Algorithms of Oppression - Vignesh Prasad

## Highlights - Those assumptions are dangerously flawed; . . . unpacking the black box of the search engine is something of interest not only to technologists and marketers, but to anyone who wants to understand how we make sense of a newly networked world. Search engines have come to play a central role in corralling and controlling the ever-growing sea of information that is available to us, and yet they are trusted more readily than they ought to be. They freely provide, it seems, a sorting of the wheat from the chaff, and answer our most profound and most trivial questions. They have become an object of faith. - the social context or meaning of derogatory or problematic Black women’s representations in Google’s ranking is normalised by virtue of their placement, making it easier for some people to believe that what exists on the page is strictly the result of the fact that more people are looking for Black women in pornography than anything else. This is because the public believes that what rises to the top in search is either the most popular or the most credible or both. - Most people surveyed could not tell the difference between paid advertising and “genuine” results. - The dominant notion of search results as being both “objective” and “popular” makes it seem as if misogynist or racist search results are a simple mirror of the collective. Not only do problematic search results seem “normal,” but they seem completely unavoidable as well, even though these ideas have been thoroughly debunked by scholars. - Google functions in the interests of its most influential paid advertisers or through an intersection of popular and commercial interests. - In essence, while users use the simplest queries they can in a search box because of the way interfaces are designed, this does not always reflect how search terms are mapped against more complex thought patterns and concepts that users have about a topic. This disjunction between, on the one hand, users’ queries and their real questions and, on the other, information retrieval systems makes understanding the complex linkages between the content of the results that appear in a search and their import as expressions of power and social relations of critical importance. - they directly suggest that it is in the consumer’s interest not to have search compromised by advertising and commercialism. - Google, according to its own disclaimer, will only remove pages that are considered unlawful, as is the case in France and Germany, where selling or distributing neo-Nazi materials is prohibited. Without such limits on derogatory, racist, sexist, or homophobic materials, Google allows its algorithm—which is, as we can see, laden with what Diaz calls “sociopolitics”—to stand without debate while protesting its inability to remove pages. - What these cases point to is that search results are deeply contextual and easily manipulated, rather than objective, consistent, and transparent, and that they can be legitimated only in social, political, and historical context. - Despite the widespread beliefs in the Internet as a democratic space where people have the power to dynamically participate as equals, the Internet is in fact organized to the benefit of powerful elites, including corporations that can afford to purchase and redirect searches to their own sites. - What this critique shows is that the privatization and commercial nature of information has become so normalized that it not only becomes obscured from view but, as a result, is increasingly difficult to critique within the public domain. - even though women constitute just slightly over half of Internet users, women’s voices and perspectives are not as loud and do not have as much impact online as those of men. - Structural inequalities of society are being reproduced on the Internet, and the quest for a race-, gender-, and class-less cyberspace could only “perpetuate and reinforce current systems of domination.” - As long as we define social life as the sum total of conscious and deliberate individual activities, then only individual manifestations of personal prejudice and hostility will be seen as racist. Systemic, collective, and coordinated behavior disappears from sight. - Neoliberalism has emerged and served as a framework for developing social and economic policy in the interest of elites, while simultaneously crafting a new worldview: an ideology of individual freedoms that foreground personal creativity, contribution, and participation, as if these engagements are not interconnected to broader labor practices of systemic and structural exclusion. - “Black girls need to learn how to code” is an excuse for not addressing the persistent marginalization of Black women in Silicon Valley. - To design technology for people, without a detailed and rigorous study of people and communities, makes for the many kinds of egregious tech designs we see that come at the expense of people of color and women. - Undoubtedly, Google/Alphabet is a broker of cultural imperialism that is arguably the most powerful expression of media dominance on the web we have yet to see. - forms of technology, from the design of nuclear power plants, which reflect centralized, authoritarian state controls over energy, to solar power designs that facilitate independent, democratic participation by citizens. He shows that design impacts social relations at economic and political levels. - Porn on the Internet is an expansion of neoliberal capitalist interests. The web itself has opened up new centers of profit and pushed the boundaries of consumption. Never before have there been so many points for the transmission and consumption of these representations of Black women’s bodies, largely trafficked outside the control and benefit of Black women and girls themselves. - The very notion that technologies are neutral must be directly challenged as a misnomer. - The ways in which women were often categorized was not much better, with headings such as “Women as Accountants” in lieu of the now-preferred “Women Accountants”; women were consistently an aberration to the assumed maleness of a subject area. - Search does not merely present pages but structures knowledge, and the results retrieved in a commercial search engine create their own particular material reality. Ranking is itself information that also reflects the political, social, and cultural values of the society that search engine companies operate within, a notion that is often obscured in traditional information science studies. - Link by link, click by click, search is building possibly the most lasting, ponderous, and significant cultural artifact in the history of humankind: the Database of Intentions. The Database of Intentions is simply this: the aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. . . . This information represents the real-time history of post-Web culture—a massive clickstream database of desires, needs, wants, and preferences that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked and exploited for all sorts of ends. - What we need are public search engine alternatives, united with public-interest journalism and librarianship, to ensure that the public has access to the highest quality information available. - Meanwhile, the onus for change is placed on the backs of Black people, and Black women in the United States in particular, to play a more meaningful role in the production of new images and ideas about Black people by learning to code, as if that alone could shift the tide of Silicon Valley’s vast exclusionary practices in its products and hiring. - I do not think it a coincidence that when women and people of color are finally given opportunity to participate in limited spheres of decision making in society, computers are simultaneously celebrated as a more optimal choice for making social decisions. - You are telling us we have to use certain keywords, and you don’t even know our language, because you think that “Black hair” means hair color, not texture! We don’t call each other African American; society calls us that. Do you know what I mean? We are Black. - we need greater transparency and public pressure to slow down the automation of our worst impulses. We have automated human decision making and then disavowed our responsibility for it.