How racial inequality is produced online decoded

Internet users tend to navigate between websites in a racially segregated way, despite pathways that provide equitable access to different sites, a new study has found.
In the study, Charlton McIlwain, associate professor at New York University in the US, specifically looked at how users navigate the web's structure and how that structure influences users' navigational patterns.
"We must consider how the internet developed as a part of a longstanding history and process of racial formation - the complex, racialised historical contexts, circumstances, interests and problems that predate, but may either be exacerbated or corrected by the web's technological environment," said McIlwain.

Creating an original dataset, McIlwain documented racial and nonracial websites. Sites were designated racial or nonracial depending on whether race-related terminology was used in the websites' title, description, or keyword meta-tags.
He also gathered data on each site's ranking based on traffic and other factors.
McIlwain then created the architecture of the actual traffic patterns among and between racial and nonracial sites using a programme that employs a spatial algorithm to compare links between sites.

The programme calculated expected number of connections within and between racial and nonracial sites based on chance, and then compared whether the actual connections significantly exceed or fall below what was expected.

McIlwain found that web producers create hyperlink networks that do not steer audience traffic to other sites based on their racial or nonracial nature.
However, the opposite pattern emerged when looking at users going to and coming from sites in the network.
McIlwain found that user navigation reflects a racially segregated traffic pattern, where visitors to nonracial sites visit other nonracial sites with greater frequency than what would be expected by chance, and visitors to racial sites visit other racial sites more than expected.
"The evidence suggests a tendency towards racially segregated site navigation. Web producers seem to build pathways providing equitable access to sites, without concern for the racial nature of the site.

"This might produce truly equitable traffic patterns if users only relied on site links to direct the flow of traffic. But other things intervene, including individuals' own choices, search engines, or a combination of both," said McIlwain.
The findings demonstrate that variables that have historically contributed to racial inequality offline, such as segregated traffic patterns and destinations, are present within the web's environment.
"These results, along with disparities in website traffic rankings, show how a race-based hierarchy might systematically emerge on the web in ways that exemplify disparate forms of value, influence and power that exist within the web environment," said McIlwain.