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Bing Is Suggesting the Worst Things You Can Imagine
If you use Bing’s image search, you’re going to see the worst filth you can imagine. Bing suggests racist terms and shows horrifying images. Bing will even suggest you search for exploited children if you have SafeSearch disabled.
We contacted Microsoft for comment, and Jeff Jones, Senior Director at Microsoft, gave us the following statement:
“We take matters of offensive content very seriously and continue to enhance our systems to identify and prevent such content from appearing as a suggested search. As soon as we become aware of an issue, we take action to address it.”
Update: Since publication, Microsoft has been working on cleaning up the offensive Bing suggestions that we mentioned. Based on our research, there are still many other offensive suggestions that have not yet been fixed, including a few that we’ve mentioned below. We are unsure if they are simply fixing the offensive items we pointed out, or if they are improving the algorithm.
Note: The screenshots here show what we saw when we wrote this piece testing the US version of Bing Image search in an Incognito private browsing session, but Bing’s results shift over time. Google didn’t have any of these problems, according to our tests. This is a Bing problem, not just a search engine problem. The same problem affects Bing’s video search.
[...] Microsoft needs to moderate Bing better. Microsoft has previously created platforms, unleashed them on the world, and ignored them while they turned bad
We’ve seen this happen over and over. Microsoft once unleashed a chatbot named Tay on Twitter. This chatbot quickly turned into a Nazi and declared “Hitler was right I hate the jews” after it learned from other social media users. Microsoft had to pull it offline.
[...] Microsoft can’t just turn a platform loose on the world and ignore it. Companies like Microsoft and Google have a responsibility to moderate their platforms and keep the horror at bay.
Suggestions Have a History of Serious Problems
Of course, there’s no team of people at Microsoft choosing these suggestions. Bing automatically suggests searches based on other people’s searches. That means many Bing Images users are searching for antisemitism, racism, child pornography, and bestiality.
Please refer to TFA for actual search terms, suggested items, and images found.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bradley13 on Tuesday October 16 2018, @06:07PM (1 child)
"What makes CP illegal in the US is that it depicts actual children in nude and sexualized poses... Hentai is not regarded as CP in the US, but it is in Canada. Most actual arrests for child pornography are the people who create it."
We're getting a bit off-topic, but you appear to be wrong on all three of these points.
While I'm not in the US, I have read of US cases where people were arrested for for photo-shopped content and even for cartoons. The law seems to be that material is criminal if it has "a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture or painting", that "depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct" [cornell.edu] IIRC, a guy was prosecuted for drawing a sarcastic cartoon of Bart Simpson in a sexual situation. I also recall a case (which I can't seem to find just now) of a guy arrested for possessing a written story (no illustrations) that described a sexual situation with a child.
These kinds of laws have nothing to do with protecting real children. In fact, they arguably have the opposite effect. The first paragraph of the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] does a fair job of summarizing the arguments here.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Reziac on Wednesday October 17 2018, @02:53AM
Parallel: if these hentai-etc. cartoons are kiddie porn, why aren't violent video games murder?? Discuss.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.