Dr. Safiya U. Noble is the David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of Gender Studies, African American Studies, and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the Director of the Center on Race & Digital Justice and Co-Director of the Minderoo Initiative on Tech & Power at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). She currently serves as Interim Director of the UCLA DataX Initiative, leading work in critical data studies for the campus.
Professor Noble is the author of the best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic harm in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press), which has been widely-reviewed in scholarly and popular publications. In 2021, she was recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow for her ground-breaking work on algorithmic discrimination.
Dr. Noble is a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, serving those vulnerable to online harassment, and provides expertise to a number of civil and human rights organizations. She is a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford where she is a chartering member of the International Panel on the Information Environment. In 2022, she was recognized as the inaugural NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award recipient.
“Noble demolishes the popular assumption that Google is a values-free tool with no agenda…She astutely questions the wisdom of turning so much of our data and intellectual capital over to a corporate monopoly….Noble’s study should prompt some soul-searching about our reliance on commercial search engines and about digital social equity.”
― STARRED Booklist
“Rather than being a neutral arbiter that sorts content by quality, Noble argues that search engines are easily gamed in ways that reflect discriminatory practices. Even without malevolent actors, search engines may be perpetuating racist stereotypes.”
― Chicago Tribune
“50 Best Book of 2018 So Far. There’s been a growing swell of concern in the academic community about the stranglehold that commercial (for-profit) search engines have over access to information in our world. Safiya Umoja Noble builds on this body of work…to demonstrate that search engines, and in particular Google, are not simply imperfect machines, but systems designed by humans in ways that replicate the power structures of the western countries where they are built, complete with all the sexism and racism that are built into those structures.”
― Popmatters.com
“A distressing account of algorithms run amok.”
― Kirkus Reviews
“Noble’s thesis is a new tune in the ever-louder chorus that, in light of the dominance of the big tech companies, is singing for ‘protections and attention that work in service of the public.”
― The Financial Times