I was skeptical after reading in Douglas Murray’s book about the political educational prejudices of Google image search. He claimed that searches for black couple gave you black couples, searches for gay couples gave you gave couples, searches for white couples gave you almost entirely mixed race or non-white couples, and searches for straight couples gave you almost entirely gay couples. I figured maybe that finding was only true in England, or was an exaggeration.
But it wasn’t. Maybe one out of ten results for white couples was actually a white couple. And virtually all of the pictures for straight couples were gay couples, many of which were headlined for stories about how gay couples were happier and better than straight couples. They were very curiously specific results, considering the Google algorhythm is really just supposed to find you what you’re looking for and have no other specific agenda. And there are all kinds of things it’s quite happy to show you every image it can find of that are quite distasteful.
It’s also strange that in a time so focused on representation and erasing identities that Google seems to be so deliberately determined to erase these particular identities. Merely from the standpoint of open access and fairness, it’s concerning. That’s a pretty heavily weighted result. I genuinely didn’t believe I would find it if I looked. I figured it was an exaggeration.
Making Nobody Happy 