The Markup: Racism, hypersexualization, and algorithmic bias in Google Keyword Planner
Alphabet workers news
Nonprofit news organization The Markup released a story today on their investigation that uncovered racism, and sexualization of people of color, in the Google Keyword Planner tool. As the article indicates with its review of history, this isn't an isolated incident, but rather has been a pattern of behavior from multiple Google products over multiple years.
Following an all-too-common script, it took an external media watchdog organization to uncover this behavior and ask questions, after which Keyword Planner's behavior suddenly changed. This type of corporate behavior is known as "privatization of the benefits and socialization of the risks" -- Google benefits financially from the keyword planner tool, but the work required to investigate and expose the tool's built-in racism was a task left to a non-profit media organization, while people of color suffer the harm.
Some extracts below.
- Bruce
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themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/07/23/google-advertising-keywords-black-girls
Google Ad Portal Equated “Black Girls” with Porn
Searching Google’s ad buying portal for “Black girls” returned hundreds of terms leading to “adult content”
This article contains graphically sexual language.
Google’s Keywords Planner, which helps advertisers choose which search terms to associate with their ads, offered hundreds of keyword suggestions related to “Black girls,” “Latina girls,” and “Asian Girls”—the majority of them pornographic, The Markup found in its research.
Searches in the keyword planner for “boys” of those same ethnicities also primarily returned suggestions related to pornography.
Searches for “White girls” and “White boys,” however, returned no suggested terms at all.
These findings indicate that, until The Markup brought it to the company’s attention, Google’s systems contained a racial bias that equated people of color with objectified sexualization while exempting white people from any associations whatsoever. In addition, by not offering a significant number of non-pornographic suggestions, this system made it more difficult for marketers attempting to reach young Black, Latinx, and Asian people with products and services relating to other aspects of their lives...
Eight years ago, Google was publicly shamed for this exact same problem in its flagship search engine. UCLA professor Safiya Noble wrote an article for Bitch magazine describing how searches for “Black girls” regularly brought up porn sites in top results...
When The Markup entered “Black girls” into the Keyword Planner, Google returned 435 suggested terms. Google’s own porn filter flagged 203 of the suggested keywords as “adult ideas.”...
Racism embedded in Google’s algorithms has a long history.
A 2013 paper by Harvard professor Latanya Sweeney found that searching traditionally Black names on Google was far more likely to display ads for arrest records associated with those names than searches for traditionally White names...
In 2015, Google was hit with controversy when its Photos service was found to be labeling pictures of Black people as gorillas, furthering a long-standing racist stereotype. Google quickly apologized and promised to fix the problem. However, a report by Wired three years later revealed that the company’s solution was to block all images tagged as being of “gorillas” from turning up search results on the service...
The following year, researchers in Brazil discovered that searching Google for pictures of “beautiful woman” was far more likely to return images of White people than Black and Asian people, and searching for pictures of “ugly woman” was more likely to return images of Black and Asian people than White people...
Blackburn, the Google spokesperson, agreed that because Google’s products are constantly incorporating data from the web, biases and stereotypes present in the broader culture can become enshrined in its algorithms...