A Google image search is going viral on Twitter as it’s said to highlight the pervasiveness of racial bias and media profiling.
A dude named Kabir Alli posted this clip on Twitter of himself carrying out a simple search of ‘three black teenagers’ on Google, which loads up a bunch of prisoner mugshots and undesirables.
When he searches for “three white teenagers” however, all you get is stock photos of smiling, well-behaved looking young people:
YOOOOOO LOOK AT THIS pic.twitter.com/uY1JysFm8w — 21 Kabbage (@iBeKabir) June 7, 2016
Much of the reaction seems to be people calling Google racist, although Kabir himself has a little more sense:
https://twitter.com/iBeKabir/status/740537933904683008?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
He added:
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.
At the end of the day, there are a lot of stories out there covering crimes involving “three black teenagers.” Is that the messed up reality of media coverage and crime statistics? Yes. But is that down to Google purposely trying to manipulate their search results to oppress black people? No. In fact, the more articles show up about this story, the more results it creates for Google where both “three white teenagers” and “three black teenagers” is in the SEO and all photos associated with the story now come up:
That’s just how Google works – nothing intentional about it on their part.
Obviously, in true social media fashion, this guy is making the most of his Tweet going viral:
add me on snap though pic.twitter.com/WMiZ6Kyb2J — 21 Kabbage (@iBeKabir) June 7, 2016
This isn’t the first time Google has been accused of racism though – remember when their Photos app was tagging black people as gorillas? Fuck me, that was embarrassing.