Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

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 embarrassed by the results, and exercises editorial control over search -- which leads to them actively removing racist systemic biases. Sure it's reactive and not proactive, but it's movement in a positive direction. Google likely spends more money on editorial control for issues of racism than for any other thing that doesn't make money.

I'll bet at least 50% of the searchers are looking for porn.

So even if Google had infinite resources, its choices are: (1) act as a moral authority and deny pornographic contents to those who are looking for them, or (2) show pornographic results to people searching for innocent stuff.

...Or maybe (3) built a perfect profile of every user and just show them what they want. But do we want to go there?

(You might be thinking that "black girls" is such an innocent term that Google should be able to determine that it's non-porn, but then the question merely shifts to less popular queries.)

This is well-known, and not Google's fault. Getting offended at Google for a reality they didn't create and can't control seems silly to me. If you don't like the result, work to change the incentives. Or work to change people's biases.

This kind of problem is not new. For example insurance companies have long known that where you live affects how much they are likely to pay out. If they base insurance rates on the data, the result is that your zip code becomes a bigger determinant of insurance rates than your driving record. Which results in very large effective racial discrimination. There are laws limiting that, for example prop 109 in California. However it is an eternal struggle because, in fact, competing insurance companies have a good motivation to have the cost of insurance reflect their best estimate of the expected cost of insuring you, and their cost really is a lot higher if you're in a "black neighborhood".

>> What we know about Google’s responses to racial stereotyping in its products is that it typically denies responsibility or intent to harm, but then it is able to “tweak” or “fix” these aberrations or “glitches” in its systems.

Only Google knows the fate of the code base that has workarounds for all of these edge cases. I think the author is wrong that all of these edge cases could’ve been caught beforehand. Some sure, but I think others would always slip through.

The question is, should search algorithms show what currently is (and therefore reinforce what is), or what the culture aspires to (which in fact more accurately matches the culture in terms of desire and movement)? I think this is a pretty smart example of how the technology we use every day can be passively malevolent - creating hurdles for change rather than enabling better information transfer.

I think that implying intent on Google's part is going way too far.

Obviously search results, to a large extent, are going to reflect the society and culture of search engine users. If our society and culture are shitty, should search results pretend otherwise? I'm pretty sure that our society and culture are rife with institutionalized racism and sexism and a whole lot of other badness, and badness of search results seems to me to be a symptom rather than a cause.

In the old days it was "most linked page with those keywords," right? So if you searched "gay man" and got a bunch of gay porn, is it necessarily google's fault that the internet is more gay porn that it is resources for gay men to discuss LGBT issues? Is it google's fault that news agencies more typically report on crime by black people than white (or that black people are more likely to be convinced/arrested in the first place?)

I think Google is responsible in 2018, now that they offer extremely tailored results. Duckduckgo, maybe not. But if Google is going to say "we're going to show you listings for restaurants in SF in your simple 'restaurants' search because we know you live in SF," I think they should also say "we're going to show you results for LGBT resources when you search for 'gay men' because nothing about your query indicates a desire for pornographic content."

Before we condemn Google for the collective actions of the broader Internet community of websites, we should take a moment to understand this point.

Now, it is possible to create a search engine curated by humans or filters that remove objectionable content, and perhaps that approach might be desirable to some - a "MyGoogle" experience with search results customized based on Google's interpretation (or explicit settings) of the visitor's demographics, political beliefs, trigger words, and purchase history.

* Taking a neutral position when building something (its just a tool, it's making decisions based on an aggregate) IS in fact making a decision. State can be -1, 0, or 1 and neutrality yields a certain result.

* The local optima of these algorithms are likely a product of local optima to the people and teams who built them. The neutral position seemed like the correct answer.

* These articles serve to reinforce the idea that the next frontier is context within algorithmic results. This global optimum can only be achieved through diversity of perspective. Perspectives are a product of one's experience, so the value of diversity can be directly connected to the goal of desiring a optimum solution towards a hard problem.

FWIW, I am a black heterosexual engineer and my experiences inform my perspective on these type of problems and blindspots affecting people not like me, especially women.

For those wanting to go deeper on the technical, scientific, and mathematical basis for what I'm referring, google 'diversity local optima'.

As much as I hate Google, they seem to be delivering exactly what they should. Their job isn't to try to change people's minds, it is to find what they are looking for. What's next? Search for "geek guy" and it's all white. Should we be upset? Someone searching for "geek guy" is probably looking for exactly what Google returns in this case and all the others she highlights.

As far as "black girls"... What kind of results are people expecting? Who is actually searching for black girls? Probably people looking for porn... Why should Google return suboptimal results because you got offended?

Same for "three black teens". It's not Google's fault that so much news is reporting on crime committed containing that phrase. Did she actually check crime statistics? Maybe "three black teens" get mugshots and commit crimes together at a vastly higher rate than "three white teens". Outside of porn, who is searching for this phrase? If you want "clean" and friendly results, try searching "stock photo three black teens".

If anything, this article shows that Google's personalization should detect people that want to search things (that they wouldn't really search for in earnest) in order to be offended then display poor quality results to avoid this "issue".

In truth though, I would imagine that if she and other black women often searched "professor style" then didn't click any results and immediately searched for "professor style for black women" then Google would pick up on their results being suboptimal and change. My guess is that no one actually makes these searches outside of making a political point, so personalization cannot fix it.

So yes, I agree that more pressure needs to be put on the algorithm-makers, so that there isn't complacency about accepting the results of "pure" computation. But I feel too much weight is given toward the sentiment of "If Google isn’t responsible for its algorithm, then who is?", as if the problems could be wholly or even substantially fixed through "modifications to its algorithm". The other side of the equation is the data -- and diversity is as important to have in media as it is to tech, even if tech feels like the stronger, more immediate lever in changing things.

Now that it's been a long time (in tech time) since 2010/2012, it'd be interesting to hear exactly what modifications/improvements Google made to its algorithm to return such different results for "black girls". Was it a de-emphasizing of negative/outdated sources? Or an arbitrary boost for such entities as "Black Girls Code"? Or was BGC not given an arbitrary boost, but found to have been unjustly ignored/under-weighted when it came to determining SERP? I understand not wanting to reveal details of search engine tweaks the day/month/year after they've been implemented. But half a decade later, hopefully learning more details of these "tweaks" won't leave Google vulnerable to black-hat SEO.

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 is particularly important, if not from a human perspective, at least from a business perspective, when the bias of your current audience is about the larger audience.

These days we have systems that is not as smart as us trying to figure us out, with predictable results. Tricks and quirks are ever shifting. A query that used to produce the results yesterday might not function the same two weeks from now. Any skill gained in navigating the system needs to be constantly trained and updated.

I believe something similar happened to Hawking, where he had a keyboard that was not smart, but was predictable so that he was the one learning to use the system. He disliked a new version of the software that would not behave in a predictable way because it 'learned'. I can't find the link anymore sadly.

If you simply reflect and amplify the behavior of the general population, you can get some pretty ugly results — which is because the general population has some actual ugly tendencies that are being accurately depicted. So the conversation needs to be about how we should actively bias the algorithm to damp out the ugliness, which is already being done by Twitter, FB, Google, etc.

I think we've done the experiment and proven pretty conclusively that a totally unbiased algorithm or information-sharing network is not a good thing for society, unless you want society to be like 4chan. Of course, that immediately opens the can of worms — who gets to decide how to bias the algorithm?

And as an aside, I think the term of bias in algorithms is misused when they are operating as intended. You'd call a poll biased if it implied it was polling group 'x', but did not actually do so due to some inadvertent bias. You wouldn't call it biased if it polled the group it stated it was going to poll and then gave the results - even if those results were not what you personally would want to see. If people are mostly searching for interracial couples when they search for 'white man and white woman' or they are mostly searching for porn when they search for 'black girls' then a biased algorithm would be one that actually returned white couples or non-pornographic results.

Google's search results is really the oldest analog we have for the "machine learning learns racism" quandary, too. This question is just going to get bigger, and its effects much more pernicious.

Although if one actually compares the results for [un]professional hairstyles for work there doesn't seem to be any negative bias; black people are well-represented in both result sets.

The other points look also valid to me, but again, I don't see why Google should be labeled racist when their engine adapts to what news sources publish. Somewhere in the code there could be an association like 3 teens -> gang and a piece of code skimming news sources that reacts to all articles containing the word "gang"; now just mix the two and what you get? Just try searching for "gang" and look at the colors predominance. Search engines aren't easy to write. If I was an Eiffel language expert I would write a book titled "A tour on the Eiffel language" just to prove that. Try searching that phrase without getting submerged by images of the famous tower. Incidentally, a fun search for "a tour on the Eiffel schnitzel kraut" yielded about 90% food related results and only about 5% tower images although it still contained 100% of the terms for both, but having the word Eiffel not immediately following tour could mislead the search engine, so I changed it to "the tour Eiffel on a schnitzel kraut" and results slightly changed with more towers but also more unrelated stuff like Stonehenge.

To me a search engine should return results based on harsh reality if necessary, not church choir dreams; policing search engines results in pursuit of politically correctness would be very dangerous. We won't see that day, nor will our grand-grand-grand-grand-kids, but one day eventually racism will start vanishing from society by itself and search engines will follow, and/or we'll be socially mature enough to ignore anything that could resemble racism to a today's biased mind, giving it even less exposure.

It was: "Sweden".

(Most likely this was on Alta Vista, not Google, but I don't remember for sure.)

Artificial Intelligence has become an alias for "shit I have no knowledge of but would like to pretend to have expertise on that is, at least tangentially, related to a computer"

When I try it in both logged in and non-logged in mode I get reasonably similar results, the differences are mostly in the ordering. When I do the same on Bing I get about 20% or so pornographic images for both 'black girls' and 'white girls'.

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.

A Google search for "American women scientists": https://i.imgur.com/o6mxG56.png

Can the media stop doing this thing where they p-hack reality for proof of racist/sexist conspiracies?

They are especially slanted on an ideological basis. Try searching "American inventors" - nearly all the people listed are African Americans.

I doubt all of this is inadvertent, and its definitely dangerous, given the power of Google. Today they are undoubtedly influenced by "left-wing" ideology, but what about tomorrow?

> My first encounter with racism in search was in 2009 when I was talking to a friend who causally mentioned one day, “You should see what happens when you Google ‘black girls.’” I did and was stunned.

but then later on:

> Although I focus mainly on the example of black girls to talk about search bias and stereotyping, black girls are not the only girls and women marginalized in search. The results retrieved two years into this study, in 2013, representing Asian girls, Asian Indian girls, Latina girls, white girls, and so forth reveal the ways in which girls’ identities are commercialized, sexualized or made curiosities within the gaze of the search engine. Women and girls do not fare well in Google Search — that is evident.

So it's not racism, it's sexism. Or is it? What would have happened if you searched for black boys, white boys etc. in 2009? I bet it wouldn't have been PG friendly...

This might be legitimate and reasonable, but you probably should be transparent about the fact that you "unbiased" your data by externally imposing a certain view of what the "fair" data should look like.

Ultimately it's a discussion for social scientists or laywers concerned with discrimination, it's not really in the realm of being fixable by engineering or computer science imho.

This is problematic in the same way as facebook’s echo chamber effect, that it can cause a feedback loop that reinforces and heightens bias and division.

Beyond that though, I think it gets gnarly how much we want Google to fix the world by tweaking their algorithms. We obviously want something thoughtful. At the same time I don’t think we should lay all the world’s problems at google’s feet.

Should Google show black women's natural hair in the results for "unprofessional hairstyles" to accurately reflect society's unfair attitudes towards black women's hair? Or should they show actual unprofessional hairstyles like giant mohawks etc.? Or should they show a message saying "No hairstyle is unprofessional. Be who you want to be."?

Developers who train these models or algorithms should be very well aware that the training data is nothing but a download of a sexist, capitalist, racist - society and that bias if is carried forward - irrespective of anything the future isn't going to be clean!

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=black+girls&t=h_&ia=web

Is introducing an anti-bias at the search engine level the appropriate solution? It seems a bit too much like Western medicine alleviating the symptoms without addressing the root cause. An anti-bias is just masking it.

Also, if the author is a feminist, why she writing for a magazine called "Bitch"?

Now when you do a search for "three white teenagers" you mostly get mug shots of black teens.

This just means that people on the internet who write about black teenagers write about the ones who get arrested. People who create pages about "black girls" create porn content, and most people who search for "black girls" most likely are looking for porn and click on links that talk about porn.

It's amazing how people can see racism everywhere.

I can see the rationale for altering the algorithm for words like "girls".

It's also interesting that, for example, the results for "swedish girls" are much tamer. Even though that's sort of a long standing phrase that was very sexual.

In other words, this is not Google's fault and is mostly just an ugly reflection of our collective problematic values.

While trying to read to article, my browser (Safari on iPhone) was redirected to a scammy looking amazon gift card website. Did anyone else have this problem? I am trying to figure out if it is a problem with Time.com or my phone.

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

Replace "book" with "algorithm", and you have my sentiments on the issue.

DDG's results for "black girls" is pretty different from Google present-day, though definitely a lot cleaner compared to what the author saw in 2009:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=black+girls&t=hb&ia=web

(sidenote: it's not clear if the author disabled SafeSearch in her 2009 search or not. SafeSearch was definitely part of Google by then, and I can't imagine "sugaryblackpussy.com" getting past that filter. If you turn DDG's Safe Search to "Moderate" -- "Off" returns the same results as "Strict" -- you will get a lot of very NSFW results. I guess this sidenote raises a new set of issues about the author's methodology but will ignore it for the sake of brevity here.)

The first result is an article titled "Black Girls Only" in Ebony magazine [0]. Which isn't a bad article (or publication). Maybe people would object that the first result is actually about sexualizing black women (albeit positively). The 2nd result is a lot less promising: "Hot Black Girls (45 pics)" at acidcow.com, which has a higher Alexa ranking [1] than Ebony.com (22K vs 63K), but basically looks to be a clunky imageboard. blackgirlscode.com is #6, followed by blackgirlsrun.com (a running club). The rest of the top results are black girl image sites (photobucket, a Facebook group for Big Beautiful Black Girls). The most notable difference between DDG and Google Results, besides what's #1, is that Google results have a lot more news articles in which "black girls" are in the headline (via NPR, nytimes, and theroot). DDG is a lot more sporadic in comparison

DDG for "white girls" is not terribly better in terms of being female-friendly:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=white+girls

The first result is to the Amazon listing of a book titled "White Girls", by a well regarded New Yorker critic [2]. But the #2 result goes to urbandictionary.com, and #3 hilariously goes to the Wayans Brothers' classic, "White Chicks". There's a bunch of results relating to "White Girl", the mediocre 2016 film (Wikipedia, rogerebert.com, rottentomatoes.com, etc). And then a bunch of results about white females with men of other races.

[a] https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/blob/b7a...

[0] http://www.ebony.com/news-views/black-girls-only-503

[1] https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/acidcow.com

[2] https://www.amazon.com/White-Girls-Hilton-Als/dp/194045025X

White men must be stopped: The very future of mankind depends [...] The future of life on the planet depends on bringing the 500-year rampage of the white man to a halt. For five centuries his ever more destructive weaponry ...

My first three DDG-results on searching 'white men'.

I shall now proceed to get over it. Suggest others do likewise.

Oh.

You are allowed to say fuck on the internet.

Also, does it really count if you skip out one letter? I never understood this. You're still all but saying the word. Nobody is being protected here lol. A kid can cycle through the five vowels in about half a second to figure out what the word is, and one of them is also kinda a swear - pissy.

EDIT: "n 2012, I wrote an article for Bitch Magazine" now I'm very confused. It's ok if it's a proper noun, I guess?

Seems ironic.