Don’t be Evil? How Google Instant perpetuates stereotypes
Google Instant does more than just help users find the information they’re looking for quickly. It also perpetuates racist, sexist and homophobic stereotypes through its auto-complete function.
That’s the conclusion of Lancaster University scholars Paul Baker and Amanda Potts, who reveal their findings in the current issue of Critical Discourse Studies.
Google Instant uses complex algorithms to guess what a user is searching for, from the moment he or she begins to type. While Google’s developers claim this innovation helps users ‘save time’ and ‘type less’, Baker and Potts noticed other, unintended, consequences of the auto-complete algorithms when undertaking searches based on the terms ‘gay’ and ‘black’.
When they asked ‘why do gay’, for instance, Google Instant auto-completed their query with ‘men have high voices’, ‘men get aids’, ‘men lisp’, ‘people exist’ and ‘talk funny’.
‘Clearly these suggested questions appear because they are the sorts of questions that other people have typed into Google in the past with a relatively high frequency,’ Baker and Potts write. ‘It is also likely that once certain questions become particularly frequent, they will be clicked on more often (thus enhancing their popularity further) so they will continue to appear as auto-suggestions.’
‘It seems as though humans may have already shaped the internet in their image, having taught stereotypes to search engines and even trained them to hastily present these as results of “top relevance”.’
The results of further auto-completed searches were then divided into categories to provide a detailed breakdown of how particular social groups – like Muslims, Jews, Christians, Asians and lesbians – appear to be associated with certain qualities. ‘Interestingly, the “control” category “people” produced proportionally the most negative questions, which tended to be concerned with why people engaged in hurtful behaviours,’ they write. ‘However, there were also relatively high proportions of negative evaluative questions for black people, gays and males.’
Baker and Potts are concerned that groups who ‘either constitute a minority or have been subject to oppression either now or in the past’ seem to be most stereotyped. They’re also concerned that there’s no way for users to object to offensive auto-completes; in their view there should be, and ‘Google should seriously consider removing any statements from auto-complete that are consistently flagged.’
While the authors do not suggest that seeing auto-completed questions like ‘why do black people … like fried chicken’ will cause people to ‘internalise stereotypes’, they are concerned that some may not realise that they are being presented with stereotypes and ‘reproduce them in other contexts’. Other users, who hold such stereotypes, ‘may feel that their attitudes are validated, because the questions appear on a reputable search page such as Google.’
‘What will Google do … next’ is at the top of the Google-related auto-completes. What they do about this problem remains to be seen.
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