3 - Digital Racism

Summary

This chapter considers two kinds of injustice that happen online: digital discrimination and digital steering. Digital discrimination occurs when users discriminate on the basis of race. The motivating question of this chapter is how to combat this kind of discrimination. Even though digital discrimination is wrong, the law makes it difficult to hold websites responsible for it. However, this chapter argues that we can hold websites responsible for facilitating discrimination, what I call “digital steering.” We can hold websites responsible for encouraging or directing their users to discriminate on the basis of race. These platforms structure how we interact online. They make decisions, for instance, about website design, user interface, profile creation, and filtering and searching mechanisms. If these websites make it easy for us to discriminate on the basis of race, they engage in digital steering. In short, this chapter distinguishes steering from discrimination as an important way to combat racism in our digital lives.