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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

#281

Post by PeterisP »

RangerScience wrote: post #272
PeterisP wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

So, I'd dance around the issue. Google's search algorithm is "fair", but society is not: It is not "fair" that these search terms are over sexualized. This is, of course, given some particular morality and ethos; your may not find society unfair in this way. (I do) My point is that now it is visible and you can make more informed choices. If you don't like what you see in mirror, why is makeup the "fix" of choice? Al…

My point was that it's like applying makeup to the mirror instead on your face - what you propose is not like improving your fitness, it's like making a curved mirror that makes you appear slim and flatters you, hides the problem and doesn't change anything about the underlying issues.

After your proposed changes it is no longer visible, and we can no longer make informed choices - people searching for "black girls" still want the same thing, but they're getting a worse service (results that don't fit their intent) just to hide them and their preferences from other parts of the society. There's also a feedback loop in the opposite direction, if there are real problems that simply are hidden, they're not going to get fixed.

On the other hand, it's worth examining the actual problem - it's worth noting that people who do want to find sexual pictures of black girls are just as valid users as black girls, and any fair solution must keep both of their preferences in mind; it would be unfair to simply damage the service for one group to appease the another. IMHO a fair solution would be based on data about what the people who use that query actually want (in some equivalence to picking equal opportunities in the "equal opportunities vs equal outcomes" tradeoff dilemma) - if some people are using the term in their daily search and some are not, then the interests of these frequent users could reasonably be considered more important. Aggressive personalization (different users having wildly different search results for the same term because of the differences in the assumed intent) is another way to do that, but it brings a bunch of other problems.

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

#283

Post by PeterisP »

Sylos wrote: post #276
kolpa wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are explicit "pornographic terms" ?

Yeah, that's much harder to define than people generally assume. Cleavage, for example, is generally perceived as sexy, but seldomly as pornographic. In general, in our Western society, the whole breast seems to be fine, as long as the nipple is covered up. So, what they could do is show you nipples, if you actually search "nipple". But maybe you're looking for male nipples, which obviously are not pornographic at al…

A nice example is the bird called "great tit" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_tit) - "tits" being one of the classic "pornographic words" (e.g. 1972 "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television"), so when someone is searching for "great tits", is it reasonable to assume that they want dirty pictures or should the search engine return just the birds?

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

#284

Post by PeterisP »

taurath wrote: post #136
savanaly wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 expect them to do anything - it’s their platform and is exceptionally useful. But consider their core mission to catalog and make available all the worlds information. If that information reflects the biases already inherent in the culture rather than a more objective reality (IE outsized coverage in media of black people being criminals) is it not more accurate to make a correction and show the real experien…

IMHO the media representation of crime is a substantially different issue than the one of this article. The crime representation is one of bias, but the "black girls" query is about the intent of the searcher; and there's no bias involved - every person searching for "black girls" has one or another intent in mind, and that distribution of intents is the underlying true reality; even if we as a society would judge that distribution of intents as unfair, discriminative, objectifying, abusive, whatever, it's still not biased, it's just that the real thing has these undesired properties.

Let's be realistic - if someone is explicitly going out and searching for "black girls", would you reasonably assume that in the majority of cases they'd be looking for clothed ones?

I understand that different results could influence behavior and make a correction - but that wouldn't be correcting a measurement bias to better reflect reality, that would be an attempt to change (improve?) the underlying objective reality, which is conceptually different than correcting bias.

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

#285

Post by PeterisP »

amelius wrote: post #46
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…

Taking it a step further, Google could apply this rule: if users really wanted to see (e.g.) porn, then adding that word to the query would show it; so let's keep the results safe by default.

Isn't the whole thing presumably caused by the fact that out of people using that query, most do want to see naked girls? So what you're proposing is to set the comparably less frequent, minority option as the default one, which is quite strange - generally you'd set the defaults so that usually they would not have to be changed.

In general, there's the "safe search" option that's on by default; but if someone has turned it off, then it's reasonable to assume that the default, most common intent of looking for "girls" actually is sexual, and if they were looking for something else (say, "black girls support group") then that would be a comparably rare situation where extra words should be added to the query.

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

#286

Post by bjourne »

komali2 wrote: post #213
digibo wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for explaining. That's what I meant by the uploader defense. I'm fairly sure Google removes CP from their search results so obviously they can exercise some control over their content. So they can't blame it all on the algorithm.

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

#287

Post by charlescearl »

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…

Perhaps, but I doubt it.

As one anecdote, http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a... reports facial recognition algorithm performance on darker-skinned women up to 30% lower than lighter-skinned men. The preliminary results were reported to Google, IBM, and Facebook. IBM was able to tune its algorithm achieve comparable scoring across all skin hues/genders within a week (according to my notes from the talk). It could be that search on that scale is much harder than facial recognition, and its also that a quick fix would introduce other errors, I'm sure it's an NP-complete problem, yada yada.

But Google and racialized search is not a new issue https://dataprivacylab.org/projects/onlineads/1071-1.pdf.

Yes the society is racist, but then the U.S. enacted the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th amendments to address extreme racism and gender discrimination. That is, citizens -- responsible engineers and data scientists among them -- can take it as their obligation to confront systemic racism. Yes, Klansmen are racist, Nazis are racist, but we don't have to accept genocide -- we don't even have to accept biased, discriminatory and derogatory internet services either.

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

#288

Post by ucaetano »

tux1968 wrote: post #240
ucaetano wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily, look at the "black girls" example. Anyway, that's Google's call to make.

You're trying to advocate for Google to make a certain decision by asserting that it is "necessary". I'm doing the same by asserting that it is decidedly "not necessary".

Apparently Google thinks it's necessary, since they are doing that decision.

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

#289

Post by forapurpose »

philwelch wrote: post #260
forapurpose wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google accurately reflecting the gist of the content and information available on the web I wouldn't assume that Google's search results reflect anything but an attempt to bring you back by showing you results you find valuable, and to monetize your visit. > scrubbing it to better reflect a chosen set of cultural sensitivities? Google (and any other mass market vendor) removes a lot of things that people don't want…

"Social norms" can be either descriptive or prescriptive. Descriptive norms are norms that reflect society as it is, and Google doesn't need to do anything about them, because the society that produces millions of web pages with cute pictures of puppies or helpful information about what not to feed your dog for every single web page with dog porn will result in a SERP that is overwhelmingly weighted towards that info…

I'm surprised myself that someone on HN is really claiming that Google doesn't edit search results for all sorts of reasons, including for purposes of social norms, of any sort, and social responsibility. In fact, every person and organization does that. I doubt there are any social interactions where people don't behave according to a set of rules.

> why are they surprised

Nobody said they are surprised; that's not relevant. They are trying to solve a problem, just like people who are working to resolve the problems of cancer, gun violence, and bugs in Firefox.

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

#290

Post by ithilglin909 »

jacquesm wrote: post #193
ithilglin909 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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', s…

No, I'm saying that in the paragraph in question, she's half-admitting that she is selectively presenting information. That is all.
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