MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Following an inquiry by tech journalism nonprofit The Markup, Google appears to have blocked its Keywords Planner product from delivering porn-related keyword suggestions for searches combining some races and ethnicities with the words “boys” or “girls.”
The change occurred after The Markup examined the tech giant’s Keywords Planner, a tool intended to help advertisers choose which search terms to associate with their ads.
When The Markup entered certain searches into Keywords Planner, they found it “offered hundreds of keyword suggestions related to ‘Black girls,’ ‘Latina girls,’ and ‘Asian girls’ — the majority of them pornographic.”
According to The Markup, “searches in the keyword planner for ‘boys’ of those same ethnicities also primarily returned suggestions related to pornography,” but “searches for ‘White girls’ and ‘White boys,’ however, returned no suggested terms at all.”
Shortly after The Markup contacted Google for comment, no results from terms combining a race or ethnicity with either “boys” or “girls” were returned by Keyword Planner.
'The Language is Offensive'
“The language that surfaced in the keyword planning tool is offensive and while we use filters to block these kinds of terms from appearing, it did not work as intended in this instance,” Google spokesperson Suzanne Blackburn told The Markup. “We’ve removed these terms from the tool and are looking into how we stop this from happening again.”
The Markup concluded that, until Google was asked to comment on the situation, the company's systems “contained a racial bias that equated people of color with objectified sexualization while exempting white people from any associations whatsoever.”
In addition, the reporters found that, by not offering alternative, non-pornographic suggestions, the system “made it more difficult for marketers attempting to reach young Black, Latinx and Asian people with products and services relating to other aspects of their lives.”
According to The Markup, entering “Black girls” into Google's Keyword Planner returned 435 suggested terms, and Google's own porn filter flagged 203 of those as “adult ideas.”
“While exactly how Google defines an ‘adult idea’ is unclear, the filtering suggests Google knew that nearly half of the results for ‘Black girls’ were adult,” The Markup added.
To read “Google Ad Portal Equated ‘Black Girls’ with Porn,” visit The Markup.
