Google's Algorithm Displays Racist Results Because the Society Is Racist (fusion.net) 304
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.
this is dumb (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
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captcha "re-arrest". seriously wtf?
Slashdot is racist.
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It occurs to me that just like 'interpreting' the Bible (or the Quoran, or whatever ancient document you care to name) you can contextualize things in such a way th
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There is a much simpler explanation. The social economic difference between white and black people coupled with the percentage of population in English speaking countries (search terms is in English) gives the results seen due to the saturation of content available.
Criminal elements are a small percentage of the population but when they put mugshots online, they tend to overwhelm a naturally small representation of a population.
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Re: this is dumb (Score:2)
That is the stupidest thing I've ever read. No wonder you posted anonymously.
Re:this is dumb (Score:4, Insightful)
When I describe a person, one of the obvious features is the color of their skin. Not even gender is so easy to determine.
Re:this is dumb (Score:4, Informative)
Why are you describing people?
Um, well.
In case of a crime, it helps track down the perpetrator(s).
If you're in a crow of people in uniform, it describes a specific person.
It's pretty f*cking stupid to not describe a person if you're trying to explain what someone looks like.
Have people become so thin skinned these days that we can't even make obvious physical declarations that are wholly neutral in opinion outside of an intrinsic trait?
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Absolutely. When you don't leave your mom's basement there is certainly no reason to describe anyway.
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No-one is this much of a moron.
Go back to troll school.
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Because I lost a buddy in an amusement park and try to find out whether one of the people working there has seen him? Because I saw how someone lost his wallet and he was gone by the time I could get there to pick it up, I try to give a description to the police who it belongs to when I deposit it there? Because I had an accident and try to describe someone who I saw standing there and I think could be a witness? Because I met someone at a meeting, can't remember his name but know that he's the guy I need t
Anything good about not being white/black/brown? (Score:2)
Look, I am just curious. Is there anything good about not being the "other" race? Just wnt to know.
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We write comprehensible sentences.
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As a white male, I can get a rent-a-white-man job to represent black males in society. Pays quite well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7LOXDA0A0Y [youtube.com]
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When you are in Rome, it's best to be Roman.
No, it's much better to be Visigoth.
I think he's on to something (Score:5, Funny)
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?
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Odd, when I googled "5 black women" I got pictures of shoes, and when I googled "5 white women" I got a couple of pictures of shoes, but mainly pictures of white women, and one that may have been a perfume ad.
My guess is that it reflects in some inscrutable way on your previous browsing history.
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Or it could be because there's a "thug culture" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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True, but those groups are tiny in comparison, as well as in the amount of damage they cause.
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White males are disproportionately represented in Wall Street bankers who caused the worldwide economic crash in 2007-08.
You wanna compare damage?
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Literally none of them are teenagers. I'm in favor of seeing their mugshots, though, don't get me wrong. Pity this never happens. Democrats or Republicans, they're all owned by Wall Street.
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So we agree that grown-ass white men cause by far the most damage in the world, pound for pound.
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Tiny in comparison to what, you may ask. Let's add some number for serious crimes in the US, the ones for which people typically get arrested *and* reported in the news papers: murder, rape and robbery. Then the 2002 numbers are 45347 white, 54787 black. In the 2000 census, 75.1% of the US was white, 12.3% black. So black people were 7.5 times more likely to commit such crimes. If reporting influences search result, and I'm sure it does, the result for queries like "black man" vs. "white man" will be influe
As they say on Avenue Q.... (Score:3)
Everyone is a little bit racist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RovF1zsDoeM [youtube.com]
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Racism is the extension of natural instinctive discrimination against people outside your family group. Being able to instinctively know your friends from your potential foes by visual discrimination is useful.
Unfortunately, it also leads to some pretty inaccurate conclusions about those other people, which is the genesis of some of the odder notions of racism. It is easy to fear people that you can easily discern as being different from you, and differing skin color is a very, very easy thing to identify
Annnnd? (Score:4, Insightful)
Google Censoring seaches video. (Score:3)
Saw this video [youtube.com] today, demonstrating google censoring their searches.
Does indeed look valid.
Relative value (Score:3)
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.
Duh? (Score:3)
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.
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It is, however, racist to ignore the fact that almost 100% of the results for "three black teenagers" are mugshots, while only a small fraction of black teenagers are actually criminals. It's also racist to believe that we as a society have nothing to do with creating a criminal underclass along racial lines.
Reality Theater is Preferable to Reality, Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Now fuck off. Oh shit, I guess that makes me a racist I suppose.
Re: Reality Theater is Preferable to Reality, Eh? (Score:2)
It's ok. According to the lefties and SJW scum everyone is racist now, so we're all the same. Finally we've attained equality among people all in the US. Hooray!
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People don't like uncomfortable truths. Google ranks things based on behavioral data suggesting what you're *expecting* when you punch in a search term. That means behaviors showing "black teens" is tied in people's minds to "criminals" will naturally lead to Google showing you criminals if you punch in "black teens" as a search term. It's *disturbing* to realize many people--perhaps yourself included--readily associate black teens with criminals, and so it must be Google's fault.
Orson Scott Card wrot
It is all Google's fault (Score:5, Insightful)
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food stamps ..... can't be used for most things you would consider fattening
You tell 'em home-boy. Food stamps can't be used to buy lard. They can't be used to buy Oreo's, those yummy cookies with the sugary lard in the middle. They can't be used to buy butter or sour cream or cheese. Those pizza places to make pizzas that you take home and finish cooking are just telling lies when they claim they take food stamps. Just can't buy anything unhealthy with them, and anyone who says "they are a racist pl
Reflection of a lot of things, not just prejudice (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
try a different search (Score:2)
Search for "Three African teenagers" and you get quite a more reasonable (similar to "Three White teenagers") result: https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
It's not some kind of huge conspiracy.
Google doesn't make content (Score:2)
Google indexes what's there.
So if "three teenagers" returns mostly white teenagers (which it doesn't by the way, at least not anymore) and "three black teenagers" returns mugshots, one should first of all wonder where these pictures come from.
"Three teenagers" is nothing you'd expect on a Facebook page. Would you classify yourself and two friends as "three teenagers"? No, you'd call it "me 'n my bff" or similar rubbish. The only place I could think of where three teenagers would actually be called "three te
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Google indexes what's there.
And for a while, when you Googled 9/11, you got page after page explaining how it was an inside job, orchestrated by the Jews. Society isn't necessarily racist. Certain groups with an axe to grind and/or an agenda have figured out how to game Google.
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This just in: Conspiracy theorist tend to be loudmouths and link at each other's nutty conspiracy as "proof" that it's true because "he says it too".
Guess what increases your Google rank.
Human society is prejudiced! Really? (Score:3)
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.
Headline is Stupid/Wrong... (Score:3)
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.
Algorithms (Score:2)
Google isn't a news site, its search results come from an algorithm. They aren't hand-picked by employees of the company.
Article has terrible sense of statistics (Score:2)
Black people make up 13% of the US population and 3% of the British population. That means there are far more white people in each population, which means far more companies potentially looking to buy images of smiling white teens. The demographic breakdown of society isn’t, in itself, racist. However, the fact that companies don’t think white people would buy their products if they had black models advertising them seems like a reflection of society’s prejudices.
Got it upside-down again... if 3% of the population are of one ethnic group how does it make sense that in a perfectly statistically representative world that more than 3% of them would take part in modelling for stock photos... I guess blaming the photographers and people buying photos makes better headlines, truth is that in terms of proportion of stock photos there is no one to blame because there's probably nothing wrong.
In other news photographers are not taking an equal number of photos of extremely r
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Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well (Score:5, Interesting)
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What are YOU doing to change that?
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Dunno about him, but considering that I live in rural Oregon, there's not a whole hell of a lot that I could do, at least locally; seems to be a shortage of non-white-folks out here.
There's help that could be done in in Portland, but the progressive crowd is too busy gentrifying the place - which in turn is driving black folk out of that town faster than redlining [wikipedia.org] ever could. Seriously - something that generations of bigots had tried and failed to do, the Latte Leftist crowd will get done in less than 10 ye
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If you want white people to solve black-on-black violence while the blacks do nothing to help themselves, don't be surprised when the solution that white people come up with displeases the black people.
How about smiling, being respectful and saying "thank you" to black people? That's the fastest way I can defuse any situation with a black person on the street, as most black people are afraid of crazy white folks.
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Why would I not say "thank you" where appropriate? I don't get the question.
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Why would I not say "thank you" where appropriate? I don't get the question.
Go to a coffee shop on a regular basis. You might notice that a white barista will get "thank you" almost all the time. A black barista will get fewer "thank you" or not at all.
When you look someone in the eye and say "thank you," you are acknowledging that they are a human being. Too many people don't regard black people as human beings, just animals that deserve to get shot in the street.
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Weird. Why would someone base saying "thank you" on the skin color of the person to thank?
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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How about smiling, being respectful and saying "thank you" to black people? That's the fastest way I can defuse any situation with a black person on the street, as most black people are afraid of crazy white folks.
Here is the problem though, Blacks kill other blacks in mass on a weekly basis, They need to see themselves first killing each other needs to stop before they expect cops to calm down though blaming cops for everything is just the smoke screen.
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Here is the problem though, Blacks kill other blacks in mass on a weekly basis,
So it's the Catholic ones that are the real problem? Perhaps you meant en masse?
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Don't pin this shit on anyone but the perpetrators of the gang mentality/thug culture.
The music industry is a big problem.
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Asians were 'oppressed' much more than black people were in the recent past, just ask George Takei (Mr. Sulu). Black people haven't been oppressed for give-or-take 50 years; that's several generations of black people growing up without knowing what it was like to be segregated. Still, historically, black crime wasn't nearly disproportionate as it is today even though they were 'oppressed'. In the early 1900's-1950's race of incarcerated people largely resembled the actual population ratios although it was h
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What could I possibly do to change the decisions others make?
Smile, be respectful and say "thank you" to black people. And not just to black people. Everyone. You might be surprised by the results.
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And we'll have world peace?
No, but it's a start to return to a civil society.
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Thank you for what?
Anything, everything. Most people don't say "thank you" anymore.
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Stealing black children and raising them to act white (or asian).
That didn't work too well with Native Americans.
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Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)
Read this: https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim... [amazon.com]
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While I think there's some truth in there, I think you've confused "commit" with "be convicted of".
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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.
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'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... [reuters.com]
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
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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
Re:And Googles moral responsibility is. (Score:4, Interesting)
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The group that has guns?
Yes, because all murders are committed with firearms....
Re:And Googles moral responsibility is. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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).
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Hmm... murderers?
Thought I would've guessed that it's more than only 52.5%
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12.5% of the population over there are murderers?
Uh... don't get me wrong, but I think I'll cancel my USA trip.
Re:And Googles moral responsibility is. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't keep arguing for equality while at the same time highlighting differences.
Re:And Googles moral responsibility is. (Score:4, Insightful)
Giving accurate results should always be the priority. Biasing data just robs people/society of an accurate self analysis.
Re:And Googles moral responsibility is. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hear hear!
Re:And Googles moral responsibility is. (Score:5, Insightful)
+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.
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How are they not representative?
Lots of highly ranked images on the internet that share a page with the words "three", "black", and "teenagers" happen to be media crime reports.
Lots of highly ranked images on the internet that share a page with the words "three", "white", "teenagers" happen to be stock photos of teenagers with white backgrounds.
That is what you asked when you do the search.
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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 i
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No. It should focus on presenting accurate search results from web sites. Google is NOT an oracle of truth.
Re:And Googles moral responsibility is. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
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Google is good because it interprets what you search for better than other search engines.
And it's good at doing that because it builds its index based upon context and what people are linking to. If you go to Google Images and search for Comcast, you'll see swastikas, a hammer and sickle, and other "inaccurate" images among the top results. That isn't because Google thinks Comcast is run by communist nazis, it's because many other sites out there have posted these images alongside text that refers to Comcast. Likewise, if searching for "three black teenagers" brings up mugshots among the top re
How can they correct this bias? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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There's nothing to correct.
The only time you would use the text "three black teenagers" is when race somehow matters. A common case in which it matters is when describing suspects in media reports. Since America is mostly white you don't use "three white teenagers" as often since that's the assumption of "three teenagers" anyway. And of course "three black teenagers" is an uncommon use of language outside of media reporting - and surprise surprise media reporting spends more time on crime than crime rates w
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Trump 2016
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It has bad PR, though. If it said Skynet is killing people because people are just fucking STUPID, and cites things like this one, it would actually receive a lot of nodding and a softly sighed "Allright, carry on..."
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Racism is a form of chauvinism. I.e. thinking that the own group is for some nonspecific reason better than the other group.
Definitions cannot be triggered. And for people who can, I would very much enjoy introducing them to something else that can easily be triggered: My Desert Eagle.
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Only to people who really, really, really piss me off. Which includes pretty much all special snowflakes.
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Someone should call Merriam-Webster and inform them that their definition is wrong...
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Not really. Trump is using "Crooked Hillary" not because he's a two year old, but because he's actually being very savvy by creating a short, media friendly sound byte.
He's using repetition after repletion to make us associate "Crooked" with Hillary, and even if we don't believe it, it has an effect. One of those effects is more media results. It's not a bias, its that the media are having their strings pulled because Trump knows how to play them.
And to be honest, she's kind of an easy target to begin wi