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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

#191

Post by brighteyes »

treis wrote: post #176
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.

"white girls" returns stuff about the movie white girl "Girls" is the HBO show "Asian girls" is porn lite "Black girls" has no porn for me. Various sites about black girls (black girls code for example)

It depends on your search history, actually.

I tried "black girls", "white girls", "asian girls" - and also "asian boys" etc. - in various accounts, some of which were used when browsing porn (i.e., home accounts vs accounts used at work), and in both google and bing.

In accounts where porn was browsed in the past, porn results were over 50% for all of the above. In others, porn was absent.

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

#192

Post by grzm »

brighteyes wrote: post #186
rayiner wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re missing the point, which is that you’re dealing with a coupled system (in the physics sense). Google reflects our racism, but exposure to that racism on the first page of results makes us more racist. Google concentrates it and reflects it back to us. (Google does this with everything else as well. What do people think of the new MacBook Pro? Searching for reviews will immediately spit back a concentrated and…

You raise an interesting point, but the comment was about the article itself and the thesis in the article.

FWIW, I read the article as addressing the issue in general. The headline and lead-in are Google-specific (as well as many of the examples), which is unfortunate in the sense that it's arguably click-baity and leads to arguments like this, that the thesis is wrong because it's not just Google. I understand why it's done, as providing a familiar, well-understood context helps people better understand what the author is getting at.

Examples of how the author is approaching the topic more generally are found in headings such as "Content and Creators" and phrases like "Information monopolies such as Google". The author's book is likewise entitled "Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism", not "How Google Reinforces Racism".

I agree that results in Bing and Duck Duck Go, for example, currently show a lot of the flaws describe in the article. But the point (as much as the headline may lead you to believe) isn't that it's only Google.

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

#193

Post by jacquesm »

ithilglin909 wrote: post #158
jacquesm wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See the paragraphs titled 'beyond black girls' in TFA.

Yes, I read the article. If anything, those paragraphs support what I just wrote.

You wrote "No, the point is that the author selectively presents information that bolsters the point she wants to make." and then claim the author supports your point?

At best you are supporting hers.

She made the case for the query 'black girls' and to pre-empt comments such as yours bolstered her argument by extending it to a general case. So in no way did she 'selective present information to bolster her point', she was as even handed as she could have been (but apparently not even handed enough for some).

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

#194

Post by RangerScience »

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…

By having a mirror, we can see and correct our flaws.

I used to be (well, still am, a bit) worried that the increasing automation of our social structures (credit scores, admission processes, etc) will just encode these biases in ways that cannot be altered.

But then saw how much of NIPS was about "fairness".

If these biases get encoded, they are measurable, examinable, detectable - and can then be accounted for in ways (presumably) much more effective than existing patterns.

So now, I'm not worried about the technology, although as always, I worry about the application of it.

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

#195

Post by tanilama »

narrator wrote: post #142
jacobreg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Political correctness and affirmative action are based on the idea that pretending the world is an ideal version of itself will eventually make it that way. That is the opposite of how it works. Affirmative action is accepting that the world has bias against certain groups, and attempting to take that into account. Political correctness is about realizing that certain groups have been marginalized or traumatized and…

The proof that a group has been marginalized is that their numbers are not representative of their presence in the population. Thus, we pretend that the ideal world exists by adjusting those numbers in situations where merit selection is the criteria in the hopes that the numbers will converge by themselves. We don't interview each participant to ask them how they were traumatized, we only look at the statistics. Peo…

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/why-me...

Statistics show that man are the new minority in the campus. But it is surely will be frown upon by some AA activists if a that program is extended to cover male. If AA is said to what it is trying to accomplish, then that shouldn't be controversial at all.

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

#196

Post by andkon »

politician wrote: post #60
andkon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, how hard is it really to get a sense for the quality of a search and the irrelevance of its results for the vast majority of people? Given how much demographic data Google pulls in from your history, it seems to be not super hard to notice that actual black girls are repulsed by what was shown to them. It also seems easy to post a notice saying: "Hey, searchers like you have found this query to contain many irr…

The problem statement is given the sentiment space of reactions to similar clusters of search queries, minimize negative sentiment across the most clusters given resource constraints (time, cost, CPU). This is a hard problem. There are many search queries, there are many clusters of similar search queries that address partially overlapping (topic,audience segment) pairs. Deriving sentiment scores from these segments…

I think I agree with you overall — there's no way to perform this task perfectly for all time in such a way that it makes this problem disappear. But I want to push back against the specifics of your argument, namely about the cost and resources involved, as well as the lack of feedback mechanisms. I do that below; I wrote those paragraphs before really giving credit to how hard it would be to comprehensively score audience + topic pairs. That sounds like... exponentially growing complexity. So that approach sounds like a non-starter; maybe an alternative is to look at quality metrics on clusters of search queries as a whole, before diving into seeing if there are problems with individual audiences and those queries. Who knows.

There are many search queries to watch, but 'black girls' was persistently problematic for a long time. Noticing when a cluster of queries gets that status might be extremely resource intensive if that status was highly ephemeral; it's not. It's work that can be done asynchronously, and run daily at most. Is this simple? Nothing involving software is, imo. But it's probably much simpler than many other machine learning-driven pieces of Google's product.

Also, there are tons of feedback mechanisms available and actively used by Google. Every user interaction with search results is available to Google; a lot of these stand in for quality of result: did the person refine their query after seeing crappy results? Did they click a link and then press 'back' really quick? All of these factors already feature in Google's algorithm.

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

#197

Post by danso »

mirimir wrote: post #163
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 unbiase…

> Google Search is arguably just a mirror. And ideally, that's what it should be.

I disagree this is the ideal. The first implementation of PageRank makes a very big assumption: that people who write webpages and control websites can be trusted to link to worthwhile content. If webmasters and web producers skew a certain way, then PageRank/BackRub will also skew that way.

Google original mission statement was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Being a mirror of web content would only partially solve that mission, and that's assuming webmasters/producers are acting in good faith. Would it really be ideal for Google to be a "mirror" of link counts for "miserable failure" [0] and "Did the Holocaust Happen?" [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb

[1] https://searchengineland.com/google-holocaust-denial-site-go...

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

#198

Post by strken »

frahs wrote: post #79
ryanmonroe wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Well, it's like the restaurant example. If I search for "restaurants", it shouldn't give me restaurants in Shanghai because that's the city with the largest population. It should give me Northern California, since that's where I live and Google knows that. Similarly, Google might reasonably infer that if someone is searching for their own race, sexuality, or religion, they're probably more interested in information o…

Why would that be true, though? Are straight men more likely than gay men to be looking for gay pornography?

At some point you've got to accept that googling "hot teens" won't get you resources on the treatment of hyperthermia in young people.

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

#199

Post by PeterisP »

RangerScience wrote: post #194
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…

By having a mirror, we can see and correct our flaws. I used to be (well, still am, a bit) worried that the increasing automation of our social structures (credit scores, admission processes, etc) will just encode these biases in ways that cannot be altered. But then saw how much of NIPS was about "fairness". If these biases get encoded, they are measurable, examinable, detectable - and can then be accounted for in w…

Is the (assuming it's true, but it seems plausible) situation that the majority of users searching for "black girls" actually do want to find sexual content instead of simply smiling faces a flaw that needs correcting? Is their intent unfair in some way, are their sexual preferences unacceptable?

If I don't like what I see in my mirror, will putting makeup on the mirror improve my face? Will removing naughty sites from the search results somehow change the fact that "black girls" (or "asian girls", or "czech girls", etc) is not usually used as an innocent search term?

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

#200

Post by sctb »

social_cooling wrote: post #156
social_cooling wrote: post #56

I 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"…

I think it is only apt and deserving that this post got flagged (despite having a positive amount of upvotes). Perhaps I should write an article to demand that Hackernews changes its biased scoring system, so that underrepresented and repressed views like mine can also get the exposure they so much need.

Users may have flagged your comment because they felt that you rode in for ideological battle, like we asked commenters not to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16700418.
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