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Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
61–70 of 295 posts
Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#62I do not think the word "racism" is a good fit for this. There is no prejudice, or a belief that another race is superior. This is not singling out black women. Any search for "blonde teens" during that time would yield porn-related results too. A search engine just tries to give the most relevant search. Likely, a large part of the population was in search of sex when searching for these type of queries. The "bias"…
If you don't think representation affects things, please post this under your main account.
Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#63It's interesting how the article tries to 'blame' an algorithm while it's basically just working fine and simply reflecting the output of culture/country/people. It's not that the software decided that one thing should be the results, and others should not, it just takes what we feed it, and gives it back to us.
Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#64Try searching Google Images for "brazilian". Her point is quite valid, and also well recognized in at least some part of the tech industry: when you "blindly" optimize for a certain audience, you risk picking up the biases of that audience. So, if you want to appeal to a broader audience than your current one, you might need to manually tune your system to remove some of the biases from your original audience. This i…
Wow, those results are so different from Bing Images for the same search.
That's really amazing. There's a similar situation when you search "American scientists." Interestingly the regular search results are very different, but the image search is similar.
Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#65I like the underlying question that the author brings up - what's google algorithm, and who's responsible for it? In the old days it was "most linked page with those keywords," right? So if you searched "gay man" and got a bunch of gay porn, is it necessarily google's fault that the internet is more gay porn that it is resources for gay men to discuss LGBT issues? Is it google's fault that news agencies more typicall…
>I think Google is responsible in 2018, now that they offer extremely tailored results. Duckduckgo, maybe not. But if Google is going to say "we're going to show you listings for restaurants in SF in your simple 'restaurants' search because we know you live in SF," I think they should also say "we're going to show you results for LGBT resources when you search for 'gay men' because nothing about your query indicates a desire for pornographic content."
Are you are saying that, in a scenario where there are more results for one sub-query than for another, Google has an obligation to assume someone is searching for the sub-query it finds more politically acceptable? This seems like a bad idea to me. We should want to reduce the political/social influence of Google, rather than think of ways to give them more tools of influence and assuming they will have a positive effect.
These two things are completely different
"Because you live in SF, if you search restaurants you probably want results pertaining to restaurants close to SF"
"Because subject X-A is socially unacceptable, if you search for subject X we will only show results pertaining to subject X-B"
Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#66I like the underlying question that the author brings up - what's google algorithm, and who's responsible for it? In the old days it was "most linked page with those keywords," right? So if you searched "gay man" and got a bunch of gay porn, is it necessarily google's fault that the internet is more gay porn that it is resources for gay men to discuss LGBT issues? Is it google's fault that news agencies more typicall…
It is Google's site and Google's (very much) proprietary algorithm so of course Google is at fault. Your argument is a variant of the "uploader defense." It was used by the TPB operators to claim that they weren't responsible for what was featured on their site because it was uploaded by users. But legally (or morally) they realized that they were, because they removed child porn even though they let Hollywood movies…
It's not as much about who is responsible as it is about what the results reflect: apparently this is what we put in, and thus what we get out of it, including results tailored to our bubble.
This isn't fixed by telling Google it's their fault and they should hide things, that's just looking away and covering things up. The true fix is making the input better, which requires society being better, which it isn't (at this point).
Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#67It's interesting how the article tries to 'blame' an algorithm while it's basically just working fine and simply reflecting the output of culture/country/people. It's not that the software decided that one thing should be the results, and others should not, it just takes what we feed it, and gives it back to us.
I find the concept fascinating that anyone would think an algorithm is "racist". More or less begging human interference with the algorithm in order to make it less racist, anything anyone does can then be viewed as racist.
Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#68It seems like the main crux of the argument is that being reflective of the culture is also reinforcing it - the fact that say there aren’t as many stock photos of 3 black teens while there is a lot more “mug shot” style photos is probably reflective of the usual portrayal in media, but most people generally agree that the culture shouldn’t be that way. The question is, should search algorithms show what currently is…
> should search algorithms show radical thought (and goes for social media as well) - how about making the results tunable based on user preferences & filters? oooh wow.. user control! what a concept..
I think that might make for a more powerful and useful search engine for sure. A Universal perspective as we've seen over the past few years simply doesn't exist - a search engine equivalent of stating a perspective would be interesting to think about. We already have location-based services, but we don't have cultural perspective based services. News media (Huffpost, Gawker etc) seem to be filling this role but only for news.
Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#69It seems like the main crux of the argument is that being reflective of the culture is also reinforcing it - the fact that say there aren’t as many stock photos of 3 black teens while there is a lot more “mug shot” style photos is probably reflective of the usual portrayal in media, but most people generally agree that the culture shouldn’t be that way. The question is, should search algorithms show what currently is…
>It seems like the main crux of the argument is that being reflective of the culture is also reinforcing it I believe expecting Google to change its search results to match an ideological agenda (I'm not using "ideological" in a derogatory sense here) is a case of shooting the messenger. It's the job of humans to make society in the image they desire and the job of the search engine to efficiently and accurately give…
I don't know if this isn't blindingly obvious by now... but Google already changes its search results to match an ideological agenda. The days of naive algorithms ended with the 2016 election. These days malicious actors will deliberately game any naive algorithm to push their malicious ideological agenda (eg [1]) and the only reasonable thing to do is to push back. (Or I suppose you could let malicious actors overrun your platform.) Google has no choice but to pursue an ideological agenda because it is being targeted by those who have the worst agendas.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/3/16413082/google-4chan-las...
Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
#70I do not think the word "racism" is a good fit for this. There is no prejudice, or a belief that another race is superior. This is not singling out black women. Any search for "blonde teens" during that time would yield porn-related results too. A search engine just tries to give the most relevant search. Likely, a large part of the population was in search of sex when searching for these type of queries. The "bias"…
If you don't think representation affects things, please post this under your main account.
That is a good one, but I am not going to. I'll explain why:
I have no problem being represented as a privileged white male, part of the dominant culture, set out to suppress others. I do not think this affects my life to a big degree. It may even reflect reality more than the current search for "black girls".
I do have a problem staying clear from attacks on my reputation and career, coming from people who feel this is justified when a viewpoint does not agree with them. I've seen people's lives being destroyed for comments similar to mine, people calling up employers or conference hosts in an effort to hurt their income. I think it is just common sense to try to avoid such attacks. No matter my representation, I am not going to post a social security number either (my main account is pseudo-anonymous too).