To do my best at boiling down a book that is already working hard to summarize a very large and broad topic, this book explores how a ubiquitous technology, web search, frequently replicates, reinforces, and amplifies features of racism in our society. Similar to Automating Inequality, this book is an important piece of work that criticizes the notion of algorithmic objectivity. Dr. Noble demonstrates how stereotypes of black women and girls are repeated and reinforced through keywords; that despite stated intentions and adjustments to avoid offensive results such as these, Google’s underlying technology encourages and rewards the phenomena. Equally important is Noble’s observation that Google’s search engine suffers from a weakness of the bibliometric tools in its technological ancestry. Specifically, that node centrality/importance in a network (e.g., of internet pages) isn’t a complete representation of the information that the network contains, and that tools ranking nodes in this way masks how existing hierarchies have shaped the network’s construction.
andrew w. moore | reading
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
Safiya Umoja Noble (2018)
★★★★★
Started: 2023-02-10
Finished: 2023-08-19