Claire Wennink
One of many great affordances of digital globalization is the ability to learn from people unlike ourselves. Whether that be cooking a recipe that originates across the globe, or even just seeing photos of a beautiful, far-away place, the internet has undoubtedly broadened our horizons. This unrestricted access breaks down barriers and invites connection, but can also open up new challenges. Our search engines and the content they push play a big role in what we discover online, and our understanding of the world. So, are we right to trust the top suggestions from Google? And, how do these search results sneakily affect our psyche? Safiya Umoja Noble answers these questions and many more in her book Algorithms of Oppression: How search engines reinforce racism.
The internet and its countless websites are commonplace in the world we live in today.
The ability to access millions of sources at the click of a button is a privilege and a tool that most Americans are familiar with. A simple Google search, for example, seems like an objective way to sift through the mountains of online content, but, as it turns out, this seemingly straightforward search engine may not be as faultless as we think.
On June 17th, 2015, Dylan Roof opened fire at a bible study happening in a predominantly Black, South Carolina Church. Nine parishioners were killed and many more were injured. In her book, Algorithms of Oppression Safiya Umoja Noble digs deep into Roof’s journey to radicalization, and how the internet played a leading role. After the murder of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, Roof allegedly Googled the term “Black on White crime”, to better understand the history and dimensions of interracial violence in the United States. Noble writes that “what Roof found was information that confirmed a patently false notion that Black violence on White Americans is an American crisis” (Noble 2018). This understanding was
largely informed by a group he discovered online, called the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a group whose ideas he understood as facts, when, in reality, the CCC is a biased, racist group, that has been long dedicated to hindering the advancement of Black people in the United States. Noble herself conducted a study, searching “Black on White crime”, in different US cities at different points in time, and what she found was unsettlingly similar to Roof’s search results.
Now, blind faith in search engines might lead one to believe that Black-on-White crime is an attention-worthy issue, after all, multiple sources at the top of the results page are reporting on it, mustn’t it be true? The reality that Noble highlights in her book is that Roof’s search engine did not lead him to the better-known and more reputable FBI website reporting crime statistics.
Had Roof been presented with the FBI’s website first, he would have learned that “most violence against White Americans is committed by White Americans, as most violence against African Americans is largely committed by other African Americans” (Noble 2018). In this case, it is made abundantly clear that the information pushed to us online has incredible power over our understanding of the world. Furthermore, Noble presents the reality that the cost of misinformation is higher than ever.
This crushing example is only one of many important truths Noble shares in her
hard-hitting work, Algorithms of Oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. Whether you are interested in learning about the power of corporate control over public information, or about how Google search results reinforce stereotypes and profit off of racism and sexism, Algorithms of Oppression reveals the hard truth behind your go-to search engine.
In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble’s powerful writing teaches us that our search results are frequently unrepresentative of the real world, and that blind trust online comes
at a cost, and, at the very least, Noble’s words will definitely force you to think twice before clicking on the first Google result you see.