Microsoft Tackles 'Horrifying' Bing Search Results (bbc.com)

Microsoft has "taken action" to change its Bing search engine after it was found to give "horrifying" results for some terms. From a report: Journalist Chris Hoffman discovered Bing suggested racist topics when he looked up words such as "Jews", "Muslims" and "black people". Bing also ranked widely debunked conspiracy theories among the top suggestions for other words. Mr Hoffman said Microsoft had to do better at moderating its search system. In his investigation, Mr Hoffman looked up racially-themed terms and found that the majority of suggestions for further searches that accompanied results pointed people to racist sites or images. Racist memes and images were also returned for many of the words he tried. "We all know this garbage exists on the web, but Bing shouldn't be leading people to it with their search suggestions," wrote Mr Hoffman. It is believed that the suggestions for further searches connected to these terms have emerged from a combination of user activity and concerted action by far-right groups to skew responses. [...] Jeff Jones, a senior director at Microsoft, said: "We take matters of offensive content very seriously and continue to enhance our systems to identify and prevent such content from appearing as a suggested search. As soon as we become aware of an issue, we take action to address it."

Comments

it depends

[cascadingstylesheet]

The problem is that anyone who's been awake in the last few years knows that not everything called racist actually is racist, in any meaningful way.

Who gets to decide? Well, in the past, you did (modulo a large bunch of publishers and broadcasters and libraries and such).

Now? Something gets "deplatformed" and you will never see it to decide for yourself. It's too easy now to just "disappear" people and ideas.

I have no problem with filters per se, as long as they are accessible - I generally have Google's safe search on, if using Google, for example. If Bing wants to have a "Filters" panel, and a checkbox that says "hide what Bing thinks is racist", great.

Re: Horrifying?

[amicusNYCL]

a true picture of reality in the net.

I think "reality in the net" is what people are trying to avoid in favor of "reality in the real world", because the two are often not the same. Every uninformed opinion posted online is not somehow equivalent to truth of what actually happens in the world. The "vaccine debate" or climate change are perfect examples, where there are a very small number of vocal opinions which somehow get amplified and equated with the much larger number of fact-based studies. You end up with a picture that these issues are hotly debated when they're really not, they're really a lot more settled than the online discussion would lead someone to believe.