Delisting: fighting back against algorithmic truths (en)

re:publica 17 - Politics & Society

One of the most prominent arguments against the right to be forgotten in the Latin American region appeals to a “right to memory” or a “right to truth”: there is a real concern that powerful individuals could exert control over narratives about the past. Nonetheless, in the era of digital colonialism, that same danger applies to Google itself. In this session we aim to explore how the company's algorithms affect the right to individual and collective identity. Do we have a right to say "I am not what Google says I am"? What happens when information is excluded from search results? Will we even notice? Is this also a form of oblivion?

• Gisela Perez de Acha

Power structures tend to take control over narratives. It happened during the harsher periods of Latin American dictatorships, and it could happen with Google. As the biggest search engine in the world, Google is not only a company, it is a synonym of knowledge, controlling the biggest share of the search engine market. It is where we go when we don't know something. Where we empty our every day thoughts. Even the way information is ordered and presented has a direct impact on our perception of facts, and therefore on our ideology.

How Google crawls, indexes and presents information is not a neutral matter. What we get as search results has been tailored and programmed into the algorithm, that obeys over 200 criteria that are well beyond "organic". We don't quite know how the algorithms work, and yet that process has consequences in terms of our collective memory, the definition of history, and also in terms of our own identity.

We need to start questioning the search engine. First, because we socially have "blind faith" in the results. We take them as reality, and as a parameter of "truth". They are unquestionable. Second, because under the paradigm of this faith, Google has built a hegemonic and centralized information system and this is what impacts the construction of history. If Google "removes" something from its database, or simply fails to include it, an informational hole is generated that is more directly related to the company's monopoly than to the very nature of the information on the Internet. Finally, taking both things into consideration, when Google indexes information about a person, it generates a deep identity conflict: it is more true and true what the searcher says to what a person feels, experiences and believes in her life.

Beyond the right to be forgotten, delisting is a proper tool to question Google's online hegemonic narrative and take control of our online identity. We aim to present an analysis of the culture of memory and oblivion in Latin America related to delisting, with concrete public policy proposals that range from cases where delisting should always be possible, to cases where it must be absolutely banned. If digital colonialism implies the creations and exportation of "truths", delisting is a tool that can provide us with possibilities to erode intermediary power structures.