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Apple will finally fix issue that blocked searches for 'Asian' as adult content
- porphyra 6y agoThe fetishization of Asian women is insane. If you search for "asian" on Reddit, the vast majority of results are porn subreddits.
- gnicholas 6y agoPerhaps, but Reddit ≠ the internet.
- xenihn 6y agoJust tried this and did not get a single NWS result. Skin care was #2
- porphyra 6y agoMaybe if you enabled "show nsfw content" in your settings. Screenshot for search results of "asian": https://i.redd.it/9jbms02e3mn61.png https://i.redd.it/9jbms02e3mn61.png
- xenihn 6y agoWon't that bias the search towards showing you NSFW content? Since you specifically made it clear that that's what you are interested in.
- keenreed 6y agoAlso try that on pornhub.... Half of reddit is a porn.
- lakecresva 6y agoI think you're misusing the search. If I enable nsfw by adding `nsfw:yes`, both 'asian' and 'european' show ONLY porn results both for content and communities. If I omit the `nsfw:yes`, but allow my profile to view nsfw content, both 'european' and 'asian' don't show any porn in the search results. The search filter is either a binary, or there's just so much porn for everything that it doesn't matter.
- porphyra 6y agoThere was no "nsfw:yes" in the search box. It was literally just "asian". I am using the search feature on the new reddit design on web: https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=asian&type=sr%2Cuser https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=asian&type=sr%2Cuser Other ethnicities, also show up with some porn results, but not nearly as extreme as for "asian". e.g. for "white" and "black" it was about a third of the top 20.
- lakecresva 6y agoI have 'Enable to view adult and NSFW (not safe for work) content in your feed and search results' enabled in my user profile, and this is what I'm seeing when I click that link: https://imgur.com/gm9PZqZ https://imgur.com/gm9PZqZ
- porphyra 6y agoHere's what I see: https://i.imgur.com/VMTdfDk.png https://i.imgur.com/VMTdfDk.png If you just recently enabled the setting in your user profile, probably there is just some caching on reddit's side so it is still serving the old results from before you enabled that.
- Daho0n 6y agoI don't think it's higher up than many other "types" it's just a broader group, like ebony, compared to all the searches that would mostly result in (or believed to result in) white women. Blondes, redheads, brunettes, cowgirls, cheerleaders, etc. all defaults to mostly white women in the results. Besides you are searching a site that is almost a SoMe version of PornHub.
- HarryHirsch 6y agoExactly that. I bet most people looking for "redhead" aren't after makeup or hair care advice.
- ceejayoz 6y ago"White is the default" is still racism, and its existence doesn't make "Asian == porn" any less racist.
- maxrev17 6y ago:s in this context does that make any sense? Specificity of porn query/popularity of query/result?
- maxrev17 6y agoAnd would racism not imply that people would dislike and therefore not search for this term/produce this content?
- Daho0n 6y agoFirst of all I didn't say if it were racist or not. Secondly the default of mostly white women is because most movies/clips are of white women. There's nothing racist in the way the results are distributed. You could argue that there are more white women in porn because of racism but that is another topic. I'd like to hear how you see returning mostly results with white women on a search of "redheads" as racisme though.
- TakuYam 6y agoAt what point does attraction cross the line and become fetishization?
- porphyra 6y agoThe fact that machine learning or statistical methods find that the word "asian" is so highly correlated with porn that it is basically synonymous enough to be blocked is a problem.
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- alpaca128 6y agoThat is a problem, but with the algorithm or its flawed application. I don't think it's too far-fetched to expect one of the largest and richest tech companies worldwide to be able to tell with decent accuracy how the word "asian" was used. The sophistication of their blocking method is basically on par with a basic word filter that doesn't even attempt to avoid the Scunthorpe problem. I mean, we're not talking about reaching 99% accuracy or really advanced linguistic detection. When a company sells smart home voice assistants surely they can be expected to tell "asian food" from more lewd content apart. Keep a list of naughty websites, track what web searches regularly return those as result and then target those specific queries. Or throw some Machine Learning at it, might as well put their enthusiastically marketed AI processing unit to use. Accurate content filtering is hard. But completely blocking anything using one of the most common words in the language just because it frequently links to porn sites? Come on.
- porphyra 6y agoYes, the algorithm is definitely inappropriate and too basic. However let's not overlook that it is a societal problem that a large amount of the US population does not care about Asians at all apart from porn. When there is 100x more searches for "asian hotties" than for "asian history", you can get 99% accuracy just by blacklisting the word "asian".
- pengaru 6y agoIn the earlier days of the internet Russian/mail-order brides seemed far more visible than asian porn/fetishes to me. I wonder when the tides shifted and what was responsible for it. Now if you search "russian" the results are dominated by politics.
- mc32 6y agoAccording to Pornhub[1] their top searches world-wide were: Lesbian Teen (18+) Ebony MILF Anal BigDick Hentai Arab ... [1]https://www.inverse.com/article/26011-pornhub-post-popular-porn-report-2016 https://www.inverse.com/article/26011-pornhub-post-popular-p... Asian was way at the bottom (and was the most pop term in Hawai'i, I guess that's expected). It looks like fetishization is an exaggeration, never the less, even if it were, who cares? People can prefer what they want, so long as it's legal.
- Cenk 6y agoHere’s the same chart for 2019: https://cs.phncdn.com/insights-static/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/1-pornhub-insights-2019-year-review-most-searched-terms.png https://cs.phncdn.com/insights-static/wp-content/uploads/201... 1. Japanese 2. Hentai 3. Lesbian 4. Milf 5. Korean 6. Asian
- mc32 6y agoIf you look at the stats, "Japanese" is driven by Chinese/Central Asian viwership. N-Am and S-Am still prefer lesbians (primarily driven by women viewers, btw). Honestly, JP porn is unwatchable. Squeaky sounds, just quite "unique" as they say. It's the porn you'd watch if you want to quit watching porn.
- PentelicoMarble 6y agoPornhub is blocked in China.
- mc32 6y agoThat’s great, I’m going by what they have on their graphic. Maybe they mean HK + the renegade province. It does not specify.
- PentelicoMarble 6y agoWhich graphic are you referring to?
- reaperducer 6y agoIf you're positing that white westerners are responsible for fetishizing Asian women, then you haven't spent any time in a Japanese convenience store in the last 50 years.
- PentelicoMarble 6y agoSurely you see the difference between Asian men being into Asian women and white men being into Asian women?
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoNo? What difference does it make?
- colinfirthisok 6y agoI think the implication is that people are interested in their own race by default and everything outside of that is notable/unusual. Not sure I buy it.
- Larrikin 6y agoNo the implication is people find people similar to the people they interact with regularly attractive by default. This doesn't preclude people from liking other types of people, but it's not common for someone to grow up surrounded by certain types of people and find none of them attractive.
- colinfirthisok 6y agoI don't think that's obviously the case. What _is_ the case is most people dating people who are 1. in close geographical proximity 2. in a similar socioeconomic position, not necessarily because they prefer that, but because that's the most natural way (at least historically) to find someone to date.
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- 88840-8855 6y agoWhat is the problem? I am a white dude and I like Asian women. Nothing wrong there. I do not see it as fetish at all. In fact, it is easier to date Asian girls for me. Hence, the preference formed.
- timeslip1523 6y agoPlus, have you seen the obesity rates for white women? Don't worry, you'll feel them, jurassic park-style. Edit: go on a diet instead of flagging!
- throwaway_porn 6y agoI am asian but I never use that to describe myself. There's always a narrower adjective that doesn't lump culturally distinct groups like chinese/korean/japanese/etc together. Except when I am describing how I look. So I don't see this a bad thing. I basically expect the same results when you search for other descriptor of appearances like blonde or big boobs. There's no other reason for subreddit communities to form around appearances other than look at gifs of them. (though there are exceptions like when you want to form communities specifically to complain about problems caused by said appearances: /r/bigboobproblems /r/ABraThatFits)
- thomastjeffery 6y agoWhat other things do you expect to find from the word Asian? Food? Try Thai, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. Same goes for anything else I can think of except porn.
- kgc 6y agoI also just tried this and didn't get any NSFW content. Most of it is coverage on hate crimes against East Asians. Maybe there's a filter to disable somewhere.
- encryptluks2 6y agoSo Apple is admitting to being racist? Shouldn't we cancel them now?
- Daho0n 6y agoThe woke crowd can't cancel Apple without having to buy a new phone and laptop to comment from. Way too much work.
- ronsor 6y agoApple has far too much money. There's no chance of being able to cancel them anyway.
- sweetheart 6y agoUsing woke as a derogatory term is such a bad look. The woke crowd in this case being folks who are trying to address issues of anti-Asian hate by exposing shortcomings like this. Seems weird to me to make fun of people who are trying to do that.
- Daho0n 6y agoI don't believe "the woke crowd" does anything at all for anti-asian hate. They only post woke comments online. Those that do make a difference are a totally different breed. I'm sure you know the kind of person I'm making fun of.
- nitrogen 6y agoUsing "bad look" as a derogatory term is also a bad look. Focusing on optics over substance is a big part of the mess that is current discourse. I expect the vast majority of people who practice what they preach are doing a lot more practicing and very little preaching.
- ThrowawayR2 6y agoAs an Asian, I find the progressive crowd to say one thing but do quite another with regard to helping Asians, so frankly the flak they receive is something that they earned through their own actions.
- lacker 6y agoAt Google around 2008-2009 we had a similar issue with the word "lesbian"... it was basically impossible to get Google Suggest to suggest anything non-adult when you started typing in "lesbian", despite trying hard to filter out all adult suggestions, because even a tiny false negative rate in the adult content filter still wasn't enough. I think someone ended up just hardcoding the Google Suggest behavior for this query. I wouldn't be surprised if it still works that way now....
- salamandersauce 6y agoI remember the first time I tried DuckDuckGo I searched the word "breast" as a test. Not a single search result with the adult filter. Not even chicken breast recipes. They seemed to have improved it since then.
- Semaphor 6y agoI had an amazing search result with ddg: I searched "forced parameterization" and all the images of SQL execution plans were censored :D
- KMag 6y agoSo, back when I worked on the Google indexing team, Bing had some Flash games that would automatically fire off Bing searches in an iframe for every puzzle guess you made. They'd give you some points that you could redeem for prizes. I suspected a major goal for the games was to artificially inflate Bing's search market share numbers, but maybe also to gather data for machine learning and/or old-fashioned statistical analysis. I was curious... and we at Google were careful about machine learning because we knew that, for instance, if you had an algorithm that internally rewrote every query by appending "breast", it would almost certainly cause the click-through rates to skyrocket while harming search quality. So, on my own time on my own computer, I used these Flash games as a typing tutor to re-learn QWERTY keyboard layout, and would often append "breast" to the in-game searches. I didn't learning anything from my poking around, though I did get enough points to get 2 Coleman tents, a mult-tool, a external hard disk, a record player, a bunch of DVDs, and a few other freebies from Bing with all of my game points.
- Panino 6y ago> It's been an issue for more than a year — but it's about to be fixed. > Now, try searching for "Asian food," "Asian Americans," "Asian history," or even "local Asian market" in your Safari browser. > All these searches are blocked. Clearly none of them have anything to do with adult content. I can't think of a better example of Asian people being treated as invisible. Apple, you need to do better. This isn't a typo kind of bug. Something is fundamentally wrong on your end to allow something like this to persist for over a year without being fixed.
- GeekyBear 6y agoGoogle never did fix the issue where pictures of black people were automatically being classified as gorillas. They just banned anything from being classified as a gorilla as a workaround. https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-gorillas-photo-recognition-algorithm-ai https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go...
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- rayiner 6y agoI'd argue it's more a manifestation of "Asian" being an artificial construct that people don't use very often because it's typically meaningless. What the hell is "Asian food?" You're either looking for "Indian food" or "Japanese food" or "Korean food." What is "Asian history?" Are you talking about Mughals in Bangladesh or Qing in China? It's all completely different. People who are actually searching for these things use the specific term. I'm from Bangladesh. I don't look for an "Asian market." I look for a "Pakistani market" or "Halal market." I remember staring at a scantron in elementary school trying to figure out whether I should check the "Asian" box--which I ended up doing because the other categories made even less sense. It's only in politics and porn where "Asian" is heavily used.
- lupire 6y agoWhat is American food? What is European history?
- Mindwipe 6y agoAdult content filters are racist and homophobic without exemption really.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoI actually have a problem with using "Asian" as descriptive of people. Asia is the largest continent with almost 60% of the world's population. It includes such diverse countries as Turkey, Russia, (east of the Urals), Armenia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, China, North Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia. There really is not much of a common culture across all those, nor is there a common ethnicity or language. To me, Asian just seems a word that was coined by British, French, German, colonial empires to describe something "other" and to lump a bunch of peoples and cultures together.
- mdoms 6y agoThis is an utterly insane point of view. What are you talking about? Should "human", "male" and "blonde" also be considered problematic? Those descriptors scoop up far greater and more diverse groups than "asian". > To me, Asian just seems a word that was coined by British, French, German, colonial empires How you "feel" about etymology isn't relevant, nor correct. Truth isn't something you conjure up with your feelings.
- xenihn 6y agoNorth & South Korea, Vietnam, and Japan absolutely share common culture with China. Korea used Chinese characters (Hanja) before Hangul. Japanese Kanji consists of adapted Chinese characters. Pre-1900s, Vietnam used Chinese characters. In the United States, "Asian" really means something more like "Sino". Maybe not the right word, but originally within varying degrees of the Chinese sphere of influence throughout history. In the UK, an Indian or Pakistani person would be considered Asian. This is not true in the United States.
- foobiekr 6y agoAsian in the US is mostly used as a short form of "East Asian."
- jhbadger 6y agoIt was not traditionally true in the US -- I agree that "Asian" traditionally meant East Asian in the US until recently, but lately the media has been calling Kamala Harris the first Asian-American vice president because her mother was Indian.
- StreamBright 6y agoWhat a time to be alive. A billion dollar corporation can do something os minuscule it should not be mentioned even on the last page of the internet with letter size 2 yet it is an article on HN.
- mdoms 6y agoThis is absolutely disgusting and blatantly racist. This should be a much bigger deal.
- AdrianB1 6y agoIt's a tech problem, as much as tech problems can be disgusting or racist.
- mdoms 6y agoThey can be and this is.
- jamie77444 6y agoNo it's not
- rayiner 6y agoI'm "Asian." I don't see why it's disgusting or blatantly racist.
- Clampower 6y agoIt would be wise to stop feeding the outrage machine for no other reason to create more outrage.
- tarboreus 6y agoI'm blind and it's almost impossible to Google anything related to blindness. There just aren't enough of us to register. Everything is either about blinds (like curtains or whatever). And some idiot made a movie called "blindness" that doesn't help matters. The blind internet is like 1998, just passing links around and knowing which websites to go to. It's also hard to Google questions about the NVDA screen reader, Google corrects you to NVIDIA, you have to use the - syntax to get it to beleive you.
- PoignardAzur 6y agoHave you considered borrowing another language? Eg in french, blind is "aveugle" which doesn't have synonyms or homonyms.
- jhbadger 6y agoThat's actually a good idea. Among English-speaking players of the board game Go (the English name being derived from the Japanese), the Korean name for the game ("baduk") is gaining popularity in large part because it is much easier to Google.
- lupire 6y agoNVDA is Nvidia's stock ticker symbol. That's not a correction.
- searchableguy 6y agoIf it's okay, can I contact you and ask a few questions? My email is in the profile.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoI recall the first internet search I ever did. It was for 'mathematical models'. The first result was the Jimmy Carter interview with Playboy. The rest were not appropriate for work.