Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism is a 2018 book by Safiya Umoja Noble in the fields of information science, machine learning, and human-computer interaction.
Noble argues that search algorithms are racist and perpetuate societal problems because they reflect the negative biases that exist in society and the people who create them.
[16] These algorithms can then have negative biases against women of color and other marginalized populations, while also affecting Internet users in general by leading to "racial and gender profiling, misrepresentation, and even economic redlining."
Noble takes a Black intersectional feminist approach to her work in studying how google algorithms affect people differently by race and gender.
Intersectional Feminism takes into account the diverse experiences of women of different races and sexualities when discussing their oppression society, and how their distinct backgrounds affect their struggles.
Additionally, Noble's argument addresses how racism infiltrates the google algorithm itself, something that is true throughout many coding systems including facial recognition, and medical care programs.
In Chapter 3 of Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Noble discusses how Google's search engine combines multiple sources to create threatening narratives about minorities.
Noble argues that it is not just google, but all digital search engines that reinforce societal structures and discriminatory biases and by doing so she points out just how interconnected technology and society are.
She first argues that public policies enacted by local and federal governments will reduce Google's “information monopoly” and regulate the ways in which search engines filter their results.
Simultaneously, Noble condemns the common neoliberal argument that algorithmic biases will disappear if more women and racial minorities enter the industry as software engineers.
To illustrate this point, she uses the example of Kandis, a Black hairdresser whose business faces setbacks because the review site Yelp has used biased advertising practices and searching strategies against her.
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Emily Drabinski writes, "What emerges from these pages is the sense that Google’s algorithms of oppression comprise just one of the hidden infrastructures that govern our daily lives, and that the others are likely just as hard-coded with white supremacy and misogyny as the one that Noble explores.
"[1] In Booklist, reviewer Lesley Williams states, "Noble’s study should prompt some soul-searching about our reliance on commercial search engines and about digital social equity.
"[25] In early February 2018, Algorithms of Oppression received press attention when the official Twitter account for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers expressed criticism of the book, saying that the results of a Google search suggested in its blurb did not match Noble's predictions.