Google slowly eliminates 'die' from autism search results

[Geordie]

With each passing day, Google?s effort to eliminate offensive terms about autism from its search engine suggestions is gradually taking effect.

Typing in the phrase ?Autistic people should ...? last week produced so-called ?auto-complete? suggestions that they ?be killed,? ?die? or ?be exterminated.?

Four days later, there has been some improvement: Only one of the three auto-complete suggestions expresses violent hostility to people who have the neurological developmental disorder.

The latest top search result suggestion is ?killed,? followed by ?should autistic people have children? and ?should autistic people drive.?
Google made the change after a national collection of autism activists blogged about their displeasure with the offensive suggestions. Idaho activist Sparrow Jones said the company had previously rebuffed their complaints, even as it acknowledged the automatic, computer-generated results were unfortunate.

The new approach was praised by the national group Autism Speaks, as well as by the statewide group Autism New Jersey.

?We applaud Google?s attempt to minimize the spread of this hostile and threatening rhetoric, as well as the efforts of the bloggers in the autism community to combat the spread of hate speech through positive messages,? said Autism New Jersey spokeswoman Ellen Schisler.

But another autism activist, 15-year-old Sam Gelfand, a former Princeton resident now living in Florida, said he worried about the free speech implications of tinkering with the search engine?s formula.

?They?re trying to protect people from hate speech, but it?s almost a form of censorship,? he said. ?In my personal opinion, everyone should be able to hear both sides of an issue.?

Google?s auto-complete function tries to save users time by choosing the most frequently used words to complete their search phrase. The changes, once implemented, would block the offensive phrases from popping up when someone is searching for topics involving autism. Users would still be able to access the sites that contained offensive wording.

Gelfand, who is in New Jersey for his spring break to give talks on Asperger?s, a high-functioning form of autism, found the earlier search results less threatening than the members of Jones? group did.

?Unfortunately, some people are just insensitive,? he said. ?But just because they search for the phrase ?Autistic people should be killed? doesn?t mean they think they should be killed,? he said. People could click on the phrase simply out of curiosity ? thereby making that search result incrementally more popular in Google?s search formula.

Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds said Thursday the fix would take time because the computer algorithm has to be tweaked to encompass all the phrases that people could use in their searches. It?s not simply a question of deleting certain words or phrases.

Sparrow disagrees that the impending Google changes constitute censorship.

?It?s not like China, where they don?t let people read things. They?re not keeping anyone from searching for anything. You can still complete the phrase yourself,? she said. The changes merely eliminate ?a platform for people to find hate speech.?

Sparrow acknowledged the search engine algorithm isn?t the problem; it is, rather, the frequency of the hostile search terms typed in by Google?s users.

While the policy change makes search results less threatening for those with autism, searches on other broad groups of people ? Jews, Muslims, men, women ? combined with the word ?should? all produce violent suggestions. That begs the question: Is autism getting special treatment?

?We?ve had people say Google should do this for everybody, and we?ve had people say they should do it for nobody,? Sparrow said. Her preference would be everybody.

?Nobody needs hate speech,? she said.

Google slowly eliminates 'die' from autism search results; shift praised by Autism New Jersey | NJ.com

 

[Cerulean]

Dang, maybe that's why I'm having a hard time finding an answer to whether I should have kids (only half kidding).

 

[King_Oni]

It's not that the removal of these autocompletions is interesting... what's more baffling to me is that among the most common terms apparently is "autistic people should be killed" amongst other things. I mean, these completions are the result of common used search commands and not something people will never have searched for (and thus random generated).

-10 for humanity *sigh*

 

[Flinty]

Thing is, this doesn't just apply to those with autism. Heck, it doesn't always apply to people with any sort of illness. Auto-completes like this are all over Google, so we shouldn't feel singled out.

 

[Jacki Cucinotta]

King, that is an awesome point. I don't think these phrase "autistic people should be killed" is regularly typed word for word, but I'm sure that many of the words in the phrase do constitute as commonly-searched words that are typed in Google everyday. I would certainly imagine that the word "killed" would be commonly typed if one is searching for a current event (i.e., the Sandy Hook tragedy). Also, the word "people" is probably extremely common.

 

[Geordie]

We have to stay positive. People with autism has talent and the passion to pursue whatever we like - just give us the tools and the opportunities, as well as the support structure - we can contribute, too!

 

[Gomendosi]

This is me throwing my hat into the ring:


The world is dying by infinitesimal increments and the rising tide is being heralded by supposed infringement of people?s rights and political correctness.

What this all boils down to is not the actual issue here; the internet has changed every living beings lives immeasurably and not always for the best.

In the real world words ebb and flow, I can no longer call an Australian indigenous person an ?abo? which is the short version of the legit word Aborigine, because it is now viewed as racist regardless of the context I use it in or the person I am and the way that I use it. However, I can call a person of a same sex couple, ?gay?, which also means I can no longer suggest my best mate and I had a gay evening out, dancing and dining with friends. Which is not to say I begrudge them the use of the word nor that I actually can?t use the word in its original context, it would just be misconstrued.

Words are just words, they hurt your feelings and you either get over it or you don?t, natural selection has nothing to do with it any more.
If it were to be a daily occurrence, I would rather be called fat, ugly, useless, and cowardly, and or whatever else might seem fitting in the eyes of my so called peers, than to be hit on the head with a rock or attacked with sticks.

We need to be protecting the next generation from this one, children born in this century are more prone to disease and ailments because they don?t go outside and everything is so sanitised ?for their protection?, they have no backbone due to no adverse treatment during the formative years, they are no longer disciplined at home so they don?t respect authority or understand pain, thus they defy authority and hurt others without understanding the ramifications, we were called names when I was in school, now they just gang bash kids and sometimes enough to put them in hospital.

Bullying divided people into two types, the ones that needed to toughen up (the victims) and the ones that needed to be reined in (the perpetrators), but with cyber bullying everybody gets a turn to be a bully [we even have them here], and people take it more to heart because more people can now see your hurt or humiliation than just the rest of your classmates.

I say leave the search engine protocol in place, it isn?t physically hurting anybody and we cannot possibly know the intentions of the people that originally typed in the suspect sentences in the first place, this is an eerie form of precognitive thought that suggests a particular string of words has malevolent meaning in every instance or that people will die in actuality because a lot of people type that sentence in their computers. Maybe we should just let them type the sentence, then trace their IP and send SWAT to take them to a prison till their homicidal tendencies abate?

This world is scary enough without imagining what others are thinking every time they type a sentence. First one guy with Asperger?s (alleged) goes troppo and we are all murderers, now a search engine is reportedly making proclamations that everybody on the spectrum will eventually be hunted and killed?

I think that what we can get out of all of this is how powerful is google that it can presume to finish your sentences for you in the first place, let alone supposit words it considers common, by what commonality is every human in existence viewed in googles terms?





This has certainly been tongue-in-cheek and may be a radical view in some opinions, while it could be perfectly worded and 100% true in others, I just try to offer a view of the other side of the fence?

 

[Perkinsj88]

It's not that the removal of these autocompletions is interesting... what's more baffling to me is that among the most common terms apparently is "autistic people should be killed" amongst other things. I mean, these completions are the result of common used search commands and not something people will never have searched for (and thus random generated).

-10 for humanity *sigh*

And people can't understand why I yield no hope for humanity. The fact enough people used those phrases to generate as you said causes quite the stir of what I think is anger. Have they not learned to show caution with possibly unstable persons yet?

 

[King_Oni]

Have they not learned to show caution with possibly unstable persons yet?

From my experience... nope!

And to make it even worse, and that's what I hear a lot "If you're unstable you need to be institutionalized".

 

[Perkinsj88]

Institutions, ha! I find society to be an institution of it's own sort. I'm not sure how society differs through out the world but yeah. At first they all accuse us of wanting attention, now...since the kid with Asperger's Syndrome did something awful, it's now recognized as a real disorder and we must pay the price for sins not committed. Sounds about right, if I were a really logical person I would have expected this from the beginning.