Google these words

This has been going on for a while now, I remember googling it after a similar thread on MN last year or the year before.

Out of interest, I would love to take a look through the SEO and metadata of these sites to see if it's something being done purposely by the LGBTQ community.

If you click into the sites, you will more than likely boost the rankings though

From the reviews of his book, and Douglas Murray's own comments about it, it appears his premise is that sexism, racism and homophobia are now “over”, therefore feminism, etc, are unnecessary.

Does that seem accurate from what you've read of it?

I'm not sure you'll find much agreement with that belief on this board. Or indeed anywhere on MN – have you seen the relationship board?

If Murray is working from the premise that this oppression doesn't exist, it's hardly surprising if he doesn't see it.

I despise the use of identity to cause division and set people against each other. It's so often expressed in terms of “You're an X; so you must be utterly different from and against that Y person,” quite ignoring the fact we're both Qs and indeed humans, and have as much in common as we have different. It's a constant attempt to promote division.

However I'm not daft enough to think that therefore I don't have these identities at all, or that other people won't treat me according to their perception of them. I'm not going to not be raped if I don't think of myself as a woman, or not be discriminated against for promotion if I was still a 20-something woman.

As it happens, Google has a history of returning racist results, including famously categorising photos of black people as gorillas in 2015. Some of this is because of algorithms not being very good (Google recognises this and is working on them); some is, as PP say, because Google reflects what's on the internet.

Google alters search autocomplete to remove 'are Jews evil' suggestion
www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/05/google-alters-search-autocomplete-remove-are-jews-evil-suggestion

This is not the first time Google and others’ autocomplete and search algorithms have caused offence. An auto-suggested photo tag within Google’s Photos service in July 2015 labelled two black teenagers as “Gorillas”. Google apologised andsaid it was workingon “longer term fixes” around the recognition of dark-skinned faces as well as the linguistics of photo labels.

In May 2015, Google apologised when the White Housewas returned as a resultfor searches for “n [...] house” and “n [...] king” within Google maps.

Google declined to explain why the results occurred but a spokesperson said: “Some inappropriate results are surfacing in Google Maps that should not be, and we apologise for any offence this may have caused.”

In April this year Google apologised after a search for “unprofessional hairstyles for work” yielded image results showing predominantly black women with natural hair, while searching for “professional” ones returned pictures of coiffed, white women.

In June, Google’s image search also caused offence by returning criminal mugshots for searches of “three black teenagers” but not for “three white teenagers”.

You're in Australia, Yeahnahyeah. It's interesting that there are no Australian news sources in your list.

What do you think of Australian media?

@Yeahnahyeah I just looked at the video and I have a completely different interpretation of it.

The guy in the video demonstrates that when you do an image search for black couples you get black couples but if you search for white couples you get a mixture. Similarly for gay/straight. And he concludes from this that there is a conscious bias, on the part of Google itself, towards gay and black people, deliberately written into the algorithms. But as a programmer with some basic knowledge of how this stuff works, I don't see any reason to posit this at all. Because the results are exactly what I would expect to see without it.

Whatever you type in, the search engine will return images labelled with those keywords. Google stores vast indexes, matching keywords to the location of images on the net. How does this classification work? I don't know all the ins and outs, but these are some ways:

• The website builders (ordinary humans) manually adding keywords to the images
• The filename that some ordinary human (who took the photo, for example) has given the image
• The content accompanying the image (the image having been selected to illustrate that content by ordinary humans)
• The results of image recognition software that is trained on data-sets classified by ordinary humans (this work is seen as unskilled and paid a pittance on piecework sites like Mechanical Turk).
• Similarity to other images classified in the above ways.

So ultimately it all comes down to ingrained ways of categorising what we see. And we see what is salient. I.e. if something is unusual or interesting, or not the default, we notice it. We are then much more likely to stick a label on it.

Supposing that, like me, you live in a country where whiteness is seen as the norm. How many times do you hear someone described as "the white guy over there"? We use race to describe people when they are not the default race. If you read Man Who Has It All you will know how startling it is to hear "male footballer" or "male boss" because we never use those terms. We assume they are male so don't need to say it. Whereas "female boss" points out something salient. When we see gay couples holding hands or kissing, we notice, and are much more likely to remark on it or remember it. This isn't a bias towards gay or black people. It's more of a bias against. It's what feminists talk about: men (or straight or white people) being the default humans, and the rest being "other".

So, images of black or gay couples are much more likely to be tagged as such that straight or white couples. And therefore the search engines are going to have a much easier time finding them.

As for the original post, I think there are simply more news stories and articles about transgender people being killed than there are about women being killed. Obviously there are vastly more women killed. But as stumbledin says, google is not a reality search, it's an internet search. It will only return what is there, and moreover, what has more interest in it. On the first page of results you will see:

• The most clicked-on articles
• The most linked-to articles (referred to in social media, on other sites, etc)
• Articles about topics that are popular enough to get into the biggest, mainstream websites
• Articles from websites that have had lots of energy put into their search-engine optimisation (whether in good faith or by gaming the system).
• Articles from websites that are regularly updated with new content and are kept in good shape (fast-loading, secure, etc) by skilled (expensive) engineers.

I believe this fully explains the preponderance of search results about transgender people. It's a hot topic. The murder of women, sadly, is not.

Black women murdered in 2019
Google this

BLOODY HELL
This is appalling.

The internet that google searches is NOT a research library. It is an ad hoc collection of information created by personal interests and inherent biases eg sexism.

Thinking you will get accurate results on a situation from google is like going into a pub and shouting at whoever is there to tell you the latest statistics on whatever issue it is you are researching.

If you want stats on women murdered you need to find who collects statistics eg this from the US crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/explorer/national/united-states/shr - but depressing to see they do not list domestic violence as a specific crime.

Although this report does show DV as a crime - see page 4 chart www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv18.pdf

I am not sure that anyone collects these statistics globally.

Googling is as likely to get you a balanced picture as thinking twitter is a source of reliable information. Mostly it is just the prejudices of the dominant culture which is male.

I started a thread on this in Feb 2018. www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3167104-Does-everybody-get-this-result-on-Google Interesting to see if we get different results now.

PerkingFaintly, I wish MN had a "like" funcrionality.

But, in a nutshell: yes! Your post contains an excellent example of precisely what I mean.

Indeed, IfYouSaySoDear .

The MN thread I linked above mentioned Carole Cadwalladr's discovery in 2016 that Google search algorithms had been gamed by users to offer anti-semitic and holocaust-denying auto-completions and top results.

Google, democracy and the truth about internet search
Tech-savvy rightwingers have been able to ‘game’ the algorithms of internet giants and create a new reality where Hitler is a good guy, Jews are evil and… Donald Trump becomes president
www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook

She tried for a while to engage with Google about this. Then worked out the most effective thing she could do was... pay them.

How to bump Holocaust deniers off Google’s top spot? Pay Google
Google ‘is unhappy’ with Holocaust denial beating the truth in its search results – but it probably makes more money that way
www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/17/holocaust-deniers-google-search-top-spot

The Holocaust did not happen. At least not in the world of Google, it seems. One week ago, I typed “did the hol” into a Google search box and clicked on its autocomplete suggestion, “Did the Holocaust happen?” And there, at the top of the list, was a link to Stormfront, a neo-Nazi white supremacist website and an article entitled “Top 10 reasons why the Holocaust didn’t happen”.

On Monday, Google confirmed it would not remove the result: “We are saddened to see that hate organisations still exist. The fact that hate sites appear in search results does not mean that Google endorses these views.”
[...]
Until Friday. When I gamed Google’s algorithm. I succeeded in doing what Google said was impossible. I, a journalist with almost zero computer knowhow, succeeded in changing the search order of Google’s results for “did the Holocaust happen” and “was the Holocaust a hoax”. I knocked Stormfront off the top of the list. I inserted Wikipedia’s entry on the Holocaust as the number one result. I displaced a lie with a fact.

How did I achieve this impossible feat? Not through writing articles. Or shaming the company into action. I did it with the only language that Google understands: money.[...] I paid to place a Google advert at the top of its search results. “The Holocaust really happened,” I wrote as the headline to my advert.

Tech giants aren't inherently left-wing (or any other ideology, for that matter) at all. Tech giants are, at their core, for-profit operations. Look at unfettered capitalism, if you are looking for blame.

On an individual level, tech giants will (no shit, Sherlock!) evidently be shaped by both a) powerful individuals and b) market pressures and demographics.

I.e. you could be looking at a personality like Microsoft's Bill Gates. I'm actually quite fond of Bill Gates, personally, to the extent that I'm finally willing to finally forgive him for Windows 95 two decades later. Like most captains of industry, he's careful to not be too overtly political - but everything we know about him suggests he leans what a US audience would refer to as "liberal". I'd be willing to bet half a year's salary that he votes Democrat. Yet, one of his most memorable political moments was him going up against the Clinton administration in the matter of the anti-trust affair.

Consider, OTOH, someone like the new Accenture CEO Julie Sweet. Now, that woman is literally on the record as being personally close to Ted Cruz. THAT Ted Cruz, yes. Again, not on the record re. her politics but, come on, though ... And, yet, she's recognised for not only single-handedly shifting the percentage of female Tech CEOs upon her ascent but also for championing women whereever she goes.

What do they both (and all of their peers) have in common? They're quite literally measured against their ability to manage corporate performance. This doesn't make them or the corporations they lead particularly evil (or good, for that matter). It's just the job description.

Once you understand this, you'll also have to understand that the business model of both a search engine and a social media platform, abstracting somewhat but not to absurdity, is basically that of any media corporation: the "product" you sell is always going to be your end users, sold to your advertisers rather than your services, sold to your end users. Which basically boils down to: "content more relevant to your target demographic equals more users equals higher market value of your product". And that's what you'll tweak your algorithms to reflect if you've any business sense.

Long story short: it's not a conspiracy. It's the business model. Corporations don't tend to do ideology, they do profits.

prise ffs I can spell honest Prize

So in the same way as wikipedia reflects that it is mainly men who post entries so you get little info about women, the same is true of the internet as a whole.

It's actually worse than this, women are actively being removed e.g. look at the thread about Magdalen Berns, moderators are taking down her wikipage because she's not significant enough. In case you think the moderators might have a point there, Donna Strickland, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2018, also had her wikipage removed by a moderator just 6 months before she won the prise. The man who she shared the Prize with had had a wikipage since 2005. Only 17% of 'notable people' with a dedicated page on wikipedia are female.

I'm currently reading The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray. He states many of the companies in Silicon Valley incl Google put staff through tests to weed out those with incorrect thoughts, so tech companies are more left/liberal leaning than you would find elsewhere.

He highlights a programme Google uses called Machine Learning Fairness (YouTube vid to explain) which is allegedly supposed to remove bias, but the human input has helped to skew history by including diversity and how it would like us to perceive topics, which may not actually be what you asked for; so black women murdered, results in black transwomen murdered as that's what they want you to consider. Some examples given in the book are to Google images of

European Art
Western people art
Asian people art
White couple
Black couple
White men/women
Black men/women
Straight couple
Gay couple

What do you expect to see and what comes up?

To be fair though, the news outlets are more likely to report things that aren't considered commonplace. For example, a lot of mass shootings in America aren't even reported - there's like one most weeks I believe.

If you dont know how to search properly you dont get valid resuts.

As ErrolTheDragon pointed out if you ask the search engine to exclude a certain word eg trans put the minus sign in front of it.

At least it is that for Google. Before searching why not look up the sytax that the search engine uses. For instance Google used to be that you added the NOT and then the words to exclude.

The results reflect what people who use the internet to post info, whether newspapers or researchers, that they think are important.

So what the search engines are telling you is that people are more interested in posting about trans women ie men, than women.

We all know that.

So in the same way as wikipedia reflects that it is mainly men who post entries so you get little info about women, the same is true of the internet as a whole.

Its a vicious circle. If women aren't prioritiesed by the world at large then the internet reflects that back.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with left or right wing.

Its the patriarchy.

Just did it. All but one result on the first page are related to trans people being killed.

I remember when Barack Obama first became president, if you google imaged Michelle Obama the first image was an incredibly racist picture of her mixed with a monkey face. It's not there anymore but it took long while for it to not come up.

I'm pretty sure black women aren't overly important to the tech companies.

I had slightly better results using Ecosia using the search "women murdered in 2019", slightly better in that some of the first page results were not trans based.