So searching for “three black teenagers” gets very different results to “three white teenagers”
@iBeKabir has posted a video on Twitter that has seriously blown up: nearly 100,000 combined likes and retweets in a day!
The core of it is showing the alarming disparity between searching for black people on Google image search and white people:
Watch the video:
YOOOOOO LOOK AT THIS pic.twitter.com/uY1JysFm8w
— July 3rd. (@iBeKabir) June 7, 2016
YOOOOOO LOOK AT THIS pic.twitter.com/uY1JysFm8w
— July 3rd. (@iBeKabir) June 7, 2016
Searching for “three black teenagers”:
Searching for “three white teenagers”:
And in the words of the famous meme:
Obviously Google itself is making no racial judgement but the combined efforts of humanity, and the choices of what images are created and what stories are told does add up to something that DOES look pretty bad.
This comes off the back of a similar story where people were concerned that searching for “unprofessional hair” produced mostly black women natural, curly hair.
We offer no solutions but the observation often repeated: algorithms are not neutral.
Source: https://twitter.com/iBeKabir/status/740005897930452992
