Apple will finally fix issue that blocked searches for 'Asian' as adult content
sea.mashable.com
sea.mashable.com
> Now, try searching for "Asian food," "Asian Americans," "Asian history," or even "local Asian market" in your Safari browser.
> All these searches are blocked. Clearly none of them have anything to do with adult content.
I can't think of a better example of Asian people being treated as invisible.
Apple, you need to do better. This isn't a typo kind of bug. Something is fundamentally wrong on your end to allow something like this to persist for over a year without being fixed.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go...
What the hell is "Asian food?" You're either looking for "Indian food" or "Japanese food" or "Korean food." What is "Asian history?" Are you talking about Mughals in Bangladesh or Qing in China? It's all completely different.
People who are actually searching for these things use the specific term. I'm from Bangladesh. I don't look for an "Asian market." I look for a "Pakistani market" or "Halal market." I remember staring at a scantron in elementary school trying to figure out whether I should check the "Asian" box--which I ended up doing because the other categories made even less sense.
It's only in politics and porn where "Asian" is heavily used.
What is European history?
"European history" works because basically all of Europe has had widespread interaction with the rest of Europe for millennia, while thanks to mountain ranges like the Himalayas and the Zagros, and the scale of the continent, huge swathes of Asia have historically had very little interaction. No Chinese dynasties have ever conquered India, and no Caliphate has ever reached China.
Just like how "America" doesn't always mean all of North and South America, or even all of North America.
I'm from India, and this still trips me up even to this day.
You may not, but people do: "An Asian supermarket is a category of grocery stores in Western countries that stocks items imported from the multiple countries in East, South and Southeast Asia." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_supermarket
Here in Raleigh, NC we have Grand Asia Market: "Since our humble start in 1997, we've been doing our best to provide the community with the highest quality Asian groceries." -- https://www.grandasiamarket.com/
H Mart is technically Korean, but its wiki page says: "H Mart is the largest Asian American grocery store chain, with 61 locations nationwide."
Over here, there are Asian restaurants that serve a separate cuisine to what you'd find at a Chinese, Korean or Thai restaurant (closer to hawker food from Malaysia/Singapore, from what I understand, but with a more Chinese influence). Then there is "Asian Fusion" on top of that.
There are universities that offer "Asian Studies" degrees, and probably a whole lot of other community organisations I don't know about because I'm not Asian.
But please realize the US isn't the Valley with tons of variety of Asian folk. In most of the US, you get some generic semi offensively named restaurant like 'Golden Dragon' or 'Jade Palace' that attempts to make foods from multiple countries. Pad Thai or sushi or dumplings in one sitting.
In most of the US, Asian people are sparse so stores and restaurants brand themselves as just Asian. My wife googles Asian stores to find things she likes, since her country specific stores are a real rarity.
Eg in french, blind is "aveugle" which doesn't have synonyms or homonyms.
My email is in the profile.
I suspected a major goal for the games was to artificially inflate Bing's search market share numbers, but maybe also to gather data for machine learning and/or old-fashioned statistical analysis.
I was curious... and we at Google were careful about machine learning because we knew that, for instance, if you had an algorithm that internally rewrote every query by appending "breast", it would almost certainly cause the click-through rates to skyrocket while harming search quality. So, on my own time on my own computer, I used these Flash games as a typing tutor to re-learn QWERTY keyboard layout, and would often append "breast" to the in-game searches.
I didn't learning anything from my poking around, though I did get enough points to get 2 Coleman tents, a mult-tool, a external hard disk, a record player, a bunch of DVDs, and a few other freebies from Bing with all of my game points.
You mean "non-sexual"? Or "non-pornographic"?
I doubt the results were full of gore or tobacco.
The search filter is either a binary, or there's just so much porn for everything that it doesn't matter.
Other ethnicities, also show up with some porn results, but not nearly as extreme as for "asian". e.g. for "white" and "black" it was about a third of the top 20.
If you just recently enabled the setting in your user profile, probably there is just some caching on reddit's side so it is still serving the old results from before you enabled that.
I don't think it's too far-fetched to expect one of the largest and richest tech companies worldwide to be able to tell with decent accuracy how the word "asian" was used. The sophistication of their blocking method is basically on par with a basic word filter that doesn't even attempt to avoid the Scunthorpe problem.
I mean, we're not talking about reaching 99% accuracy or really advanced linguistic detection. When a company sells smart home voice assistants surely they can be expected to tell "asian food" from more lewd content apart. Keep a list of naughty websites, track what web searches regularly return those as result and then target those specific queries. Or throw some Machine Learning at it, might as well put their enthusiastically marketed AI processing unit to use.
Accurate content filtering is hard. But completely blocking anything using one of the most common words in the language just because it frequently links to porn sites? Come on.
Every site hosting pornographic content finds a strong correlation between anything and porn. I literally just searched "foo" on Reddit with NSFW turned on and the results are 100% porn, ranging from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure to Foo Fighters related...content.
Do people watch porn with asians? Yes, and also with about every second noun that appears in a dictionary. I highly doubt Apple's filters are applied in a fair way. Do they block queries containing gingers? Germans? Japanese? Which continents, ethnicities and countries does Apple find too sexy? I don't think a company should be in a position where this kind of question has to be asked.
Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/bjtDEfG
Why is this a problem? The premise was hate, but now the goalposts have moved to indifference.
Have you studied Romanian history or are they beneath you racially? Or, do you disagree with the premise of the question?
I would also be fine if people watched a lot of Asian porn if at the same time they cared about Asian culture and history.
But the fact that people disproportionately watch Asian porn while not caring about Asian people is pretty weird and racist to me.
But why does it matter anyway? Is it bad to like pierogis without having an in-depth understanding of the holodomor? Should we stop listening to foreign music until we ensure we have a "proper" understanding of the political issues the artists grew up under?
> But the fact that people disproportionately watch Asian porn while not caring about Asian people is pretty weird and racist to me.
Actually, incest porn appears to be the most watched. What does that say about the exploitation of the incestuous?
Say Tiger Woods or OJ who seem to prefer blondes, or Nick Cage and Soros who seem to recently prefer East Asians. Does it matter?
Question is, does it matter? What if someone likes BBW and fetishizes it, do we care? If they then marry a BBW is it no longer a fetish?
The one argument you can make against fetishizing a group of people is that it's reducing members of that group to fetish objects.
So if you're an Asian woman trying to date seriously, you'll get a bunch of white men who only care you're Asian and nothing else.
I don't know how much of an issue that is in practice (and I'm sure it's different in diff parts of the world).
[1]https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/howyourraceaff...
I wonder when the tides shifted and what was responsible for it. Now if you search "russian" the results are dominated by politics.
Lesbian
Teen (18+)
Ebony
MILF
Anal
BigDick
Hentai
Arab ...
[1]https://www.inverse.com/article/26011-pornhub-post-popular-p...
Asian was way at the bottom (and was the most pop term in Hawai'i, I guess that's expected). It looks like fetishization is an exaggeration, never the less, even if it were, who cares? People can prefer what they want, so long as it's legal.
1. Japanese
2. Hentai
3. Lesbian
4. Milf
5. Korean
6. Asian
Honestly, JP porn is unwatchable. Squeaky sounds, just quite "unique" as they say. It's the porn you'd watch if you want to quit watching porn.
Bulgaria and Spain are in a class of their own with "Mature".
[1]https://www.joyscribe.com/pornhub-has-revealed-what-everyone...
I do not see it as fetish at all. In fact, it is easier to date Asian girls for me. Hence, the preference formed.
Except when I am describing how I look.
So I don't see this a bad thing. I basically expect the same results when you search for other descriptor of appearances like blonde or big boobs. There's no other reason for subreddit communities to form around appearances other than look at gifs of them. (though there are exceptions like when you want to form communities specifically to complain about problems caused by said appearances: /r/bigboobproblems /r/ABraThatFits)
Food? Try Thai, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.
Same goes for anything else I can think of except porn.
To me, Asian just seems a word that was coined by British, French, German, colonial empires to describe something "other" and to lump a bunch of peoples and cultures together.
In the United States, "Asian" really means something more like "Sino". Maybe not the right word, but originally within varying degrees of the Chinese sphere of influence throughout history. In the UK, an Indian or Pakistani person would be considered Asian. This is not true in the United States.
Like, a French person, a Portuguese, a Norwegian and a Bulgarian are going to have virtually nothing in common, but in international internet conversation it's assumed that they're all part of the same group.