12. Jan Hoffman, “Estimate of U.S. Transgender Population Doubles to 1.4 Million Adults,” New York Times, July 1, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/health/transgender-population.html.
13. Alexandra Buxton, “Mistress, Miss, Mrs or Ms: Untangling the Shifting History of Women’s Titles,” New Statesman, September 12, 2014, http://www.newstatesman.com/cultural-capital/2014/09/mistress-miss-mrs-or-ms-untangling-shifting-history-women-s-titles.
14. GOV.UK Service Manual, “Names,” accessed February 13, 2017, https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/design/names.
15. Caroline O’Donovan, “Nextdoor Rolls Out Product Fix It Hopes Will Stem Racial Profiling,” BuzzFeed, August 24, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/nextdoor-rolls-out-product-fix-it-hopes-will-stem-racial-pro.
16. See the post about the updates in “Our Commitment to End Racial Profiling on Nextdoor,” Nextdoor Blog, January 27, 2016, https://blog.nextdoor.com/2016/01/27/our-commitment-to-end-racial-profiling-on-nextdoor.
17. Nirav Tolia, “Reducing Racial Profiling on Nextdoor,” Nextdoor Blog, August 24, 2016, https://blog.nextdoor.com/2016/08/24/reducing-racial-profiling-on-nextdoor.
18. Margaret Rhodes, “Nextdoor Breaks a Sacred Design Rule to End Racial Profiling,” Wired, August 31, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/08/nextdoor-breaks-sacred-design-rule-end-racial-profiling.
19. Aimee Gonzalez-Cameron, phone interview with the author, November 14, 2016.
20. Emily Horseman, “The Argument for Free-Form Input,” Model View Culture, November 23, 2015, https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-argument-for-free-form-input.
21. Rhodes, “Nextdoor Breaks a Sacred Design Rule.”
Chapter 5: Delighted to Death
1. Dan Hon, Twitter post, October 10, 2016 (10:38 p.m.), https://twitter.com/hondanhon/status/785668423099428864.
2. Dan Hon, Twitter post, October 10, 2016 (10:03 p.m.), https://twitter.com/hondanhon/status/785662188178411521.
3. Timehop, [homepage], April 13, 2017, http://www.timehop.com.
4. Mike Babb, Twitter post, June 3, 2016 (4:08 a.m.), https://twitter.com/mikegbabb/status/738688748494327811.
5. Ibid.
6. All the videos I reference are embedded in this article: Adam Boult, “Facebook Makes Oddly Cheerful Video from Man’s Horrific Car Crash Photos,” Telegraph, September 13, 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/13/facebook-makes-oddly-cheerful-video-from-mans-horrific-car-crash.
7. Sally Rooney, email to the author, January 11, 2017.
8. Kiefer Lee, phone interview with the author, June 24, 2015.
9. Ibid.
10. Jesse Charger, “Negging Women—10 Awesome Negs That Work,” Seduction Science, accessed December 2016, http://www.seductionscience.com/2010/negging-women.
11. Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, Inattentional Blindness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
12. Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us (New York: Harmony, 2011). For the original video: Daniel Simons, “Selective Attention Test,” YouTube, March 10, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo.
13. Alix Spiegel, “Why Even Radiologists Can Miss a Gorilla Hiding in Plain Sight,” Shots, NPR, February 11, 2013, http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/02/11/171409656/why-even-radiologists-can-miss-a-gorilla-hiding-in-plain-sight.
14. Cory Weinberg and Amir Efrati, “Inside Facebook’s Campaign to Convince You It Cares,” The Information, January 14, 2016, https://www.theinformation.com/inside-facebooks-campaign-to-convince-you-it-cares.
15. Julianne Tveten, “The Rise of Confirmshaming: When Websites Insult You for Not Opting In,” Motherboard, June 7, 2016, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/confirmshaming.
16. Tag Savage, Twitter post, September 4, 2016 (11:30 a.m.), https://twitter.com/tagsavage/status/772504445406048257.
Chapter 6: Tracked, Tagged, and Targeted
1. Julia Angwin, Terry Parris Jr., and Surya Mattu, “Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows about Them,” ProPublica, December 27, 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-doesnt-tell-users-everything-it-really-knows-about-them.
2. Natasha Singer, “Mapping, and Sharing, the Consumer Genome,” New York Times, June 16, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/technology/acxiom-the-quiet-giant-of-consumer-database-marketing.html.
3. Acxiom Corporation, “Personicx Online Guide: 06 Casual Comfort,” 2014.
4. If you’re not sure how important this is, read security expert Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016). Twenty bucks says you’ll want to throw your phone in a river and move to a cabin off the grid by the time you’re done.
5. Andrew J. Hawkins, “Uber Wants to Track Your Location Even When You’re Not Using the App,” Verge, November 30, 2016, http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/30/13763714/uber-location-data-tracking-app-privacy-ios-android.
6. Jon Russell, “Uber’s Moral Compass Needs Recalibration,” TechCrunch, November 19, 2014, https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/19/uber-off.
7. Kai Ryssdal, “Uber’s Data Makes a Creepy Point about the Company,” Marketplace, Minnesota Public Radio, November 18, 2014, http://www.marketplace.org/2014/11/18/business/final-note/ubers-data-makes-creepy-point-about-company.
8. Tim Jones, “Facebook’s ‘Evil Interfaces,’” Deeplinks (blog), Electronic Frontier Foundation, April 29, 2010, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfaces.
9. “Facebook Asks More than 350 Million Users around the World to Personalize Their Privacy,” Facebook Newsroom, December 9, 2009, https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2009/12/facebook-asks-more-than-350-million-users-around-the-world-to-personalize-their-privacy.
10. Cecilia Kang, “Google Tracks Consumers’ Online Activities across Products, and Users Can’t Opt Out,” Washington Post, January 24, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-tracks-consumers-across-products-users-cant-opt-out/2012/01/24/gIQArgJHOQ_story.html.
11. Sarah Kessler, “Google Thinks I’m a Middle-Aged Man. What about You?” Mashable, January 25, 2012, http://mashable.com/2012/01/25/google-cookies/#MhtR2DYc3kqg.
12. Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Crown, 2016).
13. Julia Angwin and Terry Parris Jr., “Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race,” ProPublica, October 28, 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers-exclude-users-by-race.
14. Safiya Noble, phone interview with the author, January 9, 2017.
15. Jesse Barron, “The Babysitters Club,” Real Life, July 27, 2016, http://reallifemag.com/the-babysitters-club.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. See Pew Research Center, “Mobile Fact Sheet,” accessed January 12, 2017, http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/mobile.
19. O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction, conclusion.
Chapter 7: Algorithmic Inequity
1. Both men’s offenses are outlined in Julia Angwin et al., “What Algorithmic Injustice Looks Like in Real Life,” Pacific Standard, June 2, 2016, https://psmag.com/what-algorithmic-injustice-looks-like-in-real-life-c58d409aa4dc#.5vh2au6z2.
2. Julia Angwin et al., “Machine Bias,” ProPublica, May 23, 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing.
3. According to NAACP, “Criminal Justice Fact Sheet,” accessed January 30, 2017, http://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet.
4. Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Crown, 2016), conclusion.
5. Northpointe, “COMPAS Risk & Need Assessment System: Selected Questions Posed by Inquiring Agencies,” 2012, http://www.northpointeinc.com/files/downloads/FAQ_Document.pdf.
6. Sam Corbett-Davies et al., “A Computer Program Used for Bail and Sentencing Decisions Was Labeled Biased
against Blacks. It’s Actually Not That Clear,” Washington Post, October 17, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/10/17/can-an-algorithm-be-racist-our-analysis-is-more-cautious-than-propublicas.
7. Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson, “Bias in Criminal Risk Scores Is Mathematically Inevitable, Researchers Say,” ProPublica, December 30, 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/bias-in-criminal-risk-scores-is-mathematically-inevitable-researchers-say.
8. Sorelle Friedler, phone interview with the author, January 30, 2017.
9. “Why Google ‘Thought’ This Black Woman Was a Gorilla,” Note to Self, WNYC, September 28, 2015, http://www.wnyc.org/story/deep-problem-deep-learning.
10. Jacky Alciné, email to the author, January 27, 2017.
11. Google Photos, [product tour screens], accessed January 28, 2017, https://photos.google.com.
12. For a walk through the basics, see the free online book by Michael Nielsen: Neural Networks and Deep Learning (Determination Press, 2015), http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com.
13. Daniela Hernandez, “The New Google Photos App Is Disturbingly Good at Data-Mining Your Photos,” Fusion, June 4, 2015, http://fusion.net/story/142326/the-new-google-photos-app-is-disturbingly-good-at-data-mining-your-photos.
14. Fei-Fei Li tells the story of bringing this sort of neural network to life in her 2015 TED talk: “How We’re Teaching Computers to Understand Pictures,” March 2015, https://www.ted.com/talks/fei_fei_li_how_we_re_teaching_computers_to_understand_pictures/transcript.
15. “Google Apologises for Photos App’s Racist Blunder,” BBC News, July 1, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33347866.
16. Yonatan Zunger, Twitter post, June 29, 2015 (11:19 a.m.), https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/615585375487045632.
17. Mandelit del Barco, “How Kodak’s Shirley Cards Set Photography’s Skin-Tone Standard,” Color Decoded: Stories That Span the Spectrum, NPR, November 13, 2014, http://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/for-decades-kodak-s-shirley-cards-set-photography-s-skin-tone-standard.
18. Lorna Roth, “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity,” Canadian Journal of Communication 34, no. 1 (2009): 111–36, http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/2196/3069.
19. Ibid.
20. Yonatan Zunger, Twitter posts: June 29, 2015 (11:23 a.m.), https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/615586442413146112; and June 29, 2015 (11:24 a.m.), https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/615586630842236928.
21. Andrew Griffin, “Flickr’s Auto-tagging Feature Goes Awry, Accidentally Tags Black People as Apes,” Independent, May 20, 2015, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/flickr-s-auto-tagging-feature-goes-awry-accidentally-tags-black-people-as-apes-10264144.html.
22. Odelia Lee, “Camera Misses the Mark on Racial Sensitivity,” Gizmodo, May 15, 2009, http://gizmodo.com/5256650/camera-misses-the-mark-on-racial-sensitivity.
23. See “HP Computers Are Racist,” YouTube, December 10, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM.
24. Friedler, phone interview, January 30, 2017.
25. Rose Eveleth, “The Inherent Bias of Facial Recognition,” Motherboard, March 21, 2016, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-inherent-bias-of-facial-recognition.
26. Tolga Bolukbasi et al., “Man Is to Computer Programmer as Woman Is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings,” July 21, 2016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.06520v1.pdf.
27. Rob May, “Introducing CV2Vec: A Neural Model for Candidate Similarity,” Medium, May 12, 2016, https://medium.com/talla-inc/introducing-cv2vec-a-neural-model-for-candidate-similarity-e215b1b12472#.bkh1bb45w.
28. Rob May, “Artificial Intelligence in HR,” HR Examiner, March 2, 2017, http://www.hrexaminer.com/artificial-intelligence-in-hr.
29. Bolukbasi et al., “Man Is to Computer Programmer,” 3.
30. David A. Graham, “The White-Supremacist Group That Inspired a Racist Manifesto,” Atlantic, June 22, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/council-of-conservative-citizens-dylann-roof/396467.
31. From Dylann Roof’s manifesto, originally published on his site, http://www.lastrhodesian.com. A cached version was saved June 20, 2015, after his arrest, at http://archive.is/KeAK3.
32. Miriam E. Sweeney, “Not Just a Pretty (Inter)Face: A Critical Analysis of Microsoft’s ‘Ms. Dewey,’” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013), https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/46617/Miriam_Sweeney.pdf.
33. Kristen Purcell, Joanna Brenner, and Lee Rainie, “Search Engine Use 2012,” Pew Research Center, http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/03/09/search-engine-use-2012.
34. Edelman, “2017 Edelman Trust Barometer: Global Annual Study,” January 15, 2017, http://www.edelman.com/trust2017.
35. Stephen Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 206–7.
36. Northpointe, “COMPAS Risk & Need Assessment System: Selected Questions Posed by Inquiring Agencies,” January 14, 2010, http://www.northpointeinc.com/files/technical_documents/Selected_Compas_Questions_Posed_by_Inquiring_Agencies.pdf.
37. Eveleth, “Inherent Bias of Facial Recognition.”
38. Friedler, phone interview, January 30, 2017.
39. Ibid.
Chapter 8: Built to Break
1. Lindy West, “Twitter Doesn’t Think These Rape and Death Threats Are Harassment,” Daily Dot, December 23, 2014, http://www.dailydot.com/via/twitter-harassment-rape-death-threat-report.
2. Natasha Tiku and Casey Newton, “Twitter CEO: ‘We Suck at Dealing with Abuse,’” Verge, February 4, 2015, http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/4/7982099/twitter-ceo-sent-memo-taking-personal-responsibility-for-the.
3. Maeve Duggan, “Online Harassment,” Pew Research Center, October 22, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment.
4. Lindy West, “I’ve Left Twitter. It Is Unusable for Anyone but Trolls, Robots and Dictators,” Guardian, January 3, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/03/ive-left-twitter-unusable-anyone-but-trolls-robots-dictators-lindy-west.
5. If you truly can’t help yourself, see these two Breitbart articles by Yiannopoulos: “Teenage Boys with Tits: Here’s My Problem with Ghostbusters,” July 18, 2016, http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/18/milo-reviews-ghostbusters; and “Here’s Why the Left Is So Desperate to Defend the New Feminist Ghostbusters,” May 5, 2016, http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/05/05/heres-left-desperate-defend-new-feminist-ghostbusters.
6. Leslie Jones, Twitter posts: July 18, 2016 (9:44 p.m.), https://twitter.com/Lesdoggg/status/755261962674696192; and July 18, 2016 (10:20 p.m.), https://twitter.com/Lesdoggg/status/755271004520349698.
7. Charlie Warzel, “Twitter Permanently Suspends Conservative Writer Milo Yiannopoulos,” BuzzFeed, July 19, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/twitter-just-permanently-suspended-conservative-writer-milo.
8. Kerry Flynn, “Twitter’s Biggest Anti-troll Effort to Date Is Finally Here,” Mashable, November 15, 2016, http://mashable.com/2016/11/15/twitter-abuse-updates/#15Fs6Om838qP.
9. Ed Ho, “An Update on Safety,” Official Twitter Blog, February 7, 2017, https://blog.twitter.com/2017/an-update-on-safety.
10. Laurie Penny, “I’m with the Banned,” Welcome to the Scream Room, July 21, 2016, https://medium.com/welcome-to-the-scream-room/im-with-the-banned-8d1b6e0b2932#.h3k5r59gr.
11. Diana Tourjee, “Trans Student Harassed by Milo Yiannopoulos Speaks Out,” Broadly, January 3, 2017, https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/trans-student-harassed-by-milo-yiannopoulos-speaks-out.
12. Maya Oppenheim, “UC Berkeley Protests: Milo Yiannopoulos Planned to ‘Publicy [sic] Name Undocumented Students’ in Cancelled Talk,” Independent, February 3, 2017, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/uc-berkely-protests-milo-yiannopoulos-publicly-name-undocumented-students-cancelled-talk-illegals-a7561321.html.
13. Donald J.
Trump, Twitter post, February 2, 2017 (3:13 a.m.), https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/827112633224544256.
14. David Sarno, “Twitter Creator Jack Dorsey Illuminates the Site’s Founding Document. Part I,” Technology (blog), Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2009, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/twitter-creator.html.
15. Jack Dorsey, “Twittr Sketch,” Flickr, March 24, 2006, https://www.flickr.com/photos/jackdorsey/182613360.
16. Nick Douglas, “Twitter Blows Up at SXSW Conference,” Gawker (blog), March 12, 2007, http://gawker.com/243634/twitter-blows-up-at-sxsw-conference.
17. Aaron Smith, “Twitter Update 2011,” Pew Research Center, June 1, 2011, http://www.pewinternet.org/2011/06/01/twitter-update-2011.
18. Twitter, [homepage], Wayback Machine, February 2, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20070202022702/www.twitter.com.
19. Lucy Battersby, “Twitter Criticised for Failing to Respond to Caroline Criado-Perez Rape Threats,” Age, July 29, 2013, http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/twitter-criticised-for-failing-to-respond-to-caroline-criadoperez-rape-threats-20130729-2qu8d.html.
20. Josh Halliday, “Twitter’s Tony Wang: ‘We Are the Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party,’” Guardian, March 22, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-wang-free-speech.
21. A good overview of Gamergate for the uninitiated can be found in Caitlin Dewey, “The Only Guide to Gamergate You Will Ever Need to Read,” Washington Post, October 14, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/14/the-only-guide-to-gamergate-you-will-ever-need-to-read.
22. Charlie Warzel, “A Honeypot for Assholes: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure to Stop Harassment,” BuzzFeed, August 11, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/a-honeypot-for-assholes-inside-twitters-10-year-failure-to-s.
23. Ibid.
24. For just a few of the many, many articles, see Robinson Meyer, “The Decay of Twitter,” Atlantic, November 2, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/conversation-smoosh-twitter-decay/412867; Casey Newton and Nilay Patel, “Is Twitter Doomed?” Verge, January 26, 2016, www.theverge.com/2016/1/26/10833024/is-twitter-doomed; and Hayley Tsukayama, “The Death of Twitter as We Know It,” Washington Post, February 11, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/02/11/the-death-of-twitter-as-we-know-it.
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