Humanity was provided with an opportunity to communicate, search, learn, and express themselves on digital platforms. Still, these platforms were associated with several issues related to the violation of human rights. For example, these platforms seem to support racial discrimination online and within companies. African Americans are underemployed in digital business despite an increasing number of black graduates majoring in Computer Science (Noble 65). Indeed, racism has always existed in various forms in American culture (Lipsitz 371). The sad truth is that African Americans are highly underrepresented in such technology firms as Google and Facebook (Noble 69). In modern days, white citizens believe that black people have equal opportunities that they do not use because of a lack of willpower (Lipsitz 381). However, these digital platforms are designed so that “whiteness” is promoted as the correct version while black culture is, by default, shown as wrong in search results (Noble 83). Racial hierarchy on digital platforms is a critical problem caused by the dominance of white employees who generate algorithms in these companies to increase the appearance of specific websites in search results.
Once the Web was made available to the public, the online economy started to increase, supplying society with more conveniences and entertainment. However, the central issue associated with digital platforms is that they maintain racial discrimination and stigmatization. The negative representation of black women is the outcome of global monitoring for search results and advertisement payments made by the pornography industry (Noble 87). Although these technology companies do not want to be racists, their activity potentiates stereotyping people of color (Noble 89). The main problem of their algorithm is that it is aimed to bring financial profit without considering sensitive content that may result in the marginalization of large groups of people. For example, less than a decade ago, the keywords “black girls” typed into the Google search field returned the results of pornographic websites on the first page (Noble 64). Unfortunately, everything that appears on Google is often perceived by the majority as reliable information that portrays reality (Noble 71). Thus, when the keywords related to pornography are used for the search, and the results are images of black girls, stigmatization is inevitable.
Solving this problem is essential, but it will require changing coding and algorithms that may cause revenue loss for these technology corporations. These companies, founded and dominated by white people, may become resistant to such changes. The main reason is the general attitude of many white Americans who view black people as lazy. Furthermore, white citizens state that they have no obligations to African Americans (Lipsitz 382). However, in this case, the main question is not the issue of owing but the social responsibility to protect all people from discrimination.
To sum up, digital platforms have become an essential part of people’s lives, but technological companies often perpetuate racial discrimination. It is challenging to predict if Google agrees to block the content with racial and gender bias that assaults human dignity by creating a negative image of large communities. The only possible solution to this problem is legislation that will force digital platforms to block content that may be discriminatory. Still, this hypothetical law violates freedom of speech, making this problem, if not impossible, but very difficult to solve.
Works Cited
Lipsitz, George. “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the “White” Problem in American Studies.” American Quarterly, vol. 47 no. 3, 1995, pp. 369-387.
Noble, Safiya Umoja, editor. “Searching for Black Girls.” Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, NYU Press, 2018, pp. 64–109.