Censorship: Not Evil

Nov 25, 2009

For most of the past week, when someone typed "Michelle Obama" in the popular search engine Google, one of the first images that came up was a picture of the American first lady altered to resemble a monkey.

On Wednesday morning, the racially offensive image appeared to have been removed from any Google Image searches for "Michelle Obama."

I'm about to reprint the image, below the jump. Be warned, gentle readers, that it is very offensive.

Google of course is a private company, free to do as it wishes with its search results. At least in America. In China the company actively cooperates with the government to censor images which might constitute lese-majeste. In America the company firewalls sites which may offend some but are by no means obscene. And in terms of internet search, Google is as effectively a monopoly as its competitor Microsoft ever was in terms of the operating system.

But internet search, the means by which we obtain information, is far more important than browsers or operating systems. Those are, forgive the term, mere hardware. Paper, in dinosaur terms. Search engines are content, the ink applied to the paper. If Google blocks a site, it effectively doesn't exist.

I know very well what point the idiot who created this image of the First Lady was trying to make, and I don't like it. I condemn him as a racist fool. And I concede that this image, for historical and cultural reasons, is far more hurtful than this image:

which remains very high on Google's image rankings for "George W Bush," an image we all know is not as offensive as the image of Michelle Obama which Google has censored. Because Michelle Obama is not an ape, and George W. Bush is an ape. Or because African-Americans have endured hundreds of years of horrible comparisons to apes, by racists who believe them to be less than human. Or because jokes about Republicans are funny, but jokes about Democrats are not. Or because no one has complained (except for me – I'm shooting it to someone at Google as soon as I complete this post) about the Bush image, while many have complained about the Obama image.

In any case, I don't want Google to decide, before I have the choice to make my own decision, which image is more offensive. Google's not the only internet utility that presumes to know what ideas are safe for its readers to see and what aren't, but it's by far the most important.

I'm quite proficient, and comfortable, with Google. Google's product is excellent. But Google's motto "Don't Be Evil" isn't as specific a rule as I'd like in a world where "Evil" can be construed to mean publishing an image of a man standing in front of a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square, a man I consider a hero, but Chinese communists consider Evil Incarnate.

I have a better policy for Google. It would read:

Google shall make no policy respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to network, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I'm strongly considering shifting my eyes, and whatever revenue those searching eyes bring, to Microsoft of all places. I hear Bing is pretty good, and at least with Microsoft I know I'll be dealing with a company that doesn't pretend it isn't evil.

Last 5 posts by Patrick Non-White

A Word From Our Sponsor - May 8th, 2013
Lesson Plan And Syllabus For Second Semester Seniors, Princeton High School - May 3rd, 2013
A Day Reading Popehat Is Like A Day At The Farm. Every Post Is A Banquet! Every Amazon Purchase A Fortune! Every Comment Thread A Parade! I Love Popehat! - May 2nd, 2013
I Demand A Senate Investigating Committee - April 27th, 2013
Be Aware That You Have Threatened, Tried To Blackmail And Accused Our Company Of SCAM With Your E-mail! - April 26th, 2013

27 Comments

Google, internet

26 Comments

Brian Dunbar • Nov 25, 2009 @2:57 pm

When Google removes content, it's not censorship: it's just time to use something else.

But .. Bing? I don't think Microsoft is evil but since before Windows 3.11 I've spent my working days having to deal with their product. A lot of my dealings have been with the dark evil side because nobody calls IT over when things are flying along: you're only needed when stuff breaks.
Patrick • Nov 25, 2009 @3:01 pm

What do you recommend Brian? Yahoo? Wolfram Alpha?

Or, horror of horrors, is it time for the Justice Department to put Google through a Microsoft-style antitrust suit? I wouldn't support it because I don't approve of antitrust in general, but Google is as effective a monopoly as any company I've ever seen.
Ken • Nov 25, 2009 @3:12 pm

Let me play devil's advocate for a moment.

Say that we take some notorious image widely accepted as obscene. You can think of some. I'm not going to name them here because we don't want the spam.

Or say that we find some new horrible picture — crime scene photos of a murdered child, for instance.

Say that we post it here, and that we name the image "Cute puppies." And we put it in a post talking about cute puppies.

The Google image search software is dumb. It doesn't actually "look" at pictures. It looks at file names and nearby text to guess what a picture shows.

So when someone does a Google image search of "cute puppies," they might come up with our horrific and/or obscene image.

Should Google "censor" that? If so, where exactly does Google draw the line between what it should and should not censor? Should I read your post as suggesting that Google treat itself as a state actor and engage in appropriate First Amendment analysis, and only "censor" if doing so would meet appropriate levels of scrutiny under First Amendment jurisprudence?

Ultimately, Google is a tool offered by a private business in this to make money. If Google utterly failed to "censor," it might become less worthwhile as a tool. Take, for instance, George W. Bush. When I Google image search that name, 8 of the pictures on the first page are deliberately unflattering. (One — the doll — might be either sincere or ironic.) I can easily imagine a world in which the first few pages of images for any controversial person, event, or topic are deliberate Google-bombs. Would people — other than internet snarksters — continue to use Google image search under those circumstances?

Also, note that Google image search has different settings for different levels of "safety" of searches. If we are to treat Google as a state actor for purposes of how it ought to act and how it ought to avoid "censorship", what standards should Google use to determine what images Google puts in the "safe search off" category? If Google had put your Obama and Bush images above into that category, would that be censorship? Is it censorship for Google to relegate non-obscene R-rated pics into that category?

It's complicated.
Mark • Nov 25, 2009 @4:24 pm

OK, that's pretty bad. If some 10-year old is doing a school project on the First Lady, I'd rather it not be in the first few results.

I agree that it's a software problem, though – if someone was looking for that picture specifically, they probably would include the racism in the search parameters. Doing an image search on Google for anything is like throwing a dart blindfolded. At a seedy, obscene board. As an experiment, turn off safe search and enter a random number.
Jack Marshall • Nov 25, 2009 @4:36 pm

Bingo! Dead on. We can reject images ourselves, thanks—who is Google to presume that a charicature of one public figure is too offensive to show but another is OK?
SG • Nov 25, 2009 @5:46 pm

"OK, that’s pretty bad. If some 10-year old is doing a school project on the First Lady, I’d rather it not be in the first few results. "

Why not ? This would make for a far more interesting discussion than most school projects can offer. And if you're willing to ask Google to be a nice, patronizing engine that thinks of the chiiiiiildrun, then don't complain if you are treated like a child by it or another company or entity.

I mean, controversial pictures ? Proof of government or corporate misconduct ? That's pretty bad. If some mere citizen was seeking information on his government, I'd rather it not be in the first few results.
tim • Nov 25, 2009 @6:19 pm

How is google a monopoly in the search space? People who use google are not locked in. Google is not abusing their top position against their competitors (its very difficult to see how they could). All content available to google is available to Microsoft, Yahoo and anyone else who wants to build a better search engine. And they choose what appears and what does not appear every day by the very virtue of their search algorithms. Same with Bing and Yahoo. That's their very job.

Now if the vast majority of people out their want pictures of America's leaders and their spouses looking like an ape – they will find it. Google or not. And if google is no longer providing relevant answers to the questions people ask of it – they will move elsewhere – in a heartbeat.
tim • Nov 25, 2009 @6:20 pm

(saying that – if the paying off of content providers to prevent indexing by Google or others comes to pass – all bets are off)
David Schwartz • Nov 25, 2009 @7:29 pm

Google faces a difficult problem. They constantly tune their search results to ensure that the first few hits — the most important — are as relevant as possible. That's what they're supposed to do. We can't really have a search engine run by government rules any more than we could have a church — "relevant" is not content-neutral.

If they just "let the chips fall where they may", they'll wind up selling a product nobody wants to buy, filled with irrelevant results burying the good ones. Their job is to cherry-pick the ones a typical person searching for a particular term most likely most wants. Don't criticize them for doing their job.
Mark • Nov 25, 2009 @9:45 pm

SG:

Dude. 10 years old. Looking for picture to put on poster board, next to crayon flag. My objection is, it's a poor search result? Really, how likely is it that your average 'Michelle Obama' search is looking for THAT picture, before it was a national news story? Google should fix their image rankings because they're damn near random.

I wouldn't put nun porn as a top result for 'Catholicism', either. If it's on the second page, I don't think it's a free speech issue.
Greg Conen • Nov 25, 2009 @9:45 pm

It's not like they're actually burying it. If you show serious interest in finding a picture like that, by searching, eg, michelle obama monkey, this still shows up high (#2, at the time of this posting).

Rather, they're tweaking their algorithm so things people don't want to see don't show up. Which is exactly what they're supposed to do.
Brian Dunbar • Nov 25, 2009 @11:21 pm

What do you recommend Brian? Yahoo? Wolfram Alpha?

IIRC Yahoo is leasing their search from Bing. If you don't like Google, Bing appears to be 'it'.

Google is as effective a monopoly as any company I’ve ever seen.

Monopolies don't last. IBM's was dealt a self-inflicted blow when they opened up the IBM micro-computer standard. Microsoft's is being pounded on by a combination of open source and self-inflicted bloat in the Windows OS.

Hey – if the goverment wants to do something about Google they can: gawd knows that the government has a poor track record about taking action on my foolish notions.

But I'm pretty sure there are thousands of intelligent hackers who are beavering away at their version of a google killer right now: sooner or later some of them will get it right and launch at the right time and down she'll come.
Lin Masumbuko • Nov 26, 2009 @2:45 am

Such an image of the American First Lady, Michelle Obama, portrays how cruel, racist and bad these people are. Remember, that some Americans believed that it would never happen that an Afro-American (Black) rule USA. So, it was a serious wound for them to see Obama at the head of such a super power.
When Obama was elected, Americans proved that they might be considered the most democratic nation in the world, but as days go on, this concept disappears.

I think google should apoligize for this scandle, otherwise the <orld will perceive USA as a cursed land of hatred.
Lin Masumbuko • Nov 26, 2009 @2:48 am

Do not do that again.
Patrick • Nov 26, 2009 @3:06 am

Do not do what again Lin?
Greg Conen • Nov 26, 2009 @4:10 am

And Lin demonstrates why Google needs those warning labels it sometimes puts for controversial results like this. People confuse Google with the content creator, rather than an aggregator.

Google has nothing to apologize for, other than an (inevitably) imperfect algorithm.
Greg Conen • Nov 26, 2009 @4:12 am

To be clear: nothing to apologize for in this case. In other areas, they do have some things I would like to see changed.
PatrickKelley • Nov 26, 2009 @6:52 am

Ken-

"So when someone does a Google image search of “cute puppies,” they might come up with our horrific and/or obscene image."

Thank you, man. Muahahahaha
jpe • Nov 26, 2009 @5:55 pm

If there's enough of a market for racist search engines, then you'll get your wish of an engine that ranks racist garbage along w/ standard fare. The market is perfectly capable of sorting this one out.
SPQR • Nov 27, 2009 @7:40 pm

jpe, you miss the point. Patrick is stating that he does not think that Google should be deciding what is and what is not racist for us.

I think this is a more marginal issue than Patrick makes out but I don't necessarily subscribe to Ken's "devil's advocacy" either.

There are better examples of Google's hypocrisy.
Vice Magnet • Nov 27, 2009 @11:04 pm

Sounds like Lin was quoting a line from the movie Terminator.
David Schwartz • Nov 28, 2009 @7:26 am

SPQR: But they should be deciding what is or not relevant, right? How is that image relevant to a person who searches for "michelle obama"? Why does it not rightfully deserve to be buried in deep obscurity?
PatrickKelley • Nov 28, 2009 @2:53 pm

I don't know if anybody has caught on to this or not, but the more you talk about this picture, all you are doing is helping it get higher in the Google search rankings. I think that's hilarious, because most of the people that talk about it are the ones that bitch about it, which means they are a major part of the problem. If you want to call it a problem.
PatrickKelley • Nov 28, 2009 @3:02 pm

Case in point-

http://www.flystylelife.com/2008/09/wtf-is-this-michelle-obama-as-an-ape-huh/

The comments on this post have been going on since September. Not September of this year, but 2008.

What's even worse, Fly Girl, the owner of the blog, which is Fly Style Life (good blog by the way) posted the picture in a post meant to criticize it, yet she's being criticized for posting it, as though she were the originator of it. She felt compelled to make at least two comments where she was clarifying the fact that she didn't do it, she was just, like all of them, bitching about it.

The point being, if it weren't for all the controversy, this picture would never show up in Google search results, unless you're the kind of person who would go through two thousand or more pages of pictures of Michelle Obama.
bill • Dec 31, 2009 @7:34 am

The issue of censorship by Google really illustrates the slippery slope of that ugly anti-first amendment concept. Google Condolezza Rice cartoons…..you'll be amazed at what DOESN'T offend this moronic ultra-lib PC outfit. Personally, I think all such 'art' is stupid and destined for people with little else to do or bitch about.
Patrick • Dec 31, 2009 @8:14 am

Agreed on both points Bill, with the small caveat that the First Amendment doesn't apply to Google.