In Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

Bio:

Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is an associate professor at UCLA, and is a visiting faculty member to the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication. She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press). In 2019, she will join the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford as a Senior Research Fellow.

This event is sponsored by the Princeton University Library, Humanities Council, Center for Collaborative History, Department of African American Studies, University Center for Human Values, Center for Information Technology Policy, Department of Computer Science, Center for Statistics and Machine Learning, The Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton (IHUM), Department of Sociology, Department of Politics, Department of Anthropology, Department of Mathematics, and the Woodrow Wilson School.