I had also signed up to write about Equality Lab’s “Digital Security in the Age of Trump,” but it looks like that page changed to something else—and it’s also functioning very wonkily.

Engine Failure

This is essentially a Q&A in Logic Magazine, with Safiya Umoja Noble (assistant professor in the Annenberg School of Communication at USC) and Sarah T. Roberts (assistant professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies). The discussion centers around these questions:

The internet is dominated by a handful of big companies. How do they organize information to maximize profit? What are the consequences for the public sphere? And what would a better model look like?

Noble’s responses take up most of the Q&A, with Roberts’ coming in briefly at the very end. What’s particularly interesting about Noble’s work is that she’s working on “a non-commercial search engine that makes its biases visible.” Noble goes into the problems with how Google, as a search engine, is built and functions—which is essentially how citation analysis works for papers in journals and publishing houses. The more that you are cited or linked to by someone else, the higher you will rank on Google. However, Noble’s point is that citation analysis doesn’t give you context for why someone decided to link to your work. The ranking system, then, is flawed because it can’t distinguish between whether someone is linking to your work because they are agreeing or disagreeing with you.

These flaws have been problematic and have broader social stakes. Noble bring ups a few examples:

• The porn industry was able to dominate much of the information landscape by having thousands of sites that link to each other and by buying a number of keywords. That’s why, for years, if you Googled terms like “black girls,” “asian girls,” and “latina girls,” without even adding the words “sex” or “porn,” you would get search results of pornography.
• Dylann Roof, the person responsible for the Charleston church shooting, noted that Googling the phrase “black on white crime,” after the Trayvon Martin shooting, played a significant role in forming his white supremacist views. The search results he got, of course, led to many white supremacist websites that used the phrase, but they didn’t return any results that could have provided context on the white supremacist movement.
• Immediately following the 2016 United States presidential election, when you did a search of election news on Google, it’d return results about Trump winning the popular vote—which was obviously false.
• What goes viral on Facebook can be very lucrative for Facebook, even if it’s highly problematic or controversial content. This includes fake news stories posted by Macedonian teenagers and videos of police murders of unarmed African Americans.

To go about improving on and beginning to resolve these issues, Noble believes that the following would help:

• The tech industry hiring people with advanced degrees in ethnic studies and women’s studies and sociology.
• Maximizing profit not being the only “value system” in our society. In Noble’s words, “Engineers may not be malicious, of course. But I don’t think they have the requisite education in the humanities and social sciences to incorporate other frameworks into their work. And we see the outcomes of that.”

When asked whether possible solutions could be trying to reform these companies from within, thinking about regulation, nationalization, and building alternatives, both Noble and Roberts said yes to all of those things.

Discussion Questions:

1. How would we get buy-in to something like the new type of search engine that Noble is working on and proposing? It certainly sounds intriguing and like a great idea—given all the problems that Google presents, which she outlined—but the reality, still, is that Google is widely recognized and used by everyone worldwide.
2. In terms of challenging the model of the internet being controlled by a handful of big companies that care more about profits than the larger ramifications on society, Roberts mentioned international examples where countries actually had success in regulating tech companies:

• • In 2000, the French government threatened to not let Yahoo operate in France if the platform continues to allow people to sell Nazi memorabilia on its auction site.
  • In Turkey, Facebook already has to operate under the condition that any material that relates to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party must be taken down.

Do you think the United States would get to the stage of being just as aggressive in regulating tech companies? Why or why not?

Pedagogy and the Logic of Platforms

In this piece, Chris Gilliard discusses whether and how education can “save the web.” Gilliard goes into a few key concepts:

• Surveillance capitalism: a “form of information capitalism [that] aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control.” This has resulted in Web2.0, which consists of personalization, clickbait, and filter bubbles—“the only web most students know.” Gilliard believes the web is “broken” specifically because of surveillance capitalism, although he admits that “broken” isn’t the most accurate term. He writes, “A web based on surveillance, personalization, and monetization works perfectly well for particular constituencies, but it doesn’t work quite as well for persons of color, lower-income students, and people who have been walled off from information or opportunities because of the ways they are categorized according to opaque algorithms.”
• Digital redlining: “the creation and maintenance of technological policies, practices, pedagogy, and investment decisions that enforce class boundaries and discriminate against specific groups.” Some examples of digital redlining that Gilliard brings up:
  • The process by which different schools get differential journal access. Here, digital redlining dictates how quality information gets locked by paywalls that prevent students from accessing that information.
  • The level of surveillance, in the form of analytics that predict grades or programs that suggest majors to students.
  • The degree that students who perform Google searches get certain information based on the type of machine they are using or get served ads for high-interest loans based on their digital profile. (Gilliard notes that the latter is a practice Google now bans.) Interestingly, this particular example slightly relates back to “Engine Failure.”
• Consent: Gilliard writes that “if higher education is to ‘save the web,’ we need to let students envision that something else is possible, and we need to enact those practices in classrooms.” In order for that to happen, he says that “consent” needs to mean more than “click here if you agree to these terms.”

Discussion Questions:

1. Gilliard ends his piece with this:
   

   Using higher education to “save the web” means leveraging the classroom to make visible the effects of surveillance capitalism. It means more clearly defining and empowering the notion of consent. Most of all, it means envisioning, with students, new ways to exist online.

   How would you go about doing these things in your own classroom? Is it even possible to use higher education to “save the web?”

2. What would the web look like if surveillance capitalism, information asymmetry, and digital redlining were not at the root of most of what students do online? This is a question Gilliard mentioned that we don’t know the answer to, but what do you think the web would look like if that were the case? Would it be the most ideal version of the web that we all wish we had now? Why or why not?

The link to the episode on the syllabus isn’t working, but here’s the correct link if anyone is interested in doing this particular optional, suggested “reading” this week. (I do recommend listening to the full episode!) Otherwise, my summary is below, and I believe the content of the episode itself makes for interesting discussion regardless.

Summary

This podcast episode is hosted by Alex Goldman and covers Yik Yak, an app that allows users to communicate with and see posts (called “yaks”) from other users within a 10-mile radius.¹ The episode also focuses specifically on Colgate University and a string of racist incidents—that took place on the app—

In the episode, the main subject that Goldman speaks with is Melissa Melendez, who was a senior at Colgate in January 2015 (when the episode aired). Ever since arriving on campus, Melendez knew she was a bit of a “novelty”—as the child of first-generation Puerto Rican parents, she had grown up poor and was attending Colgate on scholarship. As a private college on the East Coast, Colgate stands out as having a predominantly white student body; it has half as many black and Latino students as the average university.

Melendez often found herself needing to address stereotypes when other students asked her questions (“Have you ever been shot before?”, “How many baby daddies does your mom have?”) and sometimes couldn’t distinguish between whether students were genuinely curious or bigoted. Some instances, however, were clearer. In some of her classes, students would talk about welfare and bring up that students like her, who are on scholarship, are “not deserving” of being at Colgate. So, Melendez decided she wanted to do something about it—she found other students at Colgate who were in a similar situation as her, and she and this group of students ended up forming “The Association of Critical Collegians” (ACC).

On September 22, 2014, the ACC staged a sit-in at Colgate’s admissions building that lasted five days. During the sit-in, individual Colgate students would share emotional stories for about six to seven hours. The ACC had a specific list of 21 demands for Colgate administration, such as diversity training for the staff of the financial aid office, hiring more diverse faculty, and building a discussion of privilege and systemic power dynamics into the core curriculum.²

At first, the ACC’s sit-in seemed like a massive success: Goldman stated that there were some estimates that a quarter of the school was there. However, on Yik Yak, the sentiment was quite different—and especially disturbing. Students were posting about the sit-in, and in a way, on Yik Yak were protesting the very existence of it. Below are some of the more disturbing posts that Goldman quoted in the episode:

• “In honor of today, I will only hook up with a minority tonight.”
• “I love black people, my maid was always nice to me.”
• “White people won at life; Africa lost. Sorry we were so much better than you that we were literally able to enslave you to our will.”

After the sit-in, the ACC continued to organize politically on campus, and racist chatter on Yik Yak also continued. It particularly exploded on December 2, 2014, when the ACC coordinated a “die-in” on campus to express solidarity with the Ferguson protests. During the die-in, the ACC hung an American flag upside down and wrote “Black Lives Matter” on it, as well as the names of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

Following the die-in, the racist sentiment on Yik Yak targeted one particular member of the ACC: Melissa Melendez. This was, of course, terrifying for her and the ACC because they were minority students on a predominantly white campus protesting the targeting and murder of minorities, and now they were the ones who were being targeted anonymously. They started traveling groups and felt unsafe, making it difficult to focus on their schoolwork.

That weekend, Melendez and the ACC had a meeting with Colgate’s dean. To address their concerns, the dean presented the ACC with these options:

• The students could stay at her home, or she could stay at the house the ACC members were staying at.
• Campus safety could check up on the students.
• The students could leave and finish the semester off-campus.

Although the college claimed they took the students’ concerns as seriously as possible, Melendez felt the college’s response was inadequate. She was particularly insulted by the college’s option of having the students leave, because she thought that meant someone at the college had brought up that they wanted the ACC gone, and the college was simply obliging. Still, while the school didn’t give Goldman a specific number, he heard from multiple sources that over a dozen students ended up leaving Colgate—after the option was made available—that semester. Melendez herself and some other members of the ACC ended up moving to a different town.

The students’ departures had a significant impact on faculty. Some chose to fight back—specifically on Yik Yak. Associate Professor of Biology Jeff Holm came up with something called the “Yik Yak Takeback,” which was essentially faculty attacking the bigotry by posting on Yik Yak with “relentless utterly mundane cheeriness and civility.” The only requirement Holm had for faculty participating in the “takeback” was for them to sign their names on their posts. (That would send the message: “We’re here, and we see you.” Another biology professor, Eddie Watkins, talked about one of his Yik Yak posts that received a significant amount of “upvotes” (237), which was just him congratulating a student for getting into medical school.

This might’ve seemed like a silly way to counteract racism, but it had a rather positive effect on students’ spirits and morale. Melendez was especially excited when reflecting on the “takeback”:

“I love it! I love it. I thought it was so cute. ‘Cause I knew why they were doing it. like, they were making a statement. and I liked how a lot of them sign their names. I thought that was powerful.”

Of course, while it helped, the simple “Yik Yak Takeback” didn’t make the problem go away. Goldman himself traveled to Colgate on the last day of the semester and tried out Yik Yak. He saw how some users were posting about how they hoped the ACC would dissolve and how happy they were that the ACC was driven off campus.

Notes

1. Prior to listening to this episode, I’ve vaguely heard of Yik Yak before but didn’t know much about the app. Obviously, the idea of communicating “anonymously” on the internet isn’t new, as we constantly see on discussion boards and social media platforms. What I found particularly notable about Yik Yak, however, is the ability for users to communicate with people within a 10-mile radius. That’s the specific characteristic that makes Yik Yak unique, in my view, and probably why it’d be so popular for very tight-knit communities like students on college campuses.

2. These were only 3 of the 21 demands that Goldman described in the episode. Goldman also doesn’t expand or dwell on it for too long in his episode, but Colgate administration actually published a response to the ACC’s 21 demands on Colgate’s website. The administration addresses the demands, point-by-point, in this response, so you’re also able to see each individual demand there.

Discussion Questions

1. As instructors teaching classes right now, how would you handle racist incidents and remarks that you see and hear happening in your own classroom?
2. In the time of coronavirus, racist sentiment is now especially aimed at East Asian Americans—and some racist incidents have already occurred on college campuses in the United States. What can college faculty and administration be doing to support East Asian American students during this time?
3. Was the dean’s response to the ACC students’ concerns adequate, and why or why not? If not, what more could she have done? How should universities respond when racist incidents occur on campus?
4. Read through Colgate administration’s response to the ACC’s 21 demands, (which actually notes the status of meeting each demand as “complete”). Are the ACC’s demands a good model for other colleges to establish a more diverse and inclusive community on campus, and should other colleges also establish plans to meet the same or similar demands?
5. Through the “Yik Yak Takeback,” Colgate faculty had some (but limited) success at countering the bigotry that persisted on Yik Yak. What else could they have paired with their “positive approach” to be more successful?
6. In the episode, Goldman talks about how Colgate contacted both the local and state police and asked the Madison district attorney’s office to determine whether a grand jury subpoena can be used to force Yik Yak to disclose information about some of its worst posts. Independent of the police investigation, the school and its lawyers sent separate requests for identifying information to Yik Yak, but both the request to the district attorney and Yik Yak were denied. Should Yik Yak and other platforms be obligated to disclose this information when these kinds of incidents arise, and where do we draw the line for how these platforms (and the users on them) are protected under the First Amendment?
7. In the episode, Goldman briefly mentions how some high schools have worked with Yik Yak to establish “geofences,” where the app just won’t function within a certain radius of the school. However, Yik Yak doesn’t honor these requests from colleges. Some colleges have even tried banning Yik Yak, in terms of banning usage of the app under the college’s network, but students could then simply switch to their wireless provider and continue to use the app. Is limiting usage of the app—assuming there’s a more successful approach that can ban usage of the app entirely for college students in particular—an actual solution for colleges, and why or why not? I’m also interested to hear your thoughts on whether this “more successful approach” could raise especially alarming concerns for surveillance of students on college campuses.