Bias in Commercial Search Engines: A Conversation With Safiya Umoja Noble

Out of the Echo Chamber: Conversations on Trust, Media and Democracy

Should we be skeptical of the content returned by search engines like Google? How are people in various communities represented, and how does big tech’s reliance on ad money distort the information they provide? Professor Safiya Umoja Noble, co-director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, joins the podcast to shed light on search engine discrimination and examine insights from her book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, Algorithms of Oppression. We discuss her claim that search algorithms privilege the perspective of white males and her mission to reverse these practices and get her thoughts on new Gallup-Knight research on the public’s concerns over internet content.