Drapetomaniac

I’m sure some will chalk google’s censorship of certain words in their new instant search up to “political correctness“, but those same people cry the same phrase when they stub their toe and the world doesn’t bow down to them to confirm their toe was entitled not to be stubbed.

I chalk it up more to the attitude of schools who censor religion in violation of the law, because they are afraid of the law. They buy into rhetoric about what the law actually says instead of reading anything basic on it, and end up trampling on freedoms and losing their shirts in lawsuits over it.

The Huffington Post had a slide show showing the most ridiculous words censored and I noticed Latina was among the words instant search on Google would not return results for.  It is included among “other” profanities.

Some might think this is automatic, but most machine learning requires a level of human intervention.

I’m uploading to HuffPost the following slide, showing Google censoring the word Negro but not Jungle Bunny.

Google censors negro but not jungle bunny

Google is in the information business and inserted itself into the middle of moral decisions in the search for information.

Instead of adding value as a business or information partner, they make a global display of their incompetence to monitor morality or information.

One of my favorite classes in school included the text “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks” about Black image in film.  All of those terms, by the way, come with suggestions and spelling corrections in Google.

I could read into the fact they will not search Negro, whiel offering to finish spelling variations of mulattos with results – but I won’t.

So, if you’re looking for Jungle Bunnies and Coons, Google is your tool.  Otherwise, Bing can help you with Latina (like the magazine) and Negro like the League).

You can press enter and search on Google, of course, but they are trying to train us to prefer the instant search.  The alternative is they don’t want us to prefer the feature…

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