 Thank you so much for the opportunity to share a little bit about my work and to be part of such a distinguished panel I want to share with you. My name is Safia Noble. I'm a professor at UCLA I wrote a book called algorithms of oppression how search engines reinforce racism Which when I started about 10 years ago on that book, which was a dissertation that became a book It was very very difficult to get even four people to sit on a dissertation committee And acknowledge openly that Algorithms and technology could in fact inherently discriminate In fact the ideas that we're talking about today have become mainstream over the last decade Now we hear lots of conversations about the biased algorithms and how AI and algorithms can discriminate But I promise you that just ten years ago when we talked about Computer code and computer programming and it's incredible importance in fomenting Social inequality and discrimination people would say to me Safia. That's impossible Because computer code is just math. I Would argue that that's a bit like saying human beings are just cells We're just mitochondria It's really insufficient to talk about programming and code and platforms at the level of thinking of them as simply Mathematical formulations. They're in fact, of course How inherently programmed with all kinds of bias, but they're also deployed and weaponized in a variety of different ways Which of course shown and Others on the panel will talk about today. So I want to share with you some of the findings that Informed that book algorithms of oppression which really started quite simply by doing keyword searches on a variety of racialized and gendered identities I'm a black woman at one point in my life. I was a black girl. I have a daughter I have a host of nieces. I was curious about the way in which people were relating to platforms like search engines as kind of the new public library This is of course what was happening when I was going back to graduate school around 2009 Everyone was enamored with of course many of us were on the old internet Let's say the the the web 1.0, which was I'm not gonna eat and talk about Full of being full of pop-up ads and said I'm gonna say that it was You know a very disorganized Kind of experience and so many people were thrilled to see things like search engines come along And I was curious about this because at the time that I was entering graduate school I just was just leaving a 15-year career in advertising and marketing where we were Deeply invested in ad agencies and trying to manipulate the kinds of results that showed up on the first page of search We this was before we started calling Calling that phenomena SEO or search engine optimization It was just how do we make sure that content shows up about our clients to the first page because Most people if you look at the information retrieval Research do not go past the first page of results both in a search engine or in a library database search So what happens on the first page of search is incredibly important just like what happens Let's say in the first couple of minutes of your news feed in a social media platform it's very important and The types of content that I found as I was doing these keyword searches on terms like black girls Latina girls Asian girls was represented almost exclusively with pornography and The question is how can that be that black girls and Latina girls and Asian girls are synonymous with pornography You don't have to add the words porn or sex That's just how we were encoded into the platforms and of course part of that is because The commodification of women and particularly of women and girls of color It's incredibly big business in the United States and so these are the kinds of things that really gave life to you the book and Ultimately as I was writing the book and collecting a lot of data about all of the kind of different ways in which people of color and Vulnerable people are misrepresented in platforms. It became apparent that we are in a crisis in the sense that We cannot control the ways in which we're represented or misrepresented in these platforms In fact, those who have the most money are the winners in these platforms because these are advertising platforms And they're organized to return profit and to circulate what is often the most titillating Egregious kinds of content because that in fact is the content that goes viral. It's the kind of content that gets clicks it's the kind of content that Puts us at peril The other thing that I talk about in this book is of course the case of Dillon roof and the fact that you know Dillon roof who if you don't know was a Open fire on unsuspecting African-American worshipers in Charleston, South Carolina in the summer of 2015 and killed nine African-Americans in Emanuel AME church and at the time, of course, we've had many more Violent mass murders Motivated by race and religion But at the time it was one of the worst mass murders we've seen in the United States and Dillon roof in his own words articulated that He was in fact searching for information about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman and was trying to make sense of the news reporting that was happening And why who was this Trayvon Martin and so you think about the role that We that we ascribe to search engines in particular but other kinds of platforms certainly that are increasingly responsible for Sharing out information or fact-checking or providing credible resources I think that we've given over an incredible amount of power to these platforms And of course this is what we're here to talk about today But one of the things I want to underscore is that it's really been Women women of color LGBTQI feminist Scholars and journalists who really we have also put ourselves on the line take it an incredible number of body blows just to normalize this conversation and bring it into the mainstream and Most of us have done this was a very very little kind of financial support or resource or investment in our work and so if there were Another plea that I might make about not just becoming educated. It's to think about what does it cost us when we? Keep investing in the same kind of techno utopian dreams that come out of major Silicon corridors around the United States Not just Silicon Valley, but a number of you know private universities and other kinds of institutions and think tanks that that are able to amass incredible resources and after 30 years of selling us this kind of celebratory emancipatory rhetoric about the possibilities of the digital technologies and platforms in the internet While the rest of us have been in harm's way and quite frankly paid the price for these kind of alleged Liberate liberatory possibilities of the internet and so I would say it's important for you know I think about the work that Joan is doing Despite the fact that it's at Harvard and and the work that we're doing at UCLA And and what does it mean at this particular moment as we're grappling with all of these kinds of issues that? We are seeing a massive divestment from public institutions that could serve as the counterweight You know I often talk to policymakers and regulators and I say it's insufficient to just think about regulating a big tech sector and not Also contend with the fact that we are divesting from public education divesting from public universities divesting from public media We cannot create successful powerful democratic counterweights at the at you know as the this sector grows at our expense And of course being in the University of California system where we should be flush with resources And yet our system is literally dying on the vine Relative to other kinds of private universities and we have Silicon Valley and Silicon Beach in California But when those companies don't pay taxes they actually bankrupt our public institutions And I think this is something we want to contend with today The last thing I'll say because I'm out of time is that we need massive paradigm shifting We can't just keep investing in the same old Rhetorics and toolmaking and Technodeterministic Ideas where we're going to somehow perfect the algorithms or perfect the bias out of AI There was a time in this country when we thought our whole economy was dependent upon things like oh big tobacco Or big cotton and we couldn't imagine Reorganizing our economy even those those economies were predicated upon the enslavement and human trafficking of African bodies and the occupation of indigenous lands I think it's important right now for us to think about how could we have a paradigm shift with respect to big tech? like we've had with respect to big tobacco and think about all of the ways in which Communities are facing incredible harm through the rise of these new predictive technologies And I think we have a great opportunity before us in the next decade. Thank you