You're listening to Disinformed, a mini-series from There Are No Girls on the Internet.

I'm Bridget Todd.

I talk a lot about hostility toward underrepresented voices and technology, and how it ultimately

hurts us all, and facial recognition is a great example of what I mean.

We know that facial recognition technology is unreliable when it comes to people with darker skin tones and women's faces.

And with the rise of this technology being used for things like policing and surveillance, this is obviously a pretty big problem.

We've already seen reports of black people being arrested for crimes they had nothing to do with, based solely on the use of faulty facial recognition software.

This is what happens when black women are treated like outsiders in tech spaces.

If the technology that plays such a big role in all of our lives is built by teams of homogenous people with biases they might not even realize, that technology can go on to harm us all.

Now, the reason that we know about the gender and racial biases encoded into facial recognition technology at all

is because of the labor and talent of black women AI researchers who studied it.

Joy Bulamwini, Tim Net Gabaru, and Deb Raji are black female scientists

who've conducted groundbreaking research under racial

and gender biases of facial recognition software and artificial intelligence. If you've seen

the documentary coded bias, then you've seen some of their amazing work. It's actually on Netflix

right now, and I highly suggest you'll check it out. But if you watched 60 Minutes last week,

you would never know that it was black women who first did this groundbreaking research. That's because even though 60 Minutes last week, you would never know that it was black women who first did this groundbreaking research.

That's because even though 60 Minutes producers reached out to Joy, who is also the head of the Algorithmic Justice League, an organization that raises awareness about the harms of AI, they just erased her voice from a story about the use of facial recognition to arrest two black people for crimes they didn't commit. Instead, they interviewed Patrick Grother, a white male computer scientist.

Now, no one is saying that Grother doesn't know his stuff, but he himself correctly cites

the work of these black women and acknowledges that theirs was the landmark study on bias

and facial recognition and that their work was the

motivation for his own work. So why didn't CBS feel the need to cite them at all? Even worse,

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