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Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

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Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#161

Post by PeterisP »

jacquesm wrote: post #104
themgt wrote: post #42

A Google search for "American inventors": https://i.imgur.com/qw5kfQp.png A Google search for "American women scientists": https://i.imgur.com/o6mxG56.png Can the media stop doing this thing where they p-hack reality for proof of racist/sexist conspiracies?

You are missing the point: there is no reason why an innocent query such as 'black girls' should bring up a bunch of porn. And Google seems to agree with this because they have since tweaked things so that that no longer happens.

There certainly is an obvious reason for that; this is a quite peculiar search term - the use cases where someone would google "black girls" for a non-porn intent are comparably rare compared to cases where the likelihood of user clicking on a link is strictly correlated with nudity.

Would you have ever tried to search for "black girls" if you hadn't looked at this article? On the other hand, someone who prefers black girls in a sexual way would actually search for them many times. I can imagine someone in advertising searching for random pictures of black girls, but that's a niche case far outnumbered by people searching with sexual intent.

It would be reasonable to assume that any fair, objective algorithm in Google's (or anyone else's) possession that actually optimizes for expected user intent (assuming that they don't have enough privacy-violating information to assume that the user belongs to a smaller and thus less likely minority of black girls) would still bring up a bunch of porn when searching for "black girls", since most people querying for that (except when the searcher has read this article in the last 5 minutes) actually do want to find porn; but they have configured an override purely for PR reasons.

The objective algorithm would show reality as it is, but the current override masks it and tries to show an imagined vision of "reality-as-it-should-be". And that's why the problem is not solvable algorithmically - any algorithm learning from real data and actual user behavior would show the ugly, "undesirable" reality in all kinds of edge cases, and it can only be solved in a non-scalable manner by involving some manual political correctness / good taste / etc censorship.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#162

Post by CaptSpify »

cat199 wrote: post #55
taurath wrote: post #22

It 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..

Agreed. It's infuriating to me how we keep giving filter and preference control away to other groups, then we complain that we can't filter and enable preferences the way we want!

Client-side controls > Server-side controls

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#163

Post by mirimir »

labster wrote: post #147

I think the thesis is wrong here. Google has a striking history of removing bias against black women. People make content for the web. People are racist, and make lots of racist assumptions in their writing. Society is racist. This results in Google's algorithms reflecting the corpus they scanned, and the searches that are made. But the search is just a reflection of us, and how terrible we all are. Google gets embar…

Right. The title ought to be something like "English-Speaking Cultures Have a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls". Or "... Women of Color" if that's your preferred language. Google Search is arguably just a mirror.

And ideally, that's what it should be. Otherwise, how do researchers know what's really there, and what Google makes up? But in fact, Google is far from that ideal. Maybe it was initially unbiased. But successive waves of fighting SEO, and responding to social pressure, have taken their toll. Not to mention the increasing focus on what's happening right now, forgetting the past, and showing searchers what they likely want to find.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#164

Post by jbattle »

taurath wrote: post #22

It 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…

Google has and does change our society, it always has. It has always been implicitly premised on the idea that there are new and better ways to do things. Remember life before google maps? Before youtube?

If they are willing to rethink how people navigate (both the real world and the internet), etc - if they want to dramatically change how easily people are able to access information - why should they be bashful about nudging culture as it relates to how different subpopulations are represented?

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#165

Post by blisterpeanuts »

jimrandomh wrote: post #124

I tried replicating the searches described in this article, in an incognito window. Most of the searches described inthe article are quite dated; they're also spread over a significant amount of time. None of the searches I tried came out the way the article described. There was no porn in the results for "black girls"; the third result for "professor style" was a black man, and there was a black woman further down o…

The first hit I see on Google is "blackgirlscode.com", a website to encourage black girls to get into technology. It's the fifth hit on DuckDuckGo. The other hits seem rather innocuous. DDG features "hot black girls" at the number 3 spot.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#167

Post by digibo »

emilfihlman wrote: post #125
bjourne wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wtf, you are not seriously claiming that TBP is at fault? You are just trolling, right? Because they are not. And neither is Google.

Comparing is not judging or blaming. The GP suggests that both TPB and Google are in a gray area, which I partially agree with, but I think they are in different gray areas.

TPB, as described, is in a moral gray area - "We know some of the uploaded stuff is immoral" - so they delete what's immoral (their judgement - child porn/copyright stuff/anything between), they arbitrarily decide what you see

Google is in an algorithmic gray area - "The algorithm decides what's best for you, we want the best for you, but we won't judge what's best for you" - so they do nothing and hope for the best (and least damage), the algorithm arbitrarily decides what you see

Both seem like different routes to the same hell.

Edit: Spelling, clearer wording

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#168

Post by pishpash »

IBM wrote: post #51
komali2 wrote: post #14

I 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…

Google was always responsible. From day one. Google has always exercised editorial control of their platform when it was in their commercial interests. They delete spam, porn, malware, etc. They tweak the search results to benefit their own properties or demote competitors (see Foundem).

Precisely. Social preference is still a preference like any other. Google makes it its job to understand what the user is looking for. If they need data on what is an acceptable result they have the means to collect it and fold it into their algorithm. When people search for three black teenagers are they really looking for three mugshots? Is that a good result in any conventional sense, purely judged in a QA system sense, and without prior? There is at least a query specificity or query extension problem here.

Whatever proxy they are using to find relevance is broken in this regard, and it's important to recognize that there is still an engineering problem despite, or despite it looking like, a political problem.

Re: Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

#170

Post by heavenlyblue »

jjeaff wrote: post #155
na85 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish the article had included screen shots of search results for "white girls" and "Asian girls". Would there be any less porn? I strongly doubt it.

"Asian girls", maybe. But "white girls" definitely would not have returned porn.

But it would include Russian prostitutes.
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