How does a child become a killer? How did Dylann Roof go from a little boy who wasn't
raised in a racist home, from someone who had black friends, to someone who murdered
nine African Americans while they were praying at an historic black church?
Part of the answer lies in the story of how fragile minds can be shaped
by Google's search algorithm.
Dylann Roof posted a manifesto on the web a few months before his murderous rampage.
He said that he didn't grow up in a racist home or environment. The event that awakened
him to racial issues, he said, was the Trayvon Martin case:
I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually 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?
Had Roof first come to another website, history might have been different. He might have learned
the truth, instead of the racist lies pushed by the Council of Conservative Citizens.
And the truth is that vast majority of white people who are murdered are killed by other white people,
not by black people as the Council's website suggests.
The Council's site wasn't the only one peddling misleading statistics when Roof googled
"black on white crime." In fact, the amount of interest in 2013 in this topic, stoked by white supremacist
propagandizing, actually created a cybercascade on this subject, linking Roof to these proliferating
hate materials. Because of the way Google's algorithm works, Roof's search results were
dominated by racist misinformation. The truth was submerged.
Google likes to present itself as though it's the new library for the world. It says that
its algorithm uses a set of signals to determine how trustworthy, reputable, or authoritative
a source is. But whether because Google's algorithm is flawed or because it is easily
manipulated by those well versed in search optimization, it apparently didn't present trustworthy,
reputable, or authoritative information to Roof.
Say I were to walk into a library and ask for information on black on white crime.
Well, there wouldn't be a whole section filled with white supremacists books that a librarian
would point me to. Instead, a librarian would probably lead me to the FBI's crime statistics.
That's not necessarily what happens when Google is my library.
And it gets worse the more I use Google's library. In an attempt to cater to our preferences
and ultimately to monetize them, Google's algorithm keeps giving us more and more of
what we search for. And what Roof came to want, as he was being miseducated, was proof
of an epidemic of black murders of whites, happily provided by America's white supremacists.
Another site that Roof came to was Stormfront.org, the oldest hate site on the web.
It's filled with racist and anti-Semitic materials shared by more than 300,000 registered users from
around the world. Here, Roof found himself in a world of black on white crime—
a major topic on Stormfront. We know this because Roof posted on the site.
Roof also found the Daily Stormer, a cesspool of anti-black and anti-Semitic materials that
calls itself the premier Alt-Right site. He posted there as well. And in the world in
which he found himself, thanks to Google, there was little to counter the racist propaganda
that dominated his search results.
Roof was fed, and ate up, a lie.
The problems with Google's algorithm aren't confined to the issue of crime. The same happens
when searching about Islam, or "did the Holocaust happen."
Last February, staff from the Southern Poverty Law Center visited Google and demonstrated
that when one ran searches for Martin Luther King, Jr., hate sites were at the top of the page.
They included martinlutherking.org, run by the racists at Stormfront.
Google told us that it couldn't alter its algorithm. But shortly after our visit,
the search results for Martin Luther King seemed to change. And there have been a few other
instances when Google appears to have tweaked its algorithm to avoid embarrassing results.
A few years ago, it was pointed out that if you typed Jew or Jewish into Google, all you
got was anti-Semitic arguments on the evils of Jews and why they should be exterminated.
Google apparently tweaked its algorithm to fix that. Google also probably tweaked its
algorithm when Google maps was manipulated and the White House was renamed with a racist
term.
But if Google is to live up to its claim that its algorithm delivers trustworthy, reputable,
and authoritative results, Google has much more work to do. As the path Dylann Roof followed
when he first typed the words "black on white crime" into Google's powerful search engine proves,
there is a danger that the fragile minded, the impressionable, and the young
may find themselves in a world dominated by misinformation and hate.
It's a fundamental problem that Google must address if it is to truly be the world's library.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét