Note: A version of the following also appears on the Tow Center blog.
In Germany, a man recently won a legal battle with Google over the fact that when you searched for his name, the autocomplete suggestions connected him to “scientology” and “fraud,” — two things that he felt had defamatory insinuations. As a result of losing the case, Google is now compelled to remove defamatory suggestions from autocomplete results when notified, in Germany at least.
Court cases arising from autocomplete defamation aren’t just happening in Germany though. In other European countries like Italy, France, and Ireland, to as wide afield as Japan and Australia people (and corporations) have brought suit alleging these algorithms defamed them by linking their names to everything from crime and fraud to bankruptcy or sexual conduct. In some cases such insinuations can have real consequences for finding jobs or doing business. New services, such as brand.com’s “Google Suggest Plan” have even arisen to help people manipulate and thus avoid negative connotations in search autocompletions.
The Berkman Center’s Digital Media Law Project (DMLP) defines a defamatory statement generally as, “a false statement of fact that exposes a person to hatred, ridicule or contempt, lowers him in the esteem of his peers, causes him to be shunned, or injures him in his business or trade.” By associating a person’s name with some unsavory behavior it would seem indisputable that autocomplete algorithms can indeed defame people.
So if algorithms like autocomplete can defame people or businesses, our next logical question might be to ask how to hold those algorithms accountable for their actions. Considering the scale and difficulty of monitoring such algorithms, one approach would be to use more algorithms to keep tabs on them and try to find instances of defamation hidden within their millions (or billions) of suggestions.
To try out this approach I automatically collected data on both Google and Bing autocompletions for a number of different queries relating to public companies and politicians. I then filtered these results against keyword lists relating to crime and sex in order to narrow in on potential cases of defamation. I used a list of the corporations on the S&P 500 to query the autocomplete APIs with the following templates, where “X” is the company name: “X,” “X company,” “X is,” “X has,” “X company is,” and “X company has.” And I used a list of U.S. congresspeople from the Sunlight Foundation to query for each person’s first and last name, as well as adding either “representative” or “senator” before their name. The data was then filtered using a list of sex-related keywords, and words related to crime collected from the Cambridge US dictionary in order to focus on a smaller subset of the almost 80,000 autosuggestions retrieved.
Among the corporate autocompletions that I filtered and reviewed, there were twenty-four instances that could be read as statements or assertions implicating the company in everything from corruption and scams to fraud and theft. For instance, querying Bing for “Torchmark” returns as the second suggestion, “torchmark corporation job scam.” Without really digging deeply it’s hard to tell if Torchmark corporation is really involved in some form of scam, or if there’s just some rumors about scam-like emails floating around. If those rumors are false, this could indeed be a case of defamation against the company. But this is a dicey situation for Bing, since if they filtered out a rumor that turned out to be true it might appear they were trying to sweep a company’s unsavory activities under the rug. People would ask: Is Bing trying to protect this company? At the same time they would be doing a disservice to their users by not steering them clear of a scam.
While looking through the autocompletions returned from querying for congresspeople it became clear that a significant issue here relates to name collisions. For relatively generic congressperson names like “Gerald Connolly” or “Joe Barton” there are many other people on the internet with the same names. And some of those people did bad things. So when you Google for “Gerald Connolly” one suggestion that comes up is “gerald connolly armed robbery,” not because Congressman Gerald Connolly robbed anyone but because someone else in Canada by the same name did. If you instead query for “representative Gerald Connolly” the association goes away; adding “representative” successfully disambiguates the two Connollys. The search engine has it tough though: Without a disambiguating term how should it know you’re looking for the congressman or a robber? There are other cases that may be more clear-cut instances of defamation, such as on Bing “Joe Barton” suggesting “joe barton scam” which was not corrected when adding the title “representative” to the front of the query. That seems to be more of a legitimate instance of defamation since even with the disambiguation it’s sti