Google Autocomplete Still Makes Vile Suggestions (wired.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: In December of 2016, Google announced it had fixed a troubling quirk of its autocomplete feature: When users typed in the phrase, "are jews," Google automatically suggested the question, "are jews evil?" Almost a year after removing the "are jews evil?" prompt, Google search still drags up a range of awful autocomplete suggestions for queries related to gender, race, religion, and Adolf Hitler. Google appears still unable to effectively police results that are offensive, and potentially dangerous -- especially on a platform that two billion people rely on for information. Like journalist Carol Cadwalladr, who broke the news about the "are jews evil" suggestion in 2016, I too felt a certain kind of queasiness experimenting with search terms like, "Islamists are," "blacks are," "Hitler is," and "feminists are." The results were even worse. For the term "Islamists are," Google suggested I might in fact want to search, "Islamists are not our friends," or "Islamists are evil." For the term, "blacks are," Google prompted me to search, "blacks are not oppressed." The term "Hitler is," autocompleted to, among other things, "Hitler is my hero."

Comments

Re:What did you expect?

[uCallHimDrJ0NES]

So, Google has no obligation to prevent its services from being leveraged by those who understand how it works from exploiting search suggestions as a means of disseminating their personal views. Is that what you're saying?

Re:Wait a minute...

[GameboyRMH]

RACIST is simply a tool to dismiss something that one doesn't like.

Deplorable nonsense, "racist" means "unfairly discriminates based on ethnicity," which you demonstrate your knowledge of by using it later in your own post:

However, crying racism often leads to actual racist thoughts,

Thoughts you don't like and would like to dismiss? Or thoughts which unfairly discriminate based on ethnicity?