Frank Pasquale- External URL
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Quoted byC. Cadwalladr, 'Google 'must review its search rankings because of rightwing manipulation'', The Guardian, Monday 5th Dec. 2016.
Description:'Frank Pasquale, professor of law at Maryland University, said he found this “a very troubling and disturbing development”. “They’ve gone on in the fly and plugged the plug on certain search terms in response to your article, but this raises bigger and more difficult questions. Who did that? And how did they decide? Who’s in charge of these decisions? And what will they do in the future? This is clearly just being done in response to a story in the media, but it’s not accountable, and it’s not sustainable. I find it really troubling that they’ve taken this very quick and hasty response without any explanation of how and why they’ve done it.”'
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Quoted byC. Cadwalladr, 'Google, Democracy and the Truth about Internet Search', The Observer, Sunday, 4th Dec. 2016.
Description:'Stories about fake news on Facebook have dominated certain sections of the press for weeks following the American presidential election, but arguably this is even more powerful, more insidious. Frank Pasquale, professor of law at the University of Maryland, and one of the leading academic figures calling for tech companies to be more open and transparent, calls the results “very profound, very troubling”.
He came across a similar instance in 2006 when, “If you typed ‘Jew’ in Google, the first result was jewwatch.org. It was ‘look out for these awful Jews who are ruining your life’. And the Anti-Defamation League went after them and so they put an asterisk next to it which said: ‘These search results may be disturbing but this is an automated process.’ But what you’re showing – and I’m very glad you are documenting it and screenshotting it – is that despite the fact they have vastly researched this problem, it has gotten vastly worse.”'...Neither Google or Facebook make their algorithms public. Why did my Google search return nine out of 10 search results that claim Jews are evil? We don’t know and we have no way of knowing. Their systems are what Frank Pasquale describes as “black boxes”. He calls Google and Facebook “a terrifying duopoly of power” and has been leading a growing movement of academics who are calling for “algorithmic accountability”. “We need to have regular audits of these systems,” he says. “We need people in these companies to be accountable. In the US, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, every company has to have a spokesman you can reach. And this is what needs to happen. They need to respond to complaints about hate speech, about bias.”
Is bias built into the system? Does it affect the kind of results that I was seeing? “There’s all sorts of bias about what counts as a legitimate source of information and how that’s weighted. There’s enormous commercial bias. And when you look at the personnel, they are young, white and perhaps Asian, but not black or Hispanic and they are overwhelmingly men. The worldview of young wealthy white men informs all these judgments.”'
