the race of the protagonist is not specified (determined by algorithm) have new cover art created for them, depicting the characters as People of Color. Rod Faulkner, who first brought this issue to widespread attention describes it as “literary blackface,” and points out, “Slapping illustrations of Black versions Read More