Google: Search Civility
March 21, 2018
Among the many fake news battles organizations like Facebook and Google are fighting, far right racist organizations. More often than not, hate groups are more clever at exposing flaws in algorithms than most companies give them credit for. Big tech is still trying to find solutions to these issues, but the problems keep cropping up, as we learned in a recent Phys.org story, “Google Under Fire for Anti-Semitic Search Results in Sweden.”
According to the story:
“A search on Google for the Holocaust showed an anti-Semitic blog post high up containing information about Swedish Jews. With their names, pictures and occupations listed, dozens of them were described in a humiliating and threatening manner, according to local media.
Searches for the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement’s propaganda website also appeared as news with “top stories from Nordfront.se.”
This isn’t the only occasion that algorithms have been infiltrated by offensive material. Take for example, the story of Facebook users who typed in “Videos of…” and had their search bar autofill with live sex acts. We are clearly still a long way from social media and big search cleaning up their act and once they do (if they do) we will then be in a controversial world of free speech violations.
What headaches will loom in the future?
Patrick Roland, March 21, 2018
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