Algorithms of oppression, algorithms of liberation: A conversation with Logic Magazine

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

7 p.m. 9 p.m.

Wallis Annenberg Hall (ANN), Forum


Please join USC Annenberg and Logic magazine for a conversation with Safiya Noble (USC Annenberg), Miriam Posner (UCLA), Sarah T. Roberts (UCLA), Moira Weigel (Logic magazine and Harvard University) about algorithms — the codes that are rewriting our brains, our bodies, and our civilization. Algorithms shape everything from how you find news online to how you order products that travel thousands of miles to arrive, just on time, at your door. They shape whether you find a romantic partner or qualify for a loan. Indeed, they may determine whether you can share your life and politics online at all. 

For the evening we have assembled an all-woman panel of experts to discuss how algorithms can serve the causes of social justice and human liberation--and how at present, they mostly fail to do so. Together, we will explore how algorithms are deployed in a wide range of fields — from search engine discoverability, to content moderation, to supply chain software, to dating and quantified self-apps. 

So long as these algorithms are owned and operated by a handful of tech companies — companies that are, themselves, owned mostly by a handful of white men — they tend to reinforce intersecting systems of inequality and oppression. Together, we will reflect on how better systems could make the Internet — and the world — we want. 

Because this will be Logic’s first event in Los Angeles, we will also be talking about how we talk about technology. Logic was founded in 2016, by a group of thinkers and tech workers who believed that our culture urgently needed to have a better conversation about the digital tools transforming our lives. Since then, it has published hundreds of pages of writing and interviews and hosted standing room only events in San Francisco, Oakland, and New York. Read more about our mission here.


Sarah T. Roberts

Sarah T. Roberts

Sarah T. Roberts is an assistant professor in the Department of Information Studies (Graduate School of Education & Information Studies) at UCLA. She holds a Ph.D. from the iSchool at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining UCLA in 2016, she was an assistant professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University in London, Ontario. On the internet since 1993, she was previously an information technology professional for 15 years, and, as such, her research interests focus on information work and workers. Professor Roberts is internationally recognized as a leading scholar on the emerging topic of commercial content moderation or CCM, a term she coined to define the field study around the large-scale, industrial and for-pay practice of social media user-generated content adjudication. Roberts is frequently consulted by the press and others on issues related to social media, society and culture. She has been interviewed on these topics in print, on radio and on television worldwide including: The New York Times, Associated Press, Le Monde, The Economist, the BBC, the CBC, The Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Wired, The Washington Post, News Corp Australia, Asahi Shimbun (Japan), and CNN, among others. Dr. Roberts was recently elected to the board of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. In December of 2017 she hosted All Things in Moderation on the UCLA campus, a first-of-its-kind conference to bring researchers, civil society advocates, workers, journalists and industry representatives together to discuss issues pertaining to social media moderation. Her book on commercial content moderation, titled Behind the Screen: Digitally Laboring in Social Media’s Shadow World, is under contract with Yale University Press.


Moira Weigel

Moira Weigel is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and founding editor of Logic magazine. She recently received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Media Studies from Yale University. Her first book, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating was published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux in 2016. 


Miriam Posner

Miriam Posner is an assistant professor at the UCLA Department of Information Studies. She’s also a digital humanist with interests in labor, race, feminism, and the history and philosophy of data. As a digital humanist, she is particularly interested in the visualization of large bodies of data from cultural heritage institutions, and the application of digital methods to the analysis of images and video. A film, media, and American studies scholar by training, she frequently writes on the application of digital methods to the humanities. She is at work on two projects: the first on what “data” might mean for humanistic research; and the second on how multinational corporations are making use of data in their supply chains.


Safiya Noble

Dr. Safiya U. Noble is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School of Communication. She is the recipient of a Hellman Fellowship and the UCLA Early Career Award. Noble’s academic research focuses on the design of digital media platforms on the internet and their impact on society. Her work is both sociological and interdisciplinary, marking the ways that digital media impacts and intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, and technology design. Her monograph on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines is entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press). She currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, and is the co-editor of two books: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Culture and Class Online, and Emotions, Technology & Design and several articles and book chapters. Safiya holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a B.A. in Sociology from California State University, Fresno with an emphasis on African American/Ethnic Studies. She is a partner in Stratelligence, a firm that specializes in research on information and data science challenges, and is a co-founder of the Information Ethics & Equity Institute, which provides training for organizations committed to transforming their information management practices toward more just, and equitable outcomes.

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