Reading Annotation Blog 2.3

 Representations are not just a matter of mirrors, reflections, key-holes. Somebody is making them, and somebody is looking at them, through a complex array of means and conventions. Nor do representations simply exist on canvas, in books, on photographic paper or on screens: they have a continued existence in reality as objects of exchange; they have a genesis in material production.66

Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression : How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, New York University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wsu/detail.action?docID=4834260.
Created from wsu on 2023-02-25 01:00:16.

With how the common race-based search results come out, it can be said that there is a lot of misrepresentation of various races across various search engines, but the biggest offender of this matter would still have to be google; As it is the most commonly used search engine, it holds the biggest responsibility to correct this.

In most cases, the algorithm has to decided between showing the most relevant vs the most credible results, and due to the nature of search engines it is the most common choice to opt for the former. This may help the company's user influx, however it does no help spread the truth. In some ways, this enforces a fantasy of postracialism, as people would think "Hey this is the most common search result so they're fine with it" when in most cases they probably are not.

Furthermore, this kind of situation isn't just limited to race - online personalities have their images and history imprinted into social media, and by extension search engines. In which case, if they had done horrible things in the past, it can be easily dug up and spread around as a scandal, and making it appear up in said search engines, which is why the right to be forgotten is such an important factor, as sometimes even after they've changed for the better, and even if they leave the internet entirely, their history can be dug up and ruin their lives.