Safiya Noble unearths a troubling realization in Algorithms of Oppression. She posits that the internet is an oppressive tool used to fuel the subconscious racism deeply rooted in digital algorithms. The internet claims to be a neutral technology yet it feeds us racist and misogynistic qualities without many us even comprehending what is happening. A simple search of “gorgeous” in google images will prove this.

As you can see the “neutral” search engine has displayed numerous white women and its interesting that in this case the word gorgeous is highly attributed to females and fails to show any males. Is the reason for this because women tend to be referred to as gorgeous on the internet more than men or is it because these search engines want to feed us a false idea of what gorgeous is because its backed by organizations and companies who seek to benefit from the idea that gorgeous means a slim and caucasian female? Similarly if you google “handsome” this is what you will get.

Surely now you can see the similarities in the two searches. Again only caucasian men coming up as handsome which is again apparently a “neutral” result according to these digital companies but the the real proof is in the pudding. Noble talks about breaking up these mega monopolistic companies like google because they systematically reinforce racism and sexism. But how does a society go about breaking up these monopolies when the very reason for them existing is because the masses have chosen them over all other alternatives for the daily technological needs. Google comes off as an ethically sound organization that is here to aid society not hurt it but maybe their very existence is a breeding ground for oppression that has surpassed even their control. A network of users feeding these ideas allow the algorithms to learn from them and ultimately turn “neutral algorithms” into biased propaganda machines.