> 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.
> These are the details of what a search for “black girls” would yield for many years, despite that the words “p__n,” “p__nography,” or “s*x” were not included in the search box
Nonsense. The writer doesn't show the search results for "White Girls" in 2009. I bet it would be very similar.
Of course, there's no way to confirm that now, is there, since Google have long fixed their search results to include or exclude NSFW, enable 'safe search' and such, and the author did a search only for 'black girls' in 2009 to "confirm" his hunches.
Back in the 90s, search engines were notorious for serving back lots of porn links interspersed with whatever thing you were looking for. I was unusual (apparently) in that my searches tended to be really specific and I rarely got a lot of porn results. Except one time. I was looking for information on gun violence in Europe and I was getting back not just a few porn results, but lots and lots of them. I was using really simple queries, so I was able to quickly isolate the offending term.
It was: "Sweden".
(Most likely this was on Alta Vista, not Google, but I don't remember for sure.)
This is because marketing weasels had just discovered the hottest new tech of the day: meta tags. And immediately set about polluting them. At one point in the mid 90s about half the web that existed at the time was tagged “Anna Kournikova naked”.
(Probably many on HN are too young to remember her... imagine Taylor Swift x10, that was her popularity back then)
All: we're aware that this article may have an ideological slant that is either positive or negative depending on your own views, but it also has interesting content. Please react to the factual information and steer well clear of any ideological yay-nay combat.
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?
Different publications have different style books. This is Time, which, given it's history as a mainstream magazine, likely has a more conservative editorial style than more recent, online-only publications.
Blacks and females are less represented in Google's (and most of tech) workforce, I don't recall seeing specific numbers for black females, but it is trivial to conclude that.
> Women made up 31% of Google employees in 2015, up one percentage point since 2014, according to statistics released by the Internet giant on Thursday. One in five technical hires were women in 2015, raising the number of women in technical roles to 19% from 18% in 2014 and 17% in 2013. In 2015, women held nearly a quarter of leadership posts at Google, up from 22% in 2014 and 21% in 2013.
> Google says it's also hiring more black and Hispanic workers: 4% of hires in 2015 were black and 5% were Hispanic. Hispanic employees in technical roles increased to 3% from 2%. But the increased hiring did not budge the overall percentage of underrepresented minorities in the Google workforce as total hiring rose, with Hispanics making up 3% of the work force and African Americans 2%.
Given that women are half the population, and African Americans and Hispanics each make up about 12%, we can state categorically that Google's hiring doesn't match the general US population.
> Given that women are half the population, and African Americans and Hispanics each make up about 12%, we can state categorically that Google's hiring doesn't match the general US population.
But if you account for demographics within the industry do the numbers remain biased?
For example: men account for less than 10% of nurses so if you were to go to a hospital with 50% male nurses they would be way overrepresented. Statistically speaking of course, I'm in no way trying to give the impression we need to do something about the lack of diversity within the nursing profession.
--edit--
...or maybe we need to do something about the lack of diversity in the nursing profession? Don't actually know how this ball rolls?
Probably not fair to compare against the entire population, you would need to compare against the working age population. Additionally you might want to take into account local populations for where you're hiring into.
Yeah. These comparisons to the general population make no sense in the context of a specific company. It makes much more sense to measure against the proportions of that part of the work force if what you're really trying to combat is workplace discrimination.
But that's not what this is really about, it's about racial justice. It's about redistributing wealth and power from whites to everyone else in an attempt to create more equality across the board, not about "fair" hiring practices.
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.
I think the real problem here is that Google, for all of its algorithmic might, is somehow powerless to create algorithms that don't have this problem in the first place. It signals to me that there aren't people thinking about this kind of stuff, both down in the trenches and in the upper echelons. Maybe it's as the author contends, a bigger issue with ethics in tech in general.
They can't change math because people don't like the results.
They can stop relying on algorithms because the underlying data reflects social bias, or use them and reflect society. But, they are always going to upset some group some of the time because social norms are not consistent across society.
IMO, attacking Google on this is pointless, deal with the actual problem.
Never asked to change math or stop relying on algorithms. If you think those are the only solutions you're not thinking hard enough. Google is part of the problem, dealing with the problem involves Google solving its part of the problem.
That's really amazing. There's a similar situation when you search "American scientists." Interestingly the regular search results are very different, but the image search is similar.
There isn't just a risk of picking up biases -- there is an absolute guarantee that biases exist and always will. In a sense that's the whole goal when giving _relevant_ results. The idea is to return information biased towards interesting and useful results.
I wish Google wasn't biased against the restaurant around the corner from me when I search for "The Trumpet", but it is. That's as it should be of course, since the audience for that result is so small.
All we're really talking about is a project that will never be completed of tailoring search results for the largest audience possible -- which is inherently a moving target.
Doing it manually as you suggest is likely hopeless and
more politically fraught.
You're trying to advocate for Google to make a certain decision by asserting that it is "necessary". I'm doing the same by asserting that it is decidedly "not necessary".
I like the underlying question that the author brings up - what's google algorithm, and who's responsible for it?
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."
Also, how hard is it really to get a sense for the quality of a search and the irrelevance of its results for the vast majority of people? Given how much demographic data Google pulls in from your history, it seems to be not super hard to notice that actual black girls are repulsed by what was shown to them. It also seems easy to post a notice saying: "Hey, searchers like you have found this query to contain many irrelevant or inappropriate results. Beware!"
Taking it a step further, Google could apply this rule: if users really wanted to see (e.g.) porn, then adding that word to the query would show it; so let's keep the results safe by default.
I like the simplicity of your idea. However, there's articles on porn that are non-pornographic in nature. Usually people discussing or discouraging it rather than using it. To account for that, maybe make it something like "showporn" or a dedicated search page for it. Then, people Googling for information on porn that's not pornographic still wont get hit with it. Whereas, people looking for it using dedicated search page will exclusively see it.
This isnt that different from search engines for specialized databases. I used to use meta-search engines that woukd have checkboxes or selection menus to focus search on specific topics or collections. It was very useful. I still do it for technical papers using the "site:" operator to limit search to known-good sites for them.
Isn't the whole thing presumably caused by the fact that out of people using that query, most do want to see naked girls? So what you're proposing is to set the comparably less frequent, minority option as the default one, which is quite strange - generally you'd set the defaults so that usually they would not have to be changed.
In general, there's the "safe search" option that's on by default; but if someone has turned it off, then it's reasonable to assume that the default, most common intent of looking for "girls" actually is sexual, and if they were looking for something else (say, "black girls support group") then that would be a comparably rare situation where extra words should be added to the query.
The problem statement is given the sentiment space of reactions to similar clusters of search queries, minimize negative sentiment across the most clusters given resource constraints (time, cost, CPU).
This is a hard problem. There are many search queries, there are many clusters of similar search queries that address partially overlapping (topic,audience segment) pairs. Deriving sentiment scores from these segments is difficult without any feedback mechanisms. Choosing which segments to focus on is difficult or counterintuitive and depends on the topic and audience and characteristics of the audience. Once a topic and audience segment is identified for remediation, the task of effecting change is again topic and audience specific (resistant to automation).
This is a hard problem. Neither a brute force "human review squad" approach nor an automated "deep learning" approach will provide 100% coverage through all time. Does that mean that they shouldn't try? No, of course not, and they almost certainly try every day. However, it's inevitable that they will be subject to sniping articles no matter what they do.
I think I agree with you overall — there's no way to perform this task perfectly for all time in such a way that it makes this problem disappear. But I want to push back against the specifics of your argument, namely about the cost and resources involved, as well as the lack of feedback mechanisms. I do that below; I wrote those paragraphs before really giving credit to how hard it would be to comprehensively score audience + topic pairs. That sounds like... exponentially growing complexity. So that approach sounds like a non-starter; maybe an alternative is to look at quality metrics on clusters of search queries as a whole, before diving into seeing if there are problems with individual audiences and those queries. Who knows.
There are many search queries to watch, but 'black girls' was persistently problematic for a long time. Noticing when a cluster of queries gets that status might be extremely resource intensive if that status was highly ephemeral; it's not. It's work that can be done asynchronously, and run daily at most. Is this simple? Nothing involving software is, imo. But it's probably much simpler than many other machine learning-driven pieces of Google's product.
Also, there are tons of feedback mechanisms available and actively used by Google. Every user interaction with search results is available to Google; a lot of these stand in for quality of result: did the person refine their query after seeing crappy results? Did they click a link and then press 'back' really quick? All of these factors already feature in Google's algorithm.
> It also seems easy to post a notice saying: "Hey, searchers like you have found this query to contain many irrelevant or inappropriate results. Beware!"
They did exactly this in 2004, when searches for "jew" brought up anti-Semitic website "Jew Watch" as the top result (because, as a linguistic quirk, "Jew" tends to be used in a slur-like way and Jewish organizations tend to use "Jewish," and the algorithm at the time considered those as different words): they placed an ad at the top of the page with an explanation of the "Offensive Search Results," distancing themselves from the content and explaining the "Jew"/"Jewish" thing.
It is Google's site and Google's (very much) proprietary algorithm so of course Google is at fault. Your argument is a variant of the "uploader defense." It was used by the TPB operators to claim that they weren't responsible for what was featured on their site because it was uploaded by users. But legally (or morally) they realized that they were, because they removed child porn even though they let Hollywood movies remain.
It's not as much about who is responsible as it is about what the results reflect: apparently this is what we put in, and thus what we get out of it, including results tailored to our bubble.
This isn't fixed by telling Google it's their fault and they should hide things, that's just looking away and covering things up. The true fix is making the input better, which requires society being better, which it isn't (at this point).
Comparing is not judging or blaming. The GP suggests that both TPB and Google are in a gray area, which I partially agree with, but I think they are in different gray areas.
TPB, as described, is in a moral gray area - "We know some of the uploaded stuff is immoral" - so they delete what's immoral (their judgement - child porn/copyright stuff/anything between), they arbitrarily decide what you see
Google is in an algorithmic gray area - "The algorithm decides what's best for you, we want the best for you, but we won't judge what's best for you" - so they do nothing and hope for the best (and least damage), the algorithm arbitrarily decides what you see
TPB said "We are not responsible for the content people upload." Except then they deleted CP, probably for many good as well as self-serving reasons: CP is bad, obviously, but also brings bad press (hard to get the public on the side of piracy when it leads to ease of CP access), as well as the holy wrath of pretty much every criminal federal agency in countries around the world, as opposed to just whatever branch of whatever agency is in charge of copyright protection. Doubt they could get hosting in any country if they didn't take the CP down.
But by taking CP down, they demonstrated that they do and can monitor content, that they can take it down, that they do take responsibility for at least some of it. Legally that's a shot in the foot, I thought, but they still find hosting so who knows.
Thank you for explaining. That's what I meant by the uploader defense. I'm fairly sure Google removes CP from their search results so obviously they can exercise some control over their content. So they can't blame it all on the algorithm.
Google was always responsible. From day one. Google has always exercised editorial control of their platform when it was in their commercial interests. They delete spam, porn, malware, etc. They tweak the search results to benefit their own properties or demote competitors (see Foundem).
Precisely. Social preference is still a preference like any other. Google makes it its job to understand what the user is looking for. If they need data on what is an acceptable result they have the means to collect it and fold it into their algorithm. When people search for three black teenagers are they really looking for three mugshots? Is that a good result in any conventional sense, purely judged in a QA system sense, and without prior? There is at least a query specificity or query extension problem here.
Whatever proxy they are using to find relevance is broken in this regard, and it's important to recognize that there is still an engineering problem despite, or despite it looking like, a political problem.
>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."
Are you are saying that, in a scenario where there are more results for one sub-query than for another, Google has an obligation to assume someone is searching for the sub-query it finds more politically acceptable? This seems like a bad idea to me. We should want to reduce the political/social influence of Google, rather than think of ways to give them more tools of influence and assuming they will have a positive effect.
These two things are completely different
"Because you live in SF, if you search restaurants you probably want results pertaining to restaurants close to SF"
"Because subject X-A is socially unacceptable, if you search for subject X we will only show results pertaining to subject X-B"
Neither here nor there, but as a conversational style I find that when i'm asking a legitimate but pointed question, people are more likely to take accept my question as an honest one if I open with
If I search for "restaurants", it shouldn't give me restaurants in Shanghai because that's the city with the largest population. It should give me Northern California, since that's where I live and Google knows that.
Similarly, Google might reasonably infer that if someone is searching for their own race, sexuality, or religion, they're probably more interested in information or support groups than porn. Not that both can't be served as results... just... priorities of what people are looking for.
> Similarly, Google might reasonably infer that if someone is searching for their own race, sexuality, or religion, they're probably more interested in information or support groups than porn.
Sure, if they have data to back that assumption up. My interpretation was that the parent commenter wanted them to make assumptions just based on politics, which I think is a bad idea.
> Similarly, Google might reasonably infer that if someone is searching for their own race, sexuality, or religion, they're probably more interested in information or support groups than porn. Not that both can't be served as results... just... priorities of what people are looking for.
Don't they already do this for porn? I thought that feature was in place years ago. It's even a minor Internet joke that Bing is only good for porn (since they're more lax about letting porn into their results).
Political correctness and affirmative action are based on the idea that pretending the world is an ideal version of itself will eventually make it that way.
In reality though, the world is a complex place and the ideal pretend version can only be implemented in a carefully controlled environment such as a movie, a theatrical presentation, a video game or a situation where all participants agree to or are pressured into behaving in a way in which that pretend world is real. When the rest of the world leaks in, it is impossible to maintain that pressure on everyone.
About the best we have so far is "safe search" since pornography and obscenity follow fairly regular patterns. Political correctness though is constantly evolving and requires a trained academic to determine if each piece of information should be censored or allowed. Ideally in the future we'll have google glass and advanced AI classifiers constantly scanning our vision and providing us with tape delayed audio of the outside world in order to present the world to us and filter any politically incorrect content 24/7.
For now we have to do it ourselves and ignore any inconvenient facts that may make maintaining the illusion difficult. This constant struggle to deal with cognitive dissonance can be tiresome and one should restrict oneself to heavily moderated news feeds and not using search features for now. To create the carefully controlled virtual world in an interface to the rest of the world such as Google is an overwhelming task because you would need a highly sophisticated trained AI agent to maintain that illusion and to even invent information, such as lists of Nobel award winners from disadvantaged peoples, in order to maintain the illusion.
I feel like that's a remarkably pessimistic view of the world. I don't think optimism necessitates "filtering the world out," I think one can be optimistic about the future while being aware of actual problems.
This viewpoint has served me with a perfect success rate in all of my interpersonal reactions, including relatively combative ones (handing a beer can a drunk has thrown on the street back to him and asking if he could throw it away next time, random example).
Are there any specific example of things you think are incompatible with optimism without horse blinders?
>Political correctness and affirmative action are based on the idea that pretending the world is an ideal version of itself will eventually make it that way.
That is the opposite of how it works. Affirmative action is accepting that the world has bias against certain groups, and attempting to take that into account. Political correctness is about realizing that certain groups have been marginalized or traumatized and some words perpetuate that. In a perfect world neither are necessary.
The proof that a group has been marginalized is that their numbers are not representative of their presence in the population. Thus, we pretend that the ideal world exists by adjusting those numbers in situations where merit selection is the criteria in the hopes that the numbers will converge by themselves. We don't interview each participant to ask them how they were traumatized, we only look at the statistics. People from strong well adjusted minority families that value education and have protected their kids from most of the harsh realities that poor minority families are subject to receive the same special treatment with affirmative action. The reason that the inequity exists is immaterial means that we don't even have to check if a bias exists, we just assume that since the world is not ideal that the numbers need to be fixed first and then the rest of it will follow.
At least that's the way it works in reality. Maybe this reality is politically incorrect too and you are saying that we need to implement meta-political correctness in which the means of creating an ideal world must be hidden to instead pretend that the implementers know the exact and particular circumstance of each person they are selecting based on facts other than merit and are weighing all of them appropriately in correcting injustice. By pretending that this ideal world in which knowledgeable administrators skillfully and in each individual case correct injustices, this will somehow make it become a reality.
>We don't interview each participant to ask them how they were traumatized, we only look at the statistics.
Yes, because implementing something like that would be near impossible from a legislative standpoint. Legislation has to be spelled out and enforceable or it will do nothing.
And affirmative action is not there just to prop up the numbers. It is there to push companies to hire minority groups.
There are two reasons for this. For example, on college campuses, the supreme court has upheld that it is lawful to use race as a factor in admissions because a well rounded or diverse student body is a desirable trait that will produce better outcomes for all involved. Including the white men.
The second is that it is trying to undo the many, many years of oppression (i.e. slavery) that carries generation to generation.
Programs like affirmative action are trying to tip the scales for these descendants to give them a chance to compete. After all, they were systematically disenfranchised as a race. It makes sense that we attempt to systematically bring them back up to speed with the rest of the population.
>we just assume .. numbers need to be fixed first and then the rest of it will follow
We don't have to assume anything. It is both empirically evident (as well as just "duh") that getting a higher percentage of minorities into jobs and higher education will result in a higher percentage of their children having the opportunity to do so without something like affirmative action in the future.
Statistics show that man are the new minority in the campus. But it is surely will be frown upon by some AA activists if a that program is extended to cover male. If AA is said to what it is trying to accomplish, then that shouldn't be controversial at all.
> Political correctness and affirmative action are based on the idea that pretending the world is an ideal version of itself will eventually make it that way.
Agree. It hides problem rather than fixes it. And since it is often enforced in a top-down manner, communities that outside of the PC spectrum felt being deprived of their opportunities, this very resentment is further diving the society.
I try not to get involved in these kinds of dangerous discussions but i just wanted to highlight your comparison to SafeSearch. Political correctness really does feel like having to walk around with SafeSearch on all my inputs and outputs, programmed to filter out an ever-changing and inscrutable list of wrongthink and wrongspeak from the real world. It’s so true—great comment.
I disagree, because I don't think "Political Correctness" has been sufficiently defined. I think this doubly so because of the extremism used in the OP regarding "AI goggles that block out the words that might hurt us." I see a mockery, there, and it raises my hackles. Perhaps it was unintentional.
What is "political correctness?" Are we referring right now to the alt-right manufactured bogeyman? That is my sense.
That’s what makes it so bad: despite it not being sufficiently defined, we are expected to filter our world views and interactions with others through it. Not only is it insufficiently defined, it’s situation-dependent. Political Correctness in a university or a California tech company is a totally different set of filters as Political Correctness in a Deep South Baptist Church or my rural Appalachia home town.
>we are expected to filter our world views and interactions through it
I am replying in the following manner only because I believe the discourse around this subject is usually poorly defined. It is not an attack of you or yours, but my attempt to help us all better understand what we're talking about:
By saying "filter through it," what do you mean by "it?" What are the rules of the filter you are applying?
When you say "expected," who is expecting this of you? What has indicated to you that there is this expectation, and what are the consequences of bucking that expectation?
What are the filters in California? What are the filters in the deep south? Is there any federally legal relevance? For example, you could face legal issues if you make sexually connotative comments to a female coworker, and though you are more likely to be pursued and charged in California than in the Deep South for it, is that how things should be? Shouldn't women feel comfortable with their coworkers regardless of local culture?
> Shouldn't women feel comfortable with their coworkers regardless of local culture?
The problem is what makes a woman feel uncomfortable is culturally driven - when you have such a mix of cultures at work people are bound to make innocent mis-steps.
Californian companies have a tendency of looking at it by race and gender identity.
Do you assume the best of people or do you assume the worst?
I understand where you're coming from - maybe you're referring to things like "micro-aggressions" and other things many of us would find silly? Yup, definitely something that needs tackling. I've never argued that there would be a clear algorithm for "this makes people uncomfortable to the point that it should be illegal, this does not."
Luckily, our judges and court system are pretty good at exactly this sort of thing. I think a law on the books that goes something along the lines of "nobody should be made to feel sexually uncomfortable at work" starts the definition, and then subsequent court cases sharpens it. Sorry, Tim saying "great haircut!" doesn't count, but oops yea Janice saying "quite the cucumber you're hiding away there, Bill," while waggling her eyebrows does. Etc.
> Luckily, our judges and court system are pretty good at exactly this sort of thing.
What makes you think that?
Millions of Americans have been negatively impacted by bad laws on the books.
> I think a law on the books that goes something along the lines of "nobody should be made to feel sexually uncomfortable at work" starts the definition
You have just killed all chance of workplace romance - and more than 50% of people have dated coworkers.
We have sexual harassment laws on the books already.
Why would you negatively impact millions so a few people don't have to feel mildly uncomfortable (and obviously it's mild or it would be sexual harassement which is already illegal)?
> This seems like a bad idea to me, especially in the context of a discussion about how to reduce the political/social influence of Google.
It seems to me that there's an enormous contingent of people who wants to yell about the influence of Google and Facebook and then yell even louder about how they're not actively intervening to skew content towards their political preferences (ie increase their influence massively). This split-personality approach is baffling to me.
Irrelevant to the content itself, but I have noticed a tendency in myself to treat the media and the internet as a homogeneous entity. So I might see a bunch of articles and comments about how people want to punish Hollywood for sex abuse, and a bunch more about how a given politician isn't actually guilty, and I think in my brain "well which is it!!" But then if I start paying attention to the papers themselves and the history of commentors, I'm noticing that it's not the same people calling for both. I started doing this after alt right trolls started saying things like "I thought you liberals LOVE new taxes?" and realized it was happening to me.
No, I'm definitely aware of that phenomenon and definitely check for it before I say things like this. I'm thinking of specific individual people I know, whether in real life or consistent pseudonyms on communities I have exposure to. It happens often enough in that small, detailed dataset that I'm comfortable extrapolating a little bit to the larger dataset instead of assuming that it's different subgroups with contradictory viewpoints.
I come across thoughtful people all the time who have a baseline assumption of intelligence and intellectual honesty that doesn't match almost any group you're likely to actually come across. My prior for people having obviously contradictory views is simply higher than yours.
>It seems to me that there's an enormous contingent of people who wants to yell about the influence of Google and Facebook and then yell even louder about how they're not actively intervening to skew content towards their political preferences (ie increase their influence massively). This split-personality approach is baffling to me.
It's pretty straightforward to understand the view.
1. It would be better if Google and Facebook didn't even have the power to skew content.
2. Since they do have that power and seem determined to use it they should be judged on their choice to use (or not use in this case) and implementation of content skewing.
It happens even more easily if you're lumping people into a single group, but the individuals that you see speaking out about one topic are different than the individuals that you see speaking out about another.
The upshot is that from your described experience you cannot conclude that any group is being self-contradictory unless you personally witness the same person contradicting themselves in different discussions.
I'm not speaking of groups holding collectively contradictory views, I'm speaking of the group consisting of individuals who hold individually contradictory views. I know many people personally who hold the views described above.
I don't think it's right that because there's some highly backlinked content with with some keywords, that you should assume that's what people are looking for when they search those keywords.
Shouldn't helping connect poeple with what they're looking for be the bottom line? Even if you have to manipulate your algorimths natural results to do so.
Several of the searches given as examples of racial bias are already in a feedback loop; if everyone on the Internet starts writing articles saying 'OMG search for unprofessional hairstyles for work and look racism' then it shouldn't come as a surprise that the first results for otherwise innocuous phrases become skewed, and removing this so-called bias actually requires direct intervention.
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.
But Google has agency to adapt to the content if needed. If black-hat SEO gets the upper hand and results in an Internet trending toward cheap/fake linkbait, Google (or any competitor) doesn't have to just shrug and give the excuse, "Our shitty search results only reflect the shitty Internet"
If Google was still concerning itself with representing the content of the internet, this would be the case, but increasingly Google is tailoring its results for whatever other varied ends.
If it is curating the data, then how it curates matters. In this case, they've curated most of the porn from the first page of results, from the looks of it.
Google search results reflect what's in use on the web via PageRank and modern PageRank-like approximations. Google and its human staff does not apply human intellect to the problem of sorting, picking, and ranking each search result. Moreover, Google has included "Safe Search" features for several years that would remove these types of results from search.
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.
> Google search results reflect what's in use on the web via PageRank and modern PageRank-like approximations.
PageRank is only a fraction of the total inputs to Google search. Once PageRank was described it was subject to being gamed at such a scale that it essentially destroyed the web, ironically making Google that much more a necessity.
> Google and its human staff does not apply human intellect to the problem of sorting, picking, and ranking each search result.
Yes they do. By tweaking the weights of certain output categories (such as evidenced in the article, a clear drop in the number of pornographic or semi pornographic results as a result of such a tweak) there is a large amount of influence exerted on the results.
> Moreover, Google has included "Safe Search" features for several years that would remove these types of results from search.
Safe search always was a weird one: You'd expect the opposite, a 'smut search' (Tom Lehrer would have a field day with that one).
> Before we condemn Google for the collective actions of the broader Internet community of websites (and the author's step of disabling Safe Search), we should take a moment to understand this point.
Before we invalidate the authors point by handwaving and purposefully injecting chaff into the conversation let's try to understand the actual point they are trying to make: That a query for an innocent term such as 'black girls' even with 'safe search off' should not result in a bunch of porn.
> 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 author's demographics, political beliefs, trigger words, and purchase history.
I take strong issue with the "obvious" conclusion that Google knows which terms are innocent. Disclaimer: In this specific case, I agree with you that "black girls" has an innocent connotation and am not suggesting otherwise. Please do not misinterpret my thoughts below.
Shall we require Google to be ever vigilant about the meaning of words in use at various times by the various communities of the world, and to entrust them with the responsibility for determining the innocence or guiltiness of words or phrases for all mankind?
If we shall require such effort of Google, ought we not elevate Google to the role of judge over other matters of humankind given their good stewardship over matters of innocence and guilt?
Taken to the limit the argument advocates the establishment of an echo chamber to wrap tightly around each one's subjective interpretation of their reality. Isn't this the exact opposite of what we should be trying to achieve?
> Shall we require Google to be ever vigilant about the meaning of words in use at various times by the various communities of the world, and to entrust them with the responsibility for determining the innocence or guiltiness of words or phrases for all mankind?
Google aims to 'organize the worlds information', how it does that concerns all of us so yes, this makes them responsible with determining whether a certain set of words has an innocent or negative interpretation.
It's not the world I want to live in but I live in it nonetheless. That Google should not have this power to begin with is obvious but here we are.
> If we shall require such effort of Google, ought we not elevate Google to the role of judge over other matters of humankind given their good stewardship over matters of innocence and guilt?
Definitely not, why make things even worse? They already have too much power we will not make things better by compounding the problem.
> Taken to the limit the argument advocates the establishment of an echo chamber to wrap tightly around each one's subjective interpretation of their reality. Isn't this the exact opposite of what we should be trying to achieve?
It is, but again, the filter bubble is real and the more customized Google search results are for an individual the worse this gets.
> Have we not had enough of this Brave New World?
I do, and so does the author, but clearly you are either missing the point or you have not had enough yet.
I think they are already engaged in the business of trying to provide high quality, personalized results.
Is it your argument that they should be prevented from doing this because highly personalized, low quality results might instead be the result of their efforts?
If Google's human inputs have racial bias that is certainly something that should be fixed. DuckDuckGo has safe search on by default.
> That a query for an innocent term such as 'black girls' even with 'safe search off' should not result in a bunch of porn.
I don't know what results the search term 'black girls' should return. If you just search for it, it doesn't return any porn for me. If you're seeing porn, your search results make reflect your search history since Google will customize your results based on your search history. Interesting.
That being said, it should return whatever people are searching for. We must be careful not to cross the line from fixing mistakes to politically correct moral censorship.
On Google I get the same results as the writer of the article for 'black girls', on Bing I get a bunch of porn. So it looks as if Google has permanently adjusted the results for this particular query.
I think it's possible we're actually in violent agreement due, in part, to our different result set from Google. Even "incognito mode" doesn't return for me the set of salacious results reported by the author.
I think thats basically what Facebook is at the moment, a filter/curation bubble - only jacked up to 1000. What would be IMO useful and more powerful is being able to switch bubbles. Google at the moment has a "no personalization", which is better than only being allowed to access your perspective bubble, but you probably only click on your bubble.
The point should be to slowly break down the bubbles, make them less of an echo chamber, and/or have them merge at points where they can. To anthropomorphize the "perspective" bubbles, we are in the dark ages, where people really don't travel very far from where they are, and they don't even speak the same language from their neighbors a short ways away. Allowing a translator and free exploration of other bubbles could allow for more alliances - the zero sum troll-only interaction is something nearly everyone see's is not helpful.
You actually can with Facebook and Twitter. As a moderate, I like seeing many different views on a subject. My approach to get the pulse of social media on political issues is to have a lot of really different kinds of people on my friends list. I also gave likes to and commented on any interesting things they said in case Facebook algorithms prioritize them away.
If this post got widely shared, Id see responses in Facebook from people including several types of feminists, business woman arguing cold numbers/profit, males/females arguing black angles or activism (had one just like researcher in OP), male/female opponents of both (white and non-white), activists citing whoever gets ignored most (eg nativelivesmatter to BLM activists), at least one reactionary racist whose dismissals will be common, and thoughtful oddballs who I cant easily predict. Each will have reflexive comments or even articles with evidence for their view or against others.
It can be overwhelming to look at it all but I do on critical issues to ensure Im basing my views or actions on big picture rather than a filter bubble. If not a big issue, Ill just lazily click on my feed which is definitely a bubble of folks with similar interests, the most discussions/tags/messages, or most likes. I noticed Facebook ruined my scheme more over time where I have to actually click on specific names to see those kind of view points. Ive also been told Twitter would be ideal for this and know folks that do it there but still havent got on it myself for common anti-Twitter reasons. ;)
So, you can currently do that with both platforms. If you pick representative people (gotta do that right), you will see about everything they believe as a group about what's trending in their groups or nationally. You will have more good info and see more info as bad since tunnel vision the alternative approach creates is part of why bad info spreads. Lastly, it's just really interesting if you're a people watcher like me to see all the different ideas, jokes, trends, lifestyles, etc people share. I didnt originally add these people to study politics of rough topics: each was interesting and/or helpful in discussions, often face-to-face, before I added them. So, it's fun, enlightening, and sometimes challenging to have truly, diverse friends around you.
Note: Might be worthwhile to try to design some kind of meta-search engine designed to mimick what I just described. My quick guesses at how to build it suggest it would be really tricky to deal with human factors. Ill just leave it at saying the concept would be useful.
So Google now gives her different results when she makes the same queries. Makes me wonder if this is when she is a logged in user, and what differences there exist between logged in users one to another and non logged in users.
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'.
It seems like the main crux of the argument is that being reflective of the culture is also reinforcing it - the fact that say there aren’t as many stock photos of 3 black teens while there is a lot more “mug shot” style photos is probably reflective of the usual portrayal in media, but most people generally agree that the culture shouldn’t be that way.
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.
>It seems like the main crux of the argument is that being reflective of the culture is also reinforcing it
I believe expecting Google to change its search results to match an ideological agenda (I'm not using "ideological" in a derogatory sense here) is a case of shooting the messenger. It's the job of humans to make society in the image they desire and the job of the search engine to efficiently and accurately give the search results that people want.
I don't know if this isn't blindingly obvious by now... but Google already changes its search results to match an ideological agenda. The days of naive algorithms ended with the 2016 election. These days malicious actors will deliberately game any naive algorithm to push their malicious ideological agenda (eg [1]) and the only reasonable thing to do is to push back. (Or I suppose you could let malicious actors overrun your platform.) Google has no choice but to pursue an ideological agenda because it is being targeted by those who have the worst agendas.
I don’t expect them to do anything - it’s their platform and is exceptionally useful. But consider their core mission to catalog and make available all the worlds information. If that information reflects the biases already inherent in the culture rather than a more objective reality (IE outsized coverage in media of black people being criminals) is it not more accurate to make a correction and show the real experience? Should it not correct for societies biases rather than confirming them?
IMHO the media representation of crime is a substantially different issue than the one of this article. The crime representation is one of bias, but the "black girls" query is about the intent of the searcher; and there's no bias involved - every person searching for "black girls" has one or another intent in mind, and that distribution of intents is the underlying true reality; even if we as a society would judge that distribution of intents as unfair, discriminative, objectifying, abusive, whatever, it's still not biased, it's just that the real thing has these undesired properties.
Let's be realistic - if someone is explicitly going out and searching for "black girls", would you reasonably assume that in the majority of cases they'd be looking for clothed ones?
I understand that different results could influence behavior and make a correction - but that wouldn't be correcting a measurement bias to better reflect reality, that would be an attempt to change (improve?) the underlying objective reality, which is conceptually different than correcting bias.
I think that might make for a more powerful and useful search engine for sure. A Universal perspective as we've seen over the past few years simply doesn't exist - a search engine equivalent of stating a perspective would be interesting to think about. We already have location-based services, but we don't have cultural perspective based services. News media (Huffpost, Gawker etc) seem to be filling this role but only for news.
Agreed. It's infuriating to me how we keep giving filter and preference control away to other groups, then we complain that we can't filter and enable preferences the way we want!
Google has and does change our society, it always has. It has always been implicitly premised on the idea that there are new and better ways to do things. Remember life before google maps? Before youtube?
If they are willing to rethink how people navigate (both the real world and the internet), etc - if they want to dramatically change how easily people are able to access information - why should they be bashful about nudging culture as it relates to how different subpopulations are represented?
I really appreciate the point: as much as the content of what's on google has nothing to do with google, the prioritization of search results is on them. Whether it's hard or not to avoid perpetuating stereotypes doesn't seem to obviate their responsibility to not perpetuate stereotypes, any more than the fact that Facebook's having so much content flow through their feeds could remove Facebook's responsibility to not help the spread of fake news.
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.
I’m always amazed how often the “surprise” that digital technology is in fact not unbiased and robotic in nature keeps getting written about. Algorithms that optimize for click through rate for ads and search relevancy will inevitably be a reflection of ourselves and all of the shitty things various people believe.
>> 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.
> I’m always amazed how often the “surprise” that digital technology is in fact not unbiased and robotic in nature keeps getting written about. Algorithms that optimize for click through rate for ads and search relevancy will inevitably be a reflection of ourselves and all of the shitty things various people believe.
What you just observed and described is that technology _is_ unbiased and robotic. The bias is in the humans. You can't remove it with a software bandage; the software is working as intended.
Indeed so. I'm always reminded of Charles Babbage's self-reported interactions on the subject of his Difference Engine:
'On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.'
But I think the problem is more subtle than you give it credit for. The software may be working as written, but 'intention' rarely maps cleanly to execution. The behavior of a complex system is a multidimensional shape; stretching it one way or another along some axis according to your intention for its behavior can easily have unanticipated, and often unobservable effects along other axes that you were not minding. So it may be an intention that the system optimize for click-through rates for ads, while at the same time not consciously intended to be biased against, for example, race, but also not deliberately crafted to avoid this behavior. This may functionally be the same thing as intending it to be racist, but it has different implications for who's guilty and how things get fixed.
The quip by Babbage is clever, but Babbage was too early and didn't know what we know. He could not anticipate the digital abstraction, error-correcting codes, compressed sensing, and machine learning.
Modern computing systems have components that produce output that's "better" than their input, at every level. Because we have information theory now, we know it is possible for a machine to produce good output even when some of its input is bad.
Google, incidentally, has aimed to do that for its entire existence. From the first time the Google search engine was deployed, its job was to take in the messy Web, full of misdirection and spam, and show you the useful pages you were looking for. And we can keep hoping for Google to keep doing this as the threats to information become more insidious.
For example, a search algorithm with an override that removes all links of sexual nature for certain hardcoded queries (say, "black girls") could be an example of a biased technology.
If I'd have to make a definition, then it would probably be a technology that somehow encodes an assumption that doesn't match reality. In this context, saying that "black girls" is an innocent search term and users searching for it don't expect to get sexual results is such an assumption - it would be polite, politically correct and possibly socially desirable; but it seems likely this is simply not true in the reality we live in.
I had a person on my team preparing a presentation and for whatever (reasonable) reason was looking for a stock image of a rabbit in winter with frozen precipitation around.
Just as our (very straight laced) CIO walked up behind, employee hit image search on "snow bunny". Hilarity ensued...
Though some people might argue that the biases software reproduces will in turn reinforce biases held by the users at large. Conversely, you may reduce human bias if you algorithmically reduce the bias in the data (which is possible). Not saying whether Google should, that's a very delicate debate, but it's thinkable.
I wouldn't want to be in the place of the person at Google trying to make guidelines for that, but it's definitely doable. For instance, you could probably easily argue that the phrase "three black teenagers" (an example from the article) is pretty neutral in itself and definitely shouldn't be interpreted as a call to produce arrest pictures. In general the term "three [ethnicity] teenagers" could probably be normalized with regards to the setting the pictures show, for instance.
It shouldn’t be surprising. Engineers routinely talk about how it would be great if we removed the human element and replaced it with algorithmic decision making. But see how sentencing algorithms give longer prison terms to black people. Yes, the technical explanation is that it’s just reflecting society’s racism. But the point is that, contrary to the bill of sale, using algorithms doesn’t actually remove the human element. Indeed, there is a good argument (as the author of this piece makes elsewhere) that it ossifies the human biases that exist at one moment in time.
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!
> Images of white Americans are persistently held up in Google’s images and in its results to reinforce the superiority and mainstream acceptability of whiteness as the default “good” to which all others are made invisible.
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.
Debiasing signals is a common procedure that signal processors are interested in. Not saying it's an easy or well defined problem, or that the solution will be legal, but dispassionately there is an engineering problem there to be solved.
This title is a bit misleading. The article opens with:
> 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...
How is that different from what you're doing, cherry-picking two examples that support your point to distract from the overall argument?
In fact, the article is much more supportive of its claims, because it's an excerpt from a book that cites peer-reviewed (I believe) research. The point is that there's a trend, not that some search results are weird.
You are missing the point: there is no reason why an innocent query such as 'black girls' should bring up a bunch of porn. And Google seems to agree with this because they have since tweaked things so that that no longer happens.
No, the point is that the author selectively presents information that bolsters the point she wants to make.
I'm pretty certain that if she searched for "<blank> girls" -- white girls, asian girls, etc. -- with safe search turned off, a good number of the results would be NSFW, because the internet is 75% porn (and 25% cat videos).
You wrote "No, the point is that the author selectively presents information that bolsters the point she wants to make." and then claim the author supports your point?
At best you are supporting hers.
She made the case for the query 'black girls' and to pre-empt comments such as yours bolstered her argument by extending it to a general case. So in no way did she 'selective present information to bolster her point', she was as even handed as she could have been (but apparently not even handed enough for some).
There certainly is an obvious reason for that; this is a quite peculiar search term - the use cases where someone would google "black girls" for a non-porn intent are comparably rare compared to cases where the likelihood of user clicking on a link is strictly correlated with nudity.
Would you have ever tried to search for "black girls" if you hadn't looked at this article? On the other hand, someone who prefers black girls in a sexual way would actually search for them many times. I can imagine someone in advertising searching for random pictures of black girls, but that's a niche case far outnumbered by people searching with sexual intent.
It would be reasonable to assume that any fair, objective algorithm in Google's (or anyone else's) possession that actually optimizes for expected user intent (assuming that they don't have enough privacy-violating information to assume that the user belongs to a smaller and thus less likely minority of black girls) would still bring up a bunch of porn when searching for "black girls", since most people querying for that (except when the searcher has read this article in the last 5 minutes) actually do want to find porn; but they have configured an override purely for PR reasons.
The objective algorithm would show reality as it is, but the current override masks it and tries to show an imagined vision of "reality-as-it-should-be". And that's why the problem is not solvable algorithmically - any algorithm learning from real data and actual user behavior would show the ugly, "undesirable" reality in all kinds of edge cases, and it can only be solved in a non-scalable manner by involving some manual political correctness / good taste / etc censorship.
It's always bothered me when people, (justifiably) frustrated with the bubble effect that personalization can effect upon search results, want to see Google return to "objective" results. But PageRank/BackRub was never an objective metric, it was always affected by what webmasters chose to link to and the semantic markup they wrote. It seemed to be a good metric for a majority of these things, but assuming few webmasters in the early years were black women or black, then the "objective" metric of PageRank/BackRub is going to be dismal.
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] thread> These are the details of what a search for “black girls” would yield for many years, despite that the words “p__n,” “p__nography,” or “s*x” were not included in the search box
Nonsense. The writer doesn't show the search results for "White Girls" in 2009. I bet it would be very similar.
Of course, there's no way to confirm that now, is there, since Google have long fixed their search results to include or exclude NSFW, enable 'safe search' and such, and the author did a search only for 'black girls' in 2009 to "confirm" his hunches.
It was: "Sweden".
(Most likely this was on Alta Vista, not Google, but I don't remember for sure.)
(Probably many on HN are too young to remember her... imagine Taylor Swift x10, that was her popularity back then)
Seems ironic.
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?
Meh, likely the answer is unknown, mostly I'm just commenting
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/06/30/google-d...
> Women made up 31% of Google employees in 2015, up one percentage point since 2014, according to statistics released by the Internet giant on Thursday. One in five technical hires were women in 2015, raising the number of women in technical roles to 19% from 18% in 2014 and 17% in 2013. In 2015, women held nearly a quarter of leadership posts at Google, up from 22% in 2014 and 21% in 2013.
> Google says it's also hiring more black and Hispanic workers: 4% of hires in 2015 were black and 5% were Hispanic. Hispanic employees in technical roles increased to 3% from 2%. But the increased hiring did not budge the overall percentage of underrepresented minorities in the Google workforce as total hiring rose, with Hispanics making up 3% of the work force and African Americans 2%.
Given that women are half the population, and African Americans and Hispanics each make up about 12%, we can state categorically that Google's hiring doesn't match the general US population.
But if you account for demographics within the industry do the numbers remain biased?
For example: men account for less than 10% of nurses so if you were to go to a hospital with 50% male nurses they would be way overrepresented. Statistically speaking of course, I'm in no way trying to give the impression we need to do something about the lack of diversity within the nursing profession.
--edit--
...or maybe we need to do something about the lack of diversity in the nursing profession? Don't actually know how this ball rolls?
But that's not what this is really about, it's about racial justice. It's about redistributing wealth and power from whites to everyone else in an attempt to create more equality across the board, not about "fair" hiring practices.
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.
They can stop relying on algorithms because the underlying data reflects social bias, or use them and reflect society. But, they are always going to upset some group some of the time because social norms are not consistent across society.
IMO, attacking Google on this is pointless, deal with the actual problem.
Yeah, great contribution right there! If we haven't cured cancer is because we aren't thinking hard enough!
I wish Google wasn't biased against the restaurant around the corner from me when I search for "The Trumpet", but it is. That's as it should be of course, since the audience for that result is so small.
All we're really talking about is a project that will never be completed of tailoring search results for the largest audience possible -- which is inherently a moving target.
Doing it manually as you suggest is likely hopeless and more politically fraught.
Yes, but, sadly, necessary.
Anyway, that's Google's call to make.
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."
This isnt that different from search engines for specialized databases. I used to use meta-search engines that woukd have checkboxes or selection menus to focus search on specific topics or collections. It was very useful. I still do it for technical papers using the "site:" operator to limit search to known-good sites for them.
In general, there's the "safe search" option that's on by default; but if someone has turned it off, then it's reasonable to assume that the default, most common intent of looking for "girls" actually is sexual, and if they were looking for something else (say, "black girls support group") then that would be a comparably rare situation where extra words should be added to the query.
This is a hard problem. There are many search queries, there are many clusters of similar search queries that address partially overlapping (topic,audience segment) pairs. Deriving sentiment scores from these segments is difficult without any feedback mechanisms. Choosing which segments to focus on is difficult or counterintuitive and depends on the topic and audience and characteristics of the audience. Once a topic and audience segment is identified for remediation, the task of effecting change is again topic and audience specific (resistant to automation).
This is a hard problem. Neither a brute force "human review squad" approach nor an automated "deep learning" approach will provide 100% coverage through all time. Does that mean that they shouldn't try? No, of course not, and they almost certainly try every day. However, it's inevitable that they will be subject to sniping articles no matter what they do.
There are many search queries to watch, but 'black girls' was persistently problematic for a long time. Noticing when a cluster of queries gets that status might be extremely resource intensive if that status was highly ephemeral; it's not. It's work that can be done asynchronously, and run daily at most. Is this simple? Nothing involving software is, imo. But it's probably much simpler than many other machine learning-driven pieces of Google's product.
Also, there are tons of feedback mechanisms available and actively used by Google. Every user interaction with search results is available to Google; a lot of these stand in for quality of result: did the person refine their query after seeing crappy results? Did they click a link and then press 'back' really quick? All of these factors already feature in Google's algorithm.
They did exactly this in 2004, when searches for "jew" brought up anti-Semitic website "Jew Watch" as the top result (because, as a linguistic quirk, "Jew" tends to be used in a slur-like way and Jewish organizations tend to use "Jewish," and the algorithm at the time considered those as different words): they placed an ad at the top of the page with an explanation of the "Offensive Search Results," distancing themselves from the content and explaining the "Jew"/"Jewish" thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew_Watch#Google_Search_result...
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/google/jew-watch/jew-watch-c... (and yes, that's Netscape Navigator!)
http://web.archive.org/web/20050123081919/http://www.google....
This isn't fixed by telling Google it's their fault and they should hide things, that's just looking away and covering things up. The true fix is making the input better, which requires society being better, which it isn't (at this point).
Because they are not. And neither is Google.
TPB, as described, is in a moral gray area - "We know some of the uploaded stuff is immoral" - so they delete what's immoral (their judgement - child porn/copyright stuff/anything between), they arbitrarily decide what you see
Google is in an algorithmic gray area - "The algorithm decides what's best for you, we want the best for you, but we won't judge what's best for you" - so they do nothing and hope for the best (and least damage), the algorithm arbitrarily decides what you see
Both seem like different routes to the same hell.
Edit: Spelling, clearer wording
TPB said "We are not responsible for the content people upload." Except then they deleted CP, probably for many good as well as self-serving reasons: CP is bad, obviously, but also brings bad press (hard to get the public on the side of piracy when it leads to ease of CP access), as well as the holy wrath of pretty much every criminal federal agency in countries around the world, as opposed to just whatever branch of whatever agency is in charge of copyright protection. Doubt they could get hosting in any country if they didn't take the CP down.
But by taking CP down, they demonstrated that they do and can monitor content, that they can take it down, that they do take responsibility for at least some of it. Legally that's a shot in the foot, I thought, but they still find hosting so who knows.
Whatever proxy they are using to find relevance is broken in this regard, and it's important to recognize that there is still an engineering problem despite, or despite it looking like, a political problem.
Are you are saying that, in a scenario where there are more results for one sub-query than for another, Google has an obligation to assume someone is searching for the sub-query it finds more politically acceptable? This seems like a bad idea to me. We should want to reduce the political/social influence of Google, rather than think of ways to give them more tools of influence and assuming they will have a positive effect.
These two things are completely different
"Because you live in SF, if you search restaurants you probably want results pertaining to restaurants close to SF"
"Because subject X-A is socially unacceptable, if you search for subject X we will only show results pertaining to subject X-B"
> Are you saying that ...
vs
> You are saying that ...
If I search for "restaurants", it shouldn't give me restaurants in Shanghai because that's the city with the largest population. It should give me Northern California, since that's where I live and Google knows that.
Similarly, Google might reasonably infer that if someone is searching for their own race, sexuality, or religion, they're probably more interested in information or support groups than porn. Not that both can't be served as results... just... priorities of what people are looking for.
Sure, if they have data to back that assumption up. My interpretation was that the parent commenter wanted them to make assumptions just based on politics, which I think is a bad idea.
Don't they already do this for porn? I thought that feature was in place years ago. It's even a minor Internet joke that Bing is only good for porn (since they're more lax about letting porn into their results).
Ideally it should know nothing about me!
At some point you've got to accept that googling "hot teens" won't get you resources on the treatment of hyperthermia in young people.
In reality though, the world is a complex place and the ideal pretend version can only be implemented in a carefully controlled environment such as a movie, a theatrical presentation, a video game or a situation where all participants agree to or are pressured into behaving in a way in which that pretend world is real. When the rest of the world leaks in, it is impossible to maintain that pressure on everyone.
About the best we have so far is "safe search" since pornography and obscenity follow fairly regular patterns. Political correctness though is constantly evolving and requires a trained academic to determine if each piece of information should be censored or allowed. Ideally in the future we'll have google glass and advanced AI classifiers constantly scanning our vision and providing us with tape delayed audio of the outside world in order to present the world to us and filter any politically incorrect content 24/7.
For now we have to do it ourselves and ignore any inconvenient facts that may make maintaining the illusion difficult. This constant struggle to deal with cognitive dissonance can be tiresome and one should restrict oneself to heavily moderated news feeds and not using search features for now. To create the carefully controlled virtual world in an interface to the rest of the world such as Google is an overwhelming task because you would need a highly sophisticated trained AI agent to maintain that illusion and to even invent information, such as lists of Nobel award winners from disadvantaged peoples, in order to maintain the illusion.
This viewpoint has served me with a perfect success rate in all of my interpersonal reactions, including relatively combative ones (handing a beer can a drunk has thrown on the street back to him and asking if he could throw it away next time, random example).
Are there any specific example of things you think are incompatible with optimism without horse blinders?
That is the opposite of how it works. Affirmative action is accepting that the world has bias against certain groups, and attempting to take that into account. Political correctness is about realizing that certain groups have been marginalized or traumatized and some words perpetuate that. In a perfect world neither are necessary.
At least that's the way it works in reality. Maybe this reality is politically incorrect too and you are saying that we need to implement meta-political correctness in which the means of creating an ideal world must be hidden to instead pretend that the implementers know the exact and particular circumstance of each person they are selecting based on facts other than merit and are weighing all of them appropriately in correcting injustice. By pretending that this ideal world in which knowledgeable administrators skillfully and in each individual case correct injustices, this will somehow make it become a reality.
Yes, because implementing something like that would be near impossible from a legislative standpoint. Legislation has to be spelled out and enforceable or it will do nothing.
And affirmative action is not there just to prop up the numbers. It is there to push companies to hire minority groups.
There are two reasons for this. For example, on college campuses, the supreme court has upheld that it is lawful to use race as a factor in admissions because a well rounded or diverse student body is a desirable trait that will produce better outcomes for all involved. Including the white men.
The second is that it is trying to undo the many, many years of oppression (i.e. slavery) that carries generation to generation.
Programs like affirmative action are trying to tip the scales for these descendants to give them a chance to compete. After all, they were systematically disenfranchised as a race. It makes sense that we attempt to systematically bring them back up to speed with the rest of the population.
>we just assume .. numbers need to be fixed first and then the rest of it will follow
We don't have to assume anything. It is both empirically evident (as well as just "duh") that getting a higher percentage of minorities into jobs and higher education will result in a higher percentage of their children having the opportunity to do so without something like affirmative action in the future.
Statistics show that man are the new minority in the campus. But it is surely will be frown upon by some AA activists if a that program is extended to cover male. If AA is said to what it is trying to accomplish, then that shouldn't be controversial at all.
I think this is presumptuous. We can try to find out, why not?
Agree. It hides problem rather than fixes it. And since it is often enforced in a top-down manner, communities that outside of the PC spectrum felt being deprived of their opportunities, this very resentment is further diving the society.
What is "political correctness?" Are we referring right now to the alt-right manufactured bogeyman? That is my sense.
I am replying in the following manner only because I believe the discourse around this subject is usually poorly defined. It is not an attack of you or yours, but my attempt to help us all better understand what we're talking about:
By saying "filter through it," what do you mean by "it?" What are the rules of the filter you are applying?
When you say "expected," who is expecting this of you? What has indicated to you that there is this expectation, and what are the consequences of bucking that expectation?
What are the filters in California? What are the filters in the deep south? Is there any federally legal relevance? For example, you could face legal issues if you make sexually connotative comments to a female coworker, and though you are more likely to be pursued and charged in California than in the Deep South for it, is that how things should be? Shouldn't women feel comfortable with their coworkers regardless of local culture?
The problem is what makes a woman feel uncomfortable is culturally driven - when you have such a mix of cultures at work people are bound to make innocent mis-steps.
Californian companies have a tendency of looking at it by race and gender identity. Do you assume the best of people or do you assume the worst?
I understand where you're coming from - maybe you're referring to things like "micro-aggressions" and other things many of us would find silly? Yup, definitely something that needs tackling. I've never argued that there would be a clear algorithm for "this makes people uncomfortable to the point that it should be illegal, this does not."
Luckily, our judges and court system are pretty good at exactly this sort of thing. I think a law on the books that goes something along the lines of "nobody should be made to feel sexually uncomfortable at work" starts the definition, and then subsequent court cases sharpens it. Sorry, Tim saying "great haircut!" doesn't count, but oops yea Janice saying "quite the cucumber you're hiding away there, Bill," while waggling her eyebrows does. Etc.
What makes you think that?
Millions of Americans have been negatively impacted by bad laws on the books.
> I think a law on the books that goes something along the lines of "nobody should be made to feel sexually uncomfortable at work" starts the definition
You have just killed all chance of workplace romance - and more than 50% of people have dated coworkers.
We have sexual harassment laws on the books already.
Why would you negatively impact millions so a few people don't have to feel mildly uncomfortable (and obviously it's mild or it would be sexual harassement which is already illegal)?
It seems to me that there's an enormous contingent of people who wants to yell about the influence of Google and Facebook and then yell even louder about how they're not actively intervening to skew content towards their political preferences (ie increase their influence massively). This split-personality approach is baffling to me.
I'm getting a sense of that from your post.
I come across thoughtful people all the time who have a baseline assumption of intelligence and intellectual honesty that doesn't match almost any group you're likely to actually come across. My prior for people having obviously contradictory views is simply higher than yours.
It's pretty straightforward to understand the view.
1. It would be better if Google and Facebook didn't even have the power to skew content.
2. Since they do have that power and seem determined to use it they should be judged on their choice to use (or not use in this case) and implementation of content skewing.
It happens even more easily if you're lumping people into a single group, but the individuals that you see speaking out about one topic are different than the individuals that you see speaking out about another.
The upshot is that from your described experience you cannot conclude that any group is being self-contradictory unless you personally witness the same person contradicting themselves in different discussions.
Shouldn't helping connect poeple with what they're looking for be the bottom line? Even if you have to manipulate your algorimths natural results to do so.
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.
If it is curating the data, then how it curates matters. In this case, they've curated most of the porn from the first page of results, from the looks of it.
Not sure how that makes me feel.
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.
PageRank is only a fraction of the total inputs to Google search. Once PageRank was described it was subject to being gamed at such a scale that it essentially destroyed the web, ironically making Google that much more a necessity.
> Google and its human staff does not apply human intellect to the problem of sorting, picking, and ranking each search result.
Yes they do. By tweaking the weights of certain output categories (such as evidenced in the article, a clear drop in the number of pornographic or semi pornographic results as a result of such a tweak) there is a large amount of influence exerted on the results.
> Moreover, Google has included "Safe Search" features for several years that would remove these types of results from search.
Safe search always was a weird one: You'd expect the opposite, a 'smut search' (Tom Lehrer would have a field day with that one).
> Before we condemn Google for the collective actions of the broader Internet community of websites (and the author's step of disabling Safe Search), we should take a moment to understand this point.
Before we invalidate the authors point by handwaving and purposefully injecting chaff into the conversation let's try to understand the actual point they are trying to make: That a query for an innocent term such as 'black girls' even with 'safe search off' should not result in a bunch of porn.
> 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 author's demographics, political beliefs, trigger words, and purchase history.
That's nothing to do with the authors point.
I take strong issue with the "obvious" conclusion that Google knows which terms are innocent. Disclaimer: In this specific case, I agree with you that "black girls" has an innocent connotation and am not suggesting otherwise. Please do not misinterpret my thoughts below.
Shall we require Google to be ever vigilant about the meaning of words in use at various times by the various communities of the world, and to entrust them with the responsibility for determining the innocence or guiltiness of words or phrases for all mankind?
If we shall require such effort of Google, ought we not elevate Google to the role of judge over other matters of humankind given their good stewardship over matters of innocence and guilt?
Taken to the limit the argument advocates the establishment of an echo chamber to wrap tightly around each one's subjective interpretation of their reality. Isn't this the exact opposite of what we should be trying to achieve?
Have we not had enough of this Brave New World?
Google aims to 'organize the worlds information', how it does that concerns all of us so yes, this makes them responsible with determining whether a certain set of words has an innocent or negative interpretation.
It's not the world I want to live in but I live in it nonetheless. That Google should not have this power to begin with is obvious but here we are.
> If we shall require such effort of Google, ought we not elevate Google to the role of judge over other matters of humankind given their good stewardship over matters of innocence and guilt?
Definitely not, why make things even worse? They already have too much power we will not make things better by compounding the problem.
> Taken to the limit the argument advocates the establishment of an echo chamber to wrap tightly around each one's subjective interpretation of their reality. Isn't this the exact opposite of what we should be trying to achieve?
It is, but again, the filter bubble is real and the more customized Google search results are for an individual the worse this gets.
> Have we not had enough of this Brave New World?
I do, and so does the author, but clearly you are either missing the point or you have not had enough yet.
Is it your argument that they should be prevented from doing this because highly personalized, low quality results might instead be the result of their efforts?
> That a query for an innocent term such as 'black girls' even with 'safe search off' should not result in a bunch of porn.
I don't know what results the search term 'black girls' should return. If you just search for it, it doesn't return any porn for me. If you're seeing porn, your search results make reflect your search history since Google will customize your results based on your search history. Interesting.
That being said, it should return whatever people are searching for. We must be careful not to cross the line from fixing mistakes to politically correct moral censorship.
The point should be to slowly break down the bubbles, make them less of an echo chamber, and/or have them merge at points where they can. To anthropomorphize the "perspective" bubbles, we are in the dark ages, where people really don't travel very far from where they are, and they don't even speak the same language from their neighbors a short ways away. Allowing a translator and free exploration of other bubbles could allow for more alliances - the zero sum troll-only interaction is something nearly everyone see's is not helpful.
If this post got widely shared, Id see responses in Facebook from people including several types of feminists, business woman arguing cold numbers/profit, males/females arguing black angles or activism (had one just like researcher in OP), male/female opponents of both (white and non-white), activists citing whoever gets ignored most (eg nativelivesmatter to BLM activists), at least one reactionary racist whose dismissals will be common, and thoughtful oddballs who I cant easily predict. Each will have reflexive comments or even articles with evidence for their view or against others.
It can be overwhelming to look at it all but I do on critical issues to ensure Im basing my views or actions on big picture rather than a filter bubble. If not a big issue, Ill just lazily click on my feed which is definitely a bubble of folks with similar interests, the most discussions/tags/messages, or most likes. I noticed Facebook ruined my scheme more over time where I have to actually click on specific names to see those kind of view points. Ive also been told Twitter would be ideal for this and know folks that do it there but still havent got on it myself for common anti-Twitter reasons. ;)
So, you can currently do that with both platforms. If you pick representative people (gotta do that right), you will see about everything they believe as a group about what's trending in their groups or nationally. You will have more good info and see more info as bad since tunnel vision the alternative approach creates is part of why bad info spreads. Lastly, it's just really interesting if you're a people watcher like me to see all the different ideas, jokes, trends, lifestyles, etc people share. I didnt originally add these people to study politics of rough topics: each was interesting and/or helpful in discussions, often face-to-face, before I added them. So, it's fun, enlightening, and sometimes challenging to have truly, diverse friends around you.
Note: Might be worthwhile to try to design some kind of meta-search engine designed to mimick what I just described. My quick guesses at how to build it suggest it would be really tricky to deal with human factors. Ill just leave it at saying the concept would be useful.
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'.
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 believe expecting Google to change its search results to match an ideological agenda (I'm not using "ideological" in a derogatory sense here) is a case of shooting the messenger. It's the job of humans to make society in the image they desire and the job of the search engine to efficiently and accurately give the search results that people want.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/3/16413082/google-4chan-las...
Let's be realistic - if someone is explicitly going out and searching for "black girls", would you reasonably assume that in the majority of cases they'd be looking for clothed ones?
I understand that different results could influence behavior and make a correction - but that wouldn't be correcting a measurement bias to better reflect reality, that would be an attempt to change (improve?) the underlying objective reality, which is conceptually different than correcting bias.
radical thought (and goes for social media as well) -
how about making the results tunable based on user preferences & filters?
oooh wow.. user control! what a concept..
Client-side controls > Server-side controls
If they are willing to rethink how people navigate (both the real world and the internet), etc - if they want to dramatically change how easily people are able to access information - why should they be bashful about nudging culture as it relates to how different subpopulations are represented?
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.
>> 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.
What you just observed and described is that technology _is_ unbiased and robotic. The bias is in the humans. You can't remove it with a software bandage; the software is working as intended.
'On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.'
But I think the problem is more subtle than you give it credit for. The software may be working as written, but 'intention' rarely maps cleanly to execution. The behavior of a complex system is a multidimensional shape; stretching it one way or another along some axis according to your intention for its behavior can easily have unanticipated, and often unobservable effects along other axes that you were not minding. So it may be an intention that the system optimize for click-through rates for ads, while at the same time not consciously intended to be biased against, for example, race, but also not deliberately crafted to avoid this behavior. This may functionally be the same thing as intending it to be racist, but it has different implications for who's guilty and how things get fixed.
Modern computing systems have components that produce output that's "better" than their input, at every level. Because we have information theory now, we know it is possible for a machine to produce good output even when some of its input is bad.
Google, incidentally, has aimed to do that for its entire existence. From the first time the Google search engine was deployed, its job was to take in the messy Web, full of misdirection and spam, and show you the useful pages you were looking for. And we can keep hoping for Google to keep doing this as the threats to information become more insidious.
Just to get calibrated: what is an example-- real or imagined-- of technology that is biased?
If I'd have to make a definition, then it would probably be a technology that somehow encodes an assumption that doesn't match reality. In this context, saying that "black girls" is an innocent search term and users searching for it don't expect to get sexual results is such an assumption - it would be polite, politically correct and possibly socially desirable; but it seems likely this is simply not true in the reality we live in.
Just as our (very straight laced) CIO walked up behind, employee hit image search on "snow bunny". Hilarity ensued...
Though some people might argue that the biases software reproduces will in turn reinforce biases held by the users at large. Conversely, you may reduce human bias if you algorithmically reduce the bias in the data (which is possible). Not saying whether Google should, that's a very delicate debate, but it's thinkable.
I wouldn't want to be in the place of the person at Google trying to make guidelines for that, but it's definitely doable. For instance, you could probably easily argue that the phrase "three black teenagers" (an example from the article) is pretty neutral in itself and definitely shouldn't be interpreted as a call to produce arrest pictures. In general the term "three [ethnicity] teenagers" could probably be normalized with regards to the setting the pictures show, for instance.
Turns out you can. It just takes effort.
And you should, because amplifying shitty things about people is not the ideal state of software.
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!
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.
> 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...
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?
In fact, the article is much more supportive of its claims, because it's an excerpt from a book that cites peer-reviewed (I believe) research. The point is that there's a trend, not that some search results are weird.
I'm pretty certain that if she searched for "<blank> girls" -- white girls, asian girls, etc. -- with safe search turned off, a good number of the results would be NSFW, because the internet is 75% porn (and 25% cat videos).
At best you are supporting hers.
She made the case for the query 'black girls' and to pre-empt comments such as yours bolstered her argument by extending it to a general case. So in no way did she 'selective present information to bolster her point', she was as even handed as she could have been (but apparently not even handed enough for some).
Would you have ever tried to search for "black girls" if you hadn't looked at this article? On the other hand, someone who prefers black girls in a sexual way would actually search for them many times. I can imagine someone in advertising searching for random pictures of black girls, but that's a niche case far outnumbered by people searching with sexual intent.
It would be reasonable to assume that any fair, objective algorithm in Google's (or anyone else's) possession that actually optimizes for expected user intent (assuming that they don't have enough privacy-violating information to assume that the user belongs to a smaller and thus less likely minority of black girls) would still bring up a bunch of porn when searching for "black girls", since most people querying for that (except when the searcher has read this article in the last 5 minutes) actually do want to find porn; but they have configured an override purely for PR reasons.
The objective algorithm would show reality as it is, but the current override masks it and tries to show an imagined vision of "reality-as-it-should-be". And that's why the problem is not solvable algorithmically - any algorithm learning from real data and actual user behavior would show the ugly, "undesirable" reality in all kinds of edge cases, and it can only be solved in a non-scalable manner by involving some manual political correctness / good taste / etc censorship.
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.