Algorithms of Oppression

How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

mp3 cd

English language

Published Aug. 14, 2018 by Audible Studios on Brilliance, Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio.

ISBN:
978-1-7213-0723-4
Copied ISBN!

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (9 reviews)

A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms Run a Google search for "black girls"-what will you find? "Big Booty" and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in "white girls," the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about "why black women are so sassy" or "why black women are so angry" presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads …

2 editions

Review of 'Algorithms of Oppression' on 'LibraryThing'

No rating

Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression is a book I waited for impatiently because I was familiar enough with her research to know it fit my reading interests and was important in my profession. (It jumped into the pages of Inside Higher Ed when a hasty Twitter questioning of the book's validity by a major tech organization’s official Twitter account based on nothing more than a quick glance at a publisher’s description led to a backlash. And many comments here at IHE, of course.) It’s the culmination of years of studying the ways algorithmic information systems – Google Algorithms of Oppression coverSearch in particular – represent people who are not white and not male. She noticed years ago, when shopping for her nieces, that black girls looking themselves up, would see lots of porn because that’s what Google thought you must be looking for. After she published an article about …