The way search engines work is far from unprejudiced, a new book argues.

he internet might seem like a level playing field, but it isn’t. Safiya Umoja Noble came face to face with that fact one day when she used Google’s search engine to look for subjects her nieces might find interesting. She entered the term “black girls” and came back with pages dominated by pornography.

Noble, a USC Annenberg communications professor, was horrified but not surprised. For years she has been arguing that the values of the web reflect its builders—mostly white, Western men—and do not represent minorities and women. Her latest book, Algorithms of Oppression, details research she started after that fateful Google search, and it explores the hidden structures that shape how we get information through the internet. Read more…

by Jackie Snow

February 26, 2018