The End of Bias: A Beginning: The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias by Jessica Nordell

The End of Bias: A Beginning: The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias by Jessica Nordell

Author:Jessica Nordell [Nordell, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250186188
Google: t4NsyAEACAAJ
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Published: 2021-09-20T23:00:00+00:00


8

Dismantling Homogeneity

In spring of 2013, a twenty-eight-year-old Brazilian-born, U.K.-dwelling journalist named Caroline Criado-Perez began what she thought would be a quiet campaign to keep women on British currency. The face of prison reformer Elizabeth Fry—the only woman on a banknote—was to be replaced by Winston Churchill, so Criado-Perez started an online petition to reverse the decision and its “message that no woman has done anything important enough to appear.” Soon, women were protesting outside the Bank of England dressed as historic figures, like Boudicca, warrior and Celtic rebel queen.

When the Bank of England announced that it would now feature Jane Austen on the ten-pound note, Criado-Perez began receiving threats on Twitter—a torrent. At one point, she was receiving nearly one rape or death threat per minute. When she complained to Twitter, the company suggested she report the tweets. This required completing a nine-part questionnaire for each threat. The police finally intervened, and two people were ultimately arrested and jailed. Under pressure, Twitter rolled out a “report abuse” button.1 This provided a different route to the same cumbersome nine-part questionnaire.

But the abuse and harassment didn’t stop—not for Criado-Perez, and not for untold thousands on the site. A 2020 analysis found that of the tweets women congressional candidates in the United States receive, 15 to 39 percent are abusive, compared to on average 5 to 10 percent of those received by men. Abuse escalates for women of color: Amnesty International’s review of tweets received by women journalists and lawmakers in the United States and U.K. found that as a group Black, Asian, Latina, and mixed-race women are 34 percent more likely to receive abusive tweets than White women. Black women alone are 84 percent more likely to be harassed than White women on Twitter. Of the twenty-six thousand abusive tweets sent in half a year to women in Parliament in the U.K., half were directed at a single Black woman MP. In the United States, the candidate with the highest rate of abuse on Twitter—at 39 percent of all messages—was Ilhan Omar, a Somali American congresswoman.2

The problem has been endemic at Twitter from its very beginning in 2006. In 2018, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey finally admitted that the company had failed to anticipate how it could become a breeding ground for abuse. But according to former employees, the founders also inadvertently built the mechanisms for abuse into the product architecture. Anyone can tweet to anyone; likes, retweets, and the hierarchy of visible responses to tweets have all optimized Twitter for harassment.3

“Twitter is good at two things: real time information and abuse,” Leslie Miley, a former engineering manager at Twitter, told me. “They both are disseminated in the exact same way. The vectors that allow news content to go viral allow trolls and abuse to go viral.”4 Twitter’s “algorithmic timeline” prioritizes the content it shows according to what it deems most engaging and relevant. People engage highly with negative content that arouses anxiety and anger, whether they’re reading news or harmful comments.5 While



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