Algorithms are instructions designed to solve problems, have become an indispensable ingredient of our contemporary life. The use of the algorithm is enormous, everything we interact with on the internet and social media, from search engines to dating apps, is directly linked to algorithms. In other words, without the invisible aid of algorithms, we would likely encounter random and chaotic data. Still, there is also increasing concern about algorithms' social implications. One of the typical social implications of the algorithm is Racial bias. The main reason for algorithmic bias cannot be directly linked to the algorithms themselves but the resources they relied upon. Resources are raw data sets that are often limited, deficient, or incorrect historical data that contains racial and economic biases. For instance, Twitter programmed a cropping algorithm that determines what a person might want to see first within a picture in 2018. But the researchers observed that when they fed pictures of people of different ethnicities into the system, the algorithm likely chose to show one over the other. Like when a photo of a black man and a white man is fed into the system, the algorithm chose to show the white man over the black man.
Yavuz Deveci
Reference: