In this article by Safiya U. Noble, she discusses algorithms and the companies that they’re run by like Facebook and Google. It has become easier to the company owners, etc. to claim they had no knowledge of various biases. Reading through the article, it make senses why certain things on Instagram and TikTok have become more strict on guidelines. Certain content is blocked, restricted, or receives a warning these days. For instance, most of the content I see is marked as sensitive for solely having important world information. It’s really meant to keep those who care in the loop. Sites like Google, either don’t have information or have some form of bias involved.
Noble states late in the article that: “Online search can oversimplify complex phenomena”. These sites lose their credibility and yet, we still flock to them. Noble adds: “The results, ranked by algorithms treated as trade secrets by Google, are divorced from context and lack guidance on their veracity or reliability”. This statement is true as algorithms prioritize engagement, speed, and profitability over truth, context, and nuance.
When search engines strip away the background of a complex issue, they turn real-world events into flat, consumable data points that can mislead. Instead of giving us the full picture, these companies just want to keep us scrolling for profit. This makes it so we only see what the algorithm wants us to see, hiding the truth and making it harder for everyday people to know what is actually going on. Therefore, more effort must be put in for us to determine a source’s credibility.
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