Data and Disinformation: Elevating Digital Justice in an Unjust World

The promise of the internet has been to democratize access to information and ideas. Yet by design, the algorithms that determine the very information and ideas we encounter are imbued with biases, especially those against women and people of color. Taken together with a starkly stratified education system and underrepresentation of those groups in technology fields, the digital status quo serves to perpetuate privilege and ration opportunity. One step toward reversing that trend is to strengthen students’ data fluency. Just Equations founder Pamela Burdman opened the conference and introduced keynote speaker Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble, a MacArthur fellow and UCLA internet studies scholar, to discuss the imperative of elevating digital justice and digital literacy in an age of disinformation.

‍