In this chapter, I have shown how women, particularly Black women, are misrepresented on the Internet in search results and how this is tied to a longer legacy of White racial patriarchy. The Internet has also been a contested space where the possibility of organizing women along feminist values in cyberspace has had a long history.95 Information and communication technologies are posited as the domain of men, not only marginalizing the contributions of women to ICT development but using these narratives to further instantiate patriarchy.96 Men, intending to or not, have used their control and monopoly over the domain of technology to further consolidate their social, political, and economic power in society and rarely give up these privileges to create structural shifts in these inheritances. Where men shape technology, they shape it to the exclusion of women, especially Black women.97
The work of the feminist scholars Judy Wajcman and Anna Everett is essential to parsing the historical development of narratives about women and people of color, specifically African Americans in technology. Each of their projects points to the specific ways in which technological practices prioritize the interests of men and Whites. For Wajcman, “people and artifacts co-evolve, reminding us that ‘things could be otherwise,’ that technologies are not the inevitable result of the application of scientific and technological knowledge. . . . The capacity of women users to produce new, advantageous readings of artefacts is dependent upon the broader economic and social circumstances.”98 Adding to the historical tracings that Everett provides about early African American contributions to cyberspace, she notes that these contributions have been obscured by “colorblindness” in mainstream and scholarly media that erases the contributions of African Americans.99 Institutional relations predicated on gender and race situate women and people of color outside the power systems from which technology arises. This is how colorblind ideology is mechanized in Silicon Valley: through denial of the existence of both racial orders and contributions from non-Whites.
This fantasy of postracialism has been well documented by Jessie Daniels, who has written about the problems of colorblind racism in tech industries.100 This tradition of defining White and Asian male dominance in the tech industries as a matter of meritocracy is buttressed by myths of Asian Americans as a model minority. The marginalization of women and non-Whites is a by-product of such entrenchments, design choices, and narratives about technical capabilities.101 Rayvon Fouché, the American studies chair at Purdue University, underscores the importance of Black culture in shaping the technological systems. He argues that technologies could “be more responsive to the realities of black life in the United States” by organizing around the sensibilities of the Black community. Furthermore, he problematizes the dominant narratives of technology “for” Black people:
Americans are continually bombarded with seemingly endless self-regenerating progressive technological narratives. In this capitalist-supported tradition, the multiple effects that technology has on African American lives go underexamined. This uplifting rhetoric has helped obfuscate the distinctly adversarial relationships African Americans have had with technology.102
In this work on the politics of search engines and their representations of women and girls of color, I have documented how certain searches on keywords point information seekers to an abundance of pornography using the default “moderate” setting in Google Search, and I have offered more examples of how Silicon Valley defends itself by continuing to underemploy people who have expertise in these important fields of ethnic and gender studies. The value of this exploration is in showing how gender and race are socially constructed and mutually constituted through science and technology. The very notion that technologies are neutral must be directly challenged as a misnomer.
Whether or not one cares about the specific misrepresentations of women and girls of color or finds the conceptual representations of teenagers, professors, nurses, or doctors problematic, there is certain evidence that the way that digital media platforms and algorithms control the narrative about people can have dire consequences when taken to the extreme.
3
Searching for People and Communities
On the evening of June 17, 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina, a twenty-one-year-old White nationalist, Dylann “Storm” Roof, opened fire on unsuspecting African American Christian worshipers at “Mother” Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in one of the most heinous racial and religious hate crimes of recent memory.1 His racist terrorist attack led to the deaths of South Carolina state senator Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was also the pastor of the church, along with librarian Cynthia Hurd, Tywanza Sanders, Rev. Sharonda Singleton, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson, Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., and Rev. DePayne Middleton Doctor. There were three survivors of the attack, Felecia Sanders, her eleven-year-old granddaughter, and Polly Sheppard. The location of the murders was not chosen in vain by Roof; Emanuel AME stood as one of the oldest symbols of African American freedom in the United States. It was organized by free and enslaved Black/African people in 1791, with its membership growing into the thousands, only to be burned down in 1822 by White South Carolinians who heard that the church member Denmark Vessey was leading an effort to organize enslaved Blacks to revolt against their slave masters. For over two hundred years, Emanuel AME has been a site and symbol of a struggle for freedom from White supremacy and a place where organizing for civil rights and full participation of African Americans has been foregrounded by its members and supporters from across the country.
The massacre was a tragedy of epic proportions. Reports of the racist-motivated murders came on the heels of many months and years of news reports about hundreds of African Americans murdered by police officers, security guards, and self-appointed neighborhood watchmen. As news of the massacre hit social media sites, a Twitter user by the name of @HenryKrinkIe tweeted that a “racist manifesto” had been found at www.lastrhodesian.com, which documented the many thoughts informing the killer’s understanding of race relations in the U.S. The first responder to a tweeted request for forty-nine dollars to access the site was @EMQuangel, who offered to pay for the “Reverse WhoIs” database report in order to verify that the site did in fact belong to Dylann Roof. Within a few hours, several news outlets began reporting on Roof’s many writings at the website, where he allegedly shared the following:
The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?
From this point I researched deeper and found out what was happening in Europe. I saw that the same things were happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries. Again I found myself in disbelief. As an American we are taught to accept living in the melting pot, and black and other minorities have just as much right to be here as we do, since we are all immigrants. But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many ways the situation is even worse there. From here I found out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race, and I can say today that I am completely racially aware.2
According to the manifesto, Roof allegedly typed “black on White crime” in a Google search to make sense of the news reporting on Trayvon Martin, a young African American teenager who was killed and whose killer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted of murder. What Roof found was information that confirmed a patently false notion that Black violence on White Americans is an American crisis.
Roof reportedly reached the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) when he searched Google for real information that would help him make sense of the high-profile Martin case. For Roof, CCC was a legitimate information resource purporting to be a conservative news media organization. Yet the foremost national authority on hate organizations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, tracks and describes the CCC this way:
The Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) is the modern reincarnation of the old White Citizens Councils, which were formed in the 1950s and 1960s to battle school desegregation in the South. Among other things, its Statement of Principles says that it “oppose[s] all efforts to mix the races of mankind.” Created in 1985 from the mailing lists of its predecessor organization, the CCC, which initially tried to project a “mainstream” image, has evolved into a crudely white supremacist group whose website has run pictures comparing the late pop singer Michael Jackson to an ape and referred to black people as “a retrograde species of humanity.” The group’s newspaper, Citizens Informer, regularly publishes articles condemning “race mixing,” decrying the evils of illegal immigration, and lamenting the decline of white, European civilization. Gordon Baum, the group’s founder, died in March of 2015.3
To verify what might be possible to find in the post–Dylann Roof murders of nine African Americans, I too conducted a search of the term “black on white crimes.” In these search scenarios from August 3 and 5, 2015, in Los Angeles, California, and Madison, Wisconsin, NewNation.org was the first result, followed by a number of conservative, White-nationalist websites that foster hate toward African Americans and Jewish people. I conducted the searches in similar fashion to searching for “black girls” and other girls of color, signed out of all platforms, and I cross-verified the search results (figure 3.2) with another researcher on a different computer. NewNation.org’s website promoted so much anti-Black racist hatred that in 2013, its founder was the subject of a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack by @Anon_Dox_323, a member of the hacker group Anonymous, which often targets individuals and organizations through a variety of “hacktivist” online takedowns, as seen in figure 3.3.4
Figure 3.1. Google search on the phrase “black on white crimes” in Los Angeles, CA, August 3, 2015.
Figure 3.2. Google search on the phrase “black on white crimes” in Madison, WI, August 5, 2015.
Figure 3.3. On May 14, 2014, NewNation.org published this notice on its website to alert its members to the hack.
What is compelling about the alleged information that Roof accessed is how his search terms did not lead him to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) crime statistics on violence in the United States, which point to how crime against White Americans is largely an intraracial phenomenon. Most violence against White Americans is committed by White Americans, as most violence against African Americans is largely committed by other African Americans. White-on-White crime is the number-one cause of homicides against White Americans, as violent crime is largely a matter of perpetration by proximity to those who are demographically similar to the victim.5 Homicides across racial lines do not nearly happen in the ways White supremacist organizations purport. A search on the phrase “black on white crimes” does not lead to any experts on race or to any universities, libraries, books, or articles about the history of race in the United States and the invention of racist myths in service of White supremacy, such as “black on white crime.” It does not point to any information to dispel stereotypes trafficked by White supremacist organizations. It is critical that we think about the implications of people who are attempting to vet information in the news media about race and race relations and who are led to fascist, conservative, anti-Black, anti-Jewish, and/or White supremacist websites. The power of search engines to lead people to a breadth and depth of information cannot be more powerfully illustrated than by looking at Dylann Roof’s own alleged words about using Google to find information about the Trayvon Martin murder, which led to his racial identity development.
There can be no doubt that what commercial search engines provide at the very top of the results ranking (on the first page) can have deleterious effects as much as it can also be harmless, depending on the concepts being queried. What we find when we search on racial and gender identities is profitable to Google, as much as what we find when we search on racist concepts. Recall that what shows up on the first page of search is typically highly optimized advertising-related content, because Google is an advertising company and its clients are paying Google for placement on the first page either through direct engagement with Google’s AdWords program or through a gray market of search engine optimization products that help sites secure a place on the first page of results. Jessie Daniels’s book Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights is the most comprehensive and important research to date on the ways that “cloaked websites,” or websites that purport to be one thing, such as a viable news source or a legitimate social and cultural organization, operate as fronts for organizations such as the CCC, the Ku Klux Klan, and thousands of hate-based websites, which also pay to play. Daniels names the mainstream process of making sense of online information a “white racial frame,”6 which allows many White Americans to essentially segregate online into spaces that question the legitimacy and viability of cultural pluralism and racial equality.
In the case of Dylann Roof’s alleged Google searches, his very framing of the problems of race relations in the U.S. through an inquiry such as “black on white crime” reveals how search results belie any ability to intercede in the framing of a question itself. In this case, answers from conservative organizations and cloaked websites that present news from a right-wing, anti-Black, and anti-Jewish perspective are nothing more than propaganda to foment racial hatred.
What we find in search engines about people and culture is important. They oversimplify complex phenomena. They obscure any struggle over understanding, and they can mask history. Search results can reframe our thinking and deny us the ability to engage deeply with essential information and knowledge we need, knowledge that has traditionally been learned through teachers, books, history, and experience. Search results, in the context of commercial advertising companies, lay the groundwork, as I have discussed throughout this book, for implicit bias: bias that is buttressed by advertising profits. Search engine results also function as a type of personal record and as records of communities, albeit unstable ones. In the context of commercial search, they signal what advertisers think we want, influenced by the kinds of information algorithms programmed to lead to popular and profitable web spaces. They galvanize attention, no matter the potential real-life cost, and they feign impartiality and objectivity in the process of displaying results, as detailed in chapter 1. In the case of the CCC, 579 websites link into the CCC’s URL www.conservative-headlines.com from all over the world, including from sites as prominent as yahoo.com, msn.com, reddit.com, nytimes.com and 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 prio
ritize 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.
4
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:
Algorithms of Oppression Page 12
