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Google's Algorithm Displays Racist Results Because the Society Is Racist (fusion.net)
On June 6, Kabir Alli, an 18-year old in Virginia, posted a brief video of himself running a couple of quick Google image searches. First he searched for "three black teenagers" and was met with several rows of decontextualized mugshots. Then he searched for "three white teenagers" and was served up stock photos of relaxed teens hanging out in front of various plain white backgrounds. The tweet has stirred controversy, with many people accusing Google of being racist. But is that the case? Alli says that while it's Google's fault in some sense as they should have better control over the things people see, he also believes that at the end of the day, what Google shows us is a reflection of what people think. A Google spokesperson had similar things to say. Our image search results are a reflection of content from across the web, including the frequency with which types of images appear and the way they're described online. This means that sometimes unpleasant portrayals of sensitive subject matter online can affect what image search results appear for a given query. These results don't reflect Google's own opinions or beliefs -- as a company, we strongly value a diversity of perspectives, ideas and cultures.
If you just search for "three teenagers" that's fine. When you start mentioning the race in the search term, YOU are the racist.
captcha "re-arrest". seriously wtf?
If you google "5 black women" you get photos of groups of black women, however if you google "5 white women" you get pictures of shoes.
Clearly this is some sort of intentional misogy-racist commentary on the relative shoe purchasing power of ethno-genderic foot fetishists. Or something like that at least, can I have my social studies diploma now?
And black males are disproportionately represented in gangs and other criminal statistics. Notice how most of those mugshots are of black men, and pictures of women are for the most part not mugshots.
a statistical fact that black males between ages of 14-17 are 10 times more likely to commit a homicide then Whites and Hispanic's Combines. Can deny the truth all you want but facts are facts.
Everyone is a little bit racist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RovF1zsDoeM
This just in: Search engine displays realities of life, not sugar-coated version of what we want. See other news and weather at 11.
Is it sterotypes and Lies or is it just straight on truth but everyone wants to cover it up? Take 1 guess what group commits 52.5% of the homicides on avg year after year?
If it's reflective of the content being indexed, the only way to "correct this bias" is to add bias.
You can't keep arguing for equality while at the same time highlighting differences.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
Saw this video today, demonstrating google censoring their searches.
Does indeed look valid.
Clearly Kabir we are assigning a negative value to mug shots. That's a value the computer isn't trained to assign or detect. It could be that thug life and mug shots are prized, and the white people shots are "lame" and worthy of chastising, like thingswhitepeoplelike.
This ends up being a bigger commentary on the observer and their biases rather than the neutral computer.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Sadly truth is only a defense for fact based discussions. Race based discussions are usually anything but fact based. Much of political correctness is not talking about the elephant in the room. For white people the only winning move is not to play, or to talk in this case.
Giving accurate results should always be the priority. Biasing data just robs people/society of an accurate self analysis.
I'm sorry, isn't this completely f***ing obvious? I mean all of it, that society is racist and that Google search results reflect that racism. I don't care whether you're 18 or 80, this really shouldn't be a surprise.
"it's Google's fault in some sense as they should have better control over the things people see"
No. Now fuck off. Oh shit, I guess that makes me a racist I suppose.
Alli says that while it's Google's fault in some sense as they should have better control over the things people see...
In so far as Google controlling how information is displayed, I agree. Google, however, should not control which information is displayed. There is little difference between hiding mugshot photos and hiding photos of tanks in Tienanmen Square; both represent significant social issued we should not hide from view lest they be allowed to continue behind the shadows.
That is to say, it is Google's job to display exactly the information they are displaying: the potentially offensive images and their sources. It, then, becomes our job as a moral society to take those sources to task if they are in the wrong. Google hiding this information would, in reality, protect the people actually perpetrating the offenses.
Sure, you might not have to see it anymore, but that doesn't mean it's gone away. Making it go away is our job; showing it to us so we know we haven't met with success yet is Google's.
The question, then, becomes whether or not what Google depicts is an accurate representation of reality; we already know it's an accurate representation of the sources. If it is an accurate representation of reality, it is on us to change that reality; if it is not, it is on us to convince the sources to change to match reality.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
It is all Google's fault that most black teenagers have criminal records, while most white teenagers spend their time hanging out around white backdrops. Lets not even think about putting the blame on those poor black children. They not only face the problem of poverty, but also the problem of childhood obesity caused by all that food stamp money. I blame Google. They should be returning search results based on how we would like the world to be, not how it is.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
In a sense you're seeing the beginnings of this with Trump. Really I think much of the drama is the 1% trying desperately to keep everyone from noticing that the middle class is disappearing faster than glaciers. Keep everyone riled up over non-issues (bathrooms anyone?) while inequality grows by leaps and bounds.
Some groups will do anything to avoid accurate self analysis
Trump 2016
You are welcome on my lawn.
So you think that instead of reporting on the world as it is Google should, in their infinite wisdom, decide what the world should look like and then return search results with that in mind?
Moreover, how do you envision Google actually implementing your regime of censorship? Currently the lifetime risk of going to prison for a black US male is about 30%. By age 18, 30% of black men have been arrested. The typical white and black teenager do not have the same life experiences. So how are Google's algorithms supposed to decide when displaying the inequalities of our society is the right thing to do, and when doing so would be too upsetting to the user?
+1
I was reading through before posting and FINALLY someone said the correct answer.
Google's systems are just returning matches from their index. Google isn't creating the content they are indexing. They are not making decisions about society, what you might want to see, or whatever value people want to try and slap on it. CHANGING that behavior is what would introduce bias.
And like it or not, there appears to be far more content on the web to index that has "black teenager" equated with mugshots than "white teenager". And that shouldn't be surprising ot anyone because facts show that to be true in reality, too... not just some bias of the web. We can try to argue WHY this is so, but that doesn't change that it is fact and Google is doing nothing wrong.
First do the search WITHOUT the word 'three'. Suddenly you get no mugshots.
It's the word three that's a problem. Nobody labels normal photos with the word 'three' in it. Instead, generally NEWS PHOTOS get that distinction. All the image searches you get when you do a 'three' search come from the news.
Try searching for:
three teenagers
three Jewish teenagers
three Christian teenagers
three Indian teenagers
When you ask for teenagers, you get a lot of black, Hispanic, and white teenagers, all mixed up.
When you specify that you only want three black teenagers or only three white teenagers - YOU are doing a search that embodies the racism. What's wrong with the Chinese teenagers? etc. etc.
But when racists go looking for three white teenagers, they want clean cut photos, so that's what Google gives them. When a racist goes looking for three black teenagers, they want thugs, so that is what Google gives them. When you want three Indian teenagers, you get poor people. Etc. etc. etc.
It's all from the racism inherent in the people asking those kinds of questions, not the search itself.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I couldn't find stats for children, but Wikipedia says 4.7% of black adults in the US are incarcerated. That's against a backdrop of a country with an insane incarceration rate, but still...
So there is just no way that returning multiple pictures of arrested children is in any way representative of reality.
It's nonsense like this that perpetuates untrue stereotypes.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Google produced not one but several images that reinforce negative racial stereotypes that do not represent the subject.
Google is a search engine, not a censorship engine, and not a political correctness engine. They absolutely should NOT be controlling what people see. If our society is racist, we should deal with that, rather than trying to pressure corporations into covering it up.
Google should give you what you asked for.
Indeed, that's what Google should do. However, Google's ability to do that is highly dependent in the data Google has. If all of Google's data (collected from 3rd party sources, mind you) has the text "three black teenagers" next to mugshot photos, Google is going to think those photos depict three black teenagers.
They will fix this quickly.
Yes, I'm sure this will be what pushes them to perfect their image recognition algorithms to no longer have to rely on surrounding text for context.
Except that... well... the surrounding text is how the algorithms learn in the first place.
Google won't fix this because Google can't fix this. We, as a society, must fix Google's data sources, either by making them more accurate or, if they're already accurate, changing the reality they depict.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Stealing black children and raising them to act white (or asian).
That didn't work too well with Native Americans.
a statistical fact that black males ages 14-17 are more than 10 times more likely to end up in prison for the same drug "crimes" than white teens committing the same offense. This is due to the *fact* that the color of their skin makes them more likely to get pulled over, then searched, then indicted, and then convicted.
Read this: https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim...
So just for grins, I ran through it answering as I would if I were the biggest jerk I could imagine. It came back saying I was a shining example of a human being. Almost Godlike.
I told a friend about this and she suggested I run it again with the same answers, only instead saying I was a woman. A woman giving the exact same answers was said to be a major bitch, irritating, neurotic, etc...
The point here is that there is no truly objective Reality. Google's search engine is just software and like any other observer, interacts with what is being observed.
Google results are literally the definition of not racist: they are not modifying their results or algorithm on the basis of race. The results are a reflection of prevalence and linkage of content online, which may reflect a societal racism, but even that is pretty tenuous based on the data presented. A more straightforward example is that online content is representative of statistical data, and/or societal perceptions, neither of which would indicate racism per se.
Moreover, the suggested "fix" to have Google bias search results on the basis of race IS LITERALLY RACISM. The people calling for Google to "fix" their results to be an inaccurate representation of online data are literally calling for Google to employ racism in generating their search results. *boggle*
I expect the twitter-verse to be stupid... but please at least try to not reflect their stupidity on Slashdot, kthanks.
While I think there's some truth in there, I think you've confused "commit" with "be convicted of".
It's a flaw. The user asked for images of black children, the images presented are not representative.
No, the user asked for "three black teenagers". Go do a Google image search right now for "black children" and tell me whether or not you think that is representative of the pictures that are online. So, why do mugshots of 3 black teenagers appear when you search for "three black teenagers"? Because guess how often those 3 words appear in a story accompanied by a mugshot. It IS representative, it's representative of the pictures that are posted online accompanied by the search term.
You want proof that it is representative? Go search right now for "three white teenagers". You'll see a bunch of stock photography of white kids, a few mugshots, and several screenshots of Google image results showing a bunch of black people in mugshots, as well as mugshots showing black people. So, class, what have we learned? How come an image search for "three white teenagers" TODAY shows images of black teenagers in mugshots, and screenshots of Google image search results? Do you think those images would have been part of those results a week ago? Do you understand how Google works?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
They wouldn't and he's just trolling. Black-on-black violence isn't the fault of white people not thanking black baristas, even if that actually happened in reality.
This is just the typical "white guilt" viewpoint: everything is the fault of the all-powerful whitey. If you buy your froofy coffee drink in the wrong way, minority murder rates will start rising, because those poor savages don't have any self-determination of their own.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
But does that take into account their prior convictions?
Most of the time when someone states a similar "fact", it does not.
This isnt a "whites versus idiots" issue; its "non-idiots versus idiots" one. I'm not even close to being white (from a third world country, and brown AF) and i find the idea that google should somehow PC-police their search results preposterous. There are legitimate race issues, why take caricature examples like this and decide based on them that there can never be a rational discussion around race? The winning move for whites, as well as with others, is to call out BS when they see it (like this example) and yet stay engaged in real problems that do in fact affect people everyday.
H
'my people'? Nice generalization there, especially for someone who's supposedly against the expression of such things. Most people in the US are the same peasant stock as those in Europe. The US and the UK banned slavery right around the same time, and the emancipation of ex-slaves on both continents was largely simultaneous.
At least, according to this: http://www.reuters.com/article...
America was built by racists and slave labour.
So was Europe. Of course, the countries of your continent have are much better at the whole self-loathing thing, taking in mass numbers of ill-educated barbarians who assault women and demand crazy cultural concessions. Enjoy your islamic future. I'm sure it'll be quite 'progressive.'
Today in the west (at least for now), everyone has equal opportunity, both in the US and western Europe. The current squabble in the states is over affirmative action/equal outcome which is an entirely different animal. It's largely being triggered by well funded agitprop. Personally, I do not like being told I owe something to someone else because of skin color. My ancestors never owned slaves or were aristocracy, not that civilized societies should stoop to blaming sons for the sins of the fathers.. That's so old world.
It's really not a racial thing. It's a U.S. problem in that raising three generations of black folk on welfare has generated an increasing dependence on the government for income.
Look at African folks in European and African countries for a balance. The crime problem isn't there.
It's what the U.S. culture/government does with the race that is the root of the problem.
You don't see the same crime, crappy language and behavior coming from people of African descent in other countries.
Heck, you don't even see it in Canada.
It's not classism. It's discrimination based on genetics. We are both the unwashed masses and the mongrels. They are perfectly conflated.
The "good" genetics are meant to rise to the top.
The thing is that "racism" practically does not exist as a conscious paradigm. Some examples are pointed to like the 'KKK' and 'Nazis', but the perception of these groups is so thoroughly spun up in propaganda any right-thinking person trying to get something out of life other than just fitting in with the crowd would at least be given pause in judgement.
Like I said already, it's easier to get along with people you have things in common with. Your own race are the people you share history, culture, DNA, EVERYTHING with. Every race is "racist", actually and historically. It's inherent in our instincts on a most profound level. See the theory of 'imprinting'.
People discriminate viciously based on every superficiality, and yet somehow everyone thinks its unnatural and evil to discriminate based on race.
Whether or not they realize it they do it all the time and subconsciously feel guilty about it so they translate this guilt into increased aggression when judging people based on things other than race.
All people are vicious animals when deprived of rationality. And it's not popular to be rational.
So there is just no way that returning multiple pictures of arrested children is in any way representative of reality.
Google is not meant to be representative of reality. It's an Internet search engine - its purpose is to be representative of the Internet.
And if it so happens that most online photos that can be described as "three black teenagers" are mugshots, then that's exactly what Google should be showing.
As far as fixing this, the onus is on all the websites that publish those images (I'd imagine it's mostly news sites).