7 ms·

Winston Churchill’s Image Removed in UK/US Search Results?

66 points by jpxw 6y ago

seesawtron 6y ago
This is insane. Just tried it and its true. Let this be a reminder that internet is not free but under control of umbrella corporations and it is naive to assume the opposite. Is this what Orwell meant that history can be re-written when you have the full authority? "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped." Edit: Maybe Google will respond (again) with: Sorry it was an internal bug in the code.
- danharaj 6y ago
  What Orwell described is a matter of degree, not a different state of affairs. His criticisms were of the mechanisms of power enabled by the mechanisms of media in the era of industrialized civilization. His efforts were towards a future where we transcend that era in favor of democratic socialism. In his own words: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects."
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    If the degree is still such that other search engines return Churchill, and Google also returns Churchill if you make clear your intent (https://www.google.com/search?q=winston+churchill&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=winston+churchill&tbm=isch), I think we can relax a bit on the fear of Big Brotherism.
    - danharaj 6y ago
      I certainly don't think it's Big Brother* at work here but it is worth pondering what it means that communication is so centralized that the idiosyncrasy of a single point of access can affect billions of people. For every quirk that is noticed, what goes unnoticed? * especially since, like, Big Brother as it exists loves Winston Churchill
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        That's always a good point. Decisions that Google makes do have wide-sweeping impact. This bug is minor; the decision to have top-boxes at all (for example, the fact that there's a result at all for "World War II leaders" and it includes specific people and excludes others) is a feature and has billions-of-users reach.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  "Internal bug in the code?" "An internal bug in the code, at this time of day, only in this country, localized entirely on this photo!?"
  - andrepd 6y ago
    "May I see it?" "No." Which is a great description of proprietary software. Without transparency, you cannot trust anything it's doing.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      Yeah, it'd be nice if there were a transparent search engine. Not even DDG lets us see the metadata that drives how it makes decisions on what results to return. Not like any of us can debug those search results from our couches.
    - banads 6y ago
      >"May I see it?" Given what we've seen from the likes of Cambridge Analytica, this seems like a question of national security.
  - Xorlev 6y ago
    Rollouts often happen on a per-country basis. Including bugs.
  - solidasparagus 6y ago
    The ticket says that this is a problem in a ton of countries (US, UK, Sebia, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Ireland).
  - andrewingram 6y ago
    Good Simpsons reference!
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    Isn't it more likely to be an external activists who figured out a way to poison Google search results?
- Xorlev 6y ago
  Maybe don't be so alarmist? Bugs do happen.
  - x38iq84n 6y ago
    This is no bug, this is intentional. Google the names of UK's PMs, from Johnson, May, Cameron going all the way. Only one PM does not get their photo displayed on the page with search results. Not because it failed to load/whatever, the page layout simply does not contain the photo in the place where it is for all others.
    - Xorlev 6y ago
      You don't know that. For all you know, some kind of knowledge graph tag propagated too far. There is zero evidence of it being intentional. You really think they'd just erase the photos of UK PMs? Please. If there was some kind of conspiracy there, don't you think hiding the information too (vs linking directly to the pages that have it) would be a more effective strategy? I know it's fun to jump on Google as the dictator erasing history here, but have you really thought this position through? Especially when one of Google's big industries is education, and kids are going to write papers about WW2, and various British PMs?
      - x38iq84n 6y ago
        Not erase, just add it to the already long list of suppressed and filtered content. Have you tried what I suggested, have you googled the names of few PMs? The page with search results for Churchill lacks the code to display photo in the bio at the right side. The layout and code is different, it's not just failing to load, cache problem or whatever. The most likely explanation is that a google employee added the photo on a block list in support of BLM.
        detaro 6y ago
        A (cache or whatever) problem that leads to the property not being set would produce exactly that result. It also seems clear that there isn't one global list of these people and their portraits Google uses to feed these boxes: When I compare the screenshot someone posted below with what I see, many of the leaders have different portraits.
buboard 6y ago
huge if true
- jpxw 6y ago
  It is true - try it out for yourself. Google “UK prime ministers” or “WW2 leaders”.
  - buboard 6y ago
    it's black , also no image in the wikipedia box. (i'm in greece)
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Not super-huge. Bugs do happen. And if there were actual intent to censor, you'd think the dedicated Image Search would be the first thing to go.
agakshat 6y ago
Just gonna put this here https://duckduckgo.com/about https://duckduckgo.com/about
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  And, hey, to their credit, DDG does a fine job of returning an immediate Churchill photo. This is to be expected, since it's a bug in Google and not Bing.
starpilot 6y ago
Please, it's just his photo not showing up, google still serves his Wikipedia page just fine. This seems like an error and not censorship.
imgabe 6y ago
Weird, I'm in Hong Kong and it doesn't show up here either. Unless I'm misunderstanding the implication is that this is somehow related to the protests? That seems like an odd way for Google to try to erase history, by just removing a picture, not the whole entry and not targeting any of the other myriad leaders people could object to, like Thatcher. It seems more likely that it's a glitch of some kind.
mhh__ 6y ago
If this is anything other than an accident this is absolutely insane.
- dilandau 6y ago
  Google and others are literally tripping over each other to virtue-signal these days. That said, this has to be a bug.
churchillracist 6y ago
Malcolm Gladwell's podcast did a great expose on why Churchill is for all intents and purpose the same level of war criminal as Hitler. Audio transcript: https://blog.simonsays.ai/the-prime-minister-and-the-prof-with-malcolm-gladwell-s2-e5-revisionist-history-podcast-b352121f621b https://blog.simonsays.ai/the-prime-minister-and-the-prof-wi... Gladwell's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1Vw7Z_2SD8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1Vw7Z_2SD8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Winston_Churchill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Winston_Church...
- phs 6y ago
  And yet Hitler shows up.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    To save everyone else the click through the Google support thread: https://imgur.com/cQniuVj https://imgur.com/cQniuVj
  - churchillracist 6y ago
    Rightfully so. I agree there shouldn't be any censorship. Just as the facts about Churchill ought to be highlighted and he shouldn't be allowed to aryanwash history.
- Bud 6y ago
  So you made an account just to push this point of view? Pardon me if I'm not terribly impressed. How about you make the argument yourself, in your own words, if you think it's so convincing? Good luck convincing any rational adults that Churchill is on the same level as Hitler. Notwithstanding Churchill's flaws and racism, that's plainly ludicrous.
  - churchillracist 6y ago
    Instead of you demanding I make the argument myself in my own words, you could just please watch or listen to the podcast that I directly linked to. Churchill and Lindemann intentionally genocided 3 million Indians. That's not just plain racism, that's genocide. Same as Hitler.
pkaye 6y ago
Maybe Churchill invoked the "right to be forgotten" laws?
refurb 6y ago
This is getting pretty ridiculous. If we're going to purge our nation's history of people who held beliefs we disagree with today, we're going to end up purging everyone. A good example is MLK. Civil rights leader and US icon. MLK also held very anti-LGBT views, which are captured in a letter he wrote a young man who said he was attracted to men.[1] Are we going to start tearing down his statues too? And renaming roads? "Your problem is not at all an uncommon one. However, it does require careful attention. The type of feeling that you have toward boys is probably not an innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired....You are already on the right road toward a solution, since you honestly recognize the problem and have a desire to solve it." [1]https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/advice-living-4 https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/adv...
- Xorlev 6y ago
  Or, perhaps it's a bug? You're ascribing a whole lot of intent to something without any details to support that position.
  - x38iq84n 6y ago
    What a coincidence that such alleged bug exists for this particular person at this particular time. A virtue-signaling google employee blocking the photo in support of BLM is the simplest and most likely explanation.
    - fault_lines 6y ago
      It's not much of a coincidence that the bug manifests at a time when there is considerable internet activity around Winston Churchill when Google's system automatically chooses photographs to display based on an effectively black boxed algorithm. It does not seem far fetched that the activity may have caused the algorithm to change the result to use an image that has some kind of error, for example. Your "simplest explanation" is a wild leap.
- dmix 6y ago
  Michael Jackson was recorded saying anti-Semitic statements in a taped phone call in addition (allegedly) in lyrics in one of his songs. More than enough to get cancelled today. You could do this stuff endlessly if you wanted to, plus you can just slightly expand the scope when you run out of low hanging fruit... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/24/michaeljacksontrial.arts https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/24/michaeljackson... https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/15/arts/in-new-lyrics-jackson-uses-slurs.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/15/arts/in-new-lyrics-jackso...
_bxg1 6y ago
I have to say, it's weird to think they would do something like this intentionally without coming out and saying it, since the entire point would be PR. Does anyone have proof or confirmation that it's intentional?
nihil75 6y ago
So it's not happening on a per-country basis. Reports are coming from Serbia, Australia, South Africa and I can confirm Netherlands as well. Don't over react, don't spread misinformation.
- lern_too_spel 6y ago
  The right wing outrage machine has been triggered. This will be rolled into the QAnon conspiracy canon by EOD.
  - berbec 6y ago
    Churchill was about to leak internal Clinton emails of the pizzaria-sex trafficking ring.
    - lern_too_spel 6y ago
      "Erasing history" is the new "war on Christmas" Boogeyman. The same people who used to think Starbucks putting "Happy Holidays" on coffee cups was a manifestation of a nefarious plot by the executives to dismantle Christianity now believe that removing statues glorifying the Confederacy and racists indicates some plot by intellectuals to remove them from history books and search engines.
      - dang 6y ago
        Please don't use HN for ideological flamewar. It is tedious and it destroys what this site is supposed to be for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        lern_too_spel 6y ago
        To my mind, I was simply explaining the reason why all the comments in the linked article and the top comment in this thread assumed that Google intentionally removed Churchill's picture despite how ludicrous that belief seems. That explanation necessarily involves mentioning the conspiracy theorists who are inclined to believe certain wacky things based on perceived attacks against their political beliefs. Thank you for the clarification.
akitzmiller 6y ago
Please, people. If Google wanted to make a statement about imperialists and white overlordship, there are more impactful ways to do so than hiding Churchill's picture. This is just a glitch
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Exactly. Currently the statement Google makes about imperialists and white overlordship is that we probably meant imperialism and white overlordship. :-D https://www.google.com/search?q=imperialists+and+white+overlordship https://www.google.com/search?q=imperialists+and+white+overl...
jedimastert 6y ago
This seems to be an issue with the structured information coming from Wikipedia. His picture still shows up in image searches, it's like his profile picture just got deleted or something. If this was actually an attempt by Google to censor something then they're doing a pretty poor job at it...
- Veen 6y ago
  I’m not sure that the point is censorship, but a signal of solidarity with far-left activists in the UK who are engaged in a campaign of vandalism against statues of historical figures they disapprove of, most prominently Winston Churchill.
shadowgovt 6y ago
Among the many, many, many things that could cause this: If the specific source image Google had cached as "Churchill" got scrubbed for some reason (any reason, really, including possibly copyright issues), there's no guarantee the subsystem that vends those summary images has a backup Churchill image to vend, and it may have nothing to show until the cache is repopulated. Meanwhile, an Image Search for his name shows as much Churchill as you want. Nothing really to worry about here. Unless we're generally commenting on how one bug can have significant impact on surface-level results (which has always been true, and that's why there's more than one search engine in the world).
X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
Oddly I can't find him in the "people also search for" when searching for other leaders and his family
JamisonM 6y ago
I find it hilariously dumb that people are hyperventilating over what, at first glance, looks like a fairly obvious cache corruption bug of some kind. The Orwellian implications of not showing Churchill's /image/ in the carousel of Prime Ministers after a search are precisely nil.
- seesawtron 6y ago
  Nothing is "fairly obvious" in today's world. You can choose to ignore everything and assume that the state is run by organisations that care about the "greater good". This is of course a effortless thing to do. Or you can start to re evaluate your dependence on a single centralized source of information and how there exist no measures to control that source by a publically elected body making it an extremely powerful agency for mass propaganda IF it decided to do so. It's more than just about whether this was an honest glitch or an intentional response to adhere to ongoing anger of public so as to show support. Either way, it is necessary to think how long such powerful agencies can exist without intentionally or unintentionally contributing to Orwellian dystopia.
  - JamisonM 6y ago
    This is a good example of what I find very funny. Your comment would be an entirely appropriate reaction to, say, the well-documented evidence of YouTube's recommendation engine pushing people toward radicalization - which seems like a very dystopian thing, aligns very well with their profit motive, and if demonstrated to be accurate, effective, and intentional would be of genuine concern. This is literally just a trifle.
- thu2111 6y ago
  A cache corruption bug? Of exactly this guy, and nobody else in that carousel, at exactly that time? At a company that has decades of experience of serving data from huge datasets without corruption? There are really only two plausible explanations here. The first is that some employee with KG access went rogue and blacked out Churchill because they're an idiot. The second is that the process for selecting the image of such people is entirely automated - probably pulling from Wikipedia - and the mass orgy of USSR-style history erasure has affected one of the input data sources in such a way that the algorithm bailed out or didn't know what to do. Given Danny Sullivan's apparently sincere answer that they don't currently know what happened, my guess is it's probably the latter. If it was an employee deleting it then an audit trail would probably have been left or said employee would have admitted to it and they'd know already. But sorry, to believe that this is caused by anything other than BLM hard-left historical revisionism is very naive. That's not how computers work.
raarts 6y ago
Someone told me a few months ago to search Google images for 'white family' vs 'black family'. And the results were remarkable. White families turn out to be a lot more colored then black families are white. Regardless the reasons I don't like people or programs messing with my search results. Does Google consider me a bigot and tries to change my view of the world? Will this prove to other people I must be racist because search results are personalized? Or is Google racist for being better at recognizing black than whites? Maybe some insiders can explain?
- thu2111 6y ago
  I used to work at Google. In the old days, before it was apparently internally hijacked by social activists. These sorts of things can occur by accident. It sounds implausible but it used to happen all the time. Thing to remember is that even after decades of work Google is not really a question answering machine. It's still, at its core, matching words and phrases to things it found on the internet. The most famous problem was "Google-bombing" where people realised they could control the top result for obscure phrases by using links, like [is george bush an idiot]. There was one related to Jews as well that I don't remember. Some mitigations were added and it went away as a problem. The [white families] vs [black families] thing sounds a lot like the older example of [white inventors] vs [black inventors]: https://external-preview.redd.it/N6gh6oArK2EWeIoaPJkoD-mDcsuJ_ShHwrt7VAGcJvU.png?auto=webp&s=b62ff16d727eb53a40124486a75ccbc541a9633c https://external-preview.redd.it/N6gh6oArK2EWeIoaPJkoD-mDcsu... As you can see if you search Google Images for [white american inventors] then you get the same results today. This isn't caused by racism in the algorithm or at Google but rather the fact that you're searching in English and most English speakers on the internet are from America or western Europe i.e. white. Thus it's rare to prefix professions with "white" when describing photos because that's the assumed default. How many articles are out there discussing "white inventors", do you think? Or even "white families"? Blacks on the other hand are a minority of the population and especially rare in things like "inventing", which is a rather archaic job description and thus biases old to begin with. It's practically guaranteed that any page matching the phrase "white american inventors" is going to be primarily a discussion of race, not inventing. To see that this is true just search Google Images for [family]. What a shock - all the photos are of white people. Now that said, back when I was working there people would understand these things, and give Google the benefit of the doubt. They were right to do so because in my entire time there I never saw any evidence of specific biases being introduced into web search for political reasons, nor did I see any evidence the executives in charge of web search were biased. For a search engine that trust seemed important, at least at the time. These days Google has changed and now routinely brags about its extreme biases. Firing Damore was a turning point. Now people see things like those search results or Churchill disappearing and assume the worst, instead of assuming the best. Because the true explanations are usually proprietary and arcane, this is leading to a downward spiral of trust. It's especially hard to defend Google's lack of bias these days, even knowing things like the above explanations, because they keep doing dumb stuff like publishing papers on "debiasing AI", which when read turn out to be about biasing AI towards left-wing sensibilities. For example making it believe incorrect things about gender distributions amongst the professions. Is Google search still unbiased? Well ... I search using DuckDuckGo these days by default. Just in case.
mnm1 6y ago
Not to worry. They still have pictures of Hitler and Stalin. Those guys must've been the good guys since their pictures are still on google.
menacingly 6y ago
I disagree with the easy dismissals of "they're doing a poor job of purging history". I don't think they're tyring to purge history, I think they (or more specifically, staff) are making a plausibly deniable political statement that can be dismissed as a bug.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  They don't need to purge history. They only need to convince the newer generation that our country is based on injustice and tyranny. That is how they will justify their future violent revolution. The goal is create just enough distaste for the symbols and history of the country so that fewer people will fight for it when they decide to take over. Personally, I also subscribe to the conspiracy theory that these efforts are getting foreign help.
baryphonic 6y ago
And now it's being flagged on HN?! What in the world is wrong with these people?
- dang 6y ago
  Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23515496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23515496
  - baryphonic 6y ago
    Thank you and my apologies for making a mountain out of a molehill. Mr Churchill's image is back where we expect it this morning.
yongjik 6y ago
Sigh, do people really think there's some hidden propagandist in Google that blacklisted Churchill's photo? To send what message, exactly? That they will randomly censor images until you do one single click on "Images" which will foil their evil plan? Many years ago there was an amusing bug for a few days - when you searched for Rachel (I think) the Biblical figure, the infobox showed a happy smiling face of some office worker somewhere (named Rachel, of course). Machines work in mysterious ways, sometimes they pick up signals in totally idiotic ways. At least, nobody accused Google of a hidden conspiracy to discredit Judaism...
- seesawtron 6y ago
  In response to everything we see around today that seems to make significant waves in the whole world, you can respond differently as you choose. You can choose to ignore everything and assume that the state is run by organisations that care about the "greater good". This is of course a effortless thing to do. Or you can start to re evaluate your dependence on a single centralized source of information and how there exist no measures to control that source by a publically elected body making it an extremely powerful agency for mass propaganda IF it decided to do so. It's more than just about whether this was an honest glitch or an intentional response to adhere to ongoing anger of public so as to show support. Either way, it is necessary to think how long such powerful agencies can exist without intentionally or unintentionally contributing to Orwellian dystopia.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  I suspect it's a search poisoning effort by an external group.
mmusc 6y ago
Yeah so now we're in a world where Winston Churchill is censored. But Hitler is not. I understand it's just a picture but it's a slippery slope. A search engine should return results based on your search query. What if the person searching wants to learn about the very subject they are trying censor. There's a big difference between moving/removing a statue and purging all records online.
anewdirection 6y ago
Why is this flagged? This is a very interesting bug. I would love to see a post mortem on how such things happen behind the scenes. Are there relly too many morons busy pushing ideologies in the comments to actually explore this?
- dang 6y ago
  Yes, unfortunately the thread is a combination of (1) people jumping indignantly to the extremely unlikely conclusion that Google is censoring Churchill, and (2) people arguing angrily about Churchill and (you guessed it) Hitler. Curiosity might have a faint chance against one or the other of those but not both at the same time, so I don't think it makes sense to turn off the flags. If more substantial information comes up about why this was happening, it might be possible to have a curious discussion. The vast majority of the time, these things turn out not to have been intentional or anything close to sinister. Internet users just like to assume otherwise because it's more outrageous and more fun.
sullivandanny 6y ago
The image was not removed purposefully. Images in the Knowledge Graph can update at any time. If they do, they briefly disappear. That's what seems to be happening here. We're exploring the issue more. Here's more info we posted about it: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1272077555860824065 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1272077555860824065
- throwaway_12351 6y ago
  Mate, good luck explaining that to your UK customers. This is beyond acceptable for any group of people.
- x38iq84n 6y ago
  The explanation is a load of BS. This "brief disappearance" has been going on for >12 hours now and as far as everybody is aware only one person is affected by this.
- thu2111 6y ago
  As a former Google engineer and someone who still holds some quantity of Google stock, I hope you publish a post-mortem about this. Even if it's something embarrassing like "someone added a picture to Wikipedia and our algorithm couldn't disambiguate it" or worse, "an internal employee went rogue and we're strengthening our procedures". Because frankly this bug is catastrophic for Google's credibility in the UK. Nobody will believe this is some random bug or coincidence, it quite transparently is not. Even if the problem isn't directly caused by Google employees but just the engine being confused by the turmoil out on the net, that's not the simplest possible explanation and thus in the absence of other information, it's not what people will conclude. Since Google became more publicly left-wing and committed to social justice type causes, it has to work harder to convince people it's unbiased. YouTube has been deleting videos of anyone who criticised the COVID lockdowns, including actual epidemiologists and Nobel Prize winners, and that's been widely publicised. So going into this event you're already being perceived as a part of the mainstream establishment censorship machine. And now this - it looks exactly like the people blacking out their instagram photos in solidarity with BLM. Politicians in the UK are currently receiving enormous quantities of anger from the population about the desecration of war memorials and war heros. It's an issue that's triggered huge public feeling. Google doesn't want to get sucked into that. A rigorous technical post mortem could show people what really happened and avert a political disaster.

66 points by jpxw 6y ago

This is insane. Just tried it and its true. Let this be a reminder that internet is not free but under control of umbrella corporations and it is naive to assume the opposite. Is this what Orwell meant that history can be re-written when you have the full authority? "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped." Edit: Maybe Google will respond (again) with: Sorry it was an internal bug in the code.

danharaj 6y ago
What Orwell described is a matter of degree, not a different state of affairs. His criticisms were of the mechanisms of power enabled by the mechanisms of media in the era of industrialized civilization. His efforts were towards a future where we transcend that era in favor of democratic socialism. In his own words: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects."
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  If the degree is still such that other search engines return Churchill, and Google also returns Churchill if you make clear your intent (https://www.google.com/search?q=winston+churchill&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=winston+churchill&tbm=isch), I think we can relax a bit on the fear of Big Brotherism.
  - danharaj 6y ago
    I certainly don't think it's Big Brother* at work here but it is worth pondering what it means that communication is so centralized that the idiosyncrasy of a single point of access can affect billions of people. For every quirk that is noticed, what goes unnoticed? * especially since, like, Big Brother as it exists loves Winston Churchill
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      That's always a good point. Decisions that Google makes do have wide-sweeping impact. This bug is minor; the decision to have top-boxes at all (for example, the fact that there's a result at all for "World War II leaders" and it includes specific people and excludes others) is a feature and has billions-of-users reach.
mhh__ 6y ago
"Internal bug in the code?" "An internal bug in the code, at this time of day, only in this country, localized entirely on this photo!?"
- andrepd 6y ago
  "May I see it?" "No." Which is a great description of proprietary software. Without transparency, you cannot trust anything it's doing.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    Yeah, it'd be nice if there were a transparent search engine. Not even DDG lets us see the metadata that drives how it makes decisions on what results to return. Not like any of us can debug those search results from our couches.
  - banads 6y ago
    >"May I see it?" Given what we've seen from the likes of Cambridge Analytica, this seems like a question of national security.
- Xorlev 6y ago
  Rollouts often happen on a per-country basis. Including bugs.
- solidasparagus 6y ago
  The ticket says that this is a problem in a ton of countries (US, UK, Sebia, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Ireland).
- andrewingram 6y ago
  Good Simpsons reference!
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Isn't it more likely to be an external activists who figured out a way to poison Google search results?
Xorlev 6y ago
Maybe don't be so alarmist? Bugs do happen.
- x38iq84n 6y ago
  This is no bug, this is intentional. Google the names of UK's PMs, from Johnson, May, Cameron going all the way. Only one PM does not get their photo displayed on the page with search results. Not because it failed to load/whatever, the page layout simply does not contain the photo in the place where it is for all others.
  - Xorlev 6y ago
    You don't know that. For all you know, some kind of knowledge graph tag propagated too far. There is zero evidence of it being intentional. You really think they'd just erase the photos of UK PMs? Please. If there was some kind of conspiracy there, don't you think hiding the information too (vs linking directly to the pages that have it) would be a more effective strategy? I know it's fun to jump on Google as the dictator erasing history here, but have you really thought this position through? Especially when one of Google's big industries is education, and kids are going to write papers about WW2, and various British PMs?
    - x38iq84n 6y ago
      Not erase, just add it to the already long list of suppressed and filtered content. Have you tried what I suggested, have you googled the names of few PMs? The page with search results for Churchill lacks the code to display photo in the bio at the right side. The layout and code is different, it's not just failing to load, cache problem or whatever. The most likely explanation is that a google employee added the photo on a block list in support of BLM.
      - detaro 6y ago
        A (cache or whatever) problem that leads to the property not being set would produce exactly that result. It also seems clear that there isn't one global list of these people and their portraits Google uses to feed these boxes: When I compare the screenshot someone posted below with what I see, many of the leaders have different portraits.

buboard 6y ago

huge if true

jpxw 6y ago
It is true - try it out for yourself. Google “UK prime ministers” or “WW2 leaders”.
- buboard 6y ago
  it's black , also no image in the wikipedia box. (i'm in greece)
shadowgovt 6y ago
Not super-huge. Bugs do happen. And if there were actual intent to censor, you'd think the dedicated Image Search would be the first thing to go.

agakshat 6y ago

Just gonna put this here https://duckduckgo.com/about https://duckduckgo.com/about

shadowgovt 6y ago
And, hey, to their credit, DDG does a fine job of returning an immediate Churchill photo. This is to be expected, since it's a bug in Google and not Bing.

starpilot 6y ago

Please, it's just his photo not showing up, google still serves his Wikipedia page just fine. This seems like an error and not censorship.

imgabe 6y ago

Weird, I'm in Hong Kong and it doesn't show up here either. Unless I'm misunderstanding the implication is that this is somehow related to the protests? That seems like an odd way for Google to try to erase history, by just removing a picture, not the whole entry and not targeting any of the other myriad leaders people could object to, like Thatcher. It seems more likely that it's a glitch of some kind.

mhh__ 6y ago

If this is anything other than an accident this is absolutely insane.

dilandau 6y ago
Google and others are literally tripping over each other to virtue-signal these days. That said, this has to be a bug.

churchillracist 6y ago

Malcolm Gladwell's podcast did a great expose on why Churchill is for all intents and purpose the same level of war criminal as Hitler. Audio transcript: https://blog.simonsays.ai/the-prime-minister-and-the-prof-with-malcolm-gladwell-s2-e5-revisionist-history-podcast-b352121f621b https://blog.simonsays.ai/the-prime-minister-and-the-prof-wi... Gladwell's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1Vw7Z_2SD8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1Vw7Z_2SD8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Winston_Churchill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Winston_Church...

phs 6y ago
And yet Hitler shows up.
- Lammy 6y ago
  To save everyone else the click through the Google support thread: https://imgur.com/cQniuVj https://imgur.com/cQniuVj
- churchillracist 6y ago
  Rightfully so. I agree there shouldn't be any censorship. Just as the facts about Churchill ought to be highlighted and he shouldn't be allowed to aryanwash history.
Bud 6y ago
So you made an account just to push this point of view? Pardon me if I'm not terribly impressed. How about you make the argument yourself, in your own words, if you think it's so convincing? Good luck convincing any rational adults that Churchill is on the same level as Hitler. Notwithstanding Churchill's flaws and racism, that's plainly ludicrous.
- churchillracist 6y ago
  Instead of you demanding I make the argument myself in my own words, you could just please watch or listen to the podcast that I directly linked to. Churchill and Lindemann intentionally genocided 3 million Indians. That's not just plain racism, that's genocide. Same as Hitler.

pkaye 6y ago

Maybe Churchill invoked the "right to be forgotten" laws?

refurb 6y ago

This is getting pretty ridiculous. If we're going to purge our nation's history of people who held beliefs we disagree with today, we're going to end up purging everyone. A good example is MLK. Civil rights leader and US icon. MLK also held very anti-LGBT views, which are captured in a letter he wrote a young man who said he was attracted to men.[1] Are we going to start tearing down his statues too? And renaming roads? "Your problem is not at all an uncommon one. However, it does require careful attention. The type of feeling that you have toward boys is probably not an innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired....You are already on the right road toward a solution, since you honestly recognize the problem and have a desire to solve it." [1]https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/advice-living-4 https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/adv...

Xorlev 6y ago
Or, perhaps it's a bug? You're ascribing a whole lot of intent to something without any details to support that position.
- x38iq84n 6y ago
  What a coincidence that such alleged bug exists for this particular person at this particular time. A virtue-signaling google employee blocking the photo in support of BLM is the simplest and most likely explanation.
  - fault_lines 6y ago
    It's not much of a coincidence that the bug manifests at a time when there is considerable internet activity around Winston Churchill when Google's system automatically chooses photographs to display based on an effectively black boxed algorithm. It does not seem far fetched that the activity may have caused the algorithm to change the result to use an image that has some kind of error, for example. Your "simplest explanation" is a wild leap.
dmix 6y ago
Michael Jackson was recorded saying anti-Semitic statements in a taped phone call in addition (allegedly) in lyrics in one of his songs. More than enough to get cancelled today. You could do this stuff endlessly if you wanted to, plus you can just slightly expand the scope when you run out of low hanging fruit... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/24/michaeljacksontrial.arts https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/24/michaeljackson... https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/15/arts/in-new-lyrics-jackson-uses-slurs.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/15/arts/in-new-lyrics-jackso...

_bxg1 6y ago

I have to say, it's weird to think they would do something like this intentionally without coming out and saying it, since the entire point would be PR. Does anyone have proof or confirmation that it's intentional?

nihil75 6y ago

So it's not happening on a per-country basis. Reports are coming from Serbia, Australia, South Africa and I can confirm Netherlands as well. Don't over react, don't spread misinformation.

lern_too_spel 6y ago
The right wing outrage machine has been triggered. This will be rolled into the QAnon conspiracy canon by EOD.
- berbec 6y ago
  Churchill was about to leak internal Clinton emails of the pizzaria-sex trafficking ring.
  - lern_too_spel 6y ago
    "Erasing history" is the new "war on Christmas" Boogeyman. The same people who used to think Starbucks putting "Happy Holidays" on coffee cups was a manifestation of a nefarious plot by the executives to dismantle Christianity now believe that removing statues glorifying the Confederacy and racists indicates some plot by intellectuals to remove them from history books and search engines.
    - dang 6y ago
      Please don't use HN for ideological flamewar. It is tedious and it destroys what this site is supposed to be for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - lern_too_spel 6y ago
        To my mind, I was simply explaining the reason why all the comments in the linked article and the top comment in this thread assumed that Google intentionally removed Churchill's picture despite how ludicrous that belief seems. That explanation necessarily involves mentioning the conspiracy theorists who are inclined to believe certain wacky things based on perceived attacks against their political beliefs. Thank you for the clarification.

akitzmiller 6y ago

Please, people. If Google wanted to make a statement about imperialists and white overlordship, there are more impactful ways to do so than hiding Churchill's picture. This is just a glitch

shadowgovt 6y ago
Exactly. Currently the statement Google makes about imperialists and white overlordship is that we probably meant imperialism and white overlordship. :-D https://www.google.com/search?q=imperialists+and+white+overlordship https://www.google.com/search?q=imperialists+and+white+overl...

jedimastert 6y ago

This seems to be an issue with the structured information coming from Wikipedia. His picture still shows up in image searches, it's like his profile picture just got deleted or something. If this was actually an attempt by Google to censor something then they're doing a pretty poor job at it...

Veen 6y ago
I’m not sure that the point is censorship, but a signal of solidarity with far-left activists in the UK who are engaged in a campaign of vandalism against statues of historical figures they disapprove of, most prominently Winston Churchill.

shadowgovt 6y ago

Among the many, many, many things that could cause this: If the specific source image Google had cached as "Churchill" got scrubbed for some reason (any reason, really, including possibly copyright issues), there's no guarantee the subsystem that vends those summary images has a backup Churchill image to vend, and it may have nothing to show until the cache is repopulated. Meanwhile, an Image Search for his name shows as much Churchill as you want. Nothing really to worry about here. Unless we're generally commenting on how one bug can have significant impact on surface-level results (which has always been true, and that's why there's more than one search engine in the world).

X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago

Oddly I can't find him in the "people also search for" when searching for other leaders and his family

JamisonM 6y ago

I find it hilariously dumb that people are hyperventilating over what, at first glance, looks like a fairly obvious cache corruption bug of some kind. The Orwellian implications of not showing Churchill's /image/ in the carousel of Prime Ministers after a search are precisely nil.

seesawtron 6y ago
Nothing is "fairly obvious" in today's world. You can choose to ignore everything and assume that the state is run by organisations that care about the "greater good". This is of course a effortless thing to do. Or you can start to re evaluate your dependence on a single centralized source of information and how there exist no measures to control that source by a publically elected body making it an extremely powerful agency for mass propaganda IF it decided to do so. It's more than just about whether this was an honest glitch or an intentional response to adhere to ongoing anger of public so as to show support. Either way, it is necessary to think how long such powerful agencies can exist without intentionally or unintentionally contributing to Orwellian dystopia.
- JamisonM 6y ago
  This is a good example of what I find very funny. Your comment would be an entirely appropriate reaction to, say, the well-documented evidence of YouTube's recommendation engine pushing people toward radicalization - which seems like a very dystopian thing, aligns very well with their profit motive, and if demonstrated to be accurate, effective, and intentional would be of genuine concern. This is literally just a trifle.
thu2111 6y ago
A cache corruption bug? Of exactly this guy, and nobody else in that carousel, at exactly that time? At a company that has decades of experience of serving data from huge datasets without corruption? There are really only two plausible explanations here. The first is that some employee with KG access went rogue and blacked out Churchill because they're an idiot. The second is that the process for selecting the image of such people is entirely automated - probably pulling from Wikipedia - and the mass orgy of USSR-style history erasure has affected one of the input data sources in such a way that the algorithm bailed out or didn't know what to do. Given Danny Sullivan's apparently sincere answer that they don't currently know what happened, my guess is it's probably the latter. If it was an employee deleting it then an audit trail would probably have been left or said employee would have admitted to it and they'd know already. But sorry, to believe that this is caused by anything other than BLM hard-left historical revisionism is very naive. That's not how computers work.

raarts 6y ago

Someone told me a few months ago to search Google images for 'white family' vs 'black family'. And the results were remarkable. White families turn out to be a lot more colored then black families are white. Regardless the reasons I don't like people or programs messing with my search results. Does Google consider me a bigot and tries to change my view of the world? Will this prove to other people I must be racist because search results are personalized? Or is Google racist for being better at recognizing black than whites? Maybe some insiders can explain?

thu2111 6y ago
I used to work at Google. In the old days, before it was apparently internally hijacked by social activists. These sorts of things can occur by accident. It sounds implausible but it used to happen all the time. Thing to remember is that even after decades of work Google is not really a question answering machine. It's still, at its core, matching words and phrases to things it found on the internet. The most famous problem was "Google-bombing" where people realised they could control the top result for obscure phrases by using links, like [is george bush an idiot]. There was one related to Jews as well that I don't remember. Some mitigations were added and it went away as a problem. The [white families] vs [black families] thing sounds a lot like the older example of [white inventors] vs [black inventors]: https://external-preview.redd.it/N6gh6oArK2EWeIoaPJkoD-mDcsuJ_ShHwrt7VAGcJvU.png?auto=webp&s=b62ff16d727eb53a40124486a75ccbc541a9633c https://external-preview.redd.it/N6gh6oArK2EWeIoaPJkoD-mDcsu... As you can see if you search Google Images for [white american inventors] then you get the same results today. This isn't caused by racism in the algorithm or at Google but rather the fact that you're searching in English and most English speakers on the internet are from America or western Europe i.e. white. Thus it's rare to prefix professions with "white" when describing photos because that's the assumed default. How many articles are out there discussing "white inventors", do you think? Or even "white families"? Blacks on the other hand are a minority of the population and especially rare in things like "inventing", which is a rather archaic job description and thus biases old to begin with. It's practically guaranteed that any page matching the phrase "white american inventors" is going to be primarily a discussion of race, not inventing. To see that this is true just search Google Images for [family]. What a shock - all the photos are of white people. Now that said, back when I was working there people would understand these things, and give Google the benefit of the doubt. They were right to do so because in my entire time there I never saw any evidence of specific biases being introduced into web search for political reasons, nor did I see any evidence the executives in charge of web search were biased. For a search engine that trust seemed important, at least at the time. These days Google has changed and now routinely brags about its extreme biases. Firing Damore was a turning point. Now people see things like those search results or Churchill disappearing and assume the worst, instead of assuming the best. Because the true explanations are usually proprietary and arcane, this is leading to a downward spiral of trust. It's especially hard to defend Google's lack of bias these days, even knowing things like the above explanations, because they keep doing dumb stuff like publishing papers on "debiasing AI", which when read turn out to be about biasing AI towards left-wing sensibilities. For example making it believe incorrect things about gender distributions amongst the professions. Is Google search still unbiased? Well ... I search using DuckDuckGo these days by default. Just in case.

mnm1 6y ago

Not to worry. They still have pictures of Hitler and Stalin. Those guys must've been the good guys since their pictures are still on google.

menacingly 6y ago

I disagree with the easy dismissals of "they're doing a poor job of purging history". I don't think they're tyring to purge history, I think they (or more specifically, staff) are making a plausibly deniable political statement that can be dismissed as a bug.

koheripbal 6y ago
They don't need to purge history. They only need to convince the newer generation that our country is based on injustice and tyranny. That is how they will justify their future violent revolution. The goal is create just enough distaste for the symbols and history of the country so that fewer people will fight for it when they decide to take over. Personally, I also subscribe to the conspiracy theory that these efforts are getting foreign help.

baryphonic 6y ago

And now it's being flagged on HN?! What in the world is wrong with these people?

dang 6y ago
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23515496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23515496
- baryphonic 6y ago
  Thank you and my apologies for making a mountain out of a molehill. Mr Churchill's image is back where we expect it this morning.

yongjik 6y ago

Sigh, do people really think there's some hidden propagandist in Google that blacklisted Churchill's photo? To send what message, exactly? That they will randomly censor images until you do one single click on "Images" which will foil their evil plan? Many years ago there was an amusing bug for a few days - when you searched for Rachel (I think) the Biblical figure, the infobox showed a happy smiling face of some office worker somewhere (named Rachel, of course). Machines work in mysterious ways, sometimes they pick up signals in totally idiotic ways. At least, nobody accused Google of a hidden conspiracy to discredit Judaism...

seesawtron 6y ago
In response to everything we see around today that seems to make significant waves in the whole world, you can respond differently as you choose. You can choose to ignore everything and assume that the state is run by organisations that care about the "greater good". This is of course a effortless thing to do. Or you can start to re evaluate your dependence on a single centralized source of information and how there exist no measures to control that source by a publically elected body making it an extremely powerful agency for mass propaganda IF it decided to do so. It's more than just about whether this was an honest glitch or an intentional response to adhere to ongoing anger of public so as to show support. Either way, it is necessary to think how long such powerful agencies can exist without intentionally or unintentionally contributing to Orwellian dystopia.
koheripbal 6y ago
I suspect it's a search poisoning effort by an external group.

mmusc 6y ago

Yeah so now we're in a world where Winston Churchill is censored. But Hitler is not. I understand it's just a picture but it's a slippery slope. A search engine should return results based on your search query. What if the person searching wants to learn about the very subject they are trying censor. There's a big difference between moving/removing a statue and purging all records online.

anewdirection 6y ago

Why is this flagged? This is a very interesting bug. I would love to see a post mortem on how such things happen behind the scenes. Are there relly too many morons busy pushing ideologies in the comments to actually explore this?

dang 6y ago
Yes, unfortunately the thread is a combination of (1) people jumping indignantly to the extremely unlikely conclusion that Google is censoring Churchill, and (2) people arguing angrily about Churchill and (you guessed it) Hitler. Curiosity might have a faint chance against one or the other of those but not both at the same time, so I don't think it makes sense to turn off the flags. If more substantial information comes up about why this was happening, it might be possible to have a curious discussion. The vast majority of the time, these things turn out not to have been intentional or anything close to sinister. Internet users just like to assume otherwise because it's more outrageous and more fun.

sullivandanny 6y ago

The image was not removed purposefully. Images in the Knowledge Graph can update at any time. If they do, they briefly disappear. That's what seems to be happening here. We're exploring the issue more. Here's more info we posted about it: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1272077555860824065 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1272077555860824065

throwaway_12351 6y ago
Mate, good luck explaining that to your UK customers. This is beyond acceptable for any group of people.
x38iq84n 6y ago
The explanation is a load of BS. This "brief disappearance" has been going on for >12 hours now and as far as everybody is aware only one person is affected by this.
thu2111 6y ago
As a former Google engineer and someone who still holds some quantity of Google stock, I hope you publish a post-mortem about this. Even if it's something embarrassing like "someone added a picture to Wikipedia and our algorithm couldn't disambiguate it" or worse, "an internal employee went rogue and we're strengthening our procedures". Because frankly this bug is catastrophic for Google's credibility in the UK. Nobody will believe this is some random bug or coincidence, it quite transparently is not. Even if the problem isn't directly caused by Google employees but just the engine being confused by the turmoil out on the net, that's not the simplest possible explanation and thus in the absence of other information, it's not what people will conclude. Since Google became more publicly left-wing and committed to social justice type causes, it has to work harder to convince people it's unbiased. YouTube has been deleting videos of anyone who criticised the COVID lockdowns, including actual epidemiologists and Nobel Prize winners, and that's been widely publicised. So going into this event you're already being perceived as a part of the mainstream establishment censorship machine. And now this - it looks exactly like the people blacking out their instagram photos in solidarity with BLM. Politicians in the UK are currently receiving enormous quantities of anger from the population about the desecration of war memorials and war heros. It's an issue that's triggered huge public feeling. Google doesn't want to get sucked into that. A rigorous technical post mortem could show people what really happened and avert a political disaster.