Impact on people regardless of race

We’ve looked at the impacts of racist technology on racial minorities and marginalised groups. Now, let’s look at the impacts on people outside those groups since technology can promote racism across all groups, regardless of their race.

Paths to extremism

We already gave the example of how most people who find extremist groups on Facebook do so via Facebook’s own recommendations (1). Studies have shown that YouTube (2) also has the potential to surface radical content. The danger here is that users are exposed to extremism that they may not have intentionally sought, which can lead to the promotion and spread of racist ideologies and recruitment of people into extremist groups.

Vicious cycles of discrimination

Research by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) into the use of algorithms in policing found that there is a risk for police officers to become over-reliant on automation, thereby “undermining their discretion and causing them to disregard other relevant factors”(3). Over-policing and reliance on biased automation and predictive policing algorithms can lead to reinforcing racist stereotypes, and further ingraining racist biases in policing (4).

Can you think of a time when technology had a negative influence on your views or the views of others? Share your thoughts in the comment section below

References:

1. Jeff Horwitz, 2020. Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive, Wall Street Journal.

2. Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Raphael Ottoni, Robert West, Virgílio A. F. Almeida, Wagner Meira Jr, 2019. Auditing radicalization pathways on YouTube, Cornell University.

3. Alexander Babuta and Marion Oswald, 2019. Data analytics and algorithmic bias in policing, UK Government.

4. Justin Weltz, 2019. Over-policing and fairness in machine earning, Pomona College.