Come on Google, Stop Delivering Offensive Content
March 14, 2018
Sentiment analytics is notoriously hard to program and leads to more chuckles than accurate results. Throughout the year, Google, Facebook, and other big names have dealt with their own embarrassing sentiment analytics fiascos and they still continue. The Verge shares, “Google’s Top Search Results Promote Offensive Content, Again” in an unsurprising headline.
One recent example took an offensive meme from the swathe subreddit when “gender fluid” was queried and made it the first thing displayed. Yes, it is funny, but stuff like this keeps happening without any sign of stopping:
The slip-up comes just a month after Google briefly gave its “top stories” stamp of approval to two 4chan threads identifying the wrong suspect in the recent Las Vegas mass shooting tragedy. This latest search result problem appears to be related to the company’s snippet feature. Featured snippets are designed to answer queries instantly, and they’ve often provided bad answers in the past. Google’s Home device, for example, used a featured snippet to answer the question ‘are women evil?’ with the horrendously bad answer ‘every woman has some degree of prostitute in her.’
The ranking algorithm was developed to pull the most popular stories and deliver them regardless of their accuracy. Third parties and inaccurate sources can manipulate the ranking algorithm for their own benefit or human. Google is considered the de facto source of information. There is a responsibility of purveying the truth, but there will always be people who take advantage of the news outlets.
Whitney Grace, March 14, 2018
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