Incident 88: "Jewish Baby Strollers" Provided Anti-Semitic Google Images, Allegedly Resulting from Hate Speech Campaign

Description: Google's Image search for "Jewish baby strollers" showed offensive, anti-Semitic results, allegedly a result of a coordinated hate-speech campaign involving malicious actors on 4chan.

Tools

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Alleged: Google developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Jewish people and Google Images users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
88
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2017-08-15
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam

CSETv0 Taxonomy Classifications

Taxonomy Details

Full Description

In October 2020, Google images showed anti-semitic images of a portable oven when a user searches "Jewish baby stroller" due to anti-semitic online groups tagging these anti-semitic images with the tag "Jewish baby stroller." Google claims this is a result of 'voids of information' or the algorithm being unable to decipher the image and relying on the images' tags.

Short Description

In October 2020, results for "Jewish baby stroller" on Google Images showed anti-semitic images as a result of organized online targeting by anti-Semitic online groups.

Severity

Minor

Harm Distribution Basis

Religion

Harm Type

Psychological harm

AI System Description

The Google image algorithm uses image recognition and appended text or tags to classify images.

System Developer

Google

Sector of Deployment

Information and communication

Relevant AI functions

Perception, Cognition, Action

AI Techniques

supervised learning, open source

AI Applications

image recognition, image classification, recommendation engine

Location

Global

Named Entities

Google Images, Google, raid

Technology Purveyor

Google, raid

Beginning Date

10/2020

Ending Date

10/2020

Near Miss

Harm caused

Intent

Deliberate or expected

Lives Lost

No

Data Inputs

images, tags, appended texts, user input

A Google search for ‘Jewish baby strollers’ yields anti-Semitic images. An extremist campaign may be to blame.
jta.org · 2020

(JTA) — The Google results are shocking: Do an image search for “Jewish baby strollers” and you’ll see row upon row of portable ovens — an offensive allusion to the Holocaust.

Google says it’s looking into the search results and wants to im…

Jewish Baby Stroller Image Algorithm
timebulletin.com · 2020

The anti-Semitic movement has been on the rise coordinated by an online group named ‘raid’. They operate by manipulating the google image search engine results by attaching abusive images tagged with innocent keywords which in turn, shows t…

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.