CONFRONTING ALGORTHYIM RACISM & BIGTORY IN SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMAZATION

Dr. Safiya U. Noble is a MacArthur Fellow and Professor and Presidential Endowed Chair of the David O. Sears School of Social Sciences and Gender Studies at UCLA and director of the Center on Race & Digital Justice. Opened the conversation in the Irvin D. Reid Honors College located in the David Adamany Undergraduate Library at WSU, with credit given to the School of Library Science for presenting Dr. Nobel.

The year is focused on AI. Dr. Nobel gave a brief background story regarding how her book Algorithms of Oppression came to be the bestseller cited by the NYU PRESS as one of the most informative books regarding social justice of this generation.

Dr. Nobel gave a timeline regarding the earlier days of her book project when the symptoms of racism showed their ugly head through digital discrimination. She confronted executives in Silicon Valley in companies like Google and Yahoo, which were labeling marginalized communities as “other” rather than showing equality when addressing people in search engine presentations. Dr. Nobel, who had a long history in marketing and public relations, noticed systematic bias and bigotry in how people of color’s cultural categorizations were being maliciously slanted with language to project negative viewpoints in search engine results according to race, economic status, and gender identity.

The First Amendment treats search engines as editors and expects them to operate within the legality of the law. The Anti-Defamation League has a broad spectrum of things that qualify as hate speech, but as of now there is no clear-cut legal definition of what hate speech is and what hate speech is not. The Constitution focuses on protected activities and groups rather than individual people.

Dr. Nobel exposes a collective digital racism, and this includes anti-Semitism in the technology industry. This issue could have been similarly dismissed outright upon encounter and was until Dr. Nobel applied pressure. It does not matter if it’s quiet or loud hate; this type of uncivilized behavior can spread and do harm throughout American society if left unchecked. The constitutionality of the metaverse is a developing frontier, and it’s still to be seen if all the laws on the books will carry over to electronic space via internet communications.

Written by DeShean M. McClinton, WSU Broadcast Journalism 26

https://youtu.be/hC23AaUn5JY