How systemic racial inequality is produced on the web read more at here http://www.spinonews.com/index.php/component/k2/item/610

Racial inequality is on the web have been going on for decades, but some studies have attempted to demonstrate whether and how systemic racial inequality might form on the web.

Charlton McIlwain, associate professor of media, culture, and communication at NYU Steinhardt, designed a study to conceptualize how race is represented and systematically reproduced online, specifically looking at how users navigate the web's structure and how it influences user’s navigational patterns.

Creating an original dataset, McIlwain record racial and non-racial websites. These Sites were designated depending on whether race-related terminology was used in the websites title, description, or keyword meta-tags.

Mcllwain creates a program to calculate the 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.

He found that web producers create hyperlink networks that do not steer audience traffic to other sites based on their racial or nonracial nature, and also found user navigation reflects, where visitors to nonracial sites visit other nonracial sites with greater frequency that would be expected, and visitors to racial sites visit other racial sites more than expected.

The evidence suggests a tendency toward racially segregated site navigation. This might produce truly equitable traffic patterns if users only relied on site links to direct the flow of traffic.

These results, along with disparities in website traffic rankings, show how a race-based hierarchy might systematically emerge on the web.