{"id":356,"date":"2013-06-27T10:50:04","date_gmt":"2013-06-27T14:50:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/?p=356"},"modified":"2013-06-27T10:50:04","modified_gmt":"2013-06-27T14:50:04","slug":"autocompleteslander","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/2013\/06\/27\/autocompleteslander\/","title":{"rendered":"Automating Slanderous Search"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Bill Froberg\/Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n

Modern editions of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein<\/em> often drop Shelly’s 1818 full title for the celebrated novel, which reads, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus<\/a><\/em>. The Prometheus legend<\/a> has several variations, but Shelly’s story draws more upon Aesop’s<\/a> version of the story<\/a>, in which Prometheus makes man from clay and water. Prometheus’ creation, which violated the process for how life is naturally made, rebels against him, and Zeus punishes Prometheus for the unintended consequences of his act.<\/p>\n

Last week, The Atlantic<\/em> reported<\/a> that Google and Bing seem to be autocompleting different stories about Microsoft\u2019s upcoming game console the Xbox One. On Google, a search for \u201cthe Xbox One is\u201d returns autocomplete suggestions for \u201cterrible,\u201d \u201cugly,\u201d and \u201ca joke.\u201d The same search on Bing, Microsoft\u2019s flagship search engine, returns a single autocomplete suggestion: \u201camazing.\u201d Commentators on the Atlantic<\/em> article pointed out that dropping the term \u201cthe\u201d from the searches would yield different results and should put to rest any conspiratorial thinking that Google is smearing Microsoft\u2019s product using its autocomplete. A search for \u201cxbox one is\u201d on Google is still pretty negative, suggesting \u201cxbox one issues,\u201d \u201cxbox one is bad\u201d and \u201cxbox one is garbage.\u201d However, Bing\u2019s suggestions are even more scathing. When dropping \u201cthe,\u201d Bing seems to agree with Google suggesting \u201cxbox one issues\u201d and \u201cxbox one is bad.\u201d However, it also suggests that Xbox One is \u201cterrible,\u201d \u201cgoing to fail,\u201d \u201cugly,\u201d \u201cwatching you,\u201d \u201ccrap,\u201d and \u201cdoomed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Xbox One isn\u2019t the only product to have an interesting mix of autocomplete suggestions. Autocomplete on Google suggests \u201cgoogle glass is stupid\u201d and \u201cgoogle glass is creepy.\u201d Bing suggests these too, but also suggests that google glass is: \u201cridiculous,” “[a] terrible idea,” “military tech,” “scary,” and “useless.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Searching for other tech companies returns interesting results, too. Google suggests that \u201capple is\u201d: \u201cdying,” “evil,” “dead,” and “doomed,\u201d while Bing suggests the company is: \u201cevil,” “losing its cool,” “losing,” “a cult,” “dead,” and “going downhill.” (On the flip side, Bing\u2019s autocomplete also suggests that Apple is a \u201cgood company to work for” and “better than android.\u201d) Meanwhile, Bing\u2019s autocomplete doesn’t seem to be advertising Windows 8 very well, suggesting that “windows 8 is:” \u201cterrible,” “horrible,” “awful,” “slow,” “awesome,” “a disaster,” “great,” and “crap.” These are only a few of the latest examples, but FAIL Blog<\/a> has a great collection of similar autocomplete fails collected by search engine users.<\/p>\n

\"\"But what if a person\u2019s name is autocomplete associated with something they might not like? In May 2013, former first lady of Germany Bettina Wulff<\/a> successfully sued Google<\/a> for automatically completing search terms entered into the company’s German search engine that associated her name with \u201cescort,\u201d \u201cprostitute,\u201d or \u201cpast life.\u201d For years, rumors had been circulating that Wulff had worked as an escort before meeting her husband (and future president) Christian Wulff. Five similar<\/a> autocomplete cases have been leveled against Google in Germany, most of which involve associations between a person\u2019s name and terms like \u201cfraud\u201d or \u201cbankruptcy,\u201d and before Wulff, Google had won them all.<\/p>\n

\"\"Before Wulff, Google\u2019s main defense had been, as explained by the company\u2019s Northern Europe spokesperson<\/a> Kay Oberbeck, that the predictions come from \u201calgorithmically generated result of objective factors, including the popularity of the entered search terms.\u201d Google argued it was not responsible for simply displaying the mass input of users, but even if German courts had agreed, the marketing departments have some serious work ahead of them.<\/p>\n

Despite Google\u2019s assertions that \u201cautocomplete predictions are algorithmically determined based on a number of factors (including popularity of search terms) without any human intervention\u201d and that \u201cobjective factors\u201d alone drive the suggestions, Google voluntarily and expressly intervenes<\/a> in autocomplete results to remove hate speech, copyright infringement, and other terms on a country by country basis (for example, searches in German do not show Holocaust denial keywords, but they do appear in searches within the US). While Google had not lost an autocomplete case in Germany before Wulff, it had lost several defamation cases in Japan<\/a>, Australia<\/a>, and France<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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And what if some clever person figured out how to use autocomplete to their advantage? In 2010, Internet marketing expert Brent Payne paid several assistants to search for “Brent Payne manipulated this.” Not long after, users typing “Brent P” into Google would see Payne’s results in their autocomplete suggestions. When Payne advertised what he had done<\/a>, Google removed the suggestion.<\/p>\n

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idesignwebsitesnet\/Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n

Payne\u2019s manipulation of Google\u2019s autocomplete and Google\u2019s own reaction should indicate that the algorithms built to guide and direct us through the Web are neither infallible nor incorruptible. In several countries, algorithm creators have been held responsible for the actions of their autocompleting creations. At the same time, decisions to intervene in the operation of algorithms can be viewed as censorship or an abuse of power. Shelly borrowed the term “Modern Prometheus” from Immanuel Kant’s description of Benjamin Franklin’s contemporary experiments with electricity<\/a>.\u00a0When the creators of algorithms can be held responsible for the defamation of their creation, by legal institutions or consumers, those creators are forced to accept the successes, limitations, and failures of their experiments with electronic discourse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is Google’s autocomplete function steering users away from buying Microsoft’s new gaming console the Xbox One? This article examines the social impact of algorithms and the difficulty their creators face trying to control them once they’ve been released into the wild Web. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5506,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[497,499],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google","category-microsoft"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4L9BV-5K","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5506"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=356"}],"version-history":[{"count":59,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":425,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356\/revisions\/425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}