How the Racism Baked Into Technology Hurts Teens

The Atlantic

Adolescents spend ever greater portions of their days online and are especially vulnerable to discrimination. That’s a worrying combination.

Last month, Twitter users uncovered a disturbing example of bias on the platform: An image-detection algorithm designed to optimize photo previews was cropping out Black faces in favor of white ones. Twitter apologized for this botched algorithm, but the bug remains.

Acts of technological racism might not always be so blatant, but they are largely unavoidable. Black defendants are more likely to be unfairly sentenced or labeled as future re-offenders, not just by judges, but also by a sentencing algorithm advertised in part as a remedy to human biases. Predictive models methodically deny ailing Black and Hispanic patients’ access to treatments that are regularly distributed to less sick white patients. Examples like these abound.