How to deal with internet racism when you're Google
As much as I deplore racism, it's one of those facts of life in America and many other parts of the world.
If you're a company like Google, how do you deal with racism in your search results without doing something that gets you called out for censorship? Perhaps, you do it through ads.
The search giant has been having to deal with a certain first result on a search of First Lady Michelle Obama that returns a Photoshopped picture of her that was made to have her look like an ape. The image is in poor taste but, the site's owners are apparently not violating any of Google's terms of service so, Google is not delisting the site. Instead, as it has done on previous occassions, it is putting up an ad to accompany this result. The ad reads "Sometimes our search results can be offensive. We agree. Read more." If you click on the read more link you'll see Google's explanation for why the image is allowed in their results. It reads as follows:
The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results. Individual citizens and public interest groups do periodically urge us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the integrity of our search results as an extremely important priority.
Again, as much as I abhor racism, I don't know if there is a way around this. How would a company, that literally deals in billions of web sites effectively clean up something like an image search? Also, can they reasonably be expected to deal with all offensive content? What about sexist or pornogrphic images?
I guess what I am saying is that this is a slippery slope. In my mind, the image of the First Lady was clearly racist. However, if Google had chosen to remove it from its search, it would have likely found itself needing to do a LOT more of this in many other of its listings.
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