Living in 2022, you would want that racism and sexism to be trivial matters. Even if we, as current members of this society, are trying hard to get rid of them, our past comes back to haunt us.
Just hang in with me, guys. This is all going to make sense.
In today’s day and age, the internet is the backbone of society, and social media is one of the best things to come out of the modern internet. When you think about social media, we know it is not a human being, so it cannot have any intelligence. But it is run by algorithms. And these algorithmic systems can be biased depending on who creates them, how they’re made, and finally, how they’re used. This is known as algorithmic bias. And we have all been a victim of this. Have you ever noticed anything of this sort?
Coming back to my point of us being haunted by our past. What I was trying to bring to your attention here was that these algorithms have picked up on our past prejudices against people of colour and women. This is where just the problems seem to begin.
Since these algorithms run social media, so it tends to shape our content navigation. This is a catastrophe of some sort since everyone uses social media. Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter have age restrictions for users, but let us be honest, nobody is bothered. There are a lot of young and susceptible minds on these platforms. Suppose they are fed this narrative of prejudice against people of colour and women by these algorithms. In that case, this is what will shape their future opinions. And we, as a society, should be concerned about this.
The reason for this algorithmic crisis would be that machine learning works on old data recorded over the years and not new data because there is no new data yet. Further studies have found that the AI responsible for recognising hate speech online can sometimes even magnify racial bias. Leading AI models for processing hate speech were found in one study to be 1.5 times more likely to flag tweets as offensive or hateful when prompted when written by African Americans and 2.2 times more like when written in African American English, widely spoken by black people in the United States.
Although this might sound super pessimistic, taking into account the current situation, the only way to describe social media is “just another way to sell hate.”
The algorithmic racial bias has got to a point where even Instagram itself has acknowledged it. The CEO of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, stated, “We are committed to looking into our policies and processes and how they impact Black People and other underrepresented groups on Instagram.” We can see how mainstream this problem is if the higher-ups have been forced to get involved.
As members of this society, we have to take action to stop this atrocious act. What can we do? If I’m being real, we cannot do much. Since we cannot compare our feeds with others, we usually do not know what is being shown to other individuals. All we can do is raise our voices against it. The boycott movement raised many eyes and compelled Instagram to take definite action towards the problem. If we continue down this road and everything goes well, we might get what we want. The eradication of such malpractices. But that is a pretty far stretch, so the best we can do is try, try our best.