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Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine
- s9w 8y agoThis article is straight up asking for censorship. Nothing else.
- 83457 8y agoCorrect. They are literally asking that the censorship feature to work as expected.
- s9w 8y agoSafeSearch definition says: "filter out adult text, images, and videos". It's not about racism. So it's working as expected
- jonchang 8y agoDid you read further along? There's also suggestions for bestiality and borderline child pornography, both of which definitely fall under adult images and in one or both cases are very illegal.
- true_religion 8y agoYou said borderline, because it is not past the line of illegality. Thus your second sentence makes no sense.
- jonchang 8y agoThere is a debate whether nonsexualized images of minors (e.g., toddlers playing in baths, which is mentioned in the linked article) actually constitutes child pornography. Jurisdictions vary about their interpretation, hence "borderline". I don't feel the need to define this so precisely in my original post because it distracts from my main point, which is that Bing is not only not filtering hate material but also stuff that many would generally agree fall under adult content. I will not respond to any replies to this post because I will assume that further argument is in bad faith aimed at obscuring my main point.
- yorwba 8y agoBorderline but legal child pornography would still be classified as "adult", no? To me, the second sentence makes perfect sense.
- true_religion 8y agoIf you have safe search on, all the results should be non nude, non adult. I reread the article, and see where I went wrong. They mix up two issues: bing returning odd suggestions with safe search on, and bing returning results for searches for illegal material with safe search off. I had thought they were only talking about safe search being on. In my misreading, I made the assumption that Bing would never return illegal results for searches for children, as it would never return pornography since safe search is on. Apologies to the OP.
- ubernostrum 8y agoFlip this around: There are at the very least billions of possible search term refinements and pieces of content which are not currently actively suggested. Is your position that, because they are not being suggested at this moment, they are being censored?
- s9w 8y agoThe suggestions are being computed by an algorithm. If you take things away from those it's censorship.
- ubernostrum 8y agoThe algorithm was designed to do certain things. Does this mean it's censoring the things it wasn't designed to do? (there's no way to claim that changing the algorithm would be censorship without acknowledging that the algorithm already censors things)
- lavayya 8y agoAnd who designed the algorithm?
- hnzix 8y agocuration != censorship.
- Nasrudith 8y agoPersonally I find that brutal honesty about its search suggestions refreshing as opposed to manually excluding anything remotely controversial. Although the reality is probably that somebody is spoofing the search suggestions for laughs above and beyond morbid curiosity and jokes of debatable taste akin to searching for nuclear warheads on eBay.
- sam_goody 8y agoThe issue is that once these thoughts and articles are suggested, they become much more mainstream. Try something less controversial, robbery. No doubt, people search for "how to break into houses", and you might even click on that link if it was a top suggestion. But if people saw that all the time, there would be an increase in robberies, and a decrease in the feeling that it matters. And just because it generates traffic, doesn't mean it is what most people are really looking for! It just means that it has appeal because of the way we are wired to respond to things that are outrageous. Once it is a suggestion (even at the end of the list) it will get clicks, and move up till it dominates.
- jstanley 8y ago> Once it is a suggestion (even at the end of the list) it will get clicks, and move up till it dominates. So why isn't every article that has ever been suggested moving up until it dominates?
- sam_goody 8y agoBecause most articles don't trigger the same responses. It is the outrageuos and the radical that trigger the interest. Have you not noticed that the links on the side of all the trash blogs are full of "The craziest snake!" or whatever? Which clickbait works better - "Hitler loved his black maid" or "cheap diapers"? Does that really mean that more people are searching for Hitler's black maid than for cheap diapers?
- jstanley 8y ago
- avip 8y agoAs a jew, I can't decide which one is more offensive: The dumb Antisemitic suggestions from Bing, or Jew Jitsu being the top autocompletion on Chrome. Hey Google! There are 14M of us, give some credit.
- shroom 8y agoReading your comment I reacted with 14M not being a lot at all. I was surprised to find out it is true. Having no knowledge of this before I’ve always assumed this number would be higher. Based on influence I guess. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country
- mosselman 8y agoNot the main point of the article, so off topic, but isn’t “underage children” a pleonasm? Or is it a term that respects that we are all someone’s child, so also when we reach adulthood? The term seems to suggest there is an age from which it is acceptable for children to receive sexual attention from adults. I prefer to think that there is no such age. Most people would probably agree with this. Pleonasms are very common; “your personal belongings” is a funny one. In the case of ‘underage children’ though, it undermines the message.
- yorwba 8y ago> Most people would probably agree with this. I think you might be overestimating how common your opinion is. In many (maybe most) countries, children are considered capable of consent even before they are granted all privileges of adulthood. Sometimes it's only if the partner is underage as well, but then one will be an adult sooner than the other, so there are exceptions for cases where the age difference is small. Because of the various exceptions in traditional consent law in contrast to bright-line rules against child pornography (below 18 is illegal, no exceptions), it's possible for legal sex to become illegal as soon as there's a camera between the participants. The best-known cases are probably of teens being prosecuted for child pornography when they take nude selfies.
- mosselman 8y agoWhat you say is true for interpersonal relationships. The article is about imagery with an erotic element. So in the context of erotic photography I think that most countries would consider participation of children illegal and I think most people would agree with that. So I'd think that in the context of the article it could be a pleonasm, but an understandable one then.
- henriquemaia 8y agoWell, you can have shared belongings, as with things you own with your family members (usually spouse). So my personal belongings is a valid distinction, not a pleonasm.
- anonytrary 8y agoAt least searching "muslims are" in Bing gives you honest autocompletes that reflect what people actually search for. Google, on the other hand, evidently censors content it deems to be offensive. If you search "muslims are" in Google, there are no autocomplete results at all. I doubt Google does not have enough data on "muslims are *" searches I have safe search off, meaning I don't want to be patronized when I am searching things. I would much rather know what people search for than have Google treat me like I'm their child with their hands covering my eyes during the dirty scenes.
- jakobegger 8y agoSome things should not be autocompleted. I can't think of a reason why a search engine should suggest a completion if you start typing something generic like "xyz are ...".
- anonytrary 8y agoSearching "muslims are vegetarian" could be seen as another way to search "are muslims vegetarian". A good search engine lets you search query soup like this. They don't necessarily return the same results, but people are pretty bad at querying.
- jakobegger 8y agoYeah, there's nothing wrong with a query like that, and I think autocomplete is fine once you typed "muslims are vege...". But I don't see why you'd autocomplete a sentence that could go anywhere. Just because many people type that isn't a good reason.
- jstanley 8y agoWhy isn't that a good reason? It's not a search engine's job to be the thought police.
- 8y ago
- honestoHeminway 8y agoNow who has a search engine, which is policed and censored by the chinese government- and doesnt want to stick out as a lawfull evil person here? Surely such a actor wouldnt shill this article to encite public outrage, and demands to take actions that already have been taken. And are under debate, because a wildly debating competitor appears in the chinese market.
- sgt101 8y agoIt doesn't suggest those things for me - did they fix it or is this a case of personalisation?
- pjgrad 8y agoAs the article states, Microsoft took note of it and started correcting some of the suggestions.
- johnpowell 8y agoThe article is 2.5 weeks old. Maybe the people at Bing cleaned it up a bit.
- klohto 8y agoWhy does everyone need to have a safe space? Bing suggestions work perfectly fine without patronizing and treating you like a dumb child that doesn't know how to use internet.
- boffinism 8y agoA bunch of people who use Bing are children who don't know how to use the internet.
- pembrook 8y agoSo the slippery slope here is: if you're 12 and see an algorithm autocomplete "muslims are [insert racist thing]," its going turn you into a racist by suggestion? The reason autocomplete results end up this way is because the humans this kid lives around are racists. Those people will be the reason the kid grows up racist, not some 2nd tier search engine. Why lie to the kid and pretend like the community he/she lives in doesn't have a problem? I've never understood this bizarre desire we have to hide reality from children to keep them ignorant (or more commonly referred to as "innocent"). As if they can't observe the objective reality around them. The sooner they can understand the problems with the world the sooner their generation can work toward fixing them.
- scoot_718 8y agoSure, but google image search gives spam results from Pinterest, so Bing still wins.
- lake99 8y agoWhat? I tried these searches out when the article was just three hours old on HN. I could not reproduce any of these results. Safe Search was set "Moderate", and my results did not change significantly when I switched it to "Off". The worst it got for me was when I asked for autocomplete suggestions for "muslims are": good hindu worst cancer killed Disclosure: I performed these searches from India. I'm open to the possibility that there could be regional factors worsening the search results in the US. Even so, I can't imagine what Indian customizations would make my search suggestions for "Michelle Obama" so innocuous compared to what I see in the article.
- pjc50 8y agoNot so much autocomplete suggestions, but the autosuggested related searches under Image Search. In my case I got shown "muslims are scum" and "muslims are terrorists", in the UK. "Michelle Obama" got suggested "... muscles"?
- lake99 8y agoNo, I had looked at those too. Both under Image Search (for Jews, Muslims, and "gril") and under Videos (for Michelle Obama). All the related searches were completely innocuous. The autocomplete suggestions were the least innocuous ones I got. Looking for "gril" got me images of girls, but all completely SFW or child-safe.
- puranjay 8y agoThis article assumes that Bing is in the business of telling people what to think It's not; it's in the business of showing what people think
- pjc50 8y agoNo, a search engine literally tells you what to look at, based on what you told it. And for many people there's a short path between seeing and believing. The autocomplete suggestions are a suggestion: would you like to search for this? And in the minds of many people that normalises it. "Stochastic terrorism" is a real problem. You've got one guy mailing out bombs and another shooting up a synagogue based on lies they read on the internet, just this past week. This stuff has consequences.
- vidanay 8y agoI once did a search on Bing for a .NET topic and Bing didn't even return any Microsoft documentation results.