Adweek: Black Creators File Class-Action Lawsuit Against YouTube
Bruce Hahne
Online trade journal Adweek reported on Friday that even as Google is attempting to brand itself as a supporter of racial equality, four Black women have now filed a lawsuit against Youtube for algorithmic discrimination against their content. We can see in the article that the usual Google "company spokesperson", who inevitably never gets named, falls back onto claims of algorithmic "neutrality". But as University of Sussex Digital & Technology researcher Tony Roberts reminds us in his essay Ten Rules of Technology, technology is not, and is never, neutral:
"Rule 2. Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral (Melvin Kranzberg 1985). Rule 2 is important because we are often told that "technology is just a tool", which, like the superpowers of comic-book heros, can be used for good or evil. I call this the Superman Fallacy of Technology because technology is never neutral. Technology is neither produced nor used in a social vacuum. It arrives already enmeshed in social and political relations. It is no less neutral than the people or society that produce and use it... The decisions about which technologies to invest in, and about which technologies are applied to which goals, are never neutral."
(Tony Roberts, 2016)
For more on this topic, see the book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble.
Some extracts from the Adweek article appear below.
- Bruce
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https://www.adweek.com/digital/black-creators-class-action-lawsuit-youtube-google/
Black Creators File Class-Action Lawsuit Against YouTube
Four Black female YouTube creators filed a class action lawsuit this week against the video platform’s parent company,Google, alleging the company and its algorithms discriminate against Black creators by removing their content without justification...
The federal lawsuit, filed by Kimberly Carleste Newman, Lisa Cabrera, Catherine Jones and Denotra Nicole Lewis, claims the women have earned less money, accumulated fewer subscribers and have had videos deleted because of YouTube’s racial bias...
The lawsuit accuses YouTube of 10 major discriminatory exercises, including applying unnecessary age restrictions, excluding Black creators from trending tabs, and filtering content with keywords like “Black.”
YouTube’s algorithm allows them to “rig the game,” the complain alleges, “by using their power to restrict and block … based on racial identity or viewpoint discrimination for profit.”...
In August, a group of LGBTQ creators sued YouTube for similar issues of algorithm-driven discrimination. That case is ongoing...----------------------------------------------