Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble (review)

What happens when you type "black girls …" in a Google search? Why is it that courtroom-sentencing software used by judges overpredicts Black criminality? Would Dylann Roof have murdered innocent worshippers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina had his Google search for information after the Trayvon Martin case not suggested that Black on white crime was an epidemic issue? Do we have a right to be forgotten, or do digital traces last forever in the vaults of search engines such as Google, and, worse yet, what can we do when information that was produced for private consumption is circulated in acts such as "revenge porn" that can damage or altogether obliterate women's employment opportunities? How is Black hairdresser Kandis supposed to keep her business when the algorithmic practices of Yelp in concert with the retreat of affirmative action by the major university by which she works reduce and nearly erase her visibility and ability to make a living? In Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Safiya Umoja Noble brings together Black feminist studies, library and information sciences (LIS), and media studies to carve out the field of Black feminist technology studies (BFTS). Begun as a follow-up to Andre Brock's challenge to see what happens when you type "black girls …" on a Google search in 2011, Noble pursues the study of this most influential search engine. What she finds are tremendous continuities with previous deployments of information and media technologies and a few, mostly dystopian, ruptures that threaten our democracy and our ability to access information. Based originally in library and information sciences (LIS), Noble details how systems of categorization embody biases in classifications. LIS citation practices served as a model for Google creators Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Noble notes that even though multiple review processes are used to police citation practices, these practices continue to demonstrate race and gender exclusionary tendencies. Moreover, Page and Brin themselves noted potential abuses of the search engine process due to commercial interests. The application of a practice created to facilitate the production of knowledge applied to the marketing of commodities is but one of the many transitions from the public commons to the advertising of everything. The consequences of this latest form of neoliberal assault on our public commons are born out disproportionately by the most vulnerable members in our population. Safiya Noble focuses primarily on Black girls and women, though she acknowledges this research applies to Latinas, Asian Americans, and indeed any racialized female category.

Noble takes many "truths" about the Internet in general, and Google search engine in particular, and debunks them. These are important to circulate given that Noble provides ample evidence that the public by and large trusts Google as a search engine. Not enough people realize that results do not represent the best or even most popular information. Given that the Internet and search engines, especially Google, are part of culture and the economy, Noble urges us to remember two important things. First, our culture is rooted in a system of white supremacy. Historical analyses of employment and representation in media industries show persistent patterns of racialized tropes from advertising to pornography. Second, the contemporary formation of neoliberal economics turns everything, including matters that were recently thought to be public goods such as information and education, into commodities. Pretending Google will strengthen democracy and provide neutral information is just that—a pretense. Google is an advertising engine, not an information search engine. Google is but the latest in a series of information technologies whose promise is democratic but whose actual deployment is commercial. Indeed, as with previous "new" technologies of information and media, search engines and Google exist to make a profit, not to strengthen democracy. Furthermore, drawing on the great insight provided by Dallas Smythe, a political economist of communication, Noble contends that "[w]e are the product that Google...