Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

time.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 295 posts

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

#211

Post by imh »

There are some excellent ways of framing this problem already covered in the comments. I'd like to add another. As time goes on, people seem to be treating google searches less as database queries and more as a question/answer system. Google is moving this direction too (e.g. "how tall is the eiffel tower" gives an answer above the web pages).

When google was just an excellent database index and relevance ranker, then it was ok for its results to simply reflect the underlying data. If the internet is racist, then looking up things on the internet will find racist things.

As time goes on and google purports to give answers and facts and gets more information-ey, they're kinda taking an editorial stance that the results aren't simply relevant webpages, but correct answers in some loose sense. When google tells me the Eiffel tower is 984' tall, and 1063' to the tip, they are endorsing that as The Right Answer. Endorsements come with responsibility.

As Google pushes to give correct answers, and people increasingly expect it, it's an endorsement of search results that comes with responsibility to not just reflect the huge corpus that is the internet.

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

#212

Post by quietbritishjim »

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)

That's because the results in the article are from 2011.

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

#213

Post by komali2 »

digibo wrote: post #167
emilfihlman wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alg…

It's not just the moral issue, but a legal one.

TPB said "We are not responsible for the content people upload." Except then they deleted CP, probably for many good as well as self-serving reasons: CP is bad, obviously, but also brings bad press (hard to get the public on the side of piracy when it leads to ease of CP access), as well as the holy wrath of pretty much every criminal federal agency in countries around the world, as opposed to just whatever branch of whatever agency is in charge of copyright protection. Doubt they could get hosting in any country if they didn't take the CP down.

But by taking CP down, they demonstrated that they do and can monitor content, that they can take it down, that they do take responsibility for at least some of it. Legally that's a shot in the foot, I thought, but they still find hosting so who knows.

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

#214

Post by Asdfbla »

Hyva wrote: post #115
mlazos wrote: post #32

I’m always amazed how often the “surprise” that digital technology is in fact not unbiased and robotic in nature keeps getting written about. Algorithms that optimize for click through rate for ads and search relevancy will inevitably be a reflection of ourselves and all of the shitty things various people believe. >> What we know about Google’s responses to racial stereotyping in its products is that it typically de…

> I’m always amazed how often the “surprise” that digital technology is in fact not unbiased and robotic in nature keeps getting written about. Algorithms that optimize for click through rate for ads and search relevancy will inevitably be a reflection of ourselves and all of the shitty things various people believe. What you just observed and described is that technology _is_ unbiased and robotic. The bias is in the…

> You can't remove it with a software bandage

Though some people might argue that the biases software reproduces will in turn reinforce biases held by the users at large. Conversely, you may reduce human bias if you algorithmically reduce the bias in the data (which is possible). Not saying whether Google should, that's a very delicate debate, but it's thinkable.

I wouldn't want to be in the place of the person at Google trying to make guidelines for that, but it's definitely doable. For instance, you could probably easily argue that the phrase "three black teenagers" (an example from the article) is pretty neutral in itself and definitely shouldn't be interpreted as a call to produce arrest pictures. In general the term "three [ethnicity] teenagers" could probably be normalized with regards to the setting the pictures show, for instance.

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

#216

Post by ucaetano »

tux1968 wrote: post #57
ucaetano wrote: post #13

Try 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…

There isn't just a risk of picking up biases -- there is an absolute guarantee that biases exist and always will. In a sense that's the whole goal when giving _relevant_ results. The idea is to return information biased towards interesting and useful results. I wish Google wasn't biased against the restaurant around the corner from me when I search for "The Trumpet", but it is. That's as it should be of course, since…

> Doing it manually as you suggest is likely hopeless and more politically fraught.

Yes, but, sadly, necessary.

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

#217

Post by DennisAleynikov »

kolpa wrote: post #180
jjeaff wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems a given that any search that does not include explicit "pornographic terms" should never return pornographic results.

What are explicit "pornographic terms" ?

If you search for girls online are you typically looking for clothed ones? That's a rational assumption but many searching for girls are not looking for the same thing as you might want.

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

#218

Post by MichaelGG »

danso wrote: post #197
mirimir wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 org…

No, Google does not try to mirror content. It tries to provide the best results for users. Results the user wants to click on and are relevant. Searching for "professor style", nobody wants it to return a minority professor style. Even she doesn't, at scale. If she and others did, they'd be Googling "professor style", not clicking, then Googling "professor style for black women" and results would improve/personalize.

Ditto for "black girls": either your looking for porn or for stock photos. What other intentions do you have with such a query? (Besides making a point?)

Google changing results for Holocaust "denial" is likewise wrong. Someone searching for such things probably wants to find all such sites and not just a PC version of history repeating what they've already heard. Otherwise they wouldn't need to be searching in the first place. Same for someone searching "Is the moon real" or "is the earth flat".

In a great market, Google might start "cleaning" up their results to the point of annoying people, who would then switch. Unfortunately no one comes close to Google search, let alone overall lock-in. So we're stuck with whatever Google decides reflects their brand, including fixing up well-publicized queries for people that want to be offended and complain about stuff.

Edit: I search for "best basketball player" and all I see are black guys -- way over-represented. Why doesn't Google bump up Larry Bird to 4th place so there's some more diversity and fight the stereotype? Even worse, Yao Ming is nowhere to be found, what's that say?

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

#219

Post by syrrim »

kolpa wrote: post #179
aero142 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but I'm surprised that there isn't some self correction there. My understanding is that one of the primary metrics goole uses is which link you click on last after searching. If the majority of people searching are white and all people want to see people who look like them, then the top result should be white. But I expect that when black women search, they will keep scrolling until they find the picture that th…

Do you want google personalizing your search results^H^H^H^Hspying on your search and browsing history, or giving you the overall best result^H^H^H^H^H^Hmarginalizing your minority culture?

Should be ^W, no?

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

#220

Post by mirimir »

danso wrote: post #197
mirimir wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 org…

Well, I'd like some search service that shows me what's accurately out there. If there's content out there about somebody being a "miserable failure" or Holocaust denial, I want to see it. I mean, what good is a search service that doesn't show what's there?

If I don't want to see whatever results are useless or offensive, I'll do my own filtering.

But then, I grew up on searching the scientific literature using Science Citation Index. And other stuff in LexisNexis. You don't expect stuff to be missing because it isn't cited much, hasn't been replicated, or whatever. You can filter by how well stuff has been cited, of course.

Post reply on HN