Google criticized for 'racist' image search results
A Google search for "three black teenagers" seems innocuous enough, but the company has come under fire after throwing up seemingly racist results. Images returned by Google included police mugshots when 'black' was included, but similar images were not present when conducting a 'white' search.
This is certainly not the first time Google has found itself in the firing line for apparent racism. Google Photos offended many people when its AI-powered auto-tagging feature labelled images of black people as gorillas. Flickr has suffered from similar problems with its own labeling system
There are clearly going to be issues with any automated system, and there's no denying that this doesn't look good for Google. While there is not really any doubt that the company itself is not racist, the "three black teenagers" search does highlight ingrained racial stereotypes which could very easily teeter over into racism.
The debacle was soon a trending topic on Twitter, with high school student Kabir Alli posted a video of the search in action. In the Twitter storm that followed, Google faced numerous accusations of racism:
YOOOOOO LOOK AT THIS pic.twitter.com/uY1JysFm8w
— July 3rd. (@iBeKabir) June 7, 2016
Alli says that he does not believe that Google is racist. Speaking to Guardian Australia he said: "The results were formed through the algorithm they set up. They aren't racist but I feel like they should have more control over something like that".
Photo credit: Yu_Zhdanova / Shutterstock