Thanks, every­one. It’s a plea­sure to be here today. I’m going to set my timer here so that I don’t run over, because that would be a bad thing. Alright. I don’t know if I need to do any­thing to turn myself on here. That sound­ed bad. But I actu­al­ly mean my slides.

I’m going to talk with you tonight about the cor­po­rate con­trol of infor­ma­tion and why we should care. And I’m going to try to do that as quick­ly as pos­si­ble. This is real­ly a talk that deserves more time, and I’m so excit­ed to be on this dis­tin­guished pan­el with these incred­i­ble mak­ers and researchers as well.

The thing that is so impor­tant to me and why I study cor­po­rate con­trol over infor­ma­tion, specif­i­cal­ly Google, is because in many ways, the pub­lic is increas­ing­ly reliant upon corporate-provided infor­ma­tion. And those con­texts for that pro­vi­sion often hap­pen by way of alleged neu­tral­i­ty or objec­tive kinds of truth that might be pro­vid­ed by these kinds of platforms.

Specifically, I study Google because Google real­ly dom­i­nates the mar­ket. It’s not just a mar­ket leader, it holds a monop­oly in the search space. And when you think about it, if you’re look­ing for infor­ma­tion on the Web and you don’t know a spe­cif­ic URL, you are required to go through a bro­ker, so to speak, or some­thing to help you find that kind of infor­ma­tion that you might be look­ing for. Those bro­kers are search engines. And search engines, we relate to them in so many ways. If you look at the lat­est research, for exam­ple, it shows that the major­i­ty of the pub­lic in the United States believes that search engines are fair and unbi­ased sources of infor­ma­tion. They also think that the kinds of results that they get back (and you can look at peer research) will tell you that peo­ple feel that this kind of infor­ma­tion that they find in com­mer­cial search engines like Google is cred­i­ble and trust­wor­thy. So this to me means that we have to pay close atten­tion to what’s hap­pen­ing in those spaces. 

Now, some of you might be famil­iar with this cam­paign. This is one of the more pop­u­lar cam­paigns that has come about to try to prob­lema­tize some of the kinds of things that we find in search engines. This is a cam­paign that was spon­sored by the United Nations. Ogilvy & Mather Dubai (that’s a large adver­tis­ing agency) did a cam­paign. They did search­es on var­i­ous women of col­or, in var­i­ous coun­tries, to see what kinds of things Google would pop­u­late as an auto-suggest. What they found, for exam­ple, were things like:

• women can­not dri­ve, be bish­ops, be trust­ed, speak in church
• Women should­n’t have rights, vote, work, box
• Women should stay at home, be slaves, be in the kitchen, not speak in church
• Women need to be put in their places, know their place, be con­trolled, be disciplined

This was an inter­est­ing and fair­ly effec­tive cam­paign in try­ing to point out that soci­ety holds, still, a whole lot of sex­ist, patri­ar­chal val­ues around women. But what the cam­paign failed to do was real­ly to con­tex­tu­al­ize why these kinds of results come up. It left most read­ers of the cam­paign believ­ing that search engines are sim­ply neu­tral, they’re sim­ply pro­vid­ing the results that are most pop­u­lar or most searched on.

But I have found in my research, I’ve done quite a bit of research on col­lect­ing search­es, specif­i­cal­ly on women and girls of col­or. What you find is that when you start to click on these auto-suggestions, they’re linked to sites that are incred­i­bly prof­itable for Google. For exam­ple, they might be linked to sites that are heav­i­ly pop­u­lat­ed by key­words that are used through Google’s AdWords pro­gram. So blogs or web sites that heav­i­ly use AdWords. 

So Google makes mon­ey on the kinds of traf­fic that hap­pens in rela­tion­ship to some of these search­es. And I think this is one of the fail­ings of a cam­paign to help us under­stand and make sense of this com­mer­cial aspect, what the cor­po­ra­ti­za­tion or the com­mer­cial aspects of infor­ma­tion mean to an adver­tis­ing com­pa­ny like Google. I often try to tell peo­ple that Google is not pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion retrieval algo­rithms, it’s pro­vid­ing adver­tis­ing algo­rithms. And that is a very impor­tant dis­tinc­tion when we think about what kind of infor­ma­tion is avail­able in these corporate-controlled spaces.

Here’s anoth­er exam­ple. Some of you might have seen this in the sum­mer. A very well-known Black Lives Matter activist, Deray McKesson, tweeted:

If you Google Map ​“nig­ga house,” this is what you’ll find. America. pic​.twit​ter​.com/​Y​W​R​O​1​O​i​Ygc

— der­ay (@deray) May 19, 2015

What was hap­pen­ing in Google Maps this sum­mer, many peo­ple noticed, is that if you were to go into Google Maps and search on ​“n‑word house” or ​“n‑word king” Google Maps would take you to the White House. The way that this was report­ed on by the media, The Washington Post pick­ing it up first and then oth­ers fol­low­ing, is that there must be some type of glitch in the sys­tem. And when we talk about these kinds of racist expe­ri­ences and point­ers that hap­pen in tech­ni­cal sys­tems, we also hear in the pub­lic dis­course these things talked about, again, as anom­alies, as glitch­es, rather than help­ing us to under­stand and unveil the ways that pro­gram­mers are peo­ple who write, and code is a lan­guage. And all lan­guages are value-laden, includ­ing bina­ry code languages. 

What this also tells us, even though Google gave a kind of non-apology, one of those ​“we apol­o­gize for any offense this may have caused.” I can tell you that when my hus­band says some­thing like, ​“I’m sor­ry if you’re offend­ed,” that is not actu­al­ly an apol­o­gy. So the non-apology apol­o­gy often comes for­ward from Google in these cas­es where they might even go so far as to issue a dis­claimer about the kinds of prob­lem­at­ic search results that come back. But again, the onus is typ­i­cal­ly placed back on the user. That some­how you searched incor­rect­ly, maybe you should’ve used dif­fer­ent words. Never, again, point­ing to the host of deci­sions, algo­rith­mi­cal­ly, that are made to get us to these kinds of point­ers. And this is real­ly important.

You can’t see this. I don’t know why it’s been blocked out. Sorry the image did­n’t come for­ward, but I’ll tell you what hap­pened here. You can see the main hit. I start­ed col­lect­ing search­es, for exam­ple on the words ​“black girls,” ​“Latina girls,” ​“Asian-American girls”, ​“South Asian girls,” ​“indige­nous girls,” back in 2009. In 2009 the first hit when you did a search for ​“black girls,” and of course I was moti­vat­ed par­tial­ly because a col­league of mine, Andre Brock had kind of mentioned—we were talk­ing about Google and some of the prob­lem­at­ics. And he said, ​“Oh yeah, you should see what hap­pens when you Google ​‘black girls.’ ” And I was like, ​“What? I’m a black girl. What hap­pens when you search for ​‘black girls?’ ” And of course I have six nieces and a daugh­ter. And what you would have seen here would be a list of high­ly porno­graph­ic and sex­u­al results. The first hit in 2009 was hot​black​pussy​.com, by 2011 that site had gone under and sug​ary​black​pussy​.com real­ly dom­i­nat­ed the land­scape as the first hit when you looked for ​“black girls.”

Now let me say again that where the bias is is that you did­n’t have to search for black girls and sex, or black girls and porn. Black girls metaphor­i­cal­ly meant sex and porn, as did Latinas and Asian girls, and so forth. White girls did­n’t fair too much bet­ter, [they] also were sex­u­al­ized. And then the term ​“girls” real­ly being coopt­ed in a very Sexism 101 way because all of these sites, as you clicked down them, were not girls. They were not chil­dren, they were not ado­les­cents, they were women, grown women. And so we have to look at these exam­ples and say, again, what does it mean? 

I first tried to write about this for Essence mag­a­zine, which is a mag­a­zine that focus­es on women of col­or, and they would­n’t have it because, who are you? I don’t know who you are. You can’t write for a major news out­let when you’re vir­tu­al­ly unknown. So I thought I’d write this arti­cle for the pub­lic and I con­tact­ed Bitch mag­a­zine. They’re a pro­gres­sive fem­i­nist mag­a­zine that cri­tiques soci­ety and cul­ture. And I could­n’t con­vince them to let me write this arti­cle. They were like, ​“Everybody knows when you search for girls you’re going to get porn.” And I was like, ​“Do they?”

So I said this is prob­lem­at­ic, how girls become stand-ins for pornog­ra­phy, and who and how that kind of sex­u­al­iza­tion. And you can see a map­ping, if you look in the porn stud­ies lit­er­a­ture, of the racial hier­ar­chy as well. This kind of more vio­lent forms of pornog­ra­phy and sex­u­al­iza­tion as you go through a racial order in the United States. Eventually, I told Bitch after about ten emails, ​“Listen, why don’t you do a search for ​‘wom­en’s mag­a­zines’ and then let me know if you find Bitch in the first five pages.” And then I got the sto­ry.

So the thing is that they under­stood, final­ly, that the con­cept of fem­i­nism had been divorced from women. And so it’s real­ly impor­tant to talk about con­cepts, how con­cepts get framed algo­rith­mi­cal­ly. This is a real­ly impor­tant part of my work, and I’ve writ­ten about this. I’ve actu­al­ly got a book now that’ll be forth­com­ing next year called Algorithms of Oppression, and it’s real­ly to kind of elu­ci­date how these process­es happen. 

It’s not just a mat­ter of rep­re­sen­ta­tion and mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion, porni­fi­ca­tion, because that’s incred­i­bly impor­tant. But there are oth­er nuanced ways in which algo­rith­mic bias is hap­pen­ing. Here you have an arti­cle in Forbes, a neg­a­tive arti­cle that was writ­ten against a study by Epstein and Robertson, where they found that vot­er pref­er­ences could be manip­u­lat­ed quite eas­i­ly based on the kinds of results that showed up on a first page of search.

So if neg­a­tive sto­ries about a can­di­date, espe­cial­ly at the local lev­el, cir­cu­lat­ed on the first page of search, peo­ple vot­ed against them. If pos­i­tive sto­ries cir­cu­lat­ed on the first page, peo­ple vot­ed for them. And those things are high­ly manip­u­la­ble. One of the things that Matthew Hindman for exam­ple wrote about in his book The Myth of Digital Democracy is this notion that what we find in these online news envi­ron­ments in par­tic­u­lar is just a mat­ter of unbi­ased free flow of infor­ma­tion. He found in his research study­ing elec­tions that peo­ple who had the most mon­ey were able to influ­ence what showed up in the first pages. So this political-economic cri­tique of what happens.

The first page of search is so incred­i­bly impor­tant, because the major­i­ty of peo­ple don’t go past that. So what hap­pens there is high­ly con­test­ed and some­thing that we must pay close atten­tion to.

This is one of the last things I want to share, that I recent­ly wrote about. Again, to talk about and elu­ci­date the way that con­cepts get formed and knowl­edge gets cre­at­ed and knowl­edge bias­es happen. 

Dylan ​“Storm” Roof is an avowed white suprema­cist who opened fire on a church in South Carolina this sum­mer and mur­dered in cold blood nine African-American wor­shipers. This is an excerpt from his man­i­festo that was found online. I want­ed to draw atten­tion to a cou­ple of things that are real­ly impor­tant. He says, 

The event that tru­ly awak­ened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hear­ing and see­ing his name and even­tu­al­ly I decid­ed to look him up. I read the Wikipedia arti­cle and right away I was unable to under­stand what the big deal was. It was obvi­ous that Zimmerman was in the right. But more impor­tant­ly this 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 web­site I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these bru­tal black on White mur­ders. I was in disbelief. 

And then he goes on to talk about how could this be hap­pen­ing. So he talks about research­ing even more and this affirm­ing his com­mit­ment to white suprema­cy. And he says through all this research, which we can gath­er much of this hap­pened online through Wikipedia and Google, he says,

From here I found out about the Jewish prob­lem and oth­er issues fac­ing our race, and I can say today that I am com­plete­ly racial­ly aware. 

Now, it’s not far-fetched to know and think that many peo­ple are com­ing into their var­i­ous forms of con­scious­ness, not just racial con­scious­ness, through the use of these kinds of plat­forms. What does­n’t hap­pen when you go, and for exam­ple, if you look at the Council of Conservative Citizens, the Council of Conservative Citizens is a cloaked web site. Jessie Daniels writes about cloaked web sites, web sites that pre­tend to be a neu­tral kind of media, or [an] objec­tive site, but are in fact doing some­thing dif­fer­ent. The Council of Conservative Citizens has a web site that just looks like a con­ser­v­a­tive media aggre­ga­tor that’s feed­ing out news. But it’s actu­al­ly a very well-documented white suprema­cist orga­ni­za­tion. It’s like the busi­ness­man­’s KKK and has been for a long time. 

What Dylan Roof did­n’t get when you do search­es like ​“black on white crime” is you don’t get a coun­ter­point, for exam­ple, that says ​“there is no such thing as black on white crime.” You don’t get FBI sta­tis­tics that dis­prove the con­cept of black on white crime. You don’t get infor­ma­tion from black stud­ies schol­ars, for exam­ple, that might talk about what a fram­ing of a ques­tion like black on white crime even means in the con­text of con­tem­po­rary American soci­ety. So these are some of the things that I think I’m doing in my research to try to, again, make us aware of the crit­i­cal impor­tance of what these corporate-controlled infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ments are about.

And I would just say that Big Data tech­nol­o­gy bias­es, they don’t just end in our first-world, US, Western, Global North con­text. Much of my work for the past few years has been about Google and mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion, cer­tain­ly. But if you want to extend the kinds of bias­es that hap­pen in terms of polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy, you can see the num­ber of com­pa­nies that are impli­cat­ed in things like the extrac­tion and min­ing indus­tries, where you have some of the worst polit­i­cal, sex­u­al vio­lence hap­pen­ing in direct rela­tion­ship to the extrac­tion of min­er­als that we need for our elec­tron­ics, for our tech­nolo­gies. Again, these things are hid­den from view.

We also don’t see the incred­i­ble e‑waste, the e‑waste cities that are pop­ping up along the West coast of Africa in Ghana. Incredibly tox­ic sit­u­a­tions where peo­ple are lit­er­al­ly exchang­ing their lives, in many ways, in the extrac­tion and in the waste indus­tries, hid­den from view.

So we have to think again about in what ways are our fetish­es around tech­nol­o­gy impli­cat­ed in these kinds of more inhu­mane sit­u­a­tions for oth­er peo­ple around the world. 

I’ll leave it there, and I’ll look for­ward to talk­ing with you dur­ing the Q&A.