Bridget Todd (00:03):

You're listening to Disinformed, a mini series from There are No Girls on the Internet. I'm Bridget Todd.

Bridget Todd (00:13):

I talk a lot about hostility toward underrepresented voices and technology and how it ultimately hurts us all. And facial recognition is a great example of what I mean. We know that facial recognition technology is unreliable when it comes to people with darker skin tones and women's faces. And with the rise of this technology being used for things like policing and surveillance, this is obviously a pretty big problem.

Bridget Todd (00:33):

We've already seen reports of black people being arrested for crimes that had nothing to do with based solely on the use of faulty facial recognition software. This is what happens when black women are treated like outsiders in tech spaces. If the technology that plays such a big role in all of our lives is built by teams of homogenous people with biases they might not even realize, that technology can go on to harm us all.

Bridget Todd (00:54):

Now, the reason that we know about the gender and racial biases encoded into facial recognition technology at all is because of the labor and talent of black women AI researchers who studied it. Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru and Deb Raji are black female scientists who've conducted groundbreaking research under racial and gender biases of facial recognition software and artificial intelligence. If you've seen the documentary, Coded Bias, then you've seen some of their amazing work. It's actually on Netflix right now, and I highly suggest you all check it out.

Bridget Todd (01:22):

But if you watched 60 Minutes last week, you would never know that it was black women who first did this groundbreaking research. That's because even though 60 Minutes producers reached out to Joy, who is also the head of the Algorithmic Justice League, an organization that raises awareness about the harms of AI, they just erased her voice from a story about the use of facial recognition to arrest two black people for crimes they didn't commit. Instead, they interviewed Patrick Grother, a white male computer scientist.

Bridget Todd (01:49):

Now, no one is saying that Grother doesn't know his stuff, but he himself correctly cites the work of these black women and acknowledges that theirs was the landmark study on bias and facial recognition and that their work was the motivation for his own work. So why didn't CBS feel the need to cite them at all? Even worse. Joy says that CBS actually did reach out to her. She says that she spoke to 60 Minutes producers for hours and spent time building a custom demo for Anderson Cooper and made recommendations on research to include, subjects to interview with the emphasis on stories of black people who have been falsely arrested because of AI. She was on her way to get COVID tested for the interview when at the very last minute it was canceled.

Bridget Todd (02:31):

This is erasure of black women's labor, voices and talent, and it's even worse than it happened on a segment about racial bias. Why wouldn't CBS center the black woman who pioneered this research on a story about the way that it harms the black community? Why would they only talk to white researchers? And it's the same thing that so many black women in tech have talked about. We aren't seen as experts, even in the fields that we build. Joy is not taking this. She launched a petition, demanding CBS apologize and take specific steps to make sure that black women are properly cited in the future, which just goes to show you that black women are pretty much always doing the work that makes things better for everyone.

Bridget Todd (03:10):

Those reporting on algorithmic biases and discrimination must prioritize the perspective of those doing the work who are often marginalized voices themselves. This erasure is routine. This is systemic. For centuries, the labor of black women has been kept in the background, behind closed doors and out of the public view. Black women and the brilliant cutting-edge, field-leading and sustaining work that they do must not be erased any longer, the petition reads. And you can sign that petition at the link in our show description. CBS, and honestly tech in general, needs to stop sidelining black women. It is black women who consistently do the work of making tech safer and better for everyone and we need to be recognized for it, not erased or silenced.

Bridget Todd (03:57):

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please help us grow by subscribing. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi, we'd love to hear from you at hello@tangoti.com. Disinformed is brought to you by There are No Girls on the Internet. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our supervising producer and engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. For more great podcasts, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.