UC Berkeley Hosting Prof to Discuss How Search Engines Promote Racism

For the left, everything promotes racism. We’ve been hearing this non-stop for over a decade.

Campus Reform reports:

Berkeley hosts prof to discuss how search engines are racistThe University of California-Berkeley plans to host a lecture that targets oppression and alleged discrimination on Internet search engines, and how algorithms reinforce racist activity online.Berkeley’s School of Engineering will host an event called “Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism,” which will be an hour-and-a-half long lecture on Mar. 20 and will feature University of Southern California and University of California-Los Angeles Professor Safiya Umoja Noble. Two of the main focuses of the event is to tackle “data discrimination” as a “social problem” and to introduce ideas to prevent further perceived algorithm bias by search engines in the future.Noble will demonstrate to students the idea that private interests that promote certain websites and a monopolization of search engines “leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color- and contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century,” according to the event description.UC Berkeley’s Center for New Media will sponsor the event, along with the University of California-based Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute. The name of the lecture is based on Noble’s book, which alleges racial and sexist biases in search algorithms used by Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The book was released in February 2018 and also covered how technology designers can create a bias against races and genders.“While we often think of terms such as ‘big data’ and ‘algorithms’ as benign, neutral, or objective, they are anything but,” Noble wrote in the book. “The people who make these decisions hold all types of values, many of which openly promote racism, sexism, and false notions of meritocracy.”

Tags: College Insurrection, Los Angeles

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