{"id":910,"date":"2019-10-18T15:43:47","date_gmt":"2019-10-18T15:43:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/?p=910"},"modified":"2019-10-18T15:43:47","modified_gmt":"2019-10-18T15:43:47","slug":"blog-post-4-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/critical\/blog-post-4-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog Post #4"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Algorithmic criticism is the process of people realizing that algorithms, specifically those of popular search engines have specific biases based on those who created these algorithms. Cathy O’Neil, in her video The Truth About Algorithms<\/em> states,”To build an algorithm we need only two things; a historical data set and a definition of success.” <\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> We can see how this presents a problem when the people creating the algorithms have a different definition of success than their audience. Scholars in this field have suggested that the majority of the people creating these algorithms come from similar social and economic backgrounds which influence these search results and in turn influence the people using the search engines. To combat this people not only need to diversify the field that is programming these algorithms, but become less reliant on immediate search results. These algorithms are not only biased towards socio-economic means but also fall into the hands of advertisements and properties that provide the greatest profits for the people creating these search engines. Becoming technologically aware of the bias of these search engines and not taking the first page of google as solid fact will be a huge step in combating biased algorithmic programming. This problem can be related to the 1930s and the feminist and popular front movements which sought to combat bias in American social perspectives towards women and people of color. The members of these organizations in the past strove to change the American mentality and to prove that women and people of color were just as deserving of voting rights and equal pay. These issues are resurfacing today in algorithmic bias. Safiya Noble writes in her book Algorithms of Oppression<\/em>, “…Content is already being screened and assessed according to a continuum of values that largely reflect U.S.-based social norms, and these norms reflect a number of racist and stereotypical ideas that make screening racism and sexism and the abuse of humans in racialized ways ‘in’ and perfectly acceptable, while other ideas such as the abuse of animals (which is also unacceptable) are ‘out’ and screened or blocked from view.” <\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> She points out that we are facing a new era of racial and sexual based discrimination that is determined by a certain class of people and allowing it to influence American social norms, the WPA activists of the 1930s thought that they had won the battle but it is simply resurfacing in a new way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Algorithmic criticism is the process of people realizing that algorithms, specifically those of popular search engines have specific biases based on those who created these algorithms. Cathy O’Neil, in her video The Truth About Algorithms states,”To build an algorithm we need only two things; a historical data set and a definition of success.” We can … Continue reading “Blog Post #4”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-critical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=910"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":917,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910\/revisions\/917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}