Search Engines and Social Representation Issues

I love Kate Crawford and I'm so glad that she said all kinds of stuff that I don't have to say now about white supremacy so let's just get that out of the way that's gonna be the foundation of what I'm going to talk about here today. I am an information studies professor so that means I'm coming at this from the perspective of caring about the kind of knowledge and information that's available to the public particularly at a time when people in the public are using search engines rather than libraries. or teachers to make sense of the world that we're inhabiting. And I'm going to give you some examples today of the research that I've been doing, and it's very difficult to do this for most of the scholars who are presenting in 12 minutes. What? That's like the warm-up. So I don't know. I'm going to try to get through a lot of this with headlines, but I'll also share some places where you can go and do a deeper reading. Okay, so I started collecting searches on black girls in 2009. These were the kinds of results. that dominated the first page. I was a black girl. I'm still a black girl. I'm a black woman. I have black daughters and nieces. I care very much about what happens when black girls go online and look for ourselves. In 2011, sugaryblackpussy.com was the number one hit when you did a search on black girls. In 2009, it was hotblackpussy.com. I guess sugary displaced them. You know the porn industry, it's up and down. For many years, pornography dominated the first page of search results when you looked for women and girls of color. And to me, this is a really fundamental example of why we have to care about the role of search engines in particular and how they misrepresent women, particularly women and girls of color. Now, there's nothing about girls or children on the front page when you're looking for girls of color. So in the most fundamental kind of sexism 101, women get coded as girls and pornified as such. I wanted to write about this for Essence Magazine, but Essence Magazine, which targets black women and women of color, doesn't actually care anything about people who are not famous, already well-established writers. So I decided I would write for Bitch Magazine back in 2012. It was very interesting trying to argue. Bitch Magazine is a kind of a feminist magazine that critiques popular culture. And when I wrote to them and I said, you should really let me write this article, they said, everybody knows that when you search for girls, you get porn. Do they? I was like, do they? I don't, okay. We don't want to write about that? We don't want to talk about that? Okay. So finally, I kind of was battling with them on email and I said, you got to really let me write this. And they said, this is not a story. I said, okay, here's what it is. just do a Google search on women's magazines and let me know if Bitch Magazine shows up anywhere in the first five pages. And when it didn't, they gave me the story. So this is like what you have to do. One of the things that I was trying to explain to them is that unless you're searching for feminism, you can't find Bitch Magazine. So think of all the women and girls who need feminism, but when they search for feminist media, can't find it when they search on women. These are the kinds of concepts that I'm trying to parse in my research and make sense of to help the public. So you can check that out. Now, I've also written about what happens and the way people are misrepresented, particularly when there's a large media spectacle at play. So I wrote a paper for the Black Scholar about the way that Google, and listen, I know Google's here. Are you? I don't know. Anybody that loves Google? is not gonna love me at the end of this talk, all right? But Google's just a way for me to talk about what happens because they control the search engine landscape, so that's why I have to focus on them. But the rest of you, I'll be coming, so just give me a minute and I'll be coming to talk about your platforms too. So here were some interesting results about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman and the way in which, again, their reputations were kind of characterized in autosuggest. Now this is important because When you click on auto-suggestions, they take you to places that are incredibly popular, but also might be linked to advertisers, because those are really the clients for search engines, and this is really important that we investigate this. I started also collecting searches on concepts. So there's the literal, like what happens with our specific identities when we do searches on them. I loved it. I was giving a talk at Harvard once, and they had the university librarian, who's a fantastic woman. was sitting in the back of my talk and she I just searched for middle-aged white women and you would not believe how much porn came up. And I was like, I know it doesn't seem logical, but there it was. So here's an image search on the concept beautiful. Now, I didn't type beautiful women. And I work with a team of researchers who collect searches. And we do a lot of things to try to eliminate our digital traces and our histories. in these computers that we use. But here, a dominant kind of hegemonic white beauty norm that represents the concept beautiful. I have to tell you, I thought it was going to be a beach or maybe like as a naturescape when I search for beautiful because I find that to be beautiful. And I also think often about how people say, well, you know, Safiya, your search results are influenced by who you are. Except I've been writing about how Google misrepresents people of color for a really long time, and they've never quite figured that out and tailored my searches to me. So I'm just going to say there are plenty of studies that kind of disprove that this level of personalization is really in effect to that degree, and I can share that with you if you're interested. Now, part of what is important for us to think about when we, you know, and I say this often in my work is that search engines are not information retrieval. algorithms. They're not using, they're not concerned with information retrieval in the way that, say, information professionals like librarians and people that are in my field are concerned with. When you are engaging with search engines, as many of you know, we're dealing with advertising algorithms. So this is a fundamental difference in the type of information that we get. The kinds of results that we get, as you know, are linked to things that are also commercially viable and profitable. So here's an interesting search. If you're looking for Mike Brown in YouTube, the first thing that you get led to are things like Mike Brown's shooting. Now, I can tell you as a mother of a black son that if my son is ever murdered, first of all, you're totally going to hear from me and you're going to see me on the news every single night and it's going to be crazy and I'm going to need your help. But secondly, the narrative of my son Nico is not going to be about his shooting. That's not the legacy. That's not the memory. that I'm going to want dominating the internet about him. So this is interesting as well to me, the ways in which companies like, in this case, YouTube and CNN, Google and CNN, they're profiting incredibly off of people being led to these types of results first, as opposed to other types of narratives that could, in fact, dominate the landscape. Now... I have a book forthcoming. It's just being finished up this summer. It's tentatively titled Algorithms of Oppression. NYU Press told me that that's too many syllables, so that title might change. I'm not sure. But I'll tell you that I have a whole chapter in that book dedicated to what happened when Dylan Roof, in his own words, talked about the Google searching he did. Now, Dylan Roof, if you don't know, is a white supremacist murderer. He murdered nine African Americans in a church in South Carolina last summer. When the FBI disclosed that his diary at thelastradition.com was, in fact, his, I immediately went through it, and this was something that jumped out to me. He talks about his awakening of his racial identity formation, and he says, More importantly, as he's kind of looking through Wikipedia and other places, he says, it's prompted me to type in the words black on white crime into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first citizen, the first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. Now if you know anything about the Council of Conservative Citizens, it is the first result that you get, and it's also, you know, a white supremacist site. It actually is like, the Council of Conservative Citizens is like the businessman's KKK, okay? And it portends to be a conservative news aggregator, but if you look at work of people like Jesse Daniels, who wrote a fantastic book called Cyber Racism, it's all about cloaked websites. Websites that appear to be one thing, but are actually something else. So this is a white supremacist site, and this is the first information result that Dylan Roof, a young man, is getting to make sense of. A phrase that quite frankly is nonsensical. There's actually not a phenomenon called black-on-white crime. There is a phenomenon called white-on-white crime. If you look at FBI statistics, for example, which don't come up on the first page, it will disprove the idea that there is such a thing as black-on-white crime. The majority of homicides happen within group. So you guys, if you take anything away, take white-on-white crime. away from this talk because we've got black on black crime down. All right. We've heard plenty enough about that. What's interesting to me also about what Dylan Roof is trying to talk about is that he went deeper and deeper. And then he says in his own words that he found out about the Jewish problem as he's doing more searching. And he can say today that he is completely racially aware. Now, these to me are the kinds of examples that I'm sharing with you today that really underscore. why we have to care about commercial spaces dominating our information landscape at a time when, I will tell you, libraries are closing in schools, libraries are closing in public spaces in communities and cities. Provosts of universities are saying things like, why do we need the library when we've got Google? I would challenge you to say that many of these stereotypes, many of the kinds of information that we find is not correlated to the kinds of social responsibility that we need to be taking for the information that circulates and persists. These narratives about black women and black girls being sexual objects, those are old. Those are hundreds of years old stereotypes that are actually used in service of keeping black women and black communities in a particular space. And I think that it's ever more important that we're really investigating and interrogating. And so you'll be hearing from me doing that more and more. The last thing I kind of want to say is that, you know, we have more data and technology than ever and we have more inequality and injustice to go with it. All of the latest reports on economic inequality show us that globally inequality is on the rise and I think there's a very important role that information, you know, in our earlier presentation somebody said education was so crucial to democracy and to creating the types of society we want. But our information spaces are so fraught with racial bias, racist bias, sexist bias, that there's no way that we can parse through that and make sense of the kinds of new realities that we want to create. So I appreciate your time for listening, and I hope that you'll take a look at the kinds of work that many of us are doing to raise the challenges and see what we can do to solve for them. Thank you.

What? That's like the warm-up. So I don't know. I'm going to try to get through a lot of this with headlines, but I'll also share some places where you can go and do a deeper reading. Okay, so I started collecting searches on black girls in 2009. These were the kinds of results.

that dominated the first page. I was a black girl. I'm still a black girl.

I'm a black woman. I have black daughters and nieces. I care very much about what happens when black girls go online and look for ourselves.

In 2011, sugaryblackpussy.com was the number one hit when you did a search on black girls. In 2009, it was hotblackpussy.com. I guess sugary displaced them.

You know the porn industry, it's up and down. For many years, pornography dominated the first page of search results when you looked for women and girls of color. And to me, this is a really fundamental example of why we have to care about the role of search engines in particular and how they misrepresent women, particularly women and girls of color. Now, there's nothing about girls or children on the front page when you're looking for girls of color. So in the most fundamental kind of sexism 101, women get coded as girls and pornified as such.

I wanted to write about this for Essence Magazine, but Essence Magazine, which targets black women and women of color, doesn't actually care anything about people who are not famous, already well-established writers. So I decided I would write for Bitch Magazine back in 2012. It was very interesting trying to argue. Bitch Magazine is a kind of a feminist magazine that critiques popular culture.

And when I wrote to them and I said, you should really let me write this article, they said, everybody knows that when you search for girls, you get porn. Do they? I was like, do they? I don't, okay. We don't want to write about that?

We don't want to talk about that? Okay. So finally, I kind of was battling with them on email and I said, you got to really let me write this. And they said, this is not a story. I said, okay, here's what it is. just do a Google search on women's magazines and let me know if Bitch Magazine shows up anywhere in the first five pages.

And when it didn't, they gave me the story. So this is like what you have to do. One of the things that I was trying to explain to them is that unless you're searching for feminism, you can't find Bitch Magazine.

So think of all the women and girls who need feminism, but when they search for feminist media, can't find it when they search on women. These are the kinds of concepts that I'm trying to parse in my research and make sense of to help the public. So you can check that out. Now, I've also written about what happens and the way people are misrepresented, particularly when there's a large media spectacle at play.

So I wrote a paper for the Black Scholar about the way that Google, and listen, I know Google's here. Are you? I don't know.

Anybody that loves Google? is not gonna love me at the end of this talk, all right? But Google's just a way for me to talk about what happens because they control the search engine landscape, so that's why I have to focus on them.

But the rest of you, I'll be coming, so just give me a minute and I'll be coming to talk about your platforms too. So here were some interesting results about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman and the way in which, again, their reputations were kind of characterized in autosuggest. Now this is important because When you click on auto-suggestions, they take you to places that are incredibly popular, but also might be linked to advertisers, because those are really the clients for search engines, and this is really important that we investigate this. I started also collecting searches on concepts. So there's the literal, like what happens with our specific identities when we do searches on them.

I loved it. I was giving a talk at Harvard once, and they had the university librarian, who's a fantastic woman. was sitting in the back of my talk and she I just searched for middle-aged white women and you would not believe how much porn came up. And I was like, I know it doesn't seem logical, but there it was. So here's an image search on the concept beautiful.

Now, I didn't type beautiful women. And I work with a team of researchers who collect searches. And we do a lot of things to try to eliminate our digital traces and our histories.

in these computers that we use. But here, a dominant kind of hegemonic white beauty norm that represents the concept beautiful. I have to tell you, I thought it was going to be a beach or maybe like as a naturescape when I search for beautiful because I find that to be beautiful. And I also think often about how people say, well, you know, Safiya, your search results are influenced by who you are.

Except I've been writing about how Google misrepresents people of color for a really long time, and they've never quite figured that out and tailored my searches to me. So I'm just going to say there are plenty of studies that kind of disprove that this level of personalization is really in effect to that degree, and I can share that with you if you're interested. Now, part of what is important for us to think about when we, you know, and I say this often in my work is that search engines are not information retrieval. algorithms. They're not using, they're not concerned with information retrieval in the way that, say, information professionals like librarians and people that are in my field are concerned with.

When you are engaging with search engines, as many of you know, we're dealing with advertising algorithms. So this is a fundamental difference in the type of information that we get. The kinds of results that we get, as you know, are linked to things that are also commercially viable and profitable. So here's an interesting search. If you're looking for Mike Brown in YouTube, the first thing that you get led to are things like Mike Brown's shooting.

Now, I can tell you as a mother of a black son that if my son is ever murdered, first of all, you're totally going to hear from me and you're going to see me on the news every single night and it's going to be crazy and I'm going to need your help. But secondly, the narrative of my son Nico is not going to be about his shooting. That's not the legacy.

That's not the memory. that I'm going to want dominating the internet about him. So this is interesting as well to me, the ways in which companies like, in this case, YouTube and CNN, Google and CNN, they're profiting incredibly off of people being led to these types of results first, as opposed to other types of narratives that could, in fact, dominate the landscape. Now...

I have a book forthcoming. It's just being finished up this summer. It's tentatively titled Algorithms of Oppression. NYU Press told me that that's too many syllables, so that title might change.

I'm not sure. But I'll tell you that I have a whole chapter in that book dedicated to what happened when Dylan Roof, in his own words, talked about the Google searching he did. Now, Dylan Roof, if you don't know, is a white supremacist murderer.

He murdered nine African Americans in a church in South Carolina last summer. When the FBI disclosed that his diary at thelastradition.com was, in fact, his, I immediately went through it, and this was something that jumped out to me. He talks about his awakening of his racial identity formation, and he says, More importantly, as he's kind of looking through Wikipedia and other places, he says, it's prompted me to type in the words black on white crime into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first citizen, the first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. Now if you know anything about the Council of Conservative Citizens, it is the first result that you get, and it's also, you know, a white supremacist site.

It actually is like, the Council of Conservative Citizens is like the businessman's KKK, okay? And it portends to be a conservative news aggregator, but if you look at work of people like Jesse Daniels, who wrote a fantastic book called Cyber Racism, it's all about cloaked websites. Websites that appear to be one thing, but are actually something else. So this is a white supremacist site, and this is the first information result that Dylan Roof, a young man, is getting to make sense of. A phrase that quite frankly is nonsensical.

There's actually not a phenomenon called black-on-white crime. There is a phenomenon called white-on-white crime. If you look at FBI statistics, for example, which don't come up on the first page, it will disprove the idea that there is such a thing as black-on-white crime.

The majority of homicides happen within group. So you guys, if you take anything away, take white-on-white crime. away from this talk because we've got black on black crime down. All right. We've heard plenty enough about that.

What's interesting to me also about what Dylan Roof is trying to talk about is that he went deeper and deeper. And then he says in his own words that he found out about the Jewish problem as he's doing more searching. And he can say today that he is completely racially aware. Now, these to me are the kinds of examples that I'm sharing with you today that really underscore. why we have to care about commercial spaces dominating our information landscape at a time when, I will tell you, libraries are closing in schools, libraries are closing in public spaces in communities and cities.

Provosts of universities are saying things like, why do we need the library when we've got Google? I would challenge you to say that many of these stereotypes, many of the kinds of information that we find is not correlated to the kinds of social responsibility that we need to be taking for the information that circulates and persists. These narratives about black women and black girls being sexual objects, those are old.

Those are hundreds of years old stereotypes that are actually used in service of keeping black women and black communities in a particular space. And I think that it's ever more important that we're really investigating and interrogating. And so you'll be hearing from me doing that more and more.

The last thing I kind of want to say is that, you know, we have more data and technology than ever and we have more inequality and injustice to go with it. All of the latest reports on economic inequality show us that globally inequality is on the rise and I think there's a very important role that information, you know, in our earlier presentation somebody said education was so crucial to democracy and to creating the types of society we want. But our information spaces are so fraught with racial bias, racist bias, sexist bias, that there's no way that we can parse through that and make sense of the kinds of new realities that we want to create. So I appreciate your time for listening, and I hope that you'll take a look at the kinds of work that many of us are doing to raise the challenges and see what we can do to solve for them. Thank you.

Transcript for:Search Engines and Social Representation Issues

Transcript for:
Search Engines and Social Representation Issues