talin markarians

Discrimination in Google

For years, Black women and women of color have faced discrimination from the internet and social media. They don’t receive the recognition and hardship they deserve, the interest gives terrible suggestions when someone searches for “Black Women” or another woman of color. In the book, “Algorithms of oppression” written by Safiya Noble, she dives deeper into how racist and sexist the internet browsers actually are. Many adults and children are shown these inappropriate and discriminatory links and advertisements on their everyday browser. The words “porn” nor “sex” were mentioned in the text box however these top results include them into the title. Specifically in her second chapter, she explains more in depth on what popped up on her screen when researching different ideas. She goes on to explain “…search engine results perpetuate particular narratives that reflect historically uneven distributions of power in society…. girls’ identities are commercialized, sexualized, or made curiosities within the gaze of the search engine. Women and girls do not fare well in Google Search—that is evident” (71). With search engines, they tend to be sexist by sexualizing girls and having inappropriate websites pop up on ones homepage. This affects young mindsets into thinking this is how girls and women should be viewed and how they always should be viewed. To add-on, When she searched up a specific race, African American, she founded many inappropriate and dirty websites not meant to be viewed by anyone of a young age. She was very upset and didn’t expect this to happen, so she went on to write this book about racism and sexism in the internet. Now, there is a lot of racism and sexism on search engines. Mainly towards women of different nationalities. When searching up different key words, many adjectives such as ‘sexy’, ‘voluptuous’, and other inappropriate words come up in the suggested. For years women have tried hard and long to bring themselves up as hard workers, not viewed on their looks or body but more on their strong wilded mind and how far it can go. Still, men and other point of views see women as just an object used for their sexual pleasure and its quite disgusting. Woman of color have been discriminated for many years and are mainly fueled by these search engines influencing more to have this toxic mindset because of the creators inputting terrible data into the system, it makes it harder for women of color to find jobs and be employed, and young minds are being impacted by the media and social media causing them to carry a negative mindset.