 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. All right. 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 and why I study corporate control of our information specifically Google is because in many ways the Public is increasingly reliant upon corporate provided information and Those contacts 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 a it's not just a market leader It holds a monopoly in the search space And you know 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 someone to help you find that kind of information that you might be looking for and 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 kind of Pew 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 and 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 so this is a campaign that was sponsored by the United Nations and You can't read this, but I'll tell you Ogilvy and Mather Dubai did a campaign. That's a large advertising agency They did searches on various women of color And in various countries to see what kinds of things Google would populate as an auto suggest And what they found for example were things like women cannot drive be bishops be trusted speak in church Women shouldn't have rights to 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 to be disciplined now. This was a you know an interesting and fairly effective campaign and trying to Point out that society holds still a whole lot of kind 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 are 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 kinds of auto suggestions, they're linked to Sites that are incredibly profitable for Google. They might be linked to you for example, and they might be linked to sites that are heavily populated by Keywords that are used through Google's AdWords program, right? So blogs or websites that heavily use AdWords and 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 now Here's another example. Some of you might have seen this this summer a very Well-known Black Lives Matter activist E. Ray McKesson tweeted if you Google map The n-word house This is what you'll find America right his commentary and what was happening in Google Maps this summer Many people Noticed is that if you were to go into Google Maps and search on the word on the n-word house or the n-word King Google Maps would take you to the White House Now the way that this was reported on by the media The Washington Post kind of picking it up first and then others Following is that there's 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 code and Code is a language and all languages are value-laden Including binary code language languages So what this also tells us even though Google gave a kind of apology non-apology Kind of 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 You might have you maybe you should have used different words Never kind of again pointing to the host of decisions Algorithmically that are made to get us to these kinds of pointers and this is really important Now 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 by this 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 would be a list of highly pornographic and sexual Results so the first one the first hit in 2009 was hot black pussy calm by 2011 that sighted gun underway and Sugary black pussy calm really dominated the landscape as the first hit when you looked for black girls now Let me say that again 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 fare too much better also were sexualized and then the term girls Really being co-opted in a very sexism one-on-one way because all of these sites as you click down them Were not girls. They were not children. They were not adolescents. They were women grown women And so we have to kind of look at these examples and say again. What does it mean now? I wrote about this. 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, right? I mean you can't write for a major News outlet when you're virtually unknown So I thought I'd write this this article for the public and I contacted bitch magazine They're a progressive kind of feminist magazine that critiques society and culture and I couldn't convince them In fact to let me write this article. They were like everybody knows when you search for girls You're gonna get porn. I was like do they so You know I said okay, but this is problematic again. How how girls become stand-ins for Pornography right and who and how that kind of sexualization and you can see a mapping of if you look in the kind of porn studies Literature you can see a mapping of the racial hierarchy as well of this kind of more violent forms of Pornography and sexualization as you go through kind of a racial order in the United States Eventually I told bitch after about ten emails I said listen Why don't you do a search for women's 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 and 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 now quickly 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 so here you have an article in Forbes that a Negative article that was written against a study by Epstein and Robertson where they found that 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 manipulant Manipulable one of the things that Matthew Hinman, 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 kind 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 And so this this political economic kind of critique of what happens The first page of search is so incredibly important because the majority of people don't go past that and so what happens There is as highly contested in something that we must pay close attention to you. This is one of the last things I want to share That I recently wrote about and this is the again to talk about and elucidate the way that concepts get formed and Knowledge gets created and knowledge biases happen. So the Dillon Room store fizz a avowed white supremacist who opened fire on church in South Carolina this summer and murdered in cool blood nine African-American worshippers and This is an excerpt from his manifesto that was found online and I want to kind of draw attention to a couple of things that are really important. So he says The event that truly awakened me was a 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 and 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 can find 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 a far fetch to know and think that many people are coming into their kinds of 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 website Jesse Daniels writes about cloaked websites websites that pretend to be a neutral kind of media or objective Site, but are in fact are doing something different the council of conservative citizens has a website 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 and so 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's no such thing as black-on-white crime you don't get FBI statistics that that Disprove the concept of black-on-white crime. You don't get information from black study 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 and 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 kind of 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 right 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 and Ghana incredibly toxic Situations where people are literally chain exchanging their lives in many ways in the extraction and in the waste Industries hidden from view so we have to think again about and what ways are our fetishes around technology implicated in these kinds of more Inhumane Situations for other people around the world and I'll leave it there and I look forward to you talking with you during the Q&A