Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls

Re:Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls by philwelch on Wednesday March 28, 2018 @09:34PM (#16703832)

"Social norms" can be either descriptive or prescriptive. Descriptive norms are norms that reflect society as it is, and Google doesn't need to do anything about them, because the society that produces millions of web pages with cute pictures of puppies or helpful information about what not to feed your dog for every single web page with dog porn will result in a SERP that is overwhelmingly weighted towards that information.

Conversely--haven't these same people been telling us for years that we live in a racist society? So why are they surprised that a search engine of a racist society's web pages returns racist results?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls by forapurpose on Thursday March 29, 2018 @12:33PM (#16708399)

I'm surprised myself that someone on HN is really claiming that Google doesn't edit search results for all sorts of reasons, including for purposes of social norms, of any sort, and social responsibility. In fact, every person and organization does that. I doubt there are any social interactions where people don't behave according to a set of rules.

> why are they surprised

Nobody said they are surprised; that's not relevant. They are trying to solve a problem, just like people who are working to resolve the problems of cancer, gun violence, and bugs in Firefox.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls by philwelch on Thursday March 29, 2018 @01:50PM (#16709228)

I'm not saying they don't edit search results (clearly they do); I'm saying that it's worth reexamining the expectation that they should edit search results for the sake of political agendas.

[ Parent | on HN ]