Google’s No Fly List: Racism? A-OK! Sex education? Not so much.
Today I saw Tony Comstock Twittering about something he called the Google “No Fly List,” and sending tweets about who was and wasn’t on it. I was reading Twitter on my phone when I first saw his tweets, so I couldn’t visit his links and find out exactly what he was talking about until I got home tonight. He put up two posts about the issue today, and another one earlier this week.
Turns out this is the same issue I had read about on ErosBlog in September. Somehow it had fallen off my radar though. Tony’s blog posts and Twitter updates piqued my interest again, and naturally I was curious as to whether I was on “the list.”
Apparently, I am. Hey, it’s official: I’m objectionable!
It’s not as if there aren’t search results for “amber rhea” or even “amber rhe” – but Google is specifically filtering them out of it’s auto-suggest feature.
Obviously the next person I tried was Rusty. He’s there… interesting!
Of course you can still get to any search results for any search term if you type in the full term and hit Enter. But that’s not the point here. The point is, why blacklist some search terms and not others? I think we all know the answer to that. “Objectionable” is code for “sexual.”
As Tony points out, racism is apparently just fine by Google Suggest; start typing in “stormfront” and you get no shortage of suggestions.
So then I started thinking, well, this is all very interesting, but let’s try a few other things to see if it really is specifically targeting sexual content as objectionable – not those naughty searches for porn, but information about sex.
Sure enough – start typing “sex education,” and it’s crickets from Google Suggest:
Similarly, “sex work” draws a big blank:
And the only suggestions that do show up for “sex” are very telling:
What’s important? Sex and the City. What’s objectionable? Sex education.
Things like this that some people would argue are minor or not a big deal are very, very revealing. It really shows where our collective priorities are. White supremacy? Eh, who cares. Sex? Oh god no!!