Are Auto Suggestions Inherently Problematic?
June 3, 2018
Politics is a dangerous subject to bring up in any social situation. My advice is to keep quiet and nod, then you can avoid loudmouths trying to press their agendas down your throat. Despite attempts to remain polite, the Internet always brings out the worst in people and The Sun shares how with a simple search engine function, “‘Trump Should Be Shot’ Google And Bing Searches For ‘Trump’ And ‘Conservatives’ Offer Disgusting Auto-Suggestions.”
Auto-complete is notorious for making hilarious mistakes and the same is with auto-suggest on search engines, but these end up to be more gruesome than a misspelling.
If you want to see some interesting suggestions, type “Trump should be…” into a blank search bar and the results are endless, including: shot, arrested, killed, in jail, arrested banned from Twitter (okay, the last one might be a little funny).
Typing in “conservatives need…” results in less derogatory terms, but the auto-suggestions include: to die, to go, a new party, and not apply.
Hmmm.
What creates these auto-suggestions?
“These are based on a number of factors including real-time searches, trending results, your location, and previous activity.The intuitive predictions change in “response to new characters being entered into the search box” explains Google. And the company also has its own set of “autocomplete policies” in case something untoward should pop up.Along with prohibiting predictions that contain sexually explicit, violent, and harmful terms, Google says it also removes hateful suggestions against groups and individuals. ‘We remove predictions that include graphic descriptions of violence or advocate violence generally,’ states the firm.”
Google and Bing deserve some credit for removing the slander from auto-complete, but sometimes they only do it when they are pushed. Trolls and bigots create these terms and it would be nice to see them scrubbed from auto-suggest, but it is near impossible. Hey, Bing and Google try scrubbing 4chan!
Whitney Grace, June 3, 2018
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