Incident 400: Google Search Returned Fewer Results for Abortion Services in Rural Areas

Description: Google Search reportedly returned fewer abortion clinics for searches from poorer and rural areas, particularly ones with Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws.

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Alleged: Google developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed women in need of abortion services and women having unexpected or crisis pregnancies.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
400
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2022-02-23
Editors
Khoa Lam
Googling for Abortion: Search Engine Mediation of Abortion Accessibility in the United States
arxiv.org · 2022

Among the myriad barriers to abortion access, crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) pose an additional difficulty by targeting women with unexpected or "crisis" pregnancies in order to dissuade them from the procedure. Web search engines may prov…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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