Winston Churchill’s Image Removed in UK/US Search Results? | Hacker News Reader

Winston Churchill’s Image Removed in UK/US Search Results?

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66 pointsjpxw90 comments

This is getting pretty ridiculous. If we're going to purge our nation's history of people who held beliefs we disagree with today, we're going to end up purging everyone.

A good example is MLK. Civil rights leader and US icon. MLK also held very anti-LGBT views, which are captured in a letter he wrote a young man who said he was attracted to men.[1]

Are we going to start tearing down his statues too? And renaming roads?

"Your problem is not at all an uncommon one. However, it does require careful attention. The type of feeling that you have toward boys is probably not an innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired....You are already on the right road toward a solution, since you honestly recognize the problem and have a desire to solve it."

[1]https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/adv...

Or, perhaps it's a bug? You're ascribing a whole lot of intent to something without any details to support that position.

What a coincidence that such alleged bug exists for this particular person at this particular time. A virtue-signaling google employee blocking the photo in support of BLM is the simplest and most likely explanation.

It's not much of a coincidence that the bug manifests at a time when there is considerable internet activity around Winston Churchill when Google's system automatically chooses photographs to display based on an effectively black boxed algorithm. It does not seem far fetched that the activity may have caused the algorithm to change the result to use an image that has some kind of error, for example. Your "simplest explanation" is a wild leap.

Michael Jackson was recorded saying anti-Semitic statements in a taped phone call in addition (allegedly) in lyrics in one of his songs. More than enough to get cancelled today.

You could do this stuff endlessly if you wanted to, plus you can just slightly expand the scope when you run out of low hanging fruit...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/24/michaeljackson...

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/15/arts/in-new-lyrics-jackso...

I think a lot of people fail to contextualize the words of people throughout history. We project our contemporary mindset on them and are surprised when they end up looking bad even though were considered 'good people' at the time.

Agree with you that it's getting ridiculous..

One can recognize someone was a good person by the standards of the day and not to be emulated in the present. I think that's a separate issue to this apparent Google bug, however.

To add to that, one can admire one aspect of a person and, at the same time, detest another aspect.

This may come as a shock, but humans are complex.

If their intent is to purge history, they're doing a very poor job. This search (https://www.google.com/search?q=winston+churchill&tbm=isch) gives back almost nothing but Churchill pictures.

This is not surprising at all. I guess people either didn't know the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or have forgotten about it. Check it out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Red_Guards... Everything that didn't fit the narrative of whatever would be destroyed with people's cheer. That's why I was wondering where the boundary is for the demand of total conformity.

Indeed. It's standard communist doctrine to squelch any counter-revolutionary beliefs (defined as anything except communism). There is no interest in dissent and if, despite revolutionary teaching, you're still not on board, you need to be eliminated as reactionary dissent can't be tolerated.

> I was wondering where the boundary is

The only boundary is time as it will stop when they are able to seize power. Because these purges are a means to an end - and that end is POWER.

His picture is back up. It was just an error in refreshing his photo.

This is insane. Just tried it and its true. Let this be a reminder that internet is not free but under control of umbrella corporations and it is naive to assume the opposite.

Is this what Orwell meant that history can be re-written when you have the full authority?

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped."

Edit: Maybe Google will respond (again) with: Sorry it was an internal bug in the code.

What Orwell described is a matter of degree, not a different state of affairs. His criticisms were of the mechanisms of power enabled by the mechanisms of media in the era of industrialized civilization. His efforts were towards a future where we transcend that era in favor of democratic socialism. In his own words:

"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects."

If the degree is still such that other search engines return Churchill, and Google also returns Churchill if you make clear your intent (https://www.google.com/search?q=winston+churchill&tbm=isch), I think we can relax a bit on the fear of Big Brotherism.

I certainly don't think it's Big Brother* at work here but it is worth pondering what it means that communication is so centralized that the idiosyncrasy of a single point of access can affect billions of people. For every quirk that is noticed, what goes unnoticed?

* especially since, like, Big Brother as it exists loves Winston Churchill

That's always a good point. Decisions that Google makes do have wide-sweeping impact. This bug is minor; the decision to have top-boxes at all (for example, the fact that there's a result at all for "World War II leaders" and it includes specific people and excludes others) is a feature and has billions-of-users reach.

"Internal bug in the code?"

"An internal bug in the code, at this time of day, only in this country, localized entirely on this photo!?"

"May I see it?" "No."

Which is a great description of proprietary software. Without transparency, you cannot trust anything it's doing.

>"May I see it?"

Given what we've seen from the likes of Cambridge Analytica, this seems like a question of national security.

Yeah, it'd be nice if there were a transparent search engine.

Not even DDG lets us see the metadata that drives how it makes decisions on what results to return. Not like any of us can debug those search results from our couches.

Rollouts often happen on a per-country basis. Including bugs.

The ticket says that this is a problem in a ton of countries (US, UK, Sebia, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Ireland).

Good Simpsons reference!

Isn't it more likely to be an external activists who figured out a way to poison Google search results?

Maybe don't be so alarmist? Bugs do happen.

This is no bug, this is intentional. Google the names of UK's PMs, from Johnson, May, Cameron going all the way. Only one PM does not get their photo displayed on the page with search results. Not because it failed to load/whatever, the page layout simply does not contain the photo in the place where it is for all others.

You don't know that. For all you know, some kind of knowledge graph tag propagated too far. There is zero evidence of it being intentional.

You really think they'd just erase the photos of UK PMs? Please. If there was some kind of conspiracy there, don't you think hiding the information too (vs linking directly to the pages that have it) would be a more effective strategy?

I know it's fun to jump on Google as the dictator erasing history here, but have you really thought this position through? Especially when one of Google's big industries is education, and kids are going to write papers about WW2, and various British PMs?

Not erase, just add it to the already long list of suppressed and filtered content. Have you tried what I suggested, have you googled the names of few PMs? The page with search results for Churchill lacks the code to display photo in the bio at the right side. The layout and code is different, it's not just failing to load, cache problem or whatever.

The most likely explanation is that a google employee added the photo on a block list in support of BLM.

A (cache or whatever) problem that leads to the property not being set would produce exactly that result.

It also seems clear that there isn't one global list of these people and their portraits Google uses to feed these boxes: When I compare the screenshot someone posted below with what I see, many of the leaders have different portraits.

It would be an incredible coincidence that it's just him and right at this time. Also, from Google's support thread, he is receiving the same treatment as Weinstein, apparently Churchill was added to a list of people for whom Google won't show photo in the bio summary, next to Weinstein.

And somehow that "list of people Google won't show photos for" applies in some European countries and not in others? Because Google is showing pictures for both of them to me.

The image was not removed purposefully. Images in the Knowledge Graph can update at any time. If they do, they briefly disappear. That's what seems to be happening here. We're exploring the issue more. Here's more info we posted about it: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1272077555860824065

Mate, good luck explaining that to your UK customers. This is beyond acceptable for any group of people.

The explanation is a load of BS. This "brief disappearance" has been going on for >12 hours now and as far as everybody is aware only one person is affected by this.

As a former Google engineer and someone who still holds some quantity of Google stock, I hope you publish a post-mortem about this. Even if it's something embarrassing like "someone added a picture to Wikipedia and our algorithm couldn't disambiguate it" or worse, "an internal employee went rogue and we're strengthening our procedures".

Because frankly this bug is catastrophic for Google's credibility in the UK. Nobody will believe this is some random bug or coincidence, it quite transparently is not. Even if the problem isn't directly caused by Google employees but just the engine being confused by the turmoil out on the net, that's not the simplest possible explanation and thus in the absence of other information, it's not what people will conclude.

Since Google became more publicly left-wing and committed to social justice type causes, it has to work harder to convince people it's unbiased. YouTube has been deleting videos of anyone who criticised the COVID lockdowns, including actual epidemiologists and Nobel Prize winners, and that's been widely publicised. So going into this event you're already being perceived as a part of the mainstream establishment censorship machine. And now this - it looks exactly like the people blacking out their instagram photos in solidarity with BLM.

Politicians in the UK are currently receiving enormous quantities of anger from the population about the desecration of war memorials and war heros. It's an issue that's triggered huge public feeling. Google doesn't want to get sucked into that. A rigorous technical post mortem could show people what really happened and avert a political disaster.

They decided to give a brief explaination but a post-mortem report like you ask wouldn't likely happen without involving the law. But again have governments ever fined or accussed search engines for misinformation or disinformation in the recent histoy? They have been fined probably for lack of moderation I guess, does anyone know?

I disagree with the easy dismissals of "they're doing a poor job of purging history".

I don't think they're tyring to purge history, I think they (or more specifically, staff) are making a plausibly deniable political statement that can be dismissed as a bug.

They don't need to purge history. They only need to convince the newer generation that our country is based on injustice and tyranny.

That is how they will justify their future violent revolution.

The goal is create just enough distaste for the symbols and history of the country so that fewer people will fight for it when they decide to take over.

Personally, I also subscribe to the conspiracy theory that these efforts are getting foreign help.

Just gonna put this here https://duckduckgo.com/about

And, hey, to their credit, DDG does a fine job of returning an immediate Churchill photo. This is to be expected, since it's a bug in Google and not Bing.

Sigh, do people really think there's some hidden propagandist in Google that blacklisted Churchill's photo? To send what message, exactly? That they will randomly censor images until you do one single click on "Images" which will foil their evil plan?

Many years ago there was an amusing bug for a few days - when you searched for Rachel (I think) the Biblical figure, the infobox showed a happy smiling face of some office worker somewhere (named Rachel, of course). Machines work in mysterious ways, sometimes they pick up signals in totally idiotic ways. At least, nobody accused Google of a hidden conspiracy to discredit Judaism...

In response to everything we see around today that seems to make significant waves in the whole world, you can respond differently as you choose. You can choose to ignore everything and assume that the state is run by organisations that care about the "greater good". This is of course a effortless thing to do. Or you can start to re evaluate your dependence on a single centralized source of information and how there exist no measures to control that source by a publically elected body making it an extremely powerful agency for mass propaganda IF it decided to do so.

It's more than just about whether this was an honest glitch or an intentional response to adhere to ongoing anger of public so as to show support. Either way, it is necessary to think how long such powerful agencies can exist without intentionally or unintentionally contributing to Orwellian dystopia.

I suspect it's a search poisoning effort by an external group.

I find it hilariously dumb that people are hyperventilating over what, at first glance, looks like a fairly obvious cache corruption bug of some kind.

The Orwellian implications of not showing Churchill's /image/ in the carousel of Prime Ministers after a search are precisely nil.

Nothing is "fairly obvious" in today's world. You can choose to ignore everything and assume that the state is run by organisations that care about the "greater good". This is of course a effortless thing to do. Or you can start to re evaluate your dependence on a single centralized source of information and how there exist no measures to control that source by a publically elected body making it an extremely powerful agency for mass propaganda IF it decided to do so.

This is a good example of what I find very funny.

Your comment would be an entirely appropriate reaction to, say, the well-documented evidence of YouTube's recommendation engine pushing people toward radicalization - which seems like a very dystopian thing, aligns very well with their profit motive, and if demonstrated to be accurate, effective, and intentional would be of genuine concern.

This is literally just a trifle.

A cache corruption bug? Of exactly this guy, and nobody else in that carousel, at exactly that time? At a company that has decades of experience of serving data from huge datasets without corruption?

There are really only two plausible explanations here.

The first is that some employee with KG access went rogue and blacked out Churchill because they're an idiot.

The second is that the process for selecting the image of such people is entirely automated - probably pulling from Wikipedia - and the mass orgy of USSR-style history erasure has affected one of the input data sources in such a way that the algorithm bailed out or didn't know what to do.

Given Danny Sullivan's apparently sincere answer that they don't currently know what happened, my guess is it's probably the latter. If it was an employee deleting it then an audit trail would probably have been left or said employee would have admitted to it and they'd know already.

But sorry, to believe that this is caused by anything other than BLM hard-left historical revisionism is very naive. That's not how computers work.

Among the many, many, many things that could cause this:

If the specific source image Google had cached as "Churchill" got scrubbed for some reason (any reason, really, including possibly copyright issues), there's no guarantee the subsystem that vends those summary images has a backup Churchill image to vend, and it may have nothing to show until the cache is repopulated.

Meanwhile, an Image Search for his name shows as much Churchill as you want. Nothing really to worry about here. Unless we're generally commenting on how one bug can have significant impact on surface-level results (which has always been true, and that's why there's more than one search engine in the world).

Please, people. If Google wanted to make a statement about imperialists and white overlordship, there are more impactful ways to do so than hiding Churchill's picture.

This is just a glitch

Exactly. Currently the statement Google makes about imperialists and white overlordship is that we probably meant imperialism and white overlordship. :-D

https://www.google.com/search?q=imperialists+and+white+overl...

Someone told me a few months ago to search Google images for 'white family' vs 'black family'.

And the results were remarkable. White families turn out to be a lot more colored then black families are white.

Regardless the reasons I don't like people or programs messing with my search results. Does Google consider me a bigot and tries to change my view of the world? Will this prove to other people I must be racist because search results are personalized? Or is Google racist for being better at recognizing black than whites?

Maybe some insiders can explain?

I used to work at Google. In the old days, before it was apparently internally hijacked by social activists.

These sorts of things can occur by accident. It sounds implausible but it used to happen all the time. Thing to remember is that even after decades of work Google is not really a question answering machine. It's still, at its core, matching words and phrases to things it found on the internet.

The most famous problem was "Google-bombing" where people realised they could control the top result for obscure phrases by using links, like [is george bush an idiot]. There was one related to Jews as well that I don't remember. Some mitigations were added and it went away as a problem.

The [white families] vs [black families] thing sounds a lot like the older example of [white inventors] vs [black inventors]:

https://external-preview.redd.it/N6gh6oArK2EWeIoaPJkoD-mDcsu...

As you can see if you search Google Images for [white american inventors] then you get the same results today. This isn't caused by racism in the algorithm or at Google but rather the fact that you're searching in English and most English speakers on the internet are from America or western Europe i.e. white. Thus it's rare to prefix professions with "white" when describing photos because that's the assumed default. How many articles are out there discussing "white inventors", do you think? Or even "white families"? Blacks on the other hand are a minority of the population and especially rare in things like "inventing", which is a rather archaic job description and thus biases old to begin with. It's practically guaranteed that any page matching the phrase "white american inventors" is going to be primarily a discussion of race, not inventing.

To see that this is true just search Google Images for [family]. What a shock - all the photos are of white people.

Now that said, back when I was working there people would understand these things, and give Google the benefit of the doubt. They were right to do so because in my entire time there I never saw any evidence of specific biases being introduced into web search for political reasons, nor did I see any evidence the executives in charge of web search were biased. For a search engine that trust seemed important, at least at the time. These days Google has changed and now routinely brags about its extreme biases. Firing Damore was a turning point. Now people see things like those search results or Churchill disappearing and assume the worst, instead of assuming the best. Because the true explanations are usually proprietary and arcane, this is leading to a downward spiral of trust.

It's especially hard to defend Google's lack of bias these days, even knowing things like the above explanations, because they keep doing dumb stuff like publishing papers on "debiasing AI", which when read turn out to be about biasing AI towards left-wing sensibilities. For example making it believe incorrect things about gender distributions amongst the professions. Is Google search still unbiased? Well ... I search using DuckDuckGo these days by default. Just in case.

Thanks for your answer. Unfortunately not explaining these things in public feeds public distrust, and to be fair, I now look at google more suspiciously as well. Because well, things like this keep popping up, conservative employees being afraid to speak out, the collective crying session video after Trump was elected, please let everyone go back to implementing great software and products. I need a search engine I can trust is not tampered with.

So it's not happening on a per-country basis.

Reports are coming from Serbia, Australia, South Africa and I can confirm Netherlands as well.

Don't over react, don't spread misinformation.

The right wing outrage machine has been triggered. This will be rolled into the QAnon conspiracy canon by EOD.

Churchill was about to leak internal Clinton emails of the pizzaria-sex trafficking ring.

"Erasing history" is the new "war on Christmas" Boogeyman. The same people who used to think Starbucks putting "Happy Holidays" on coffee cups was a manifestation of a nefarious plot by the executives to dismantle Christianity now believe that removing statues glorifying the Confederacy and racists indicates some plot by intellectuals to remove them from history books and search engines.

Please don't use HN for ideological flamewar. It is tedious and it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

To my mind, I was simply explaining the reason why all the comments in the linked article and the top comment in this thread assumed that Google intentionally removed Churchill's picture despite how ludicrous that belief seems. That explanation necessarily involves mentioning the conspiracy theorists who are inclined to believe certain wacky things based on perceived attacks against their political beliefs.

Thank you for the clarification.

If this is anything other than an accident this is absolutely insane.

Google and others are literally tripping over each other to virtue-signal these days. That said, this has to be a bug.

Why is this flagged? This is a very interesting bug. I would love to see a post mortem on how such things happen behind the scenes. Are there relly too many morons busy pushing ideologies in the comments to actually explore this?

Yes, unfortunately the thread is a combination of (1) people jumping indignantly to the extremely unlikely conclusion that Google is censoring Churchill, and (2) people arguing angrily about Churchill and (you guessed it) Hitler. Curiosity might have a faint chance against one or the other of those but not both at the same time, so I don't think it makes sense to turn off the flags.

If more substantial information comes up about why this was happening, it might be possible to have a curious discussion. The vast majority of the time, these things turn out not to have been intentional or anything close to sinister. Internet users just like to assume otherwise because it's more outrageous and more fun.

Maybe Churchill invoked the "right to be forgotten" laws?

Weird, I'm in Hong Kong and it doesn't show up here either. Unless I'm misunderstanding the implication is that this is somehow related to the protests? That seems like an odd way for Google to try to erase history, by just removing a picture, not the whole entry and not targeting any of the other myriad leaders people could object to, like Thatcher. It seems more likely that it's a glitch of some kind.

Please, it's just his photo not showing up, google still serves his Wikipedia page just fine. This seems like an error and not censorship.

Oddly I can't find him in the "people also search for" when searching for other leaders and his family

This seems to be an issue with the structured information coming from Wikipedia. His picture still shows up in image searches, it's like his profile picture just got deleted or something.

If this was actually an attempt by Google to censor something then they're doing a pretty poor job at it...

I’m not sure that the point is censorship, but a signal of solidarity with far-left activists in the UK who are engaged in a campaign of vandalism against statues of historical figures they disapprove of, most prominently Winston Churchill.

I have to say, it's weird to think they would do something like this intentionally without coming out and saying it, since the entire point would be PR.

Does anyone have proof or confirmation that it's intentional?

And now it's being flagged on HN?! What in the world is wrong with these people?

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23515496

Thank you and my apologies for making a mountain out of a molehill. Mr Churchill's image is back where we expect it this morning.

huge if true

It is true - try it out for yourself. Google “UK prime ministers” or “WW2 leaders”.

it's black , also no image in the wikipedia box. (i'm in greece)

Not super-huge. Bugs do happen.

And if there were actual intent to censor, you'd think the dedicated Image Search would be the first thing to go.

Not to worry. They still have pictures of Hitler and Stalin. Those guys must've been the good guys since their pictures are still on google.

Yeah so now we're in a world where Winston Churchill is censored. But Hitler is not.

I understand it's just a picture but it's a slippery slope.

A search engine should return results based on your search query. What if the person searching wants to learn about the very subject they are trying censor.

There's a big difference between moving/removing a statue and purging all records online.

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