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I'm April Williams, and I am an assistant professor
in the Department of Communication Media.
I'm also faculty in the Digital Studies Institute,
and I am an RCI fellow of Research and Community Impact
fellow with the NCID.
The RCI fellowship is funding my project on online dating.
The project is called Swipe Rights,
and I am thinking through advocating
for people and the way that we use
apps and everyday technologies.
AI has a lot of bias, whether that's
racial bias or gender bias.
So my project is really trying to bring awareness
to that bias, especially where dating apps are concerned.
The dating apps are only giving us what they think we want,
and that's the problem.
All the social problems that exist in our society
get amplified by algorithms.
They're not necessarily created by them.
And we have to really stop and think through,
do I want to use a race filter on Hinge?
Do I want to put something in my bio that is racially coded?
Do I want to train the algorithm to look for things that
might be racially sensitive?
Most of the responsibility for bias
that happens in dating platforms falls on those
who are making the platforms.
There's a huge power imbalance where those folks at the top
have most of the power, and us individual users
have less of the power.
I want to empower users to know what they're looking for,
to ask questions about where their data is coming from,
what happens to their data when they upload it to the apps,
and to really call out app designers and platform
designers, to get them to be more accountable to users,
to be more trustworthy and to be more transparent.
I have a forthcoming book which is
on online dating and the algorithms that drive
the online dating process.
It's called Not My Type--
Automating Sexual Racism in Online Dating.
And I think about it both from the perspective
of online daters and the things that we do,
so our individual swiping behaviors, but then
also the algorithms that program and drive
our swipe-based experiences.
I'm working on a guide to accompany the book so that users
can know exactly what language they need to use when they are
writing to their representatives and saying,
hey, look, actually, big tech needs to be regulated.
This is something that I care about.
This is something that I would vote for.
Right?
We vote on policy with our dollars,
whether that is an in-app purchase, downloading Tinder,
downloading Bumble, or any of the other apps
that you might use.
Everything that we do is really reinforcing demand.
So if we want dating apps to sort of stop
and think about the racial bias that's in their algorithms,
we have to encourage them by saying,
no, this is unacceptable.
And the way that we do that is by withholding our money
from them.
So ultimately, the goal would be that dating platforms, dating
companies, would do an internal audit
and really take accountability for the algorithms
that they're currently using.
Hopefully, if there were enough users that said,
I'm concerned about this, I'm uncomfortable with this,
that would really indicate to these programmers to really say,
OK, we need to stop and reevaluate
the way that we collect data, the way that we
use data, the way that we draw inferences about our user base.
So with this grant, I'm really pulling together several
of the leading scholars in the field
and lots of other practitioners as well
to think through what it means for the individual user
to say to a company, hey, I'm not comfortable with the way
that you're using my data.
Hey, we're not going to take this anymore.