5 ms·

> any search tangentially related to “Asian” (i.e., Asian-American, Asian food, Southeast Asian, Asian restaurants near me, etc) will return a message reading “

by neya 6y ago

> any search tangentially related to “Asian” (i.e., Asian-American, Asian food, Southeast Asian, Asian restaurants near me, etc) will return a message reading “You cannot browse this page at ‘google.com’ because it is restricted,” or, “The URL was blocked by a content filter.” > Other racial or ethnic search terms such as “Black,” “white,” “Korean,” “Arab” or “French” don’t seem to be impacted by the filter. How is this not racism against Asians? It's pathetic that a trillion dollar company's racist content filter would even pass through quality checks in the first place.

filoleg 6y ago
>How is this not racism against Asians? That same filter also blocks the word "redhead", among others.
- type0 6y ago
  What conclusion could we make? Apple doesn't consider Asians and redheads important enough to fix this.
  - filoleg 6y ago
    I think a more charitable interpretation of the situation would be "Apple didn't expect the number of Adult Content Filter users to be high enough to dedicate more efforts to testing it before shipping. So they had no idea until now that there were issues like this in the first place." This situation has nothing to do with Asians or redheads not being "important enough". It has everything to do with the adult content filter feature not being "important enough" (until these news about the bug broke out, I assume).
judge2020 6y ago
Because there is no quality check. It's a bad implementation not being reviewed by a human - it's not racist, it's just banning stuff related to porn, and inconsistently at that.
- zwkrt 6y ago
  > it's not racist, it's just Hanlon’s razor is no excuse for discrimination. In fact it’s the most common excuse, but it is never acceptable.
  - x3n0ph3n3 6y ago
    No one is saying it's an excuse or acceptable, it's just an explanation for why the state of things is the way it is. People are too lazy or incompetent to fix software. Calling it racism is to cheapen the label into meaninglessness.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    I'm not saying it is. If Apple spun a wheel of all english words with the commitment to ban the one it landed on, and it was 'asian', it wouldn't be racist, but as you say it wouldn't be acceptable - both in terms of how they did it and the outcome.
  - dnautics 6y ago
    as an asian american, uh... I guess my feeling is that this isn't meaningfully discrimination. It's both an understandable mistake, and unacceptable only when not fixed with celerity.
    - Brian_K_White 6y ago
      I don't consider it an understandable or excusable mistake. Not that they failed to specially protect Asians when they made their content filter, that they even made a content filter in the first place. Because this kind of error is not only predictable and inevitable, it's not even fixable. Even now, even if someone at Apple directs this to be fixed, the fix can only possibly be stupid, and the same error will still happen to countless other benign searches and content. Even actual humans get this wrong. Since 2018 when they introduced the filter, it was known for blocking searches for "safe sex" or anything with sex in the string, while allowing searches to join terrorist organizations. The fundamental problem is that words are not deeds nor intents. Words, any words, are just words and have no good or bad value. Even good people doing good things still have to use words that refer to bad things. In order to say "War is Hell", you have to say both war and hell. It's patently insane to think there is some way around such a basic thing. If you wanted to respond to my arguement and say yeah but what about "Japanese school girl"? You had to say "Japanese school girl" and the discussion would be impossible or a farce if both our comments kept getting blocked, or even if just the "bad" parts were.
fhood 6y ago
Seems silly to suggest "racism" rather than badly designed algorithm that nobody at apple is paying attention to.
- saurik 6y ago
  And how is that not racism? "I didn't care enough about Asians to make my software work for them" is "systemic racism".
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - HaoZeke 6y ago
    Do you have proof that no Asian employees at Apple were involved in the development of the filter?
    - saurik 6y ago
      I mean, why do you think my statement has anything to do with that? It is widely accepted among the people who talk about "systemic racism" that, say, the existence of black cops doesn't mean the department isn't racist against black people.
  - type0 6y ago
    It's called systematic bias
joshxyz 6y ago
Easy there bud thats just shit algo and its hilarious
cgriswald 6y ago
The author of the article bends over backwards to make an incredibly weak and muddled argument for racism, before using a term that many people, including people who are the demographic focus of the term, find racist in any context. It's an absolutely terrible article. The filter is racist because the term being blocked is the result of an underlying bias in the data that has racist origins: the fetishization of Asian women. (That block may have a real impact on people's lives. A young child searching for 'Asian history'; or a teen searching for 'Asian takeout' won't be able to find what they're looking for, which could impact Asians directly. I don't know specifically, and a real journalist would have found some real life examples, tried to get data to measure impact, etc.) I don't agree with the author that this is 'insulting' just because it happened; or that Apple (or anyone) need necessarily hand curate the block list. (Maybe they can automate a filter list for their filter list...) I think the problem is that Apple was informed of this problem over a year ago and has neither discussed nor resolved it. That problem is, at best, only hinted at in the article.
kbumsik 6y ago
Anyone who think it's not racism, look at this: > Shen also told the Independent that he had filed a report to Apple in December 2019 pointing out the issue, but that he never received a response. So Apple ignored the issue for more than a year. This is the real problem. If it were "black" then do you expect people will react the same and say it's just an algorithm problem or a systematic bias?

by neya 6y ago

filoleg 6y ago

>How is this not racism against Asians? That same filter also blocks the word "redhead", among others.

type0 6y ago
What conclusion could we make? Apple doesn't consider Asians and redheads important enough to fix this.
- filoleg 6y ago
  I think a more charitable interpretation of the situation would be "Apple didn't expect the number of Adult Content Filter users to be high enough to dedicate more efforts to testing it before shipping. So they had no idea until now that there were issues like this in the first place." This situation has nothing to do with Asians or redheads not being "important enough". It has everything to do with the adult content filter feature not being "important enough" (until these news about the bug broke out, I assume).

judge2020 6y ago

Because there is no quality check. It's a bad implementation not being reviewed by a human - it's not racist, it's just banning stuff related to porn, and inconsistently at that.

zwkrt 6y ago
> it's not racist, it's just Hanlon’s razor is no excuse for discrimination. In fact it’s the most common excuse, but it is never acceptable.
- x3n0ph3n3 6y ago
  No one is saying it's an excuse or acceptable, it's just an explanation for why the state of things is the way it is. People are too lazy or incompetent to fix software. Calling it racism is to cheapen the label into meaninglessness.
- judge2020 6y ago
  I'm not saying it is. If Apple spun a wheel of all english words with the commitment to ban the one it landed on, and it was 'asian', it wouldn't be racist, but as you say it wouldn't be acceptable - both in terms of how they did it and the outcome.
- dnautics 6y ago
  as an asian american, uh... I guess my feeling is that this isn't meaningfully discrimination. It's both an understandable mistake, and unacceptable only when not fixed with celerity.
  - Brian_K_White 6y ago
    I don't consider it an understandable or excusable mistake. Not that they failed to specially protect Asians when they made their content filter, that they even made a content filter in the first place. Because this kind of error is not only predictable and inevitable, it's not even fixable. Even now, even if someone at Apple directs this to be fixed, the fix can only possibly be stupid, and the same error will still happen to countless other benign searches and content. Even actual humans get this wrong. Since 2018 when they introduced the filter, it was known for blocking searches for "safe sex" or anything with sex in the string, while allowing searches to join terrorist organizations. The fundamental problem is that words are not deeds nor intents. Words, any words, are just words and have no good or bad value. Even good people doing good things still have to use words that refer to bad things. In order to say "War is Hell", you have to say both war and hell. It's patently insane to think there is some way around such a basic thing. If you wanted to respond to my arguement and say yeah but what about "Japanese school girl"? You had to say "Japanese school girl" and the discussion would be impossible or a farce if both our comments kept getting blocked, or even if just the "bad" parts were.

fhood 6y ago

Seems silly to suggest "racism" rather than badly designed algorithm that nobody at apple is paying attention to.

saurik 6y ago
And how is that not racism? "I didn't care enough about Asians to make my software work for them" is "systemic racism".
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- HaoZeke 6y ago
  Do you have proof that no Asian employees at Apple were involved in the development of the filter?
  - saurik 6y ago
    I mean, why do you think my statement has anything to do with that? It is widely accepted among the people who talk about "systemic racism" that, say, the existence of black cops doesn't mean the department isn't racist against black people.
- type0 6y ago
  It's called systematic bias

joshxyz 6y ago

Easy there bud thats just shit algo and its hilarious

cgriswald 6y ago

The author of the article bends over backwards to make an incredibly weak and muddled argument for racism, before using a term that many people, including people who are the demographic focus of the term, find racist in any context. It's an absolutely terrible article. The filter is racist because the term being blocked is the result of an underlying bias in the data that has racist origins: the fetishization of Asian women. (That block may have a real impact on people's lives. A young child searching for 'Asian history'; or a teen searching for 'Asian takeout' won't be able to find what they're looking for, which could impact Asians directly. I don't know specifically, and a real journalist would have found some real life examples, tried to get data to measure impact, etc.) I don't agree with the author that this is 'insulting' just because it happened; or that Apple (or anyone) need necessarily hand curate the block list. (Maybe they can automate a filter list for their filter list...) I think the problem is that Apple was informed of this problem over a year ago and has neither discussed nor resolved it. That problem is, at best, only hinted at in the article.

kbumsik 6y ago

Anyone who think it's not racism, look at this: > Shen also told the Independent that he had filed a report to Apple in December 2019 pointing out the issue, but that he never received a response. So Apple ignored the issue for more than a year. This is the real problem. If it were "black" then do you expect people will react the same and say it's just an algorithm problem or a systematic bias?