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[KO Traveling Hobo]

I still have no idea what it's supposed to mean.

Interestingly, I tried typing "do blacks" into google and it didn't provide any autofill suggestions. Usually it only does that when you try to search for porn stuff.

 

[Asbel]

People have been told not to believe everything you hear on tv for decades. Same with the Internet when it came out yet the fact that fake news is such a huge problem today reminds us how stupid a significant number of humans will likely always be.

An affective way to prevent an abusive regulation is through transparency and choice of what is being regulated. And Google already does this. Safe search is on by default and you have the choice to turn it off. A similar option for hate speech/fake news would be a massive step against the problem while preserving choice for the individual.

 

[Totakeke]

Confirmation that Google did modify autocomplete suggestions during the weekend.

On Monday the searches for Jews and women no longer returned those results, although the “are Muslims bad” autocomplete was still present.

A Google spokesperson said: “We took action within hours of being notified on Friday of the autocomplete results.” Google did not comment on its decision to alter some but not all those raised in the article.

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...-autocomplete-remove-are-jews-evil-suggestion

Another article criticizing Google's role.

Google must urgently review its search ranking system because of “compelling” evidence that it is being “manipulated and controlled” by rightwing propagandists, leading academics have said, after the Observer reported that hate sites are now dominating searches on Muslims, Jews, Hitler and women.

Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist and the author of Weapons on Math Destruction, said that, unless Google acknowledged responsibility for the problem, it would be a “co-conspirator” with the propagandists. “This is the end for Google pretending to be a neutral platform,” she said. “It clearly has a terrible problem here and it has to own and acknowledge that.

“It simply can’t go on pretending that it has no editorial responsibilities when it is delivering these kinds of results. It is simply not defensible for it go on claiming ‘plausible deniability’. It has clearly become a conduit for rightwing hate sites and it must urgently take action.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...ch-rankings-because-of-rightwing-manipulation

 

[Joni]

Google is a confirmation bias engine. Because it predicts what you want to search and then predicts what you want to see. Engines that don't do that, are simply less good at showing what you want to see.

 

[Skellig Gra]

No, but we can definitely blame them for how they compile and curate the information that people search for. That is entirely on them.

Pure search is the only way to go, the more I think about it. Just present the relevant results that people search for. Stop trying to read your users' minds. Because your algorithms fucking suck, you fuck up, and it has serious consequences on a macro level.

I've trained myself to complete ignore the search suggestions because half the time they have no relevance to what I'm looking for, and the other half of the time the suggestions or racist/sexist/homophobic/stupid-as-fuck. This isn't new. This problem with google has been meme'd for years. We've had threads on stupid search suggestions on GAF. Google just saw fit to ignore the problem until this year.

You are probably right, personally I hate the autocomplete as it almost never gives me what I want.

 

[Slackbladder]

There's a kinda' update to this. Google is not ‘just’ a platform. It frames, shapes and distorts how we see the world

One week on, Google is still quietly pretending there’s nothing wrong, while surreptitiously going in and fixing the most egregious examples we published last week. It refused to comment on the search results I found – such as the autocomplete suggestion that “jews are evil”, with eight of its 10 top results confirming they are – and, instead, hand-tweaked a handful of the results. Or as, we call it in the media, it “edited” them. It did this without acknowledging there was any problem or explaining the basis on which it is altering its results, or why, or what its future editorial policy will be. Its search box is no longer suggesting that Jews are still evil but it’s still suggesting “Islam should be destroyed”. And, it is spreading and broadcasting the information as fact

 

[chillybright]

 

[Crayon]

It's 10 am and I've had enough internet.

 

[Totakeke]

There's a kinda' update to this. Google is not ‘just’ a platform. It frames, shapes and distorts how we see the world

Thanks for the update.

Screenshot of the week I guess?

When Google are silently modifying the autocomplete results you know they agree it's a problem. Problem is that they're doing it silently and probably wishing this would go away.

 

[efyu_lemonardo]

Gonna link a thread I made a couple weeks ago that is highly relevant to this topic:

http://www.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=1317429

 

[Totakeke]

My own screenshot for good measure.