Film and media

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Figure 3.4. Cloaked “news” website of the White supremacist

organization CCC, August 5, 2015.

A straight line cannot be drawn between search results

and murder. But we cannot ignore the ways that a murderer

such as Dylann Roof, allegedly in his own words, reported

that his racial awareness was cultivated online by searching

on a concept or phrase that led him to very narrow, hostile,

and racist views. He was not led to counterpositions, to

antiracist websites that could describe the history of the

CCC and its articulated aims in its Statement of Principles

that reflect a long history of anti-Black, anti-immigrant,

antigay, and anti-Muslim fervor in the United States. What

we need is a way to reframe, reimagine, relearn, and

remember the struggle for racial and social justice and to

see how information online in ranking systems can also

impact behavior and thinking offline. There is no federal,

state, or local regulation of the psychological impact of the

Internet, yet big-data analytics and algorithms derived from

it hold so much power in overdetermining decisions.

Algorithms that rank and prioritize for profits compromise

our ability to engage with complicated ideas. There is no

counterposition, nor is there a disclaimer or framework for

contextualizing what we get. Had Dylann Roof asked an

expert on the rhetoric of the CCC and hate groups in the

U.S., such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, he would

have found a rich, detailed history of how White

supremacist organizations work to undermine democracy

and civil rights, and we can only hope that education would

have had an impact on his choices. But search results are

not tied to a multiplicity of perspectives, and the

epistemology of “ranking” from one to a million or more

sites suggests that what is listed first is likely to be the most

credible and trustworthy information available.

Searching for Protections from Search Engines

On January 16, 2013, a California court decided that a

middle school science teacher was unfit for the classroom

because material from her nine-month stint in the

pornography industry had been discovered on the Internet.

USA Today reported on January 16, 2013, that Judge Julie

Cabos-Owen wrote in her opinion, “Although [the woman’s]

pornography career has concluded, the ongoing availability

of her pornographic materials on the Internet will continue

to impede her from being an effective teacher and

respected colleague.”1 The teacher was fired, although she

testified that she engaged in this work after her boyfriend

left her and she faced financial hardship. In every interview

with school district officials reported in the media, the

teacher was deemed immoral and incapable of being an

excellent role model for her students. News outlets began

reporting on March 9, 2011, that a St. Louis high school

teacher was fired from her job when a student discovered

her previous work as an exotic dancer in the pornography

industry in the 1990s. Though she reported that working in

the industry was one of the greatest regrets of her life, she

was unable to keep her job. School officials decided that her

work from nearly two decades before was too much of a

distraction to keep her employed. A band teacher in Ohio

resigned when her participation in the adult entertainment

industry was discovered. A surgical tech was treated with

disdain and disrespected at the hospital where she worked

when an anesthesia tech recognized her from her adult

entertainment films. A real estate salesperson was let go

after a coworker recognized her from adult films on the

Internet. A freshman at Duke University was eviscerated by

her peers when it was discovered that she did porn to pay

her way through school. She was trying to pay a $60,000

annual tuition at her dream school because her parents

could not afford to cover it. She was threatened and bullied

online and on campus after a member of a Greek fraternity

outed her to hundreds of men on campus. An award-winning

high school principal took sexually provocative photos with

her husband over the course of many years, and during

their divorce, he sent hundreds of photos to the school

board, which summarily demoted her after threats to end

her long and excellent teaching career. What was privately

shared in a marriage became a case of revenge porn that

threatened to destroy all that she had earned. Their

intimate acts, of which he was a participant, were only used

against her. In 2010, the website IsAnyoneUp.com allowed

users to post anonymous sexually explicit, nude images of

men and women that included their name, address, and

social media profiles from Facebook or Twitter. The founder

of the site, Hunter Moore, faced multiple lawsuits that

eventually forced the closure of the site in 2012, but he

alleged the website had more than thirty million page views

per month.2 During the height of his websites “success,”

Moore managed to circumvent a number of legal actions

because he never claimed ownership of the material posted

to his site. Copyright claims by victims of revenge porn have

been the most viable means for securing take-down notices

in the courts and the primary way of getting images down

from the web, predicated on lack of consent for distribution.

Danny Gold, writing for TheAwl.com, interviewed a woman

who shared what it felt like to have her images up at the

site:

http://www.isanyoneup.com/

http://www.theawl.com/

I was submitted to isanyoneup.com by my ex-boyfriend.

I am confronted by friends, family and strangers that

they have seen me naked online everyday. . . . You may

think it’s funny but sometimes [I] don’t want to leave

my house and go to the mall with my family because I

fear somebody will come up to me while I’m with my

mother and mention it. My sisters . . . are ashamed to

be related with me and want to lie to their friends that

they are my sisters. I am a disgrace to my family. . . . My

self worth has gone out the window and I worry I may

never get it back. This keeps me one step away from

happiness every single day. I don’t know what to do

anymore.3

The circulation of sexually explicit material has prompted

thirty-four states to enact “revenge porn” laws, or laws that

address nonconsensual pornography (NCP), defined by the

Cyber Civil Rights Initiative as the distribution of sexually

graphic images of individuals without their consent.4 Laws

currently range from misdemeanors to felonies, depending

on the nature of the offense. On December 4, 2015, the first

conviction under the California “revenge porn” law, of Noe

Iniguez, was reported by the Los Angeles Times. Iniguez

posted to Facebook a topless photo of his ex-girlfriend,

including a series of slurs that included encouraging her

employer to fire her.5 In December 2015, Hunter Moore of

IsAnyoneUp.com was sentenced to two and a half years in

prison after pleading guilty to “one count of unauthorized

access to a protected computer to obtain information for

purposes of private financial gain and one count of

aggravated identity theft,” according to the Washington

Post.6

What does it mean that one’s past is always determining

one’s future because the Internet never forgets?

http://www.isanyoneup.com/

On the Right to Be Forgotten

These cases in the U.S. are typical, but there are many

scenarios that have prompted people to call for expanded

protections online. In 2014, the European Court of Justice

ruled in the case of Google Spain v. AEPD and Mario Costeja

González7 that people have the right to request delisting of

links to information about them from search engines,

particularly if that information on the web may cause them

personal harm. The pivotal legal decision was not without

substantive prior effort at securing “the right to delete,”

“the right to forget or be forgotten,” “the right to oblivion,”

or “the right to erasure,” all of which have been detailed in

order to better distinguish the rights that European citizens

have in controlling information about themselves on the

web.8 In 2009, the French government signed the “Charter

of good practices on the right to be forgotten on social

networks and search engines,”9 which stands as a marker of

the importance of personal control over information on the

web.10 Since then, considerable debate and pushback from

Google has ensued, highlighting the tensions between

corporate control over personal information and public

interest in the kinds of records that Google keeps.

At the center of the calls for greater transparency over the

kinds of information that people are requesting removal of

from the Internet is a struggle over power, rights, and

notions of what constitutes freedom, social good, and

human rights to privacy and the right to futures

unencumbered by the past. The rulings against Google that

support the “right to be forgotten” law currently affects only

the European Union. Such legal protections are not yet

available in the United States, where greater

encroachments on personal information privacy thrive and

where vulnerable communities and individuals are less likely

to find recourse when troublesome or damaging information

exists and is indexed by a commercial search engine.

However, Google is still indexing and archiving links about

people and groups within the EU on its domains outside of

Europe, such as on google.com, opening up new challenges

to the notion of national boundaries of the web and to how

national laws extend to information that is digitally available

beyond national borders. These laws, however, generally

ignore the record keeping that Google does on individuals

and organizations that are archived and shared with third

parties beyond Google’s public-facing search results.

I am not talking solely about the harmful effects of search

results for groups of people. I am also concerned about the

logic and harm caused by our reliance on large corporations

to feed us information, information that ultimately leads us

somewhere, often to places unexpected and unintended. In

the case of the web results, this means communicating

erroneous, false, or downright private information that one

would otherwise not want perceived as the “official record”

of the self on Google, the effects of which can be

devastating. A difficult aspect of challenging group versus

individual representations online is that there are no

protections or basis for action under our current legal

regime. Public records, of which web results can be

included, whether organized by the state or vis-à-vis

corporations, work in service of a privatized public good.

Google and other large monopolies in the information and

communications technology sector have a responsibility to

communities, as much as they do to individuals. Currently,

there is key legislation that challenges Google’s records of

information it provides about individuals, much of which is

being discussed through legislative reforms such as the

“right to be forgotten” policies in the European Union,11 and

new laws in the U.S. are emerging around “revenge porn.”

These tensions need to be taken up by and for communities

and groups, particularly marginalized racial minorities in the

United States and abroad, whose collective experiences,

http://www.google.com/

rights, and representations are not sufficiently protected

online. Search results are records, and the records of human

activity are a matter of tremendous contestation; they are a

battleground over the identity, control, and boundaries of

legitimate knowledge. Records, in the form of websites, and

their visibility are power. Ultimately, both individuals and

communities are not sufficiently protected in Google’s

products and need the attention of legislators in the United

States.

At a time when state funding for public goods such as

universities, schools, libraries, archives, and other important

memory institutions is in decline in the U.S., private

corporations are providing products, services, and financing

on their behalf. With these trade-offs comes an exercising of

greater control over the information, which is deeply

consequential for those who are already systematically

oppressed, as noted by the many scholars I have discussed

in this book. They are also of incredible consequence for

young people searching for information and ideas who are

not able to engage their ideas with teachers, professors,

librarians, and experts from a broad range of perspectives

because of structural barriers such as the skyrocketing cost

of college tuition and the incredible burdens of student debt.

If advertising companies such as Google are the go-to

resource for information about people, cultures, ideas, and

individuals, then these spaces need the kinds of protections

and attention that work in service of the public.

In the context of searching for racialized and gendered

identities in Google’s search engine, the right to control

what information or records can exist and persist is

important. It is even more critical because the records are

presented in a ranking order, and research shows that the

public in the U.S. believes that search results are credible

and trustworthy.12 As already noted in the previous

chapters, Google exercises considerable discursive and

hegemonic control over identity at the group and cultural

levels, and it also has considerable control over personal

identity and what can circulate in perpetuity, or be

forgotten, through take-downs or delisting of bad

information. Searches on keywords about minoritized,

marginalized, and oppressed groups can yield all kinds of

information that may or may not be credible or true, but

they surface in a broader culture of implicit bias that already

exists against minority groups. The right to be forgotten is

an incredibly important mechanism for thinking through

whether instances of misrepresentation can be impeded or

stopped.

Our worst moments are also for sale, as police database

mug shots are the fodder of online platforms that feature

pictures of people who have been arrested. This is a

practice that disproportionately impacts people of color,

particularly African Americans, who are overarrested in the

United States for crimes that they may not be convicted of

in court. New platforms such as Mugshots.com and

UnpublishArrest.com are services that promise, for a fee of

$399 (one arrest) up to $1,799 (for five arrests), to remove

mug shots from the Mugshots.com database across all

major search engines. UnpublishArrest.com notes, “As a

courtesy, when permanent unpublishing is chosen and

information is unpublished for The Mugshots.com Database;

requests will be submitted to Google to have the inactive

links (dead links) and mugshots associated with the

arrest(s) and Mugshots.com removed from the Google

search results. Google results are controlled by Google and

as such; courtesy Google submissions are not guaranteed

nor are they part of the optional paid service provided.

Google’s removal lead times average 7–10 days and can

take as long as 4–6 weeks.”13 Proponents of this practice,

including lawmakers and public-interest organizations,

argue that this is a public safety issue and that the public

has a right to know who potential criminals are in their

communities. Opponents of the practice argue that it is a

privacy issue and a matter that inflames the public,

particularly people who are not found guilty but who appear

guilty given the titillating nature of the pubic display of

these photos.

Research shows just how detrimental the lack of control

over identity is. In the 2012 work of Latanya Sweeney, a

professor of government and technology at Harvard

University and the director of the Data Privacy Lab in the

Institute of Quantitative Social Science at Harvard, she

showed that Google searches on African American–sounding

names are more likely to produce criminal-background-

check advertisements than are White-sounding names.14

Time and again, the research shows that racial bias is

perpetuated in the commercial information portals that the

public relies on day in and day out. Yet, as I have noted in

previous chapters, the prioritization and circulation of

misrepresentative and even derogatory information about

people who are oppressed and maligned in the larger body

politic of a nation, as are African Americans, Native

Americans, Latinos, and other peoples of color, is an

incredible site of profit for media platforms, including

Google. We need to think about delisting or even

deprioritizing particular types of representative records.

How do we reconcile the fact that ethnic and cultural

communities have little to no control over being indexed in

ways that they may not want? How does a group resolve the

ways that the pubic engages with Google as if it is the

arbiter of truth?

The recording of human activity is not new. In the digital

era, the recordings of human digital engagements are a

matter of permanent record, whether known to people or

not. Memory making and forgetting through our digital

traces is not a choice, as information and the recording of

human activities through digital software, hardware, and

infrastructure are necessary and vital components of the

design and profit schemes of such actions. The information

studies scholars Jean-François Blanchette and Deborah

Johnson suggest that the tremendous capture and storage

of data, without plans for data disposal, undermines our

“social forgetfulness,” a necessary new beginning or “fresh

start,” that should be afforded people in the matter of their

privacy record keeping. They argue that much policy and

media focus has been on the access and control that

corporations have over our personal information, but less

attention had been paid to the retention of our every digital

move.15

The Edward Snowden revelations in 2014 made some

members of the public aware that governments, through

multinational corporations such as Verizon and Google, were

not only collecting but also storing private records of digital

activity of millions of people around the world. The threats

to democracy and to individual privacy rights through the

recording of individuals’ information must be taken up,

particularly in the context of persistent racialized

oppression.

I foreground previous work about why we should be

concerned about data retention in the digital world and the

ways in which the previous paper-based information-keeping

processes by institutions faced limits of space and archival

capacity. These limits of space and human labor in

organization and preservation presupposed a type of check,

or “institutional forgetfulness,”16 that was located in the

storage medium itself, rather than relating to policy limits

on holding information for long periods of time. Oscar

Gandy, Jr., aptly characterizes the nature of why forgetting

should be an important, protected right:

The right to be forgotten, to become anonymous, and to

make a fresh start by destroying almost all personal

information, is as intriguing as it is extreme. It should be

possible to call for and to develop relationships in which

identification is not required and in which records are

not generated. For a variety of reasons, people have left

home, changed their identities, and begun their lives

again. If the purpose is non-fraudulent, is not an

attempt to escape legitimate debts and responsibilities,

then the formation of new identities is perfectly

consistent with the notions of autonomy I have

discussed.17

These rights to become anonymous include our rights to

become who we want to be, with a sense of future, rather

than to be locked into the traces and totalizing effect of a

personal history that dictates, through the record, a matter

of truth about who we are and potentially can become. The

record, then, plays a significant ontological role in the

recognition of the self by existing, or not, in an archived

body of information.18 In the case of Google, though not an

archive of specific intent organized in the interest of a

particular concern, it functions as one of the most

ubiquitous and powerful record keepers of digital

engagement. It records our searches or inquiries, our

curiosities and thoughts.

The record, then, in the context of Google, is never

ending. Its data centers, as characterized in a recent

YouTube video produced by Google,19 keep copies of our

personal information on at least two servers, with “more

important data” on digital tape. The video does not explain

which data is considered most important, nor does it state

how long data is stored on Google’s servers. In many ways,

Google’s explanations about how it manages data storage

speaks to and assuages the sensitivity to issues about Web

2.0 transactions such as credit card protections or secure

information (Social Security numbers, passwords)

transmitted over the Internet that might be used for online

financial or highly private transactions.

Google says,

We safeguard your data.

Rather than storing each user’s data on a single

machine or set of machines, we distribute all data—

including our own—across many computers in different

locations. We then chunk and replicate the data over

multiple systems to avoid a single point of failure. We

randomly name these data chunks as an extra measure

of security, making them unreadable to the human eye.

While you work, our servers automatically back up

your critical data. So when accidents happen—if your

computer crashes or gets stolen—you can be up and

running again in seconds.

Lastly, we rigorously track the location and status of

each hard drive in our data centers. We destroy hard

drives that have reached the end of their lives in a

thorough, multi-step process to prevent access to the

data.

Our security team is on-duty 24x7.

Our full-time Information Security Team maintains the

company’s perimeter defense systems, develops

security review processes, and builds our customized

security infrastructure. It also plays a key role in

developing and implementing Google’s security policies

and standards.

At the data centers themselves, we have access

controls, guards, video surveillance, and perimeter

fencing to physically protect the sites at all times.20

The language of privacy and security, as articulated by

Google’s statements on data protection, does not address

what happens when you want your data to be deleted or

forgotten. Indeed, Google suggests that when you delete

data from an application, it is wiped from the Google

servers:

Deleted Data

After a Google Apps user or Google Apps administrator

deletes a message, account, user, or domain, and

confirms deletion of that item (e.g., empties the Trash),

the data in question is removed and no longer

accessible from that user’s Google Apps interface.

The data is then deleted from Google’s active servers

and replication servers. Pointers to the data on Google’s

active and replication servers are removed.

Dereferenced data will be overwritten with other

customer data over time.21

But these explanations do not address the myriad ways that

records are created and circulated through Google’s

products and how we lose control over information about

ourselves. Recently, Darlene Storm wrote an article for

ComputerWorld citing researchers who purchased twenty

mobile phones from Craigslist and eBay only to find

thousands of photos, emails, and texts—including deleted

messages through Facebook—after doing factory resets of

their data.22 The most acute breaches of personal security

were on Android smartphones, after using Google’s software

to allegedly wipe them clean. Personal information at the

level of device and infrastructure is not forgotten and can be

circulated with ease.

The ways in which our human activities are recorded and

stored are vast, and the value of social forgetfulness is not

just good for individuals but is good for society. We should

frame it as a public or social good:

A world in which there is no forgetfulness—a world in

which everything one does is recorded and never

forgotten—is not a world conducive to the development

of democratic citizens. It is a world in which one must

hesitate over every act because every act has

permanence, may be recalled and come back to haunt

one, so to speak. Of course, the opposite is equally true:

A world in which individuals are not held accountable

over time for the consequences of their actions will not

produce the sense of responsibility that is just as

necessary to a democratic society. Thus, achieving the

appropriate degree of social forgetfulness is a complex

balancing act, ever in tension between the need to hold

accountable, and the need to grant a “fresh start.”23

Google’s position about forgetting has stood in stark

contrast to previous conceptions of memory and forgetting,

as Napoleon Xanthoulis of the Dickson Poon School of Law

at King’s College London articulated in his important article

theorizing the rights of individuals to control their data

privacy as a fundamental human rights issues: a “right to

cyber-oblivion.” He notes that Google’s chief privacy officer,

Peter Fleisher, has argued against cyber-oblivion, or record

wiping, as “an attempt to give people the right to wash

away digital muck, or delete the embarrassing stuff.”24

Indeed, Google’s position has been that the recording of

everything we do is a matter of the cultural record of

humanity, “even if it’s painful.”25 Both Xanthoulis and

Blanchette and Johnson argue that it is important that bad

actors, violators of the public trust, and ill-intentioned public

officials not necessarily be allowed to erase their deeds from

the digital record. This has been Google’s general

disposition toward erasures of information from its records.

However, Google has begun to respond to pressures to

change its algorithm. On August 10, 2012, Google

announced on its blog that it would be pushing further down

in its ranking websites with valid complaints about copyright

infringement.26 Google suggested that this would help users

find more credible and legitimate content from the web. This

decision was met with much commendation from powerful

media companies—many of which are Google’s advertising

customers. These companies want to ensure that their

copyrighted works are prioritized and that pirated works are

not taking prominence in Google’s web results.

***

There are many troubling issues to contend with when our

every action in the digital record is permanently retained or

is retained for some duration so as to have a lasting impact

on our personal lives. Privacy and identity ownership are

constructed within a commercial web space such as Google,

and Google controls the record. Subjects and publics are

documented through Google’s algorithms, and displays of

search results are decidedly opportunistic and profitable.

While tremendous focus on “right to be forgotten”

legislation is on control of records that are publicly visible on

the web (e.g., websites, images, audio files, etc.), more

attention needs to be paid to information that is collected

and archived by Google that is not visible to the public.

These records are conveyed by Google as necessary for its

product development and for enhanced consumer

experiences (see Google’s privacy policy). However,

Google’s record keeping has its genesis in providing

information shared across its networked services for its

clients, which include U.S.-based national security agencies,

as well as Google’s commercial partners. Increased

attention must be paid to both the visible and invisible ways

that identity information and records of activity can be

archived through Internet infrastructures, buttressed by

Google’s monopoly on information services in the United

States. Inevitably, the power differentials between the

record keepers, in this case a private company such as

Google, and those who are recorded are insurmountable.

Google’s power is only buttressed by its work on behalf of

the U.S. government, which has outsourced its data

collection and unconstitutional privacy invasions to the

company.27

The goal of elevating these conversations is to recognize

and name the neoliberal communication strategies used by

Google to circumvent or suppress its record keeping of the

public through surveillance, particularly in its privacy

policies and responses to “right to be forgotten” public

policy. Google’s control and circumvention of privacy and

the right to be forgotten intensifies damage to vulnerable

populations. As I have previously argued, Google is, at one

moment, implicated in prioritizing predatory

misrepresentations of people, such as algorithmically

privileging sexualized information about women and girls,

because it is profitable. In another moment, it is providing

our records to third parties. While Google has consistently

argued that “right to oblivion” laws are unfairly shifting the

record of real-world human activity, which it believes the

public has a right to know, recent leakages of requests for

take-down notices were reported in the British media,

showing that the nature of take-down requests is much

more personal and relevant to everyday people, rather than

public figures skirting responsibility to some alleged public

interest.

On July 14, 2015, the Guardian reported that “less than

5% of nearly 220,000 individual requests made to Google to

selectively remove links to online information concern

criminals, politicians and high-profile public figures . . . with

more than 95% of requests coming from everyday members

of the public.”28 What is critical to this new revelation is that

previously Google’s statements about the nature of “right to

be forgotten” requests have been exaggerated or unknown

because delisting information from its records has not been

transparent, despite calls for information about the nature

of the requests from over eighty academics in a letter

authored by Ellen P. Goodman, a professor of law at Rutgers

University, and Julia Powles, a researcher at the University

of Cambridge Faculty of Law.29 In an open letter to Google,

the scholars not only argue that the public has a right to

have information taken out of Google’s search engine and

all other engines subject to data protection rulings, but they

also state,

Google and other search engines have been enlisted to

make decisions about the proper balance between

personal privacy and access to information. The vast

majority of these decisions face no public scrutiny,

though they shape public discourse. What’s more, the

values at work in this process will/should inform

information policy around the world. A fact-free debate

about the RTBF [right to be forgotten] is in no one’s

interest.30

Challenging content on the web under the auspices of the

right to be forgotten must extend beyond the take down of

personal information and beyond erasing the memory of

past acts from the web. The right to be forgotten must

include the recognition of all forms of records that Google is

archiving and sharing with third parties, both visible and

invisible to the public.

The discussion about the right to be forgotten has largely

lived in the frameworks of contesting neoliberal control and

encroachments on social and public life organized around

unstable notions of a public sphere. In the academics’ letter,

calls for transparency about delisting requests point to the

ways that ideologies of transparency privilege a kind of fact-

based, information-oriented gathering of evidence to make

clear and thoughtful decisions within the context of how

privacy should operate within the records of Google. The

questions about who controls the records of our social life

and how they can be forgotten must move to the fore in the

United States. They are explicitly tied to who can own

identity markers and how we can reclaim them at both the

individual and community level.

Librarians and information professionals are particularly

implicated in these projects. In 2016, the librarian Tara

Robertson wrote an important blog post to the profession

about why all information should not be digitized and made

available on the open web. Robertson’s point is that people

share material, thoughts, and communications with each

other in closed communities, as in the case of the

digitization of On Our Backs, a lesbian porn publication that

had a limited print run and circulated from 1984 to 2004,

prior to the mainstreaming and commercialization of

content on the web that we see today. People who

participated in the publication did so before there was an

Internet, before digitization would make the material

public.31 Robertson raises the important ethical issues, as

have many other researchers, about what should be

digitized and put on the open web and what belongs to

communities with shared values, to be shared within a

community:

In talking to some queer pornographers, I’ve learned

that some of their former models are now elementary

school teachers, clergy, professors, child care workers,

lawyers, mechanics, health care professionals, bus

drivers and librarians. We live and work in a society that

is homophobic and not sex positive. Librarians have an

ethical obligation to steward this content with care for

both the object and with care for the people involved in

producing it.32

Figure 4.1. Call to librarians not to digitize sensitive information that was

meant to be private, by Tara Robertson.

On Our Backs has an important history. It is regarded as

the first lesbian erotica magazine to be run by women, and

its title was a cheeky play on the name of a second-wave,

and often antipornography, feminist newspaper named Off

Our Backs. On Our Backs stood in the sex-positive margin

for lesbians who were often pushed out of the mainstream

feminist and gay liberation movements of the 1970s–1990s.

What Robertson raises are the ethical considerations that

arise when participants in marginalized communities are

unable to participate in the decision making of having

content they create circulate to a far wider, and outsider,

audience. These are the kinds of issues facing information

workers, from the digitization of indigenous knowledge from

all corners of the earth that are not intended for mass public

consumption, to individual representations that move

beyond the control of the subject. We cannot ignore the

long-term consequences of what it means to have

everything subject to public scrutiny, out of context, out of

control.

Ultimately, what I am calling for is increased regulation

that is undergirded by research that shows the harmful

effects of deep machine-learning algorithms, or artificial

intelligence, on society. It is not just a matter of concern for

Google, to be fair. These are complex issues that span a

host of institutions and companies. From the heinous effects

manifested from Dylann Roof’s searching on false concepts

about African Americans that may have influenced his effort

to spark a race war, to the ways in which information can

exist online about people and communities that can be

nearly impossible to correct, to the owning of identity by the

highest bidder—public policy must address the many

increasing problems that unregulated commercial search

engines pose. In addition to public policy, we can

reconceptualize the design of indexes of the web that might

be managed by librarians and information institutions and

workers to radically shift our ability to contextualize

information. This could lead to significantly greater

transparency, rather than continuing to make the neoliberal

capitalist project of commercial search opaque.

The Future of Knowledge in the Public

Student protests on college campuses have led to calls for

increased support of students of color, but one particular

request became a matter of national policy that led to a

threat to the Library of Congress’s budget in the summer of

2016. In February 2014, a coalition of students at

Dartmouth College put forward “The Plan for Dartmouth’s

Freedom Budget: Items for Transformative Justice at

Dartmouth” (the “Freedom Plan”),1 which included a line

item to “ban the use of ‘illegal aliens,’ ‘illegal immigrants,’

‘wetback,’ and any racially charged term on Dartmouth-

sanctioned programming materials and locations.” The plan

also demanded that “the library search catalog system shall

use undocumented instead of ‘illegal’ in reference to

immigrants.” Lisa Peet, reporting for Library Journal, noted,

The replacement of the subject heading was the

culmination of a two-year grassroots process that began

when Melissa Padilla, class of 2016, first noticed what

she felt were inappropriate search terms while

researching a paper on undocumented students at

Dartmouth’s Baker-Berry Library in 2013. While working

with research and instruction services librarian Jill Baron,

Padilla told LJ [Library Journal], she realized that nearly

every article or book she looked at was categorized with

the subject heading “Illegal aliens.”2

The Dartmouth College librarians became deeply engaged

in petitioning the Library of Congress. According to Peet,

“Baron, DeSantis, and research and instruction services

librarian Amy Witzel proposed that the students gather

documentation to prove that ‘Illegal aliens’ is not a

preferred term, and to find evidence that better terms—such

as ‘Undocumented immigrant,’ which was their initial

suggestion for a replacement—were in common use. At that

point news organizations such as the Associated Press, USA

Today, ABC, the Chicago Tribune, and the LA Times had

already committed not to use the term ‘Illegal’ to describe

an individual.”3 Though unsuccessful in 2015, the librarians’

case to the Library of Congress had gained traction, and the

librarian and professor Tina Gross at St. Cloud State

University began organizing caucuses and committees in

the American Libraries Association, including the subject

analysis committee, social responsibilities round table, and

REFORMA, which advocates for library services for Latinos

and those who speak Spanish. Social media campaigns

ensued, organized under the Twitter hashtags

#DropTheWord and #NoHumanBeingIsIllegal.4 By March 29,

2016, Dartmouth College’s student-led organization the

Coalition for Immigration Reform, Equality (CoFired) and

DREAMers announced in a press release that after a two-

year battle, in partnership with campus librarians and the

American Libraries Association, “the Library of Congress will

replace the term ‘illegal aliens’ with ‘noncitizens’ and

‘unauthorized immigrants’ in its subject headings.”5

“Illegal Alien” Revisited

The struggle over reclassifying undocumented immigrants

was part of a long history of naming members of society as

problem people. In many ways, this effort to eliminate

“illegal alien” was similar to the ways that Jewish people

were once classified by the Library of Congress as the

“Jewish question,” later to be reclassified in 1984 as “Jews,”

and Asian Americans were once classified as the “Yellow

Peril.”6 Control over identity is political and often a matter of

public policy. Almost as soon as the successful change was

approved, House Republicans introduced HR 4926 on April

13, 2016, also known as the “Stopping Partisan Policy at the

Library of Congress Act,” sponsored by Rep. Diane Black (R-

TN). In essence, the bill threatened the Library’s budget,

and Black suggested that the effort to change the Library of

Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) was a matter of “caving

to the whims of left-wing special interests and attempting to

mask the grave threat that illegal immigration poses to our

economy, our national security, and our sovereignty.”7

The battle over how people are conceptualized and

represented is ongoing and extends beyond the boundaries

of institutions such as the Library of Congress or

corporations such as Alphabet, which owns and manages

Google Search. Jonathan Furner, a professor of information

studies at UCLA, suggests that information institutions and

systems, which I argue extend from state-supported

organizations such as the Library of Congress to the

Internet, are participating in “legitimizing the ideology of

dominant groups” to the detriment of people of color.8 His

case study of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC)

system, for example, underscores the problematic

conceptualizations of race and culture and efforts to

“deracialize” the library and classification schemes.9 Furner

offers several strategies for thinking about how to address

these issues, using critical race theory as the guiding

theoretical and methodological model. I believe these

strategies are of great value to thinking about the

information studies issues at hand in this research:

• admission on the part of designers that bias in

classification schemes exists, and indeed is an

inevitable result of the ways in which they are

currently structured;

• recognition that adherence to a policy of

neutrality will contribute little to eradication of

that bias and indeed can only extend its life;

[and]

• construction, collection and analysis of

narrative expressions of the feelings, thoughts,

and beliefs of classification-scheme users who

identify with particular racially-defined

populations.10

While the web-indexing process is not the same as

classification systems such as DDC, the application of the

theoretical model is still valid for thinking about

conceptualizing algorithms and indexing models that could

actively intervene in the default normativity of racism and

sexism in information resources.

Problems in Classifying People

The idea of classification as a social construct is not new. A.

C. Foskett suggests that classificationists are the products of

their times.11 In the work of Nicholas Hudson of the

University of British Columbia on the origins of racial

classification in the eighteenth century, he suggests that

during the Enlightenment, Europeans began to construct

“imagined communities,” citing Benedict Anderson’s term.12

He says, “This mental image of a community of like-minded

individuals, sharing a ‘general will’ or a common national

‘soul,’ was made possible by the expansion of print-culture,

which stabilized national languages and gave wide access to

a common literary tradition.”13 Classification systems, then,

are part of the scientific approach to understanding people

and societies, and they hold the power biases of those who

are able to propagate such systems. The invention of print

culture accelerated the need for information classification

schemes, which were often developing in tandem with the

expansion of popular, scholarly, and scientific works.14

Traces of previous works defining the scientific classification

of native peoples as “savage” and claims about Europeans

as the “superior race,” based on prior notions of peoples

and nations, began to emerge and be codified in the

eighteenth century. Extensive histories have been written of

how racial classification emerged in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries in North America as a paradigm of

differentiation that would support the exclusion of native

and African people from social and political life.

By the nineteenth century, the processes involved in the

development of racial classification marked biological rather

than cultural difference and were codified to legally deny

rights to property ownership and citizenship. These

historical practices undergird the formation of racial

classification, which is both assumed and legitimated in

classification systems. Without an examination of the

historical forces at play in the development of such systems,

the replication and codification of people of African descent

into the margins goes uncritically examined. This process

can be seen in knowledge organization that both privileges

and subordinates through information hierarchies such as

catalogs and classification systems. The field of library

science has been implicated in the organization of people

and critiqued for practices that perpetuate power by

privileging some sectors of society at the expense of others.

Traditional library and information science (LIS)

organization systems such as subject cataloging and

classification are an important part of understanding the

landscape of how information science has inherited and

continues biased practices in current system designs,

especially on the web.

Opportunities abound for the interdisciplinarity of LIS to

extend more deeply into cultural and feminist studies,

because these social science fields provide powerful and

important social context for information about people that

can help frame how that information is organized and made

available. To date, much of the attention to information

organization, storage, and retrieval processes has been

influenced and, more importantly, funded by scientific

research needs stemming from World War II and the Cold

War.15 The adoption of critical race theory as a stance in the

field would mean examining the beliefs about the neutrality

and objectivity of the entire field of LIS and moving toward

undoing racist classification and knowledge-management

practices. Such a stance would be a major contribution that

could have impact on the development of new approaches

to organizing and accessing knowledge about marginalized

groups.

If the information-retrieval priority of making access to

recorded information efficient and expedient is the guiding

process in the development of technical systems, from

databases to web search engines, then what are the

distinguishing data markers that define information about

racialized people and women in the United States? What

have primarily been missing from the field of information

science, and to a lesser degree library science, are the

issues of representation that are most often researched in

the fields of African American studies, gender studies,

communications, and increasingly digital media studies.

Information organization is a matter of sociopolitical and

historical processes that serve particular interests.

A Short History of Misrepresentation in

Classifying People

In order to understand how racial and gender

representations in Google Search express the same

traditional bias that exists in other organizational systems,

an overview of how women and non-Whites have been

historically represented in information categorization

environments is in order. The issue of misrepresentations of

women and people of color in classification systems has

been significantly critiqued.16 Hope A. Olson, an associate

dean and professor at the School of Information Studies at

the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, has contributed

among the most important theories on the social

construction of classification that many of us in the field

assign to our students as a way of fostering greater

awareness about the power that library, museum, and

information professionals hold. Those who have the power

to design systems—classification or technical—hold the

ability to prioritize hierarchical schemes that privilege

certain types of information over others. An example of

these biases include the cataloging of people as subjects in

the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which

serve as a foundational and authoritative framework for

categorizing information in libraries in the United States.

The LCSH have been noted to be fraught with bias, and the

radical librarian Sanford Berman details the ways that this

bias has reflected Western perspectives:

Since the first edition of Library of Congress Subject

Headings appeared 60 years ago, American and other

libraries have increasingly relied on this list as the chief

authority—if not the sole basis—for subject cataloging.

There can be no quarrel about the practical necessity for

such labor-saving, worry-reducing work, nor—abstractly

—about its value as a global standardizing agent, as a

means for achieving some uniformity in an area that

would otherwise be chaotic. . . . But in the realm of

headings that deal with people and cultures—in short,

with humanity—the LC list can only “satisfy” parochial,

jingoistic Europeans and North Americans, white-hued,

at least nominally Christian (and preferably Protestant)

in faith, comfortably situated in the middle-and higher-

income brackets, largely domiciled in suburbia,

fundamentally loyal to the Established Order, and

heavily imbued with the transcendent, incomparable

glory of Western Civilization.17

Eventually the LCSH abolished labels such as “Yellow Peril”

and “Jewish Question” or made substitutions in the catalog,

changing “Race Question” or “Negroes” to “Race Relations”

and “Afro-Americans,”18 but the establishment of such

headings and the subsequent decade-long struggles to undo

them underscored Berman’s point about Western racial bias.

(In fact, it was Berman who led the field in calling for

antiracist interventions into library catalogs in the 1970s.)

Patriarchy, like racism, has been the fundamental organizing

point of view in the LCSH. The ways in which women were

often categorized was not much better, with headings such

as “Women as Accountants” in lieu of the now-preferred

“Women Accountants”; women were consistently an

aberration to the assumed maleness of a subject area.19

Furthermore, efforts at self-identity from the perspective

of marginalized and oppressed groups such as the Roma or

Romanies cannot escape the stigmatizing categorization of

their culture as “Gypsies,” even though their “see also”

designation to “rogues and vagabonds” was finally dropped

from the LCSH.20 A host of other problematic naming

conventions including “Oriental” instead of “Asian” and the

location of Christianity at the top of the religious hierarchy,

with all deviations moving toward the classification of

“Primitive,” suggests that there is still work to be done in

properly addressing and classifying groups of people around

identity.21 Olson says, “the problem of bias in classification

can be linked to the nature of classification as a social

construct. It reflects the same biases as the culture that

creates it.”22 These types of biases are often seen in offline

information practices where conquest is a means of erasing

the history of one dynasty or culture by the subsequent

regime.23 Olson’s research has already shown that

classifications reflect the philosophical and ideological

presumptions of dominant cultures over subordinate

cultures or groups. For example, in traditional Dewey

Decimal Classification (DDC), over 80% of its religion section

is devoted exclusively to Christianity, even though there are

greater numbers of other religious texts and literature.24

Olson points to the Library of Congress Classification (LCC)

and its biases toward North American and European

countries in volumes on the law, with far fewer allocations of

space for Asia, Eurasia, Africa, the Pacific area, and

Antarctica, reflecting the discourse of the powerful and the

presumption of marginality for all others.25

In this respect, Olson reminds us that the ordering of

information provided in classification schemes “tends to

reflect the most mainstream version of these relationships”

because “classificatory structures are developed by the

most powerful discourses in a society. The result is the

marginalization of concepts outside the mainstream.”26 In

other words, the most mainstream (e.g., White,

heterosexual, Christian, middle-class) controlling regimes in

society will privilege themselves and diminish or subdue all

others in the organization of what constitutes legitimate

knowledge. When we inherit privilege, it is based on a

massive knowledge regime that foregrounds the structural

inequalities of the past, buttressed by vast stores of texts,

images, and sounds saved in archives, museums, and

libraries. Certainly, classification systems have some

boundaries and limits, as they are often defined in whole by

what is included and what is excluded.27 In the case of most

library databases in the United States, Eurocentrism will

dominate the canons of knowledge. Knowledge

management reflects the same social biases that exist in

society, because human beings are at the epicenter of

information curation. These practices of the past are part of

the present, and only committed and protracted

investments in repairing knowledge stores to reflect and

recenter all communities can cause a shift toward equality

and inclusion in the future. This includes reconciling our

brutal past rather than obscuring or minimizing it. In this

way, we have yet to fully confront our histories and

reconstitute libraries and museums toward reconciliation

and reparation.

Search engines, like other databases of information, are

equally bounded, limited to providing only information

based on what is indexed within the network. Who has

access to provide information in the network certainly

impacts whether information can be found and surfaced to

anyone looking for it. Olson’s research points to the ways

that some discourses are represented with more power,

even if their social classifications are relatively small:

In North American society, taking away women, African

Americans, Hispanic Americans, French Canadians,

Native peoples, Asian Americans, lesbians and gay men,

people with disabilities, anyone who is not Christian,

working class and poor people, and so forth, one is left

with a very small “core.” An image that shows the

complexity of these overlapping categories is that of a

huge Venn diagram with many sets limited by Boolean

ANDs. The white AND male AND straight AND European

AND Christian AND middle-class AND able-bodied AND

Anglo mainstream becomes a very small minority . . . ,

and each set implies what it is not. The implication of

this image is that not every person, not every discourse,

not every concept, has equal weight. Some discourses

simply wield more power than others.28

Arguably, if education is based in evidence-based research,

and knowledge is a means of liberation in society, then the

types of knowledge that widely circulate provide a crucial

site of investigation. How oppressed people are represented,

or misrepresented, is an important element of engaging in

efforts to bring about social, political, and economic justice.

Figure 5.1. Google autocorrects to “himself” rather than “herself.”

Search sent to me by a colleague, June 16, 2016.

We have to ask ourselves what it means in practical terms

to search for concepts about gender, race, and ethnicity

only to find information lacking or misrepresentative,

whether in the library database or on the open web. Olson’s

notion that cultural metaphor is the basis of the

construction of classification systems means these cultural

metaphors are profoundly represented in the notions of the

“Jewish Question” or the “Race Question.” These subject

headings suggest both an answer and a point of view from

which the problems of Jews and race are presupposed.

Simply put, to phrase “Jewish” or “race” as a question or

problem to be answered suggests a point of view on the

part of the cataloger that is quite different from how a

Jewish person or a racialized person might frame

themselves. It is here that the context and point of view of

library and information science professionals who are

responsible for framing people and communities as

“problems” and “questions” is important. By examining the

ways that Black people specifically have been constructed

in the knowledge schemes, the African American studies

professor and philosopher Cornel West aptly describes the

positionality of how this community is depicted in the West:

Black people as a problem-people rather than people

with problems; black people as abstractions and objects

rather than individuals and persons; black and white

worlds divided by a thick wall (or a “Veil”) . . . ; black

rage, anger, and fury concealed in order to assuage

white fear and anxiety; and black people rootless and

homeless on a perennial journey to discover who they

are in a society content to see blacks remain the

permanent underdog.29

The library scholar Joan K. Marshall points to the way this

idea was expressed in the Library of Congress when

“N*ggers” was a legitimate subject category, reflecting the

“social backgrounds and intellectual levels” of users,

concretizing oppressive race relations.30 Difference, in the

case of the Library of Congress, is in direct relation to

Whiteness as the norm. No one has made this more clear

than Berman, whose groundbreaking work on Library of

Congress Subject Headings has forever changed the field.

He notes that in the case of both Jews and the

representations of race, these depictions are not without

social context:

For the image of the Jew to arouse any feelings, pro or

con, he [sic] had to be generalized, abstracted,

depersonalized. It is always possible for the personal,

individual case to contradict a general assertion by

providing living, concrete proof to the contrary. For the

Jews to become foils of a mass movement, they had to

be converted into objectified symbols so as to become

other than human beings.31

In the case of Google, because it is a commercial

enterprise, the discussions about its similar information

practices are situated under the auspices of free speech and

protected corporate speech, rather than being posited as an

information resource that is working in the public domain,

much like a library. An alternative possibility could be that

corporate free speech in the interests of advertisers could

be reprioritized against the harm that sexist and racist

speech on the Internet could have on those who are harmed

by it. This is the value of using critical race theory—

considering that free speech may in fact not be a neutral

notion but, rather, a conception that when implemented in

particular ways silences many people in the interests of a

few.

The disclaimer by Google for the problem of searching for

the word “Jew” leading to White supremacist, Holocaust-

denial web results is surprisingly similar to the construction

of Jewish identity in the LCSH. Both systems reflect the

nature of the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish

Europeans and North Americans. This is no surprise, given

that hyperlinking and indexing are directly derived from

library science citation-analysis practices. This linkage

between the indexing practices of the World Wide Web and

the traditional classification systems of knowledge

structures such as the Library of Congress is important. Both

systems rely on human decisions, whether given over en

masse to artificial intelligence and algorithms or left to

human beings to catalog. The representation of people and

cultures in information systems clearly reflects the social

context within which the subjects exist. In the case of search

engines, not unlike cataloging systems, the social context

and histories of exploitation or objectification are not taken

into explicit consideration—rather, they are disavowed.

What can be retrieved by information seekers is mediated

by the technological system—be it a catalog or an index of

web pages—by the system design that otherizes. In the

case of the web, old cataloging and bibliometric practices

are brought into the modern systems design.

Library science scholars know that bibliographic and

naming controls are central to making knowledge

discoverable.32 Part of the issue is trying to understand who

the audience is for knowledge and naming and organizing

information in ways that can be discovered by the public.

Berman cites Joan Marshall’s critiques of the underlying

philosophy of the Library of Congress’s subject-cataloging

practices and the ways that they constitute an audience

through organizational bias, wherein a “majority reader” is

established as a norm and, in the case of the Library of

Congress, is often “white, Christian (usually Protestant) and

male.”33 Indeed, these scholars are taking note of the

influence that categorization systems have on knowledge

organization and access. What is particularly important in

the interrogation of these marginalizing information-

management systems is Berman’s reference to the Algerian

psychologist Franz Fanon’s articulation of the mechanics of

cultural “brain washing” that occurs through racist

cataloging practices.34 Berman underscores that the

problems of racial representation and racism are deeply

connected to words and images and that a racist worldview

is embedded in cataloging practices that serve to bolster

the image and domination of Western values and people

(i.e., White, European, and North Americans over people of

African descent). The library practitioner Matthew Reidsma

gave a recent gift to the profession when he blogged about

library discovery systems, or search interfaces, that are just

as troubled as commercial interfaces. In his blog post, he

details the limitations of databases, the kinds of gender

biases that are present in discovery tools, and how little

innovation has been brought to bear in resolving some of

the contradictions we know about.35

Figure 5.2. A call to the profession to address algorithmic bias in library

discovery systems by Matthew Reidsma attempts to influence the field

of information studies. Source: Reidsma, 2016.

I sought to test the call that Reidsma made to the

profession to interrogate library information management

tools by conducting searches in a key library database. I

looked in the largest library image database available to

academic libraries, ArtStor, and found troublesome practices

of metadata management there too. Undoubtedly, these

kinds of cataloging stances can be evaluated in the context

of the field of library science, which is largely averse to

teaching and talking about race and the White racial gaze

on information. I have published several articles with

colleagues about the challenges of teaching about race in

the library and information studies classroom and the

importance of integrating theory and training of information

workers around issues of social justice in the profession. I

interpret these kinds of cataloging mishaps as a result of the

investment of the profession in colorblind ideology. Unable

and unequipped to think through the complexities of

systems of racialization, the profession writ large struggles

to find frameworks to think critically about the long-term

consequences of misidentification of people and, in this

case, concepts about works of art.

Figure 5.3. Search in ArtStor for “black history” features the work of a

series of European and White American artists, March 2, 2016. The first

result is work by Thomas Waterman Wood.

Figure 5.4. On to Liberty, an oil on canvas by Theodore Kauffman, a

German painter, is the first item under “African American stereotype.”

Figure 5.5. A satirical piece by the artist Damali Ayo and her online piece

Rent-A-Negro, which is a critique of liberal racial ideologies that tokenize

African Americans. The work is cataloged as “racism.”

Search as a Source of Reality

Indeed, problematic results in ArtStor are just a small

window into a long and troubled history of

misrepresentation in library subject cataloging and

classification systems, which are faithful reflections of the

problematic representations in mainstream U.S. culture. Our

ability to recognize these challenges can be enhanced by

asking questions about how technological practices are

embedded with values, which often obscure the social

realities within which representations are formed. The

interface of the search engine as a mechanism for accessing

the Internet is not immune, nor impartial, to the concerns of

embedded value systems. Search is also more than the

specific mathematical algorithms and deep-machine

learning developed by computer scientists and software

engineers to index upward of a trillion pages of information

and move some from the universal data pile to the first

page of results on a computer screen. The interface on the

screen presents an information reality, while the operations

are rendered increasingly invisible.36 The media and

communications scholar Alex Galloway destabilizes the idea

that digital technologies are transparent, benign windows or

doors providing a view or path to somewhere and in

themselves insignificant—the digital interface is a material

reality structuring a discourse, embedded with historical

relations, working often under the auspices of ludic

capitalism, where a kind of playful engagement of labor is

masked in vital digital media platforms such as Google.37

Search does not merely present pages but structures

knowledge, and the results retrieved in a commercial search

engine create their own particular material reality. Ranking

is itself information that also reflects the political, social,

and cultural values of the society that search engine

companies operate within, a notion that is often obscured in

traditional information science studies.

Further, new digital technologies may constitute

containers for old media discourses, and the web interface

(such as a plain Google search box) is a transitional format

from previous media forms.38 Certainly in the case of digital

technology such as commercial search engines, the

interface converges with the media itself. Commercial

search, in the case of Google, is not simply a harmless

portal or gateway; it is in fact a creation or expression of

commercial processes that are deeply rooted in social and

historical production and organization processes. John

Battelle, who has carefully traced the history of Google,

describes search as the product of our needs and desires,

aggregated by companies:

Link by link, click by click, search is building possibly the

most lasting, ponderous, and significant cultural artifact

in the history of humankind: the Database of Intentions.

The Database of Intentions is simply this: the aggregate

results of every search ever entered, every result list

ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. . . .

This information represents the real-time history of post-

Web culture—a massive clickstream database of

desires, needs, wants, and preferences that can be

discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked and

exploited for all sorts of ends.39

Undoubtedly, search is also pivotal in the development of

artificial intelligence. In many ways, Google Search is an

attempt to use computer science as a basis for sorting and

making decisions about the relevance and quality of

information rather than human sorting and web-indexing

practices—practices that search engine companies such as

Yahoo! and those of the past invested in heavily and that

were both expensive to implement and limited and less

responsive in real time.40

Providing Context for Information about People

In a narrow sense, information is a series of signals and

messages that can be expressed through mathematics,

algorithms, and statistical probabilities. In a broader sense,

however, Tefko Saracevic, a professor emeritus of

information science at Rutgers, suggests that information is

constituted through “cognitive processing and

understanding.”41 There is a pivotal relationship between

information and users that is dependent on human

understanding. It is this point that I want to emphasize in

the context of information retrieval: information provided to

a user is deeply contextualized and stands within a frame of

reference. For this reason, it is important to study the social

context of those who are organizing information and the

potential impacts of the judgments inherent in informational

organization processes. Information must be treated in a

context; “it involves motivation or intentionality, and

therefore it is connected to the expansive social context or

horizon, such as culture, work, or problemat-hand,” and this

is fundamental to the origins of information science and to

information retrieval.42 Information retrieval as a practice

has become a highly commercialized industry, predicated

on federally funded experiments and research initiatives,

leading to the formation of profitable ventures such as

Yahoo! and Google, and a focus on information relevance

continues to be of importance to the field. Information

science is essentially deeply entwined with the history of

library science and has primarily been concerned with the

collection, storage and retrieval, and access to and use of

information. Saracevic notes that “the domain of

information science is the transmission of the universe of

human knowledge in recorded form, centering on

manipulation (representation, organization, and retrieval) of

information, rather than knowing information.”43 This

foregrounds the ways that representations in search engines

are decontextualized in one specific type of information-

retrieval process, particularly for groups whose images,

identities, and social histories are framed through forms of

systemic domination. Although there is a long, broad, and

historical context for addressing categorizations, the impact

of learning from these traditions has not yet been fully

realized.44

Attention to “the universe of human knowledge” is

suggestive for contextualizing information-retrieval

practices this way, leading to inquiries into the ways current

information-retrieval practices on the web, via commercial

search engines, make some types of information available

and suppress others. The present focus on the types of

information presented in identity-based searches shows that

they are removed from the social context of the historical

representations and struggles over disempowering forms of

representation. These critiques have been levied toward

other media practices such as television and print culture.

Whether human beings believe that the information

delivered in search is relevant has consistently been the

basis of judgment about information quality,45 but what is

underdiscussed is that retrieval of information in

commercial platforms such as web-based search engines is

not unique to the individual searcher. A web-based

commercial search engine does not entirely “know” who a

user is, and it is not customizing everything to our personal

and political tastes, although it is aggregating us to people it

thinks are similar to us on the basis of what is known

through our digital traces.

Finding Culturally Situated Information on the

Web

The field of LIS is significantly engaged in information

classification and organization work, which can inform the

framework for thinking about developing ICTs that are

focused on surfacing prioritized results, such as the search

engine. Critical race theory in this process of developing

information-organization tools is of great value, particularly

when thinking about the phenomenon of excessive recall of

documents on the web that are irrelevant or

decontextualized. Responses to the kinds of problematic

biases in large commercial search engines are part of the

growing motivation behind a host of culturally situated

search engines that are emerging, particularly Blackbird

(www.blackbirdhome.com), a Mozilla Firefox browser

designed to help surface content of greater relevance to

African Americans. Blackbird has been met with mixed

reviews, from support and interest to wholesale rejection.46

In any case, organizations and individuals are responding to

the limits of traditional commercial search engines through

the development of such search engines. Identity-focused

websites, a combination of web-based browsers and web

directories, are emerging to prioritize the interests of

specific communities on the basis of the human-curated

practices of the past and can be seen in search engines

such as BlackWebPortal (www.blackwebportal.com);

GatewayBlackPortal (www.gatewayblack.com), which is

based on international models such as JGrab, a Jewish

search engine; BlackFind.com (www.blackfind.com); and

Blackbird. Sites such as Jewogle (www.jewogle.com), which

serves as an online encyclopedia of the accomplishments of

Jewish people; Jewish.net (http://jewish.net/), which is used

to “search the Jewish Web”; JewGotIt (www.jewgotit.com);

and Maven Search (www.maven.co.il), which catalogs over

fifteen thousand Jewish websites, have emerged in the

hundreds, some tongue in cheek, across religion, culture,

and national origin. Much of this is a response of

communities that are seeking control over relevant content

http://www.blackbirdhome.com/

http://www.blackwebportal.com/

http://www.gatewayblack.com/

http://www.blackfind.com/

http://www.jewogle.com/

http://www.jewish.net/

http://jewish.net/

http://www.jewgotit.com/

http://www.maven.co.il/

and representation, as well as access to quality information

within racial or group identity.

One of the fundamental challenges for these culturally

situated search engines is the way in which they make

visible the contradictions and biases in search engines,

which André Brock discusses in relationship to Blackbird. He

notes that “Blackbird’s efforts to foreground African

American content were seen as an imposition on the

universal appeal of the internet, highlighting the perception

of the browser as a social structure limited by Black

representation.”47 Brock’s work indicates that though there

is a demand for culturally relevant Internet browsing that

will help surface content of interest to Black people, its

value works against norms on the web, making it less

desirable.

Reproducing Social Relations through

Information Technologies

Online racial disparities cannot be ignored because they are

part of the context within which ICTs proliferate, and the

Internet is both reproducing social relations and creating

new forms of relations based on our engagement with it.

Technologies and their design do not dictate racial

ideologies; rather, they reflect the current climate. As users

engage with technologies such as search engines, they

dynamically co-construct content and the technology

itself.48 Online information and content available in search is

also structured systemically by the infusion of advertising

revenue and the surveillance of user searches, which the

subjects of such practices have very little ability to reshape

or reformulate. Lack of attention to the current exploitative

nature of online keyword searches only further entrenches

the problematic identities in the media for women of color,

identities that have been contested since the advent of

commercial media such as broadcast, print, and radio.

Noticeably absent in the discussions of search is the broader

social and technical interplay that exists dynamically in the

way technology is increasingly mediating public access to

information, from libraries to the search engine.

Now, more than ever, a new conception of information

access and quality rooted in historical, economic, and social

relations could have a transformational effect on the role

and consequences of search engines. It is my goal through

this research to ensure that traditionally underrepresented

ideas and perspectives are included in the shaping of the

field—to surface counternarratives that would allow for a

questioning of the normalization of such practices. Rather

than prioritize the dominant narratives, Internet search

platforms and technology companies could allow for greater

expression and serve as a democratizing tool for the public.

This is rendered impossible with the current commercial

practices.

What we need are public search engine alternatives,

united with public-interest journalism and librarianship, to

ensure that the public has access to the highest quality

information available.

The Future of Information Culture

In March 2010, the U.S. Federal Communications

Commission (FCC) put forward its ten-year broadband plan,

wherein it called for high-speed Internet to become the

common medium of communications in the United States.1

This plan still governs the information landscape. The FCC

envisioned that the Internet, as the common medium, would

potentially displace current telecommunications and

broadcast television systems as the primary

communications vehicle in the public sphere. According to

the report, “almost two-thirds of the time users spend online

is focused on communication, information searching,

entertainment or social networking.”2 The plan called for

increased support for broadband connectivity to facilitate

Americans’ ability to access vital information, and it is

focused on infrastructure, devices, accessibility, and

connectivity. However, the plan made no mention of the role

of search engines in the distribution of information to the

public, with the exception of noting that the plan itself will

be archived and made available in perpetuity in the archives

of the Internet. Primary portals to the Internet, whether

connecting through the dwindling publicly funded access

points in libraries and schools or at home, serve as a

gateway to information and cannot be ignored. Access to

high-quality information, from journalism to research, is

essential to a healthy and viable democracy. As information

moves from the public sphere to private control by

corporations, a critical juncture in the quality of information

available and the public’s ability to sift and use it is at stake,

as the noted political economist Herbert Schiller forewarned:

The American economy is now hostage to a relatively

small number of giant private companies, with inter-

locking connections, that set the national agenda. This

power is particularly characteristic of the

communication and information sector where the

national cultural-media agenda is provided by a very

small (and declining) number of integrated private

combines. The development has deeply eroded free

individual expression, a vital element of a democratic

society.3

An increasingly de-and unregulated commercially driven

Internet raises significant issues about how information is

accessed and made available. This is exacerbated by the

gamification of news and headlines, as Nicole Cohen of the

Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and

Technology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, has

documented in her ethnography of journalists who write for

online news outlets. In her book Writers’ Rights: Freelance

Journalism in a Digital Age, she documents the increasing

tensions between journalists and commercial news media

organizations.4 In some cases, journalists are facing screens

that deliver real-time analytics about the virality of their

stories. Under these circumstances, journalists are

encouraged to modify headlines and keywords within a

news story to promote greater traction and sharing among

readers. The practices Cohen details are precisely the kind

of algorithmically driven analytics that place pressure on

journalists to modify their content for the express purposes

of increasing advertising traffic. Undoubtedly, in this case,

big-data analytics have potential to significantly

compromise the quality of reporting to the public.

As quality information typically provided by the public

sector moves into more corporate and commercial spaces,

the ability of the public to ensure protections that are

necessary in a democracy is eroded, due to the cost of

access. Organizations such as FreePress.org are showing

how the rise of advertising and commercial interests have

bankrupted the quality and content of journalism, heretofore

considered a fundamental and necessary component of a

democratic society. The media scholars Robert McChesney

and John Nichols have noted in great historical detail and

with abundant concrete evidence the importance of

information in a democratic society—free from commercial

interests.5 These rapid shifts over the past decade from the

public-interest journalism environment prior to the 1990s,

along with the corporate takeover of U.S. news media, have

eroded the quality of information available to the public.

Similarly, the move of the Internet from a publicly funded,

military-academic project to a full-blown commercial

endeavor has also impacted how information is made

available on the web.

Media stereotypes, which include search engine results,

not only mask the unequal access to social, political, and

economic life in the United States as broken down by race,

gender, and sexuality; they maintain it.6 This suggests that

commercial search engines, in order to opt out of such

traditional racist representations, might want, at minimum,

to do something like a “disclaimer” and, at maximum, to

produce a permanent “technical fix” to the proliferation of

racist or sexist content. Veronica Arreola wondered as much

on the Ms. blog in 2010 when Google Instant, a new search-

enhancement tool, initially did not include the words

“Latinas,” “lesbian,” and “bisexual” because of their X-rated

front-page results: “You’re Google. . . . I think you could

figure out how to put porn and violence-related results, say,

on the second page?”7

http://www.freepress.org/

It is these kinds of practices that mark the consequences

of the rapid shift over the past decade from public-interest

information to the corporate takeover of U.S. news media,

which has made locating any kind of alternative information

increasingly difficult and pushed the public toward the web.

Equally, media consolidations have contributed to the

erosion of professional standards such as fact checking, not

misrepresenting people or situations, avoiding imposing

cultural values on a group, and distinguishing between

commercial and advertising interests versus editorial

decisions—all of which can be applied to information

provision on the web.8 As the search arena is consolidated

under the control of a handful of corporations, it is even

more crucial to pay close attention to the types of processes

that are shaping the information prioritized in search

engines. In practice, the higher a web page is ranked, the

more it is trusted. Unlike the vetting of journalists and

librarians, who are entrusted to fact check and curate

information for the public according to professional codes of

ethics, the legitimacy of websites’ ranking and credibility is

simply taken for granted. The take-home message is that,

when it comes to online commercial search engines, it is no

longer enough to simply share news and education on the

web; we must ask ourselves how the things we want to

share are found and how the things we find have appeared.

A Monopoly on Information

Not enough attention has been paid to Google’s monopoly

on information in the most recent debates about network

control. The focus on net neutrality in the U.S. is largely

invested in concerns over the movement of packets of data

across commercial networks owned by the

telecommunications and cable giants, which include AT&T,

Verizon, DirecTV, and Comcast. Much of the debate has

focused on maintaining an open Internet, free from traffic-

routing discrimination. In this context, discrimination refers

to the movement of data and the rights of content providers

not to have their traffic delayed or managed across the

network regardless of size or content. Focus on content

prioritization processes should enter the debates over net

neutrality and the openness of the web when mediated by

search engines, especially Google. Over the past few years,

consumer watchdog organizations have been enhancing

their efforts to provide data about Google’s commercial

practices to the public, and the Federal Trade Commission is

investigating everything from Wi-Fi data harvesting of

consumer data to Google’s horizontal ownership and

dominance of web-based services such as YouTube,

AdSense, Google Maps, Blogger, Picasa, Android,

Feedburner, and so on. Internet service providers have been

set back by the recent U.S. court of appeals decision to

protect the rights of consumers via maintaining the FCC

stance on protecting net neutrality. The decision prevents

Comcast from prioritizing or discriminating in traffic

management over its networks. Organizations such as the

Open Internet Coalition have been at the fore in lobbying

Congress for protections from the prioritization of certain

types of lawful Internet traffic that multinational

telecommunications companies are able to promote, while

simultaneously blocking access to their networks by

competitors. Quietly, companies such as Google, Facebook,

and Twitter that have high volumes of traffic have backed

the Open Internet Coalition in an effort to ensure that they

will have the necessary bandwidth to support their web-

based assets that draw millions of users a day to their sites

with tremendous traffic.

Outside the United States, Google has faced a host of

complaints about representations of material culture and

identity. In the realm of public information, the former

Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton outlined the

problematic issues that arose from the Google book-

digitization project. In this project, Google digitized millions

of books, over ten million as of the close of 2009, opening

up considerable speculation about the terms on which

readers will be able to access these texts. The legal issues

at play at the height of the legal battle included potential

violations of antitrust law and whether public interests

would prevail against monopolistic tendencies inherent in

one company’s control and ownership of such a large

volume of digital content.9 Proponents of Google’s project

suggested that the world’s largest library will make

previously out-of-print and unavailable texts accessible to a

new generation of readers/consumers. Opponents were

fearful that Google would control the terms of access, unlike

public libraries, on the basis of shareholder interests.

Further challenges to this project were leveled by France

and Germany, which rejected the ownership of their

material culture by a U.S.-based company, claiming it is

impinging on their national and cultural works.10 They

suggested that the digitization of works by their national

citizens of the past is an infringement on the public good,

which is threatened by Google’s monopoly on information.

In 2013, U.S. Circuit Court Judge Denny Chin ruled that the

Google book project was “fair use,” serving a blow to critics,

and in 2015, a hearing of the case was rejected by the U.S.

Supreme Court.11 An appeal to the Second Circuit, New York,

affirmed Google’s right to claim fair use. Despite Darnton’s

critique, underscored by media scholars such as Siva

Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies and law at the

University of Virginia, who has written substantially on the

threats of the decision to the legal concept of “fair use,” the

verdict underscores the power of Google’s capital and its

influence, to the detriment of nations that cannot withstand

its move to create the largest digital repository in the world.

This includes the ability to own, categorize, and determine

the conditions or terms of access to such content. In support

of the position against the project before the European

Commission, concerns were presented by France that “a

large portion of the world’s heritage books in digital format

will be under the control of a single corporate entity.”12

Closer to home, with the exception of the Anti-Defamation

League’s previously mentioned letter, many protests of

Google’s information and website representation have not

been based on the way cultural identities are presented, but

rather the focus has been on commercial interests in

patents, intellectual property, and even page ranking. For

example, in 2003, an early lawsuit against Google focused

on its prioritization of high-paying advertisers that were

competing against small businesses and entities that do not

index pages on the basis of the pay-per-click advertising

model that has come to dominate experiences of the

Internet in the United States. The lawsuit by Search King

and PR Network against Google alleged that Google

decreased the page rank of its clients in a direct effort to

annihilate competition.13 Since Bob Massa, the president of

Search King and PR Ad Network, issued a statement against

Google’s biased ranking practices, Google’s business

practices have been under increased scrutiny, both in the

U.S. and globally.

Why Public Policy Matters

Given the controversies over commercial, cultural, and

ethnic representations of information in PageRank, the

question that the Federal Trade Commission might ask

today, however, is whether search engines such as Google

should be regulated over the values they assign to racial,

gendered, and sexual identities, as evidenced by the types

of results that are retrieved. At one time, the FCC enforced

decency standards for media content, particularly in

television, radio, and print. Many political interventions over

indecency and pornography on the web have occurred since

the mid-1990s, with the 1996 Communications Decency Act

(CDA) being the most visible and widely contested example,

particularly section 230 with respect to immunity for online

companies, which cannot be found liable for content posted

by third parties. Section 230 is specifically designed to

protect children from online pornography, while granting the

greatest rights to freedom of expression, which it does by

not holding harm toward Internet service providers, search

engines, or any other Internet site that is trafficking content

from other people, organizations, or businesses—companies

such as Google, Facebook, Verizon, AT&T, Wordpress, and

Wikipedia—all of which are exempt from liability under the

act.14 These were the same protections afforded to Hunter

Moore and his revenge-porn site discussed in chapter 4.

The attorney Gregory M. Dickinson describes the

important precedents set by a court ruling against the

Internet service provider Prodigy. He suggests that the

court’s interpretation of Prodigy’s market position was that

of a “family-friendly, carefully controlled and edited Internet

provider,” which engaged in processes to filter or screen

offensive content in its message boards; as such, it “had

taken on the role of a newspaper-like publisher rather than a

mere distributor and could therefore be held liable.”15 He

underscores the importance of the court ruling in Stratton

Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co. (1995) that Prodigy’s

engagement in some level of filtering content of an

objectionable nature meant that Prodigy was responsible

and liable. This, he argues, was not Congress’s intent—to

hold harmless any platform providing content that is

obscene, pornographic, or objectionable by community

standards of decency.

Commercial search engines, at present, have been able to

hide behind disclaimers asserting that they are not

responsible for what happens in their search engine

technologies. Yet Dickinson’s study of the law with respect

to Prodigy raises interesting legal issues that could be

explored in relationship to search engines, particularly

Google, now that it has admitted to engaging in filtering

practices. What is most apparent since the passage of the

CDA in 1996 is that decency standards on the web and in

traditional media have been fodder for “the culture wars,”

and by all apparent measures, indecency is sanctioned by

Congress, the FCC, and media companies themselves.

These protections of immunity are mostly upheld by the

Zeran v. America Online, Inc. (1997) ruling in the U.S. Court

of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which found that

companies are not the responsible parties or authors of

problematic material distributed over their hardware,

software, or infrastructure, even though section 230 was

intended to have these companies self-censor indecent

material. Instead, the courts have ruled that they cannot

hold companies liable for not self-censoring or removing

content. Complicating the issues in the 1996 act is the

distinction between “computer service providers”

(nonmediated content) and “information providers”

(mediated content).16

During the congressional hearings that led to the Federal

Trade Commission investigation of Google, the reporter

Matthew Ingram suggested in a September 2011 article that

“it would be hard for anyone to prove that the company’s

free services have injured consumers.”17 But Ingram is

arguably defining “injury” a little too narrowly. Searching for

“Latinas” or “Asian women” brings about results that focus

on porn, dating, and fetishization. What is strikingly similar

in the cases of searching for “Jew” and for “black girls” is

that objectionable results materialized in Google’s page-

ranking algorithm—results that might not reflect the social

or historical context of the lives of each group or their desire

to be represented this way. However, what is strikingly

dissimilar is that Black teenagers and girls of color have far

less social, political, or economic agency than the Anti-

Defamation League does. Public policy must open up

avenues to explore and assess the quality of group identity

information that is available to the public, a project that will

certainly be hotly contested but that should still ensue.

The Web as a Source of Opportunity

The web is characterized as a source of opportunity for

oppressed and marginalized people, with tremendous focus

put on closing the hardware, software, and access gaps on

the Internet for various communities. Among the most

prevalent ideas about the political aspects of technology

disenfranchisement and opportunity are theories that center

on the concept of the “digital divide,” a term coined in a

series of speeches and surveys by the Clinton-Gore

administration and the National Telecommunications

Infrastructure Administration. Digital-divide narratives have

focused on three key aspects of disempowerment that have

led to technological deficits between Whites and Blacks:

access to computers and software, development of skills

and training in computer technologies, and Internet

connectivity—most recently characterized by access to

broadband.18

However true the disparities between Whites and non-

Whites or men and women in the traditional articulations of

the digital divide, often missing from this discourse is the

framework of power relations that precipitate such unequal

access to social, economic, and educational resources.19

Thus, the context for discussing the digital divide in the U.S.

is too narrow a framework that focuses on the skills and

capabilities of people of color and women, rather than

questioning the historical and cultural development of

science and technology and representations prioritized

through digital technologies, as well as the uneven and

exploitive global distribution of resources and labor in the

information and communication ecosystem. Certainly, the

digital divide was an important conceptual framework to

deeper engagement for poor people and people of color, but

it also created new sites of profit for multinational

corporations.20 Closing the digital divide through ubiquitous

access, training, and the provisioning of hardware and

software does address the core criticisms of the digital

technology have and have-not culture in the U.S.; but much

like the provisioning of other technological goods such as

the telephone, it has not altered the landscape of power

relations by race and gender.

Search needs to be reconciled with the critical necessity of

closing the digital divide, since search is such a significant

part of mediating the online experience. Digital-divide

scholars have argued that increased culturally relevant

engagements with technology, web presence, and skill

building will contribute to greater inclusion and to greater

social, political, and economic agency for historically

underrepresented, marginalized, and oppressed groups.21

This is the thrust of the neoliberal project of “uplift” and

“empowerment”—by closing the skill-based gaps in

computer programming, for example. These approaches do

not account for the political economy and corporate

mechanisms at play, and we must ask how communities can

intervene to directly shape the practices of market-

dominant and well-established technology platforms that

are mediating most of our web interaction.22 They also often

underexamine the diasporic labor conditions facing Black

women who are engaged in the raw-mineral extraction

process to facilitate the manufacture of computer and

mobile phone hardware. I raise this issue because research

on the global digital divide, and Google’s role in it,23 must

continue to expand to include a look at the ways that Black

people in the U.S. and abroad are participating and, in the

case of the United States, not participating to a significant

degree in information and communication technology

industries.24 This makes calls for “prosumer” participation,25

as a way of conceptualizing how Black people can move

beyond being simple consumers of digital technologies to

producers of technological output, a far more complex

discussion.

George Ritzer and Nathan Jurgenson at the University of

Maryland characterize this emphasis of merging the

consumptive and productive aspects of digital engagement

as “a trend toward unpaid rather than paid labor and toward

offering products at no cost, and the system is marked by a

new abundance where scarcity once predominated.”26 The

critical communications scholar Dallas Smythe describes

this type of prosumerism as “the audience as commodity,”

where users are sold to advertisers as a commodity and, in

return for “free” services, users are explicitly exposed to

advertising.27 Christian Fuchs, the director of the

Communication and Media Research Institute and

Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies, discusses this

accumulation strategy, bolstered by Google’s users, as a

process of both prosumer commodity and audience

commodity by virtue of the decentralized nature of the

web.28 The intensive participation of people in uploading,

downloading, sharing, tagging, browsing, community

building, and content generation allows for mass distribution

and one-to-many or many-to-many engagements in a way

that traditional media could not have done due to its

centralized nature.29 In Fuchs’s work on the political

economy of Google, he characterizes the unpaid, user-

generated content provided by its users as the basis for

Google’s ability to conduct keyword searching because it

indexes all user-generated content and “thereby acts as a

meta-exploiter of all user-generated content producers.”30

Surplus labor is created for Google through users’

engagements with its products, from Gmail to Google

Scholar, the reading of blogs in Blogger/Blogspot, the use of

Google Maps or Google Earth, or the watching of videos on

YouTube, among many of the company’s services.31 The

vertical offerings of Google are so great,32 coupled with its

prioritization of its own properties in keyword searches, that

mere use of any of these “free” tools creates billion-dollar

profits for Google—profits generated from both unpaid labor

from users and the delivery of audiences to advertisers.

Fuchs’s work explicitly details how Google’s commodities

are not its services such as Gmail or YouTube; its

commodities are all of the content creators on the web

whom Google indexes (the prosumer commodity) and users

of their services who are exposed to advertising (audience

commodity).

We are the product that Google sells to advertisers.

These aspects of software and hardware development are

important, and decreased engagements of women and

people of color in the high-tech design sector, coupled with

increased marginalized participation in the most dangerous

and volatile parts of the information and communication

technology labor market, have impact on the artifacts such

as search results themselves. According to U.S. Department

of Labor workforce data obtained by the Mercury News

through a Freedom of Information request, of the 5,907 top

managers in the Silicon Valley offices of the ten largest high-

tech companies in 2005, 296 were Black or Hispanic, a 20%

decline from 2000.33 Though the scope of this book does not

include a formal interrogation of Black manufacturing labor

migration to outsourced ICT manufacturing outside the

United States, it is worth noting that this phenomenon has

implications for participation in industries that shape

everything from hardware to software design, of which

Google is playing a primary role. As of July 1, 2016, Google’s

own diversity scorecard shows that only 2% of its workforce

is African American, and Latinos represent 3%. With all of

the aberrations and challenges that tech companies face in

charges of data discrimination, the possibility of hiring

recent graduates and advanced-degree holders in Black

studies, ethnic studies, American Indian studies, gender and

women’s studies, and Asian American studies with deep

knowledge of history and critical theory could be a massive

boon to working through the kinds of complex challenges

facing society, if this is indeed the goal of the technocracy.

From claims of Twitter’s racist trolling that drives people

from its platform34 to charges that Airbnb’s owners openly

discriminate against African Americans who rent their

homes35 to racial profiling at Apple stores in Australia36 and

Snapchat’s racist filters,37 there is no shortage of projects to

take on in sophisticated ways by people far more qualified

than untrained computer engineers, whom, through no fault

of their own, are underexposed to the critical thinking and

learning about history and culture afforded by the social

sciences and humanities in most colleges of engineering

nationwide. The lack of a diverse and critically minded

workforce on issues of race and gender in Silicon Valley

impacts its intellectual output.

Google is a powerful and important resource for

organizing information and facilitating social cooperation

and contact, while it simultaneously reinforces hegemonic

narratives and exploits its users. This has widely been

characterized by critical media scholars as a dialectic that

has less to do with Google’s technologies and services and

more to do with the organization of labor and the capitalist

relations of production.38 The notion that Google/Alphabet

has the potential to be a democratizing force is certainly

laudable, but the contradictions inherent in its projects must

be contextualized in the historical conditions that both

create it and are created by it. Thinking about the specifics

of who benefits from these practices—from hiring to search

results to technologies of surveillance—these are problems

and projects that are not equally experienced. I have

written, for example, with my colleague Sarah T. Roberts

about the myriad problems with a project such as Google

Glass and the problems of class privilege that directly map

to the failure of the project and the intensifying distrust of

Silicon Valley gentrifiers in tech corridors such as San

Francisco and Seattle.39 The lack of introspection about the

public wanting to be surveilled at the level of intensity that

Google Glass provided is part of the problem: centuries-old

concepts of conquest and exploration of every landscape,

no matter its inhabitants, are seen as emancipatory rather

than colonizing and totalizing for people who fall within its

gaze. People on the street may not characterize Google

Glass as a neocolonial project in the way we do, but they

certainly know they do not like seeing it pointed in their

direction; and the visceral responses to Google Glass

wearers as “Glassholes” is just one indicator of public

distrust of these kinds of privacy intrusions.

The neocolonial trajectories are not just in products such

as search or Google Glass but exist throughout the

networked economy, where some people serve as the most

exploited workers, including child and forced laborers,40 in

such places as the Democratic Republic of Congo, mining

ore called columbite-tantalite (abbreviated as “coltan”) to

provide raw materials for companies such as Nokia, Intel,

Sony, and Ericsson (and now Google)41 that need such

minerals in the production of components such as tantalum

capacitors, used to make microprocessor chips for computer

hardware such as phones and computers.42 Others in the

digital-divide network serve as supply-chain producers for

hardware companies such as Apple43 or Dell,44 and this

outsourced labor from the U.S. goes to low bidders that

provide the cheapest labor under neoliberal economic

policies of globalization.

To review, in the ecosystem, Black people provide the

most grueling labor for blood minerals, and they do the

dangerous, toxic work of dismantling e-waste in places such

as Ghana, where huge garbage piles of poisonous waste

from discarded electronics from the rest of the world are

shipped. In the United States, Black labor is for the most

part bypassed in the manufacturing sector, a previous site

of more stable unionized employment, due to electronics

and IT outsourcing to Asia. African American identities are

often a commodity, exploited as titillating fodder in a

network that traffics in racism, sexism, and homophobia for

profit. Meanwhile, the onus for change is placed on the

backs of Black people, and Black women in the United

States in particular, to play a more meaningful role in the

production of new images and ideas about Black people by

learning to code, as if that alone could shift the tide of

Silicon Valley’s vast exclusionary practices in its products

and hiring.

Michele Wallace, a professor of English at the City College

of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University

of New York (CUNY), notes the crisis in lack of management,

design, and control that Black people have over the

production of commercial culture. She states that under

these conditions, Black people will be “perpetual objects of

contemplation, contempt, derision, appropriation, and

marginalization.”45 Janell Hobson at the University of Albany

draws important attention to Wallace’s commentary on

Black women as creative producers and in the context of the

information age. She confirms this this confluence of media

production on the web is part of the exclusionary terrain for

Black women, who are underrepresented in many aspects of

the information industry.46 I would add to her argument that

while it is true that the web can serve as an alternative

space for conceiving of and sharing empowered conceptions

of Black people, this happens in a highly commercially

mediated environment. It is simply not enough to be

“present” on the web; we must consider the implications of

what it means to be on the web in the “long tail” or

mediated out of discovery and meaningful participation,

which can have a transformative impact on the enduring

and brutal economic and social disenfranchisement of

African Americans, especially among Black women.

Social Inequality Will Not Be Solved by an App

An app will not save us. We will not sort out social inequality

lying in bed staring at smartphones. It will not stem from

simply sending emails to people in power, one person at a

time. New, neoliberal conceptions of individual freedoms

(especially in the realm of technology use) are

oversupported in direct opposition to protections realized

through large-scale organizing to ensure collective rights.

This is evident in the past thirty years of active antilabor

policies put forward by several administrations47 and in

increasing hostility toward unions and twenty-first-century

civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter. These

proindividual, anticommunity ideologies have been central

to the antidemocratic, anti-affirmative-action, antiwelfare,

antichoice, and antirace discourses that place culpability for

individual failure on moral failings of the individual, not

policy decisions and social systems.48 Discussions of

institutional discrimination and systemic marginalization of

whole classes and sectors of society have been shunted

from public discourse for remediation and have given rise to

viable presidential candidates such as Donald Trump,

someone with a history of misogynistic violence toward

women and anti-immigrant schemes. Despite resistance to

this kind of vitriol in the national electoral body politic,

society is also moving toward greater acceptance of

technological processes that are seemingly benign and

decontextualized, as if these projects are wholly apolitical

and without consequence too. Collective efforts to regulate

or provide social safety nets through public or governmental

intervention are rejected. In this conception of society,

individuals make choices of their own accord in the free

market, which is normalized as the only legitimate source of

social change.49

It is in this broader social and political environment that

the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade

Commission have been reluctant to regulate the Internet

environment, with the exception of the Children’s Internet

Protection Act50 and the Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007.51

Attempts to regulate decency vis-à-vis racist, sexist, and

homophobic harm have largely been unaddressed by the

FCC, which places the onus for proving harm on the

individual. I am trying to make the case, through the

mounting evidence, that unregulated digital platforms cause

serious harm. Trolling is directly linked to harassment offline,

to bullying and suicide, to threats and attacks. The entire

experiment of the Internet is now with us, yet we do not

have enough intense scrutiny at the level of public policy on

its psychological and social impact on the public.

The reliability of public information online is in the context

of real, lived experiences of Americans who are increasingly

entrenched in the shifts that are occurring in the information

age. An enduring feature of the American experience is

gross systemic poverty, whereby the largest percentages of

people living below the poverty line suffering from un-and

underemployment are women and children of color. The

economic crisis continues to disproportionately impact poor

people of color, especially Black / African American women,

men, and children.52 Furthermore, the gap between Black

and White wealth has become so acute that a recent report

by Brandeis University found that this gap quadrupled

between 1984 and 2007, making Whites five times richer

than Blacks in the U.S.53 This is not the result of moral

superiority; this is directly linked to the gamification of

financial markets through algorithmic decision making. It is

linked to the exclusion of Blacks, Latinos, and Native

Americans from the high-paying jobs in technology sectors.

It is a result of digital redlining and the resegregation of the

housing and educational markets, fueled by seemingly

innocuous big-data applications that allow the public to set

tight parameters on their searches for housing and schools.

Never before has it been so easy to set a school rating in a

digital real estate application such as Zillow.com to preclude

the possibility of going to “low-rated” schools, using data

that reflects the long history of separate but equal,

underfunded schools in neighborhoods where African

Americans and low-income people live. These data-intensive

applications that work across vast data sets do not show the

microlevel interventions that are being made to racially and

economically integrate schools to foster educational equity.

They simply make it easy to take for granted data about

“good schools” that almost exclusively map to affluent,

White neighborhoods. We need more intense attention on

how these types of artificial intelligence, under the auspices

of individual freedom to make choices, forestall the ability to

see what kinds of choices we are making and the collective

impact of these choices in reversing decades of struggle for

social, political, and economic equality. Digital technologies

are implicated in these struggles.

These dramatic shifts are occurring in an era of U.S.

economic policy that has accelerated globalization, moved

http://www.zillow.com/

real jobs offshore, and decimated labor interests. Claims

that the society is moving toward greater social equality are

undermined by data that show a substantive decrease in

access to home ownership, education, and jobs—especially

for Black Americans.54 In the midst of the changing social

and legal environment, inventions of terms and ideologies of

“colorblindness” disingenuously purport a more humane

and nonracist worldview.55 This is exacerbated by

celebrations of multiculturalism and diversity that obscure

structural and social oppression in fields such as education

and information sciences, which are shaping technological

practices.56 Research by Sharon Tettegah, a professor of

education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, shows

that people invested in colorblindness are also less

empathetic toward others.57 Making race the problem of

those who are racially objectified, particularly when seeking

remedy from discriminatory practices, obscures the role of

government and the public in solving systemic issues.58

Central to these “colorblind” ideologies is a focus on the

inappropriateness of “seeing race.” In sociological terms,

colorblindness precludes the use of racial information and

does not allow any classifications or distinctions.59 Yet,

despite the claims of colorblindness, research shows that

those who report higher racial colorblind attitudes are more

likely to be White and more likely to condone or not be

bothered by derogatory racial images viewed in online

social networking sites.60 Silicon Valley executives, as

previously noted, revel in their embrace of colorblindness as

if it is an asset and not a proven liability. In the midst of

reenergizing the effort to connect every American and to

stimulate new economic markets and innovations that the

Internet and global communications infrastructures will

afford, the real lives of those who are on the margin are

being reengineered with new terms and ideologies that

make a discussion about such conditions problematic, if not

impossible, and that place the onus of discriminatory

actions on the individual rather than situating problems

affecting racialized groups in social structures.61

Formulations of postracialism presume that racial

disparities no longer exist, a context within which the

colorblind ideology finds momentum.62 George Lipsitz, a

critical Whiteness scholar and professor at the University of

California, Santa Barbara, suggests that the challenge to

recognizing racial disparities and the social (and technical)

structures that instantiate them is a reflection of the

possessive investment in Whiteness—which is the inability

to recognize how White hegemonic ideas about race and

privilege mask the ability to see real social problems.63 I

often challenge audiences who come to my talks to consider

that at the very historical moment when structural barriers

to employment were being addressed legislatively in the

1960s, the rise of our reliance on modern technologies

emerged, positing that computers could make better

decisions than humans. I do not think it a coincidence that

when women and people of color are finally given

opportunity to participate in limited spheres of decision

making in society, computers are simultaneously celebrated

as a more optimal choice for making social decisions. The

rise of big-data optimism is here, and if ever there were a

time when politicians, industry leaders, and academics were

enamored with artificial intelligence as a superior approach

to sense-making, it is now. This should be a wake-up call for

people living in the margins, and people aligned with them,

to engage in thinking through the interventions we need.

Conclusion

Algorithms of Oppression

We have more data and technology than ever in our daily

lives and more social, political, and economic inequality and

injustice to go with it. In this book, I have sought to critique

the political-economic framework and representative

discourse that surrounds racial and gendered identities on

the web, but more importantly, I have shined a light on the

way that algorithms are value-laden propositions worthy of

our interrogation. I am particularly mindful of the push for

digital technology adoption by Black / African Americans,

divorced from the context of how digital technologies are

implicated in global racial power relations. I have tried to

show how traditional media misrepresentations have been

instantiated in digital platforms such as search engines and

that search itself has been interwoven into the fabric of

American culture. Although rhetoric of the information age

broadly seeks to disembody users, or at least to minimize

the hegemonic backdrop of the technological revolution,

African Americans have embraced, modified, and

contextualized technology into significantly different

frameworks despite the relations of power expressed in the

socio-algorithms. This book can open up a dialogue about

radical interventions on socio-technical systems in a more

thoughtful way that does not further marginalize people

who are already in the margins. Algorithms are, and will

continue to be, contextually relevant and loaded with power.

Toward an Ethical Algorithmic Future

This book opens up new lines of inquiry using what I believe

can be a black feminist technology studies (BFTS) approach

to Internet research. BFTS could be theorized as an

epistemological approach to researching gendered and

racialized identities in digital and analog media studies, and

it offers a new lens for exploring power as mediated by

intersectional identities. More research on the politics,

culture, and values embedded in search can help frame a

broader context of African American digital technology

usage and early adoption, which is largely underexamined,

particularly from the perspectives of women and girls. BFTS

is a way to bring more learning beyond the traditional

discourse about technology consumption—and lack thereof

—among Black people. Future research using this framework

can surface counternarratives about Black people and

technology and can include how African American popular

cultural practices are influencing non–African American

youth.1 Discourses about African Americans and women as

technologically illiterate are nothing new, but dispelling the

myth of Blacks / African Americans as marginal to the

broadest base of digital technology users can help us define

new ways of thinking about motivations in the next wave of

technology innovation, design, and, quite possibly,

resistance.

Algorithms and Invisibility: My Interview with

Kandis

Most of the attention to the protection of online information

has been argued legally as a matter of “rights.” Rights are a

type of property, or entitlement, that function on the web

through a variety of narratives, such as “free speech” and

“freedom of expression,” all of which are constitutionally

protected in the United States. The framing of web content

and ownership of web URLs as “property” afforded private

protections is of consequence for individuals, as noted in

Jessie Daniels’s aforementioned work, which documents the

misrepresentation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the site

martinlutherking.org, a cloaked website managed by neo-

Nazis and White supremacists at Stormfront.2 Private

ownership of identity on the web is a matter of who can pay

and who lines up quickly enough to purchase identity

markers that establish a type of official record about a

person or a group of people. Indeed, anyone can own

anyone else’s identity in the current digital landscape. The

right to control over group and personal identity and

memory must become a matter of concern for archivists,

librarians, and information workers, and a matter of internet

regulation and public policy.

In concluding this book, I want to extend an example

beyond Google to look closely at the consequences of the

lack of identity control on another platform: Yelp.

Kandis has been in business for thirty years, and her

primary clients are African American. This is her story, which

elucidates in a very personal way how algorithmic

oppression works and is affecting her very quality of life as a

small business owner who runs the only local African

American hair salon within a predominantly White

neighborhood, located near a prestigious college town in the

United States:

When I first came and opened up my shop here, there was a

strong African American community. There were Black

sororities and fraternities, and they had step shows, which

no loner exist anymore! The Black Student Union

organization was very strong; it was the ’80s. Everyone felt

like family, and everyone knew each other. Even though I

http://www.martinlutherking.org/

only worked in this part of town, it was almost like I went to

school there too. We all knew each other, and everyone

celebrated each other’s success.

I often get invited to participate in the major events and

celebrations—from marriages to their parents’ funerals. For

instance, I have several clients from the ’80s who I still

service to this day. Here it is twenty years later, and now I’m

servicing their sons’ and daughters’ hair, who may or may

not attend the same university. The relationships are intact

and so strong. It’s not uncommon, even if we aren’t always

in touch for the past several years, for clients who may live

on the other side of the country to send a recommendation

my way! I have worked in this community for thirty years. I

know a lot of people. They all have to get their hair done.

I asked Kandis how has that changed:

Well, prior to the changes the Internet brought about, I

never had to do much advertising because my name carried

weight through the campus and the graduate school. So, if

you were a Black prelaw or premed student, I would know

who you were, pretty much as you were coming into the

school, because people would tell them about me, and then

they would book an appointment with me.

But now, since there are only a small number of African

Americans at the university, and those few people aren’t

looking up at each other, we are losing the art of

conversation and how we used to verbally pass information.

So my name started dying down. It kind of reminds me of

how in elementary school, there are songs that kids sing,

and they continue through generations. All kids know

certain nursery rhymes and songs, even the ones their

parents sang when they were little. It’s like those song are

trapped in time.

We, as African Americans, are storytellers. My name is not

being talked about anymore, because young people don’t

talk to each other anymore. I was able to afford a modest

lifestyle. Prior to these changes, from the stock market

crashing and now this way of doing business through

technology, life has become an uphill battle, and I felt like I

was drowning. I’ve actually considered leaving, but where

would I go? Where would I go?

Look, I’m very much used to diversity, but when the

campus stopped admitting so many Blacks, I became a

minority in a way that I had never felt before. You think of

the university as being a part of the community, and the

community would benefit from the university. But I don’t

think they thought about would happen to all the businesses

who supported those students. Where would the students

and faculty go to get their needs met, like their hair cared

for? I mean, other students can go down the street to

anyone, but the Black students have to have a car to travel

thirty minutes across town? Why are they required have to

have a car or transportation when no one else needs that to

get their hair done?

Kandis was directly impacted by the shifts away from

affirmative action that decimated the admission of African

Americans to colleges and universities over the past twenty

years:

Sometimes people are in a highly competitive arena, and

they need to go to a nonjudgmental place where they can

be themselves and where they don’t have to apologize for

the way they speak or their culture or wonder if they go to a

Caucasian hair stylist, if they can handle their hair.

To be a Black woman and to need hair care can be an

isolating experience.

The quality of service I provide touches more than just the

external part of someone. It’s not just about their hair. A lot

of people are away from their families, and they need

someone to trust who will support them. People do like to be

recommended to someone they can trust.

I asked Kandis how the Internet changed things for her

and her business:

Back then, when I had many more clients, there was no

Internet. A personal computer was almost like a concept but

not a reality for most people. At the beginning, you had a lot

of younger people on the cutting edge of computers or who

were more computer savvy and up on the current trend. My

generation was a little bit slower to comprehend and

participate. The Internet has also developed a new age of

the infomercial and the how-to-do-it-yourself university!

The Internet is now showing everyone how to do it

themselves and how to cut out the middleman. They have

created the new consumers. New consumers have less

value for small businesses; they think just because they

watch the new infomercial, they can do it themselves, buy it

themselves, make it themselves. Also, because you can

purchase everything for yourself, the new consumers now

feel entitled. They feel no shame with coming in and

snapping photographs. They collect your hard work, all your

information in two seconds, by taking pictures of all of my

products so they can go and purchase them online instead

of from me.

When things started changing so fast technologically,

using the computer was an easier transition for me, because

I had taken a few computer [Mac] classes on campus, and I

was able to adapt to what was going on. Because of this, I

was familiar, and I was comfortable with exploring the

unknown.

I quickly realized the Internet/Yelp told people that I did

not exist.

I think algorithms don’t take into consideration

communities of color and their culture of trusting in the web

with our personal information and that we are dealing with

things that won’t even allow us to give someone a review.

We don’t like to give our personal information out like that.

And just because I don’t have reviews doesn’t mean that I

have no value. Because the computer, or I guess the

Internet/Yelp, is redefining who is valuable and where the

value lies, and I believe this is false. It’s not right.

The algorithm shouldn’t get to decide whether I exist or

not. So I had to figure it out, within my financial limitations,

because now it becomes another financial burden to stay

relevant in eyes of what the web is telling people about who

is valuable. I had to be creative and spend a lot of time on

the computer trying to figure what was the least expensive

way to be visible with the most impact.

So, when I discovered Yelp and it’s alleged benefits—

because I don’t think it really benefited me—I was forced to

participate in Yelp.

I asked what that participation with Yelp was like.

They tell you that everything is free, like they are doing a

community service, but later on, it’s basically pay to play.

They call on a regular basis to get you to spend a few

hundred dollars a month to advertise with them, and if you

don’t, they are going to push you further down their pile. I

can be sitting in my chair searching for myself and not find

me or find me ten pages later. I can type in every keyword,

like “African American,” “Black,” “relaxer,” natural,” as

keywords, and White businesses, White hairdressers, or

White salons would clearly come up before me—along with

people who have not been in business as long as me. I think

they need to put in how long someone has been in business

in that algorithm, because I don’t think it’s fair that people

who are brand new are popping up before those of us who

may or may not be on the Internet but have more

experience and are more established.

And another thing, Black people don’t “check in” and let

people know where they’re at when they sit in my chair.

They already feel like they are being hunted; they aren’t

going to tell The Man where they are. I have reviews from

real clients that they put into a filter because it doesn’t

meet their requirements of how they think someone should

review me.

I asked her to tell me more about that.

I think Yelp looks at people as their clients, not mine. If they

are your clients who are loyal to your business and you,

they are not interested. They want to market to my clients,

and if you review me and you’ve never reviewed any other

businesses, they are not going to take you as a serious

voice on Yelp. What is that about? They are selling to the

reviewers. Since I am the only Black person in this

neighborhood doing hair, that should tip the scale in my

favor, but it doesn’t. If they were honest, it would mean I

would go to the top. But they are promoting and biasing the

lay of the land in this area, which is causing me more harm

by making it look like I don’t exist.

I have been on Facebook and pulled up some folks who

work at Yelp, and from my perspective and from what I saw,

there weren’t that many Black people. It wasn’t diverse. You

can see everyone on FB, and these people are not Black

people. And that’s a problem, because how would they

know to even consider the needs of a minority or what our

language is? You are telling us we have to use certain

keywords, and you don’t even know our language, because

you think that “Black hair” means hair color, not texture!

We don’t call each other African American; society calls us

that. Do you know what I mean? We are Black.

You know, they locked me out of Yelp. When I sent them

an email asking them why I wasn’t on the first page of Yelp

and why, when I’m sitting in my chair, I can’t find myself

and why, when I used certain keywords, I couldn’t find

myself. I told them that by doing that, they are suggesting I

don’t exist. At that time, they put most of my reviews in a

filter and locked me out for about four months. Every time

you make a change on Yelp, there is someone checking you.

If you go into your page, there is someone looking at what

you are doing. I know that because if you get people

inquiring about you, Yelp will call you and try to get

advertising from you. And they will say that they see people

trying to connect with you through Yelp, and then they will

try to sell you advertising. They will try to show their value

by saying they can help you get more business.

I used to have my own page, but now you have a third of

a page with people who are similar to you. And if they don’t

choose you, they are showing your competition. For a fee,

they will remove your competition, but otherwise they are

showing your competition on your own page! You don’t have

your own page anymore; you are on a page with advertising

and your competition, who are similar to your style, and

they will put you up against them while searching on your

own business.

They’d rather put other salons in other parts of the city to

avoid driving the clients to someone who is not paying for

advertisement. So I would do something like put up a

picture of myself, as this was something that they

suggested, and I use keywords to be found, but that doesn’t

help now.

Before, Yelp would encourage the business owner to

upload a photo of themselves, and that was great for me.

This is when being in the minority would help me stand out.

That didn’t last long because they stopped showing your

head shot, and now they put up a map instead of allowing

you to use your own your image. Your own image isn’t

shown. Before you get to my photos and my reviews, there

are suggestions to other people who could be as far as five

miles or more away. The first one is laser hair removal and

extensions. I don’t do hair removal or extensions.3

Kandis pulled out her mobile phone and walked me through

her Yelp page and showed me how it works.

They are already advertising against me. At the end of the

page, there are more competitors. I have to pay to take that

off. My reviews are in the middle. You can’t control the

photos anymore. They have a “people who viewed this also

viewed . . .” section, and it goes to other businesses. I have

to pay to get that taken off. They have a few reviews now

that are blocked, that they felt that I had asked my clients to

do, and because these people haven’t reviewed other

people, they don’t show.

So if you get two reviews in one day and haven’t had any

in six months, they think you have done something, and

they block my reviews.4 The basic principle of Yelp is to

supposedly lead people with unbiased decisions when

choosing a good business. How? You tell me? Can they

honestly do this when they’re in the business of selling the

advertisement?

They control the algorithm, which controls who can write

the reviews. All this has a major influence on where you’re

placed on the list. You hope and pray that your customers,

who may be from a different generation or culture, will

participate in their construct. It just isn’t as random as one

may think.

There is no algorithm that can replace human dignity.

They created a system that simulates a value, based on

their own algorithm, so Yelp can be the number-one

beneficiary. When companies like Yelp shake the tree for

low-hanging fruit, this affects mostly small businesses and

the livelihoods of real people who will never work for

corporate America. The key is to be independent of these

companies, because they never stop. They have new goals,

and they come back with new visions. And it’s not like a real

contract where you can argue and negotiate. The scale is

unbalanced; you can’t negotiate.

I verified all of the claims that Kandis was making by

visiting her page and the pages of other small business to

see how they placed her competitors. Indeed, several times

when I thought I was clicking on reviews of her small

business or getting more information, I was instead clicking

on competitors and led away from the business I was

investigating. I share Kandis’s experience to demonstrate

the way that both the interface and the algorithmic design

is taking on new dimensions of control and influence over

her representation and access to information about her

business. She has so little ability to impact the algorithm,

and when she tries, the company subverts her ability to be

racially and gender recognized—a type of recognition that is

essential to her success as a business owner. The attempts

at implementing a colorblind algorithm in lieu of human

decision making has tremendous consequences. In the case

of Kandis, what the algorithm says and refuses to say about

her identity and the identity of her customers has real social

and economic impact.

Imagining Alternatives: Toward Public

Noncommercial Search

Neoliberal impulses in the United States to support market-

driven information portals such as Google Search have

consequences for finding high-quality information on the

Internet about people and communities, since this is the

primary pathway to navigating the web. This is one of the

many contradictions of the current for-profit search and

cloud-computing industry. Future research efforts might

address questions that can help us understand the role of

the design of platforms, interfaces, software, and

experiences as practices that are culturally and gender

situated and often determined by economic imperatives,

power, and values. Such an agenda could forward a

commitment to ensuring that pornographic or exploitive

websites do not stand as the default identification for

women on the web. Despite a climate wherein everything

driven by market interests is considered the most expedient

and innovative way of generating solutions, we see the

current failings. Calling attention to these practices,

however unpopular it might be, is necessary to foster a

climate where information can be trusted and found to be

reliable. What is needed is a decoupling of advertising and

commercial interests from the ability to access high-quality

information on the Internet, especially given its increasing

prominence as the common medium in the United States.

When using a digital media platform, be it Google Search

or Yelp or some other ranking algorithmic decision’s default

settings, it is possible to believe that it is normal to see a list

of only a handful of possible results on the first page of a

search, but this “normal” is a direct result of the way that

human beings have consciously designed both software and

hardware to function this way and no other.

Figure C.1. S. U. Noble’s interface of transparency: the imagine engine.

Imagine instead that all of our results were delivered in a

visual rainbow of color that symbolized a controlled set of

categories such that everything on the screen that was red

was pornographic, everything that was green was business

or commerce related, everything orange was entertainment,

and so forth. In this kind of scenario, we could see the entire

indexable web and click on the colors we are interested in

and go deeply into the shades we want to see. Indeed, we

can and should imagine search with a variety of other

possibilities. In my own imagination and in a project I am

attempting to build, access to information on the web could

be designed akin to the color-picker tool or some other

highly transparent interface, so that users could find

nuanced shades of information and easily identify the

borderlands between news and entertainment, or

entertainment and pornography, or journalism and

academic scholarship. In this scenario, I might also be able

to quickly identify the blogosphere and personal websites.

Such imaginings are helpful in an effort to denaturalize

and reconceptualize how information could be provided to

the public vis-à-vis the search engine. In essence, we need

greater transparency and public pressure to slow down the

automation of our worst impulses. We have automated

human decision making and then disavowed our

responsibility for it. Without public funding and adequate

information policy that protects the rights to fair

representation online, an escalation in the erosion of quality

information to inform the public will continue.

Where Are Black Girls Now?

Since I began the pilot study in 2010 and collected data

through 2016, some things have changed. In 2012, I wrote

an article for Bitch Magazine, which covers popular culture

from a feminist perspective, after some convincing from my

students that this topic is important to all people—not just

Black women and girls. I argued that we all want access to

credible information that does not foster racist or sexist

views of one another. I cannot say that the article had any

influence on Google in any definitive way, but I have

continued to search for Black girls on a regular basis, at

least once a month. Within about six weeks of the article

hitting newsstands, I did another search for “black girls,”

and I can report that Google had changed its algorithm to

some degree about five months after that article was

published. After years of featuring pornography as the

primary representation of Black girls, Google made

modifications to its algorithm, and the results as of the

conclusion of this research can be seen if figure C.2.

No doubt, as I speak around the world on this subject,

audiences are often furiously doing searches from their

smart phones, trying to reconcile these issues with the

momentary results. Some days they are horrified, and other

times, they are less concerned, because some popular and

positive issue or organization has broken through the clutter

and moved to a top position on the first page. Indeed, as

this book was going into production, news exploded of

biased information about the U.S. presidential election

flourishing through Google and Facebook, which had

significant consequences in the political arena.

I encourage us all to take notice and to reconsider the

affordances and the consequences of our hyperreliance on

these technologies as they shift and take on more import

over time. What we need now, more than ever, is public

policy that advocates protections from the effects of

unregulated and unethical artificial intelligence.

Figure C.2. My last Google search on “black girls,” June 23, 2016.

Epilogue

Between the time I wrote this book and the day it went into

production, the landscape of U.S. politics was radically

altered with the presidential defeat on November 8, 2016, of

former secretary of state Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump.

Within days, media pundits and pollsters were trying to

make sense of the upset, the surprise win by Trump,

particularly since Clinton won the popular vote by close to

three million votes.

Immediately, there were claims that “fake news”

circulating online was responsible for the outcome. Indeed,

as I gave talks about this book in the weeks after the

election, I could only note in my many public talks that “as

I’ve argued for years about the harm toward women and

girls through commercial information bias circulating

through platforms like Google, no one has seemed to care

until it threw a presidential election.” Notably, one

remarkable story about disinformation (patently false

information intended to deceive) made headlines about the

election results.

This new political landscape has dramatically altered the

way we might think about public institutions being a major

force in leveling the playing field of information that is

curated in the public interest. And it will likely be the source

of a future book that recontextualizes what information

means in the new policy regime that ensues under the

leadership of avowed White supremacists and

disinformation experts who have entered the highest levels

of public governance.

Figure E.1. Google search for “final election results” leads to fake news.

Source: Washington Post, November 14, 2016.

Figure E.2. Google results on final election results incorrectly show

Trump as the winner of the popular vote. Source: Washington Post,

November 14, 2016.

Figure E.3. Circulation of false information on Twitter shows Trump as the

winner of the popular vote, November 14, 2016.

Agencies that could have played a meaningful role in

supporting research about the role of information and

research in society, including the Institute for Museum and

Library Services, the National Endowment for the

Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts, are

all under the threat of being permanently defunded and

dismantled as of the moment this book goes into

production. In fact, public research universities are also

facing serious threats in cuts to federal funding because of

their lack of compliance with the new administration’s

policies. This has so radically altered the research landscape

to the political right that scientists and researchers marched

on Washington, D.C., on April 22, 2017, in response to

orders that government-funded scientists and researchers

stop conducting and disseminating research to the public.

The potential for such a precedent may extend to public

research universities, or at least many faculty members are

working under the premise that this may not be out of the

realm of possibility over the next four to eight years.

In this book, I have argued that the neoliberal political and

economic environment has profited tremendously from

misinformation and mischaracterization of communities,

with a range of consequences for the most disenfranchised

and marginalized among us. I have also argued for

increased nonprofit and public research funding to explore

alternatives to commercial information platforms, which

would have included support of noncommercial search

engines that could serve the public and pay closer attention

to the circulation of patently false or harmful information. In

the current environment, I would be remiss if I did not

acknowledge, on the eve of the publication of this book, that

this may not be viable at all given the current policy

environment that is unfolding.

My hope is that the public will reclaim its institutions and

direct our resources in service of a multiracial democracy.

Now, more than ever, we need libraries, universities,

schools, and information resources that will help bolster and

further expand democracy for all, rather than shrink the

landscape of participation along racial, religious, and

gendered lines. Information circulates in cultural contexts of

acceptability. It is not enough to simply want the most

accurate and credible information to rise to the top of a

search engine, but it is certainly an important step toward

impacting the broader culture of information use that helps

us make decisions about the distribution of resources

among the most powerful and the most disenfranchised

members of our society.

In short, we must fight to suspend the circulation of racist

and sexist material that is used to erode our civil and

human rights. I hope this book provides some steps toward

doing so.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Matsakis, 2017.

2. See Peterson, 2014.

3. This term was coined by Eli Pariser in his book The Filter Bubble

(2011).

4. See Dewey, 2015.

5. I use phrases such as “the N-word” or “n*gger” rather than

explicitly using the spelling of a racial epithet in my scholarship. As

a regular practice, I also do not cite or promote non–African

American scholars or research that flagrantly uses the racial epithet

in lieu of alternative phrasings.

6. See Sweney, 2009.

7. See Boyer, 2015; Craven, 2015.

8. See Noble, 2014.

9. The term “digital footprint,” often attributed to Nicholas

Negroponte, refers to the online identity traces that are used by

digital media platforms to understand the profile of a user. The

online interactions are often tracked across a variety of hardware

(e.g., mobile phones, computers, internet services) and platforms

(e.g., Google’s Gmail, Facebook, and various social media) that are

on the World Wide Web. Digital traces are often used in the data-

mining process to profile users. A digital footprint can often include

time, geographic location, and past search results and clicks that

have been tracked through websites and advertisements, including

cookies that are stored on a device or other hardware.

10. “Kandis” is a pseudonym.

11. See H. Schiller, 1996.

CHAPTER 1. A SOCIETY, SEARCHING

1. See UN Women 2013.

2. See Diaz, 2008; Segev, 2010; Nissenbaum and Introna, 2004

3. See Olson, 1998; Berman, 1971; Wilson, 1968; and Furner, 2007.

4. See Daniels, 2009, 2013; Davis and Gandy, 1999.

5. See Halavais, 2009, 1–2.

6. See Angwin et al., 2016.

7. See O’Neil, 2016, 8.

8. See Levin, 2016.

9. See Kleinman, 2015.

10. The debates over Google as a monopoly were part of a

congressional Antitrust Subcommittee hearing on September 21,

2011, and the discussion centered around whether Google is

causing harm to consumers through its alleged monopolistic

practices. Google has responded to these assertions. See Kohl and

Lee, 2011.

11. See Ascher, 2017.

12. See Leonard, 2009.

13. See Daniels, 2009, 2013; Brock, 2009.

14. See Kendall, 2002.

15. See Brock, 2009.

16. See S. Harding, 1987, 7.

17. See chapter 2 for a detailed discussion of the “Jewish” disclaimer

by Google.

18. See hooks, 1992; Harris-Perry, 2011; Ladson-Billings, 2009; Miller-

Young, 2007; Sharpley-Whiting, 1999; C. M. West, 1995; Harris,

1995; Collins, 1991; Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith, 1982.

19. See Collins, 1991; hooks, 1992; Harris, 1995; Crenshaw, 1991.

20. See Brock, 2007.

21. The “digital divide” is a narrative about the lack of connectivity of

underserved or marginalized groups in the United States that stems

from the National Telecommunications and Information

Administration report on July 8, 1999, Falling through the Net:

Defining the Digital Divide.

22. See Inside Google 2010.

23. See Fallows, 2005; Purcell, Brenner, and Rainie, 2012.

24. A detailed discussion of this subject can be found in a Google

disclaimer about the results that surface when a user searches on

the word “Jew.” The URL for this disclaimer (now defunct) was

www.google.com/ explanation.html.

25. Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Antitrust,

Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, 2011.

26. See Elad Segev’s work on Google and global inequality (2010).

27. A good discussion of the ways that Google uses crowdsourcing as

an unpaid labor pool for projects such as Google Image Labeler can

be found in the blog Labortainment at

http://labortainment.blogspot.com (last accessed June 20, 2012).

28. See the work of Cameron McCarthy, professor of education at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1994).

29. See Nissenbaum and Introna, 2004; Vaidhyanathan, 2011; Segev,

2010; Diaz, 2008; and Noble, 2014.

30. This process has been carefully detailed by Levene, 2006.

31. Blogger, Wordpress, Drupal, and other digital media platforms

make the process of building and linking to other sites as simple as

the press of a button, rather than having to know code to

implement.

32. See Spink et al., 2001; Jansen and Pooch, 2001; Wolfram, 2008.

33. See Markey, 2007.

34. See Ferguson, Kreshel, and Tinkham, 1990.

35. See Wasson, 1973; Courtney and Whipple, 1983.

36. See Smith, 1981.

37. See Bar-Ilan, 2007.

38. Google’s official statement on how often it crawls is as follow:

“Google’s spiders regularly crawl the Web to rebuild our index.

Crawls are based on many factors such as PageRank™, links to a

page, and crawling constraints such as the number of parameters

in a URL. Any number of factors can affect the crawl frequency of

individual sites. Our crawl process is algorithmic; computer

programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many

pages to fetch from each site. We don’t accept payment to crawl a

site more frequently.” See Google, “About Google’s Regular

Crawling of the Web,” accessed July 6, 2012, http://

support.google.com/ webmasters/ bin/ answer.py?

hl=en&answer=34439.

39. Brin and Page, 1998a: 110.

40. Ibid.

41. Brin and Page, 1998b, 18, citing Bagdikian, 1983.

http://www.google.com/explanation.html

http://labortainment.blogspot.com/

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34439

42. On June 27, 2012, the online news outlets The Local and The Raw

Story reported on Google’s settlement of the claim based on

concerns over linking the word “Jew” with popular personalities.

See AFP, 2012.

43. Anti-Defamation League, 2004.

44. Ibid.

45. See Zittrain and Edelman, 2002.

46. See SEMPO, 2010.

47. A website dedicated to the history of web memes attributes the

precursor to the term “Google bombing” to Archimedes Plutonium,

a Usenet celebrity, who created the term “searchenginebombing”

in 1997. For more information, see “Google Bombing,” Know Your

Meme, accessed June 20, 2012, http:// knowyourmeme.com/ memes/

google-bombing. Others still argue that the first Google bomb was

created by Black Sheep, who associated the terms “French Military

Victory” to a redirect to a mock page that looked like Google and

listed all of the French military defeats, with the exception of the

French Revolution, in which the French were allegedly successful in

killing their own French citizens. The first, most infamous instance

of Google bombing was the case of Hugedisk magazine linking the

text “dumb motherfucker” to a site that supported George W. Bush.

For more information, see Calore and Gilbertson, 2001.

48. Brin and Page note that in the Google prototype, a search on

“cellular phone” results in PageRank making the first result a study

about the risks of talking on a cell phone while driving.

49. See SEMPO, 2004, 4.

50. In 2003, the radio host and columnist Dan Savage encouraged his

listeners to go to a website he created, www.santorum.com, and

post definitions of the word “santorum” after the Republican

senator made a series of antigay remarks that outraged the public.

51. See Hindman, 2009; Zittrain, 2008; Vaidhyanathan, 2011.

52. Steele and Iliinsky, 2010, 143.

53. See Hindman, 2009.

54. Ibid.

55. See Gulli and Signorini, 2005.

56. Federal Communications Commission, 2010.

57. Associated Press v. United States, 326 U.S. 1, 20 (1945). Diaz

(2008) carefully traces the fundamental notion of deliberative

democracy and its critical role in keeping the public informed, in the

tradition of John Stuart Mill’s treatise “On Liberty,” which contends

that democracy cannot flourish without public debate and discourse

from the widest range of possible points of view.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/google-bombing

http://www.santorum.com/

58. See Van Couvering, 2004, 2008; Diaz, 2008; Noble, 2014; and

Zimmer, 2009.

59. See Lev-On, 2008.

60. See Andrejevic, 2007.

61. See Goldsmith and Wu, 2006.

62. H. Schiller, 1996, 48.

63. See Fallows, 2005; Purcell, Brenner, and Rainie, 2012.

64. President Eisenhower forewarned of these projects in his farewell

speech on January 17, 1961, when he said, “In the councils of

government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted

influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial

complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power

exists and will persist.” Eisenhower, 1961.

65. Niesen, 2012.

66. The full report can be accessed at www.pewinternet.org.

67. See Epstein and Robertson, 2015.

68. Purcell, Brenner, and Rainie, 2012, 2. Pew reports these findings

from a survey conducted from January 20 to February 19, 2012,

among 2,253 adults, age eighteen and over, including 901

cellphone interviews. Interviews were conducted in English and

Spanish. The margin of error for the full sample is plus or minus two

percentage points.

69. Feuz, Fuller, and Stalder, 2011.

70. Google Web History is designed to track signed-in users’ searches

in order to better track their interests. Considerable controversy

followed Google’s announcement, and many online articles were

published with step-by-step instructions on how to protect privacy

by ensuring that Google Web History was disabled. For more

information on the controversy, see Tsukayama, 2012. Google has

posted official information about its project at http://

support.google.com/ accounts/ bin/ answer.py?

hl=en&answer=54068&topic=14149&ctx=topic (accessed June 22,

2012).

71. Leigh Estabrook and Ed Lakner (2000) have conducted a national

study on Internet control mechanisms used by libraries, which

primarily consist of policies and user education rather than filtering.

These policies and mechanisms are meant to deter users from

accessing objectionable content, including pornography, but also

other material that might be considered offensive.

72. See Corea, 1993; Dates, 1990; Mastro and Tropp, 2004; Stroman,

Merrit, and Matabane, 1989.

http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=54068&topic=14149&ctx=topic

73. The Chicago Urban League has developed a Digital Media

Strategy that is specifically concerned with the content and images

of Black people on the Internet. See the organization’s website:

www.thechicagourbanleague.org.

74. The NAACP Image Awards recognize positive images of Blacks in

the media. See the organization’s website: www.naacp.org.

75. See Hunt, Ramón, and Tran, 2016.

76. FreePress.org has a page dedicated to the issues of civil rights

and media justice. See www.freepress.net/ media_ issues/ civil_ rights

(accessed April 15, 2012).

77. The Federal Trade Commission is looking into the privacy issues

facing Americans over Google’s targeted and behavior-based

advertising programs. It has also settled out of court over the

Google book-digitization project, which was reported in the media

as a “monopolistic online land grab” over public domain orphan

works. See Yang and Easton, 2009.

78. See Roberts, 2016; Stone, 2010.

79. For more information, see Roberts, 2012.

80. Roberts, 2016.

81. See Heider and Harp, 2002; Gunkel and Gunkel, 1997; Pavlik,

1996; Kellner, 1995; Barlow, 1996.

82. See Heider and Harp, 2002.

83. Ibid., 289.

84. Berger, 1972, 64.

85. See Mayall and Russell, 1993, 295.

86. Gardner, 1980, 105–106.

87. Gunkel and Gunkel, 1997, 131.

88. Lipsitz, 1998, 370.

89. Ibid., 381.

90. See Mills, 2014.

91. See Winner, 1986; Pacey, 1983.

92. See Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999.

93. See Barlow, 1996.

94. See Segev, 2010.

95. Stepan, 1998, 28.

96. #Gamergate was an incident involving a group of anonymous

harassers of women in the video-gaming industry, including Zoë

Quinn and Brianna Wu, as well as the writer and critic Anita

Sarkeesian, who faced death threats and threats of rape, among

others. In response to challenges of white male supremacy, sexism,

http://www.thechicagourbanleague.org/

http://www.naacp.org/

http://www.freepress.net/media_issues/civil_rights

racism, and misogyny in video-game culture, many women video-

game developers, feminists, and men supporting women in gaming

were attacked online as well as stalked and harassed.

CHAPTER 2. SEARCHING FOR BLACK GIRLS

1. See Guynn, 2016.

2. See Hiles, 2015.

3. See Sinclair, 2004; Everett, 2009; Nelson, Tu, and Hines, 2001;

Daniels, 2015; Weheliye, 2003; Eglash, 2002; Noble, 2012.

4. See chapter 2 for a detailed explanation of Google AdWords.

5. To protect the identity of subjects in the websites and

advertisements, I intentionally erased faces and body parts using

Adobe Photoshop while still leaving enough visual elements for a

reader to make sense of the content and discourse of the text and

images.

6. See Omi and Winant, 1994.

7. See Daniels, 2009.

8. Ibid., 56.

9. Treitler, 1998, 966.

10. See Golash-Boza, 2016.

11. Omi and Winant, 1994, 67.

12. See Daniels, 2013.

13. See Hall, 1989; Davis and Gandy, 1999.

14. See Fraser, 1996.

15. Jansen and Spink, 2006.

16. McCarthy, 1994, 91.

17. Davis and Gandy, 1999, 368.

18. Barzilai-Nahon, 2006.

19. See Segev, 2010.

20. Ibid.

21. See Williamson, 2014.

22. XMCP, 2008.

23. Morville, 2005, 4.

24. See C. M. West, 1995; hooks, 1992.

25. See Ladson-Billings, 2009.

26. See Yarbrough and Bennett, 2000.

27. See Treitler, 2013; Bell, 1992; Delgado and Stefancic, 1999.

28. See Davis and Gandy, 1999; Gray, 1989; Matabane, 1988; Wilson,

Gutierrez, and Chao, 2003.

29. See Dates, 1990.

30. Punyanunt-Carter, 2008.

31. Ford, 1997.

32. Fujioka, 1999.

33. Pacey, 1983; Winner, 1986; Warf and Grimes, 1997.

34. See Pacey, 1983.

35. Winner, 1986.

36. Warf and Grimes, 1997, 260.

37. Brock, 2011, 1088.

38. Harvey, 2005; Fairclough, 1995.

39. See Boyle, 2003; D. Schiller, 2007.

40. See Davis, 1972.

41. See Dorsey, 2003.

42. See hooks, 1992, 62.

43. Ibid.

44. Dorsey, 2003.

45. Ibid.

46. U.S. Census Bureau, 2008.

47. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2007). 5.4% of White

married people live in poverty, compared to 9.7% of Blacks and

14.9% of Hispanics. Among single people, 22.5% of Whites live in

poverty, compared to 44% of Blacks and 33.4% of Hispanics.

48. Ibid.

49. See the “Panel Study of Income Dynamics,” reportedly the longest

running longitudinal household survey in the world, conducted by

the University of Michigan: http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu.

50. Lerner, 1986, 223.

51. Ibid.

52. See Sharpley-Whiting, 1999; Hobson, 2008.

53. See Braun et al., 2007.

54. Ibid., e271 (original notes omitted).

55. Ibid.

56. See Stepan, 1998.

57. See L. Harding, 2012.

58. See White, [1985] 1999.

59. See the museum’s website: www.ferris.edu/ jimcrow.

60. See Miller-Young, 2005; Harris-Perry, 2011.

http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/

http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow

61. See White, 1985/1999, 29. White’s book is an excellent historical

examination of the Jezebel portrayal, especially chapter 1, “Jezebel

and Mammy” (27–61).

62. See C. M. West, 1995.

63. See Kilbourne, 2000; Cortese, 2008; O’Barr, 1994.

64. See Everett, 2009; Brock, 2009; Brock, Kvasny, and Hales, 2010.

65. See Kappeler, 1986.

66. Ibid., 3.

67. See Paasonen, 2011.

68. See ibid.; Bennett, 2001; Filippo, 2000; O’Toole, 1998; Perdue,

2002.

69. See Estabrook and Lakner, 2000.

70. Nash, 2008, 53.

71. Miller-Young, 2014.

72. Paasonen, 2010, 418.

73. Ibid.

74. Dines, 2010, 48.

75. Ibid., 47, 48.

76. Miller-Young, 2007, 267.

77. See hooks, 1992, 65.

78. Miller-Young, 2007, 262.

79. See Greer, 2003; France, 1999; Tucher, 1997.

80. See Markowitz, 1999.

81. See Burbules, 2001.

82. See Barth, 1966; Jenkins, 1994.

83. See Herring, Jankowski, and Brown, 1999, 363.

84. See Vaidhyanathan, 2011; Gandy, 2011.

85. See Jenkins, 1994.

86. See Harris, 1995.

87. See Jenkins, 1994.

88. Davis and Gandy, 1999, 367.

89. See Jenkins, 1994; Davis and Gandy, 1999.

90. See Ferguson, Kreshel, and Tinkham, 1990; Pease, 1985; Potter,

1954.

91. See Ferguson, Kreshel, and Tinkham, 1990; Tuchman, 1979.

92. See Rudman and Borgida, 1995; Kenrick, Gutierres, and Goldberg,

1989; Jennings, Geis, and Brown, 1980.

93. Kilbourne, 2000, 27.

94. Kuhn 1985, 10; quoted in hooks, 1992, 77.

95. See Paasonen, 2011; Gillis, 2004; Sollfrank, 2002; Haraway, 1991.

96. See Wajcman, 2010.

97. See Wajcman, 1991, 5.

98. Wajcman, 2010, 150.

99. See Everett, 2009, 149.

100. See Daniels, 2015.

101. See Everett, 2009.

102. Fouché, 2006, 640.

CHAPTER 3. SEARCHING FOR PEOPLE AND COMMUNITIES

1. Dylann Roof was indicted on federal hate crimes charges on July

22, 2015. Apuzzo, 2015.

2. The website of Dylann Roof’s photos and writings,

www.lastrhodesian.com, has been taken down but can be accessed

in the Internet Archive at http:// web.archive.org/ web/

20150620135047/ http://lastrhodesian.com/ data/ documents/

rtf88.txt.

3. See description of the CCC by the SPLC at www.splcenter.org/ get-

informed/ intelligence-files/ groups/ council-of-conservative-citizens.

4. Gabriella Coleman, the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological

Literacy at McGill University, has written extensively about the

activism and disruptions of the hackers known as Anonymous and

the cultural and political nature of their work of whistleblowing and

hacktivism. See Coleman, 2015.

5. FBI statistics from 2010 show that the majority of crime happens

within race. They also note that “White individuals were arrested

more often for violent crimes than individuals of any other race,

accounting for 59.3 percent of those arrests.” See U.S. Department

of Justice, 2010.

6. See Daniels, 2009, 8.

http://web.archive.org/web/20150620135047/http://lastrhodesian.com/data/documents/rtf88.txt

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/groups/council-of-conservative-citizens

CHAPTER 4. SEARCHING FOR PROTECTIONS FROM SEARCH

ENGINES

1. See Associated Press, 2013.

2. See Gold, 2011.

3. Ibid. The original post can be found at http:// you-

aremyanchor.tumblr.com/ post/ 7530939623.

4. See Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, “Revenge Porn Laws,” accessed

August 9, 2017, www.cybercivilrights.org.

5. Rocha, 2014.

6. Ohlheiser, 2015.

7. See Judgment of the Court (Grand Chamber), 13 May 2014, Google

Spain SL, Google Inc. v. Agencia Español de Protección de Datos

(AEPD), Mario Costeja González, http://curia.europa.eu.

8. See Xanthoulis, 2013.

9. See Charte du droit à l’oubli dans les sites collaboratifs et les

moteurs de recherche, September 30, 2010.

10. See Xanthoulis, 2013; Kuschewsky, 2012.

11. See Jones, 2016.

12. See Purcell, Brenner, and Rainie, 2012.

13. See UnpublishArrest.com, “Unpublish, Permanently Publish or Edit

Content,” accessed August 9, 2017, www.unpublisharrest.com/

unpublish-mugshot/.

14. See Sweeney, 2013.

15. Blanchette and Johnson, 2002.

16. Ibid., 34.

17. Gandy, 1993, 285.

18. See Caswell, 2014.

19. See “Explore a Google Data Center with Street View,” YouTube,

linked from Google, “Inside Our Data Centers,” accessed August 17,

2017, www.google.com/ about/ datacenters/ inside/.

20. Google, “Inside Look: Data and Security,” accessed August 17,

2017, www.google.com/ about/ datacenters/ inside/ data-security/.

21. “Security Whitepaper: Google Apps Messaging and Collaboration

Products,” 2011, linked from Google, “Data and Security,” accessed

August 16, 2016, www.google.com/ about/ datacenters/ inside/ data-

security/.

22. See Storm, 2014.

http://you-aremyanchor.tumblr.com/post/7530939623

http://www.cybercivilrights.org/

http://curia.europa.eu/

http://www.unpublisharrest.com/unpublish-mugshot/

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/data-security/

23. Blanchette and Johnson, 2002, 36.

24. See Xanthoulis, 2012, 85, citing Fleischer, 2011.

25. Ibid.

26. See Google, 2012.

27. A comprehensive timeline of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing

on the U.S. government’s comprehensive surveillance program is

detailed by the Guardian newspaper in MacAskill and Dance, 2013.

28. Tippman, 2015.

29. Kiss, 2015.

30. Goode, 2015.

31. See Robertson, 2016.

32. Ibid.

CHAPTER 5. THE FUTURE OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE PUBLIC

1. See the plan at “The Plan for Dartmouth’s Freedom Budget: Items

for Transformative Justice at Dartmouth,” Dartblog, accessed

August 9, 2017, www.dartblog.com/ Dartmouth_ Freedom_ Budget_

Plan.pdf.

2. Peet, 2016.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Qin, 2016.

6. Sanford Berman documents the sordid history of racist

classification in the Library of Congress in his canonical work

Prejudices and Antipathies (1971). A follow-up to his findings was

written thirty years later by Steven A. Knowlton in the article “Three

Decades since Prejudices and Antipathies: A Study of Changes in

the Library of Congress Subject Headings” (2005).

7. Peet, 2016.

8. Furner, 2007, 148.

9. Ibid., 147.

10. Ibid., 169.

11. See Olson, 1998.

12. See Anderson, 1991, 37–46.

13. Hudson, 1996, 256; Anderson, 1991.

14. The first documented evidence of print culture is attributed to

Chinese woodblock printing. See Hyatt Mayor, 1971, 1–4.

15. See Saracevic, 2009.

16. See Berman, 1971; Olson, 1998.

17. Berman, 1971, 15.

18. Ibid., 5.

19. See ibid.; Palmer and Malone, 2001.

20. See Berman, 1971, 5.

21. Ibid.

22. Olson, 1998, 233.

23. Ibid., 234

24. Ibid., 234–235.

25. Ibid., 235.

26. Ibid.

http://www.dartblog.com/Dartmouth_Freedom_Budget_Plan.pdf

27. See Cornell, 1992; Olson, 1998.

28. See Olson, 1998, 237.

29. See C. West, 1996, 84.

30. See Berman, 1971, 18.

31. Ibid., citing Mosse, 1966.

32. See Wilson, 1968, 6.

33. Berman, 1971, 19, citing Marshall, personal communication, June

23, 1970.

34. Ibid., 20.

35. Reidsma, 2016.

36. See Galloway, 2008.

37. See Galloway, Lovink, and Thacker, 2008.

38. See Galloway, 2008.

39. Battelle, 2005, 6.

40. See Brin and Page, 1998a.

41. Saracevic, 1999, 1054.

42. Ibid.

43. Saracevic, 2009, 2570.

44. See Bowker and Star, 1999.

45. See Saracevic, 2009.

46. See Brock, 2011.

47. Ibid., 1101.

48. See Fuchs, 2008.

CHAPTER 6. THE FUTURE OF INFORMATION CULTURE

1. See Federal Communications Commission, 2010

2. Ibid.

3. H. Schiller, 1996, 44.

4. Cohen, 2016.

5. See McChesney and Nichols, 2009; H. Schiller, 1996.

6. See Harris-Perry, 2011; hooks, 1992.

7. Arreola, 2010.

8. See the website of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of

Ethics, www.spj.org.

9. See Darnton, 2009; Jeanneney, 2007.

10. See Jeanneney, 2007.

11. See Authors Guild v. Google, Case 1:05-cv-08136-DC, Document

1088, November 14, 2013.

12. Darnton, 2009, 2.

13. See Search King v. Google, 2003.

14. See Dickinson, 2010.

15. Ibid., 866.

16. Ibid.

17. Ingram, 2011.

18. See Wilhelm, 2006.

19. See Sinclair, 2004.

20. See Luyt, 2004.

21. See van Dijk and Hacker, 2003; and Pinkett, 2000.

22. See Rifkin, 2000.

23. See Segev, 2010.

24. See Rifkin, 1995.

25. The term “prosumer” is a portmanteau of “producer” and

“consumer” that is often used to indicate a higher degree of digital

literacy, economic participation, and personal control over the

means of technology production. The term is mostly attributed, in

this context, to Alvin Toffler, a futurist who thought that the line

between traditional economic consumer and producer would

eventually blur through engagements with technology and that this

participation would generally lead to greater mass customization of

http://www.spj.org/

products and services by corporations. See Toffler, 1970, 1980;

Tapscott, 1996; Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010.

26. Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010, 14.

27. See Smythe, 1981/2006.

28. See Fuchs, 2011.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., 43.

31. Ibid.

32. A list of Google’s global assets and subsidiaries can be found in

its SEC filings: www.sec.gov/ Archives/ edgar/ data/ 1288776/

000119312507044494/ dex2101.htm.

33. See recent news coverage discussing U.S. Department of Labor

data and the significant decline of Blacks, Latinos, and women in

the Silicon Valley technology industries: Swift, 2010.

34. See Meyer, 2016.

35. See Glusac, 2016.

36. See Eddie and Prigg, 2015.

37. See Mosher, 2016.

38. See Fuchs, 2011.

39. See Noble and Roberts, 2015.

40. See Department of Labor, Office of the Secretary, “Notice of Final

Determination Revising the List of Products Requiring Federal

Contractor Certification as to Forced or Indentured Child Labor

Pursuant to Executive Order 13126,” which prohibits coltan that has

been produced by child labor from entering the United States.

41. Kristi Esseck covered this issue in her article “Guns, Money and

Cell Phones” (2011). The United Nations also issued a report,

submitted by Secretary General Kofi Annan, about the status of

companies involved in coltan trafficking and the impact of

investigations by the UN into the conflicts arising from such

practices in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The report can

be accessed at www.un.org/ Docs/ journal/ asp/ ws.asp?m=S/ 2003/

1027 (accessed July 3, 2012).

42. Coltan mining is significantly understudied by Western scholars

but has been documented in many nongovernmental organizations’

reports about the near-slavery economy in the Congo that is the

result of Western dependence on “conflict minerals” such as coltan

that have been the basis of ongoing wars and smuggling regimes

that have extended as far as Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi. See

reviews in the New York Times as well as a detailed overview of the

conditions in the Congo due to mining by Anup Shah, at

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312507044494/dex2101.htm

http://www.un.org/Docs/journal/asp/ws.asp?m=S/2003/1027

www.globalissues.org, which asserts that an elite network of

multinational companies, politicians, and military leaders have

essentially kept the issues from the view of the public. See

Hardenaug, 2001; Shah, 2010.

43. While less formal scholarship has been dedicated to this issue,

considerable media attention in 2011 and 2012 has been focused

on the labor conditions in parts of China where Apple manufactures

its products. While some of the details of the journalistic reporting

have been prone to factual error in location and dates, there is

considerable evidence that labor conditions by Apple’s supplier

Foxconn are precarious and rife with human-rights abuses. See

Duhigg and Barboza, 2012.

44. See Fields, 2004.

45. Wallace, 1990, 98.

46. See Hobson, 2008.

47. See Harvey, 2005.

48. See Jensen, 2005; Brown, 2003; Burdman, 2008.

49. See Harvey, 2005.

50. The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) was adopted by the

FCC in 2001 and is designed to address filtering of pornographic

content from any computers in federally funded agencies such as

schools and libraries. The act is designed to incentivize such

organizations with Universal E-Rate discounts for using filters and

providing Internet safety policies. See FCC, “Children’s Internet

Protection Act,” accessed August 9, 2017, www.fcc.gov/ guides/

childrens-internet-protection-act.

51. The Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007 is designed to regulate

objectionable adult-themed material so that children cannot see it

on mobile devices. The FCC is investigating the use of blocking

software or devices for use on television and mobile devices

through the use of a V-Chip that can allow adults to block content.

See FCC, “Protecting Children from Objectionable Content on

Wireless Devices,” accessed August 9, 2017, www.fcc.gov/ guides/

protecting-children-objectionable-content-wireless-devices.

52. The National Urban League reported in 2010 startling statistics

about the economic crisis, specific to African Americans: (1) less

than half of black and Hispanic families own a home (47.4% and

49.1%, respectively), compared to three-quarters of White families;

and (2) Blacks and Hispanics are more than three times as likely as

whites to live below the poverty line. See National Urban League,

2010.

53. See McGreal, 2010.

http://www.globalissues.org/

http://www.fcc.gov/guides/childrens-internet-protection-act

http://www.fcc.gov/guides/protecting-children-objectionable-content-wireless-devices

54. See Jensen, 2005; McGreal, 2010.

55. See Neville et al., 2012.

56. See Pawley, 2006.

57. See Tettegah, 2016.

58. See Brown, 2003; Crenshaw, 1991.

59. See Lipsitz, 1998; Brown, 2003; Burdman, 2008.

60. See Tynes and Markoe, 2010.

61. See Brown, 2003.

62. Ibid.

63. See Lipsitz, 1998; Jensen, 2005.

CONCLUSION

1. See Tate, 2003.

2. See Daniels, 2008.

3. This suppression of Kandis’s business, according to her, is not

based on her lack of popularity but, rather, on her unwillingness to

pay more to Yelp to have her competitors taken off her page.

4. Kandis described an experience of having two of her clients who

are not regular reviewers on Yelp post positive reviews about her,

only to have them sequestered from her page. She described her

conversations with Yelp customer service agents, from which she

deduced that these reviews were seen as “fraudulent” or

inauthentic reviews that she must have solicited.

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