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Google Apologizes For "Michelle Obama" Results
theodp writes "CNN reports that for most of the past week, when someone did a Google image search for 'Michelle Obama,' one of the first images that came up was a picture of the First Lady altered to resemble a monkey. After being hit with a firestorm of criticism over the episode, Google first banned the site that posted the photo, saying it could spread malware. Then, when the image appeared on another site, Google displayed the photo in its search results, but displayed an apologetic Google ad above it. On Wednesday morning, the racially offensive image appeared to have been removed from any Google Image searches for 'Michelle Obama.' Google officials could not immediately be reached for comment."
Update — 15:38 GMT by SS: A reader pointed out that this article from the Guardian says the image was de-listed simply because it was removed from the blog where it was hosted rather than by any "deliberate" action from Google.
People post dumb shit on the internet. Other people complain. Welcome to the 21st century. How is this remotely news? To me it seems more like pandering to the slobbering teabaggers, it's basically saying "look, teh googles controls your free speach!!!"
Google pulls shit from search results all the time for a wide variety of reasons, in this case because it's fucking offensive. You wanna be a racist prick that's your business, you can still find the picture it's just not the top result for a search of "Michelle Obama". If you can't deal with that you can go use Bing like the dumbfuck you are.
You're ridiculous.
The administration wouldn't have to lift a finger to get Google to remove this - market pressures would. Someone finds a race-baiting image of the First Lady is a top result on Google and sends word to everyone in their address book about it, and those people spread it, and so on. At some point you'd have tons of people contacting Google to demand that it be remedied, and Google would do it rather than suffer a pretty serious PR black eye.
Why would the Obama administration bother swinging at a pitch in the dirt like this? People have been shown at protests with signs that insult the man's *children* by calling them all kinds of racist names, and he doesn't bother responding to it, but you think that a stupid caricature of his wife is somehow going to get him to say "Hey, I think I'll take an action that, if found out, would completely ruin my credibility and won't have any impact because the image will still be out there. That's a winning move!"
It looks like you're a paranoid kook who doesn't have any clue how the real world actually works. The fact that some other mong modded you "insightful" should be frightening to people who actually have a functioning brain.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Come on.. this is the just the Zeitgeist. There are more people searching for the picture in question rather than just her name. That would put the suggestion higher in the list (I'm guessing that's how the autocomplete algorithm works).
Google isn't really to blame.. and them removing this item can be seen as censorship.
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
Mods: please read the link first before you dub this off-topic.
There was a fascinating article on the BBC website about this; read
Hitler Moustache about a comedian, Richard Herring, who wanted to reclaim the right to make it socially acceptable to wear a "toothbrush moustache" like the famous.... Charlie Chaplin.
I just did a Google vs Bing comparison on image search for michelle+obama+monkey.
First comment: the images were displayed really slowly on Bing; many never appeared at all.
Second comment: of the images displayed, Google's had more with a monkey theme of some sort.
Third comment: neither search produced anything I'd refer to as offensive.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
And the constitution is entirely about democracy
Really? Show me where the word is mentioned. I'm sure it must be in there somewhere.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
We've heard the argument before: "we are just a search engine, we arent responsible for child porn, warez, illegal mp3s or anythign like that that show up in our results"... unless its a picture of Michelle Obama... If you can flush that you have proved you can flush the other things as well. So whats next?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
don't just blame it on the guy who posted it, but also Google works on natural search. Blame the millions of people who searched for this picture using those keywords. This image coming up first just shows how racist americans still are. I say Google should have let it be. As disgusting as it is it represents a group of people in this period of history. You can't erase it like the Germans are trying to do with the Nazi history.
And for those morons who are comparing this to George Bush's monkey, you all are idiots. George Bush's monkey was showing he was as dumb as a monkey. Michelle Obama's is just racist. There's a history of racist calling blacks monkeys in the US. And if you think they are the same then you most likely are a racist yourself. Its time for you to come out of the closet and be open about it.
Can I bum a sig?
Interesting. Can you elaborate further? This seems counter-intuitive to me.
If you ban something you only attract a whole bunch of people who think it's banned because it's cool.
And yet we've gone from it being publicly acceptable to put blacks in the back of a bus and make them drink from a different water fountain, to an African American president.
They essentially made overt racism illegal, at least in public.
I just spent several hours reviewing various axiomatic treatments of probability theory and then ... this. Major train derailment. Stick accordion self-compacted for hundreds of yards. Tragic loss of brain function for all involved. Luria weeps at the carnage.
What people self-report on exit polls proves bupkus all. Most people suck at preference reporting (ask any economist). This nut case is thinking that if a person self-reports incorporating "is black" in their preference determination, that Michael Vick would have prevailed over Abraham Lincoln on every one of these ballots.
The sad fact of life in America is that a man who is regarded as a black man experiences life differently--and usually not better. Would it were not the case that Obama had a longer row to hoe to get where he is now. And I'm not even counting overcoming negative precedent: that no black had yet accomplished this feat. Could it be that most black people in America have a stronger sense of Obama rose above, having faced it themselves? Empathy considered harmful. What next?
Likely many of these people voted for Obama because he rose above his blackness, and made it a non-issue, which would be hard to accomplish (the rising above part) if he wasn't *black* in the first place. (Zeno's unknown paradox of non-issue making.)
I'm sure the average exit poll carefully distinguishes this sentiment from the depiction in the word salad above. And then this nameless worm goes on to complain that the major media didn't smoke his troll weed.
I'm never given a rat's ass about the Turing test, but I sure would like to code a reliable troll detector, one that isn't fooled by sarcasm or wit, because we sure need more of that and less of this.
Voting on the basis of skin color is quite acceptable by today's moral standard.
Concluding sentence: slime-factor bonus +5
"on the basis of skin color" => via mental processes too unseemly to state clearly; to the exclusion of all other factors
"quite acceptable" => passive-aggressive fang-baring under cover of triteness
"today's moral standard" => we're all going to hell in a hand-basket
Surely these are easily detected memes? The indirection isn't terribly clever.
From transcript gloss for Ayres on Super Crunchers and the Power of Data
Russ Roberts made a rebuttal to this guy's claims in a following podcast, but I think statistics goes a long way, applied appropriately. What I would like to correlate are the predictable trappings of the sleaze module when forced to intertwine emotion and logic in certain styles of pathological prose.
We've spent too much time trying to understand the logic of language, when often there isn't any. Why aren't we studying instead the pragmatics of sleaze?
As someone who isn't American, thank you for explaining that. I couldn't figure out what people were so worked up over.
I still think it's a steaming pile of horse shit. In bad taste, yes. Something to get excited over? I'm still not seeing it. Many people can be caricatured in various ways due to their looks, and sometimes it's even amusing. I don't see the need to declare a comparison "off limits" because of someone's race. A lot of the comments here seem to suggest it's fine for me to portray a white person as a monkey (even if we agree it's in bad taste), even if they happen to resemble one more than most of us do. But don't dare make that comparison of someone black.
Be willing to call it like it is, even it's a crappy attempt at humour. That seems to more closely embody equality, at least to me. But yes, a lot of it depends on intent, and I wasn't around to hear the racial slurs of the past.
And that kids is how I met your mother.
Excellent points. What was the search phrase that used to lead to GWB's White House page..."ignorant asshole" or "incompetent moron" or something?