Anti-Semitic Search Suggestions
Last December, Google was hit with a large scandal. When users typed in the phrase “are jews” into the search engine, Google automatically suggested “are jews evil” in which nine out of the ten top results lead to anti-Semitic hate sites. This most likely was not perpetrated by Google itself but nonetheless is in some ways still Google’s responsibility as its search ranking algorithms were easily “played” by the right-wing activists that launched the so-called “information war”.
The connectivity of the internet and use of searching engines or social network websites has allowed fake news and information to propagate farther than with just person to person communication. When hyperlinks of these hate sites are interconnected with each other and to other mainstream sources such as Facebook or YouTube, Google’s algorithm ranks them higher which makes these links viewed more often by users. Due to the internet being a giant network component in which there are millions of paths between any two sources, these hate websites are increasingly showing up, growing in strength and influence. Ultimately, Google had to manually alter its search autocomplete to remove these anti-Semitic suggestions. However, the solution cannot be to manually change the search engine for every PR incident. Our privacy and online security is becoming growingly vulnerable as society becomes more interconnected online.