this is totally racist and offensive

A while back when I was doing a search for images of the President for a montage I was making, I entered the term Obamacare in Google’s image search, hoping to find images associated with the protests at ‘town hall meetings.’ I posted the url as my facebook status that day because I was so shocked at the horribly racist images that came up.

In a previous and unrelated web search, I had entered the term “non-white” along with the term “new media art” and the first page of results was white supremacist organizations.

This new controversy reported in the LA Times about the ranking of a distorted and offensive image of Michelle Obama raises questions again about Google specifically and the Internet in general–about “free spech” of course, but even more about preferred speech and the way in which data is tagged & processed.

These images are offensive. They are racist. I don’t want them on my blog. But, like same-sex marriage, they also exist  despite many people fighting to not let it be so.

When I entered “Michelle Obama” in Google’s image search, there was no “house advertisement above it with the headline, ‘Offensive Search Results,’” and the offensive image is in the #1 slot. So, Google may not be evil, but they also aren’t telling the truth. What’s more, the image isn’t even on the <<Hot Girls>> page anymore, and only exists as data accessible via Google’s image search. This situation reinforces the importance of tagging and collaboration online, and it also reminds us, again, of the inherent dangers of giving too much power of your own research or investigation or imagination to a huge transnational corporation like Google, who sold out the Chinese people, lest we ever forget Tiananmen Square.