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fake news continues to be rapidly
distributed on the internet our reality
has become increasingly shaped by false
information many people don't know the
difference between something real and
something created to deceive them
I spent about 15 years in advertising
and marketing and while I was there
Google arrived on the scene
I understood the transformative effect
that this search engine was having and
helping us curate through all kinds of
information
but I was surprised having just left
advertising that everybody was thinking
about Google as this new public trusted
resource because I thought of it as an
advertising platform
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most people who use search engines
believe that search engine results are
fair and unbiased
public and especially kids and young
people use search engines to tell them
the facts about the world
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one weekend my nieces were coming over
to hang out and I was thinking oh let me
pull my laptop out and see if I can find
some cool things for us to do this
weekend I just thought to type in black
girls and the whole first page of search
results was almost exclusively
pornography or hypersexualized content
in 2012. I started to see some of the
results changing
Google had started to suppress the
pornography around black girls
unfortunately still today we see
pornography and a kind of
hypersexualized content as the primary
way in which Latina and Asian girls are
represented
what makes Asian girls so attractive
Asian fetish hot ladies from Asians see
who we ranked number one in 2020 tender
Asian girls meet Royal Beauties
this is the study that was done
by the markup that replicated my study
from 10 years ago they found that black
girls Latina girls and Asian girls those
phrases were look so profoundly linked
with kind of adult content
zero for white girls zero for white boys
there are so many racial stereotypes and
gender stereotypes that show up in
search results
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what about actual girls and children who
go and look for themselves in these
spaces
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it's very disheartening when women
become sex objects in a space like this
it's really profound because the public
generally relates to search engines as
kind of fact checkers
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before we were so heavily Reliant upon a
database we use something like a card
catalog
we didn't break content it was
alphabetical it also might be by subject
it's a summary of the organization
system we call the Dewey Decimal System
now when we're in a subject we know
there's a lot in relationship to that
one item that we might be looking for we
might go look for a book in the stacks
for example and find that there's
hundreds of books around that one that
tell us something about that book and we
might serendipitously find all kinds of
other bits of information that are
amazing but we can see a little bit more
about the Logics of that we don't
understand the Logics of how certain
things make it to the first page in a
search
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Google has a very complicated and
nuanced algorithm for search
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over 200 different factors go into how
they decide what we see of course
they're indexing about half of all of
the information that is on the web and
even that is trillions of pages billions
of times a day Google software locates
all the potentially relevant results on
the web removes all the spam and ranks
them based on hundreds of factors like
keywords links location and freshness
all in oh 0.81 seconds
the whole premise of a search engine is
to categorize and classify information
a lot of the content that comes back to
us on the Internet it's in a cultural
context of ranking we know very early
what it means to be number one so
ranking logic signals to us that the
classification is accurate from one
being the best to whatever's on page 48
of search which nobody ever looks at
part of what it's doing is picking up
signals from things that we've clicked
on in the past that a lot of other
people have clicked on things that are
popular
so an algorithm is in essence a decision
tree
if these conditions are present then
this decision should be made and the
decision tree gets automated so that it
becomes like a sorting mechanism
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Google's very reliable for certain types
of information
if you're using it in these kind of
phone book fashion it's Fairly reliable
but when you start asking a search
engine more complex questions or you
start looking for knowledge the evidence
isn't there that it's capable of doing
that
this combination of hyperlinking It's a
combination of advertising and capital
and also what people click on that
really drives what we find on the web
this is where we start falling into
trickier situations because those who
have the most money are really able to
optimize their content better than
anyone else
there have been great studies about the
disparate impact of what a profile
online says about who you are
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I was the first African-American woman
to get a PhD in computer science at MIT
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so I visit Harvard I'm being interviewed
there by a reporter and he wants to see
a particular paper that I had done
before
so I go over to my computer
I type in my name into a Google search
bar and up will pop this ad implying I
had an arrest record
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he says Ah forget that article tell me
about the time you were arrested I said
well I have never been arrested and he
says then why does your computer say
you've been arrested
so I click on the ad I go to the company
to show him not only did I not have an
arrest record but nobody with a Latonya
Sweeney name had an arrest record and he
says yeah but why did it say that
if you type in the name Latonya in the
Google image search you can see a lot of
Black Faces staring back whereas if I
type Tanya I see a lot of white faces
staring back so we get the idea that
there are some first names given more
often to black babies than white babies
so I then took a month and I researched
almost 150 000 ad deliveries around the
country and I found that if your name
was given more often to white babies
than black babies the ad would be
neutral
and if your first name was given more
often to black babies than white babies
you were 80 likely to get an ad implying
you had an arrest record
even if no one with your name had any
arrest record in their database
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specific way that algorithms
discriminate is that they just are too
crude
the idea of if x then y if you have this
type of name it means you're
automatically associated with
criminality that blunt crude kind of
Association that is the staple
logic of how algorithms work
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the types of bias that we find on the
internet are often blunt we are being
profiled into similar groups of people
who do the kinds of things that we might
be doing and we're clustered and sold as
a cluster to advertisers and so there's
certainly a commercial bias but we also
have the bias of the people who design
the Technologies
much
to think that technologies will be
neutral or never have bias is really an
improper framing
of course there will always be a point
of view in our Technologies the question
is is the point of view in service of
Oppression is it sexist is it racist
here I was a passionate believer in the
future of Equitable technology and if
the people when they were hiring me at
Harvard had typed my name into the
Google search bar and paid attention to
this ad it put me at a disadvantage and
not just me but a whole group of black
people would be placed at a disadvantage
how could these biases of society be
invading the technology that I really
had grown to love and now Civil Rights
was up for grabs by what technology
design allowed or didn't allow
Google's ad delivery system is really
quite amazing you click on a web page
and that webpage has a slot that an ad
is going to be delivered and in that
fraction of a second while the page is
being delivered Google runs a fast
digital auction
and in that digital auction they decide
which of competing ads are going to be
the ad they're going to place right
there
at first the Google algorithm will
choose one of them randomly but if
somebody clicks on one then that one
becomes weighted more often to be
delivered
so one way the Discrimination in online
ads Could Happen would have been that
society would have been biased on which
ads they clicked most often and that
this would have represented the bias of
society itself
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sharing are so powerful that they are
kind of like the new policy maker
we don't have oversight over these
designs but yet how the Technology's
design dictates the rules we live by and
this meant that
we were moving from a democracy to a new
kind of technocracy it became the chief
technology officer at the Federal Trade
Commission
they're sort of the de facto Police
Department of the internet
one of the experiments that I had done
while I was at the FTC showed that
everyone's online experience is not the
same
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Technologies and social media is the
criteria for surfacing what's most
important can be deeply highly
manipulated one of the hardest
case studies to write in my book was
about Dylan roof he went online and he
was trying to make sense of the trial of
George Zimmerman
the first thing that
is
Trayvon Martin an unarmed black teenager
was shot down by a white neighborhood
Watchman who claimed self-defense
eventually I decided to you know look
look his name I'm just type him in the
Google you know what I'm saying
to maybe type in the words black on
white crime we know from Dylan roof's
own words that the first sight that he
comes to is the Council of conservative
citizens
the CCC is an organization that the
Southern Poverty Law Center calls
vehemently racist
let's say he had been my student I could
have just immediately said did you know
that that phrase is kind of a racist red
herring
the FBI statistics show us that the
majority of white people are actually
killed by other white people
but instead he goes to the internet and
he finds the CCC and he goes down a
rabbit hole of white supremacist
websites did you read a lot did you read
books or watch videos or watch movies or
YouTube or anything like that
specifically about that subject matter
no it's pretty much just reading Arts
reading articles
and we know that shortly thereafter he
goes into a church murders nine
African-Americans and says his intent is
to start a race war
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this is not an atypical possibility when
you don't get a Counterpoint to the
query you don't get black studies
scholarship or FBI statistics or
anything that would reframe the very
question that you're asking this is an
extreme case of acting upon white power
radicalization but this is not unlike
things that are happening right now
every day in search engines on Facebook
on Twitter in gab people are being
targeted and radicalized in very
dangerous ways
this is what is at stake when people are
so susceptible to disinformation hate
speech hate propaganda in our society
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racism itself can't be solved by
technology the question is to what
extent can we make sure technology
doesn't perpetuate it doesn't allow
harms to be made because of it
we need a diverse and inclusive
community in the design stage in the
marketing and business stage in the
Regulatory and journal stages as well
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Solutions it's easy to talk about the
problems and it's painful also to talk
about the problems but that pain and
that struggle should lead us to thinking
about alternatives
those are the kinds of things that I
like to talk to other information
professionals and researchers and
Librarians about
as a person who has a name that doesn't
sound like Jennifer Wright or Sarah or
something that paper made the difference
for me because I was just this grad
student and you were this esteemed
Harvard professor and you were having
these experiences too when I think about
the like the the foundations of
something like ethical AI
I go back to you in that early paper I
think what I feel most hopeful about is
that there's this new cottage industry
called ethical Ai and I know that our
work is profoundly tied to that but on
another level I feel like these
Predictive Technologies are so much more
ubiquitous than they were 10 years ago
you know what I find really painful is
that as we move forward it's harder to
track one thing that comes clear is we
could use a heck of a lot more
transparency
as a computer scientist my vision is I
want Society to enjoy the benefits of
all these new technologies without these
problems technology doesn't have to be
made this way that's right that's right
I see so many more women and girls of
color interested in these conversations
and one of the things that I also see is
how we see things because we ask
different questions based on our lived
experiences just the fact that the
questions are being raised means that
the space is less hostile
means there's an opportunity for your
voice and and the other thing that's
really important about this work it
means that it's a new kind of way of
thinking about computer science it's
it's in this conversation with you that
I see a future I'm hopeful because it's
not one isolated paper but in fact it's
a it's a movement who are asking the
right questions exposing the right
unforeseen consequences and pushing this
forward towards a solution
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some questions cannot be answered
instantly
some issues we're dealing with in
society we need time and we need
discussion
how could we look for new Logics and new
metaphors and new ways to get a bigger
picture
maybe we could see when we do that query
that that's just nothing but propaganda
and we could even see the sources of the
disinformation Farms maybe we could see
the financial backers there's a lot of
ways that we could reimagine our
information landscape
so I do feel like there is some hope
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