One of the books recommended on the Science Friday 2018 Summer Reading show is Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble. It was described as demonstrating how deep learning algorithms contribute to disparate life outcomes for people based on race or neighborhood. I was pleased to find it available in our library immediately, and sorry to discover that it is nearly a polemic: long on accusations, short on evidence.

Google is the villain of the piece. Intentions do not matter, only results, and as the dominant browser, Google gets blamed for some very sketchy search results, screenshots supplied. One example is the search for “black on white crime”: in the book the first four hits are from newnation, infowars, violenceagainstwhites, and whitedude, all white supremacy sites. I just did the exact same search, and my first four hits are from splcenter, theroot, nypost, and fbi.gov.

Maybe Google has fixed this since the book came out? Or maybe I have SafeSearch turned on.

I remember the Internet before SafeSearch, that is, during the previous century. My oldest son, who was born one year before the WWW went public, was pretty young, I want to say pre-reading, and asked to check out Star Wars online. He at least didn’t read well enough to skim search hits, which was good, since the first twenty or so were of the “Star Wars Babes” ilk.

This book was published in 2018, and SafeSearch is not super easy to disable. That the author wasn’t using it reinforces my skepticism about the book’s objectivity.

On The Other Hand, like all humans, I am a sucker for a powerful anecdote, and she has a searing one. Dylann Root, the shooter at the AME church in Charleston in 2015, claimed to have been made “racially aware” by reading the results of the Internet search “black on White crime”, his capitalization.* He read “pages upon pages” about “brutal black on White murders” in the US. He “researched deeper” and found “the same things were happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries.” His research alerted him to “the Jewish problem” as well.

I imagine he isn’t the only hate-crime perp who was inspired by the Internet. I know we love free speech, but should hate speech really be free? Europeans don’t think so. Dangerous ideas can take hold quickly, ideas that lead not only to murder but to policies based on wild rumor, policies that undercut democracy and equality, and even the natural world.

The author suggests that Google could refuse Adwords income from such sites, blocking them at least from being able to pay for a higher position in the results queue. Google is a corporation, the sort of entity which wouldn’t be expected to demonstrate moral judgment, yet which seems more principled that the US government today.

Where else can we turn?

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* I got the search results listed above whether I used white or White.