
Winston Churchill’s Image Removed in UK/US Search Results? - jpxw
https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/53297714
======
refurb
This is getting pretty ridiculous. If we're going to purge our nation's
history of people who held beliefs we disagree with today, we're going to end
up purging everyone.

A good example is MLK. Civil rights leader and US icon. MLK also held very
anti-LGBT views, which are captured in a letter he wrote a young man who said
he was attracted to men.[1]

Are we going to start tearing down his statues too? And renaming roads?

 _" Your problem is not at all an uncommon one. However, it does require
careful attention. The type of feeling that you have toward boys is probably
not an innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired....You
are already on the right road toward a solution, since you honestly recognize
the problem and have a desire to solve it."_

[1][https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-
papers/documents/adv...](https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-
papers/documents/advice-living-4)

~~~
hintymad
This is not surprising at all. I guess people either didn't know the Chinese
Cultural Revolution, or have forgotten about it. Check it out here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Red_Guards...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Red_Guards_and_the_destruction_of_the_%22Four_Olds%22)
Everything that didn't fit the narrative of whatever would be destroyed with
people's cheer. That's why I was wondering where the boundary is for the
demand of total conformity.

~~~
koheripbal
> I was wondering where the boundary is

The only boundary is time as it will stop when they are able to seize power.
Because these purges are a means to an end - and that end is POWER.

------
seesawtron
This is insane. Just tried it and its true. Let this be a reminder that
internet is not free but under control of umbrella corporations and it is
naive to assume the opposite.

Is this what Orwell meant that history can be re-written when you have the
full authority?

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every
picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed,
every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and
minute by minute. History has stopped."

Edit: Maybe Google will respond (again) with: Sorry it was an internal bug in
the code.

~~~
mhh__
"Internal bug in the code?"

"An internal bug in the code, at this time of day, only in this country,
localized entirely on this photo!?"

~~~
andrepd
"May I see it?" "No."

Which is a great description of proprietary software. Without transparency,
you cannot trust anything it's doing.

~~~
banads
>"May I see it?"

Given what we've seen from the likes of Cambridge Analytica, this seems like a
question of national security.

------
sullivandanny
The image was not removed purposefully. Images in the Knowledge Graph can
update at any time. If they do, they briefly disappear. That's what seems to
be happening here. We're exploring the issue more. Here's more info we posted
about it:
[https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1272077555860824065](https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1272077555860824065)

~~~
thu2111
As a former Google engineer and someone who still holds some quantity of
Google stock, I hope you publish a post-mortem about this. Even if it's
something embarrassing like "someone added a picture to Wikipedia and our
algorithm couldn't disambiguate it" or worse, "an internal employee went rogue
and we're strengthening our procedures".

Because frankly this bug is catastrophic for Google's credibility in the UK.
Nobody will believe this is some random bug or coincidence, it quite
transparently is not. Even if the problem isn't directly caused by Google
employees but just the engine being confused by the turmoil out on the net,
that's not the simplest possible explanation and thus in the absence of other
information, it's not what people will conclude.

Since Google became more publicly left-wing and committed to social justice
type causes, it has to work harder to convince people it's unbiased. YouTube
has been deleting videos of anyone who criticised the COVID lockdowns,
including actual epidemiologists and Nobel Prize winners, and that's been
widely publicised. So going into this event you're already being perceived as
a part of the mainstream establishment censorship machine. And now this - it
looks exactly like the people blacking out their instagram photos in
solidarity with BLM.

Politicians in the UK are currently receiving enormous quantities of anger
from the population about the desecration of war memorials and war heros. It's
an issue that's triggered huge public feeling. Google doesn't want to get
sucked into that. A rigorous technical post mortem could show people what
really happened and avert a political disaster.

~~~
seesawtron
They decided to give a brief explaination but a post-mortem report like you
ask wouldn't likely happen without involving the law. But again have
governments ever fined or accussed search engines for misinformation or
disinformation in the recent histoy? They have been fined probably for lack of
moderation I guess, does anyone know?

------
menacingly
I disagree with the easy dismissals of "they're doing a poor job of purging
history".

I don't think they're tyring to purge history, I think they (or more
specifically, staff) are making a plausibly deniable political statement that
can be dismissed as a bug.

~~~
koheripbal
They don't need to purge history. They only need to convince the newer
generation that our country is based on injustice and tyranny.

That is how they will justify their future violent revolution.

The goal is create just enough distaste for the symbols and history of the
country so that fewer people will fight for it when they decide to take over.

Personally, I also subscribe to the conspiracy theory that these efforts are
getting foreign help.

------
agakshat
Just gonna put this here
[https://duckduckgo.com/about](https://duckduckgo.com/about)

~~~
shadowgovt
And, hey, to their credit, DDG does a fine job of returning an immediate
Churchill photo. This is to be expected, since it's a bug in Google and not
Bing.

------
yongjik
Sigh, do people really think there's some hidden propagandist in Google that
blacklisted Churchill's photo? To send what message, exactly? That they will
randomly censor images until you do one single click on "Images" which will
foil their evil plan?

Many years ago there was an amusing bug for a few days - when you searched for
Rachel (I think) the Biblical figure, the infobox showed a happy smiling face
of some office worker somewhere (named Rachel, of course). Machines work in
mysterious ways, sometimes they pick up signals in totally idiotic ways. At
least, nobody accused Google of a hidden conspiracy to discredit Judaism...

~~~
seesawtron
In response to everything we see around today that seems to make significant
waves in the whole world, you can respond differently as you choose. You can
choose to ignore everything and assume that the state is run by organisations
that care about the "greater good". This is of course a effortless thing to
do. Or you can start to re evaluate your dependence on a single centralized
source of information and how there exist no measures to control that source
by a publically elected body making it an extremely powerful agency for mass
propaganda IF it decided to do so.

It's more than just about whether this was an honest glitch or an intentional
response to adhere to ongoing anger of public so as to show support. Either
way, it is necessary to think how long such powerful agencies can exist
without intentionally or unintentionally contributing to Orwellian dystopia.

------
JamisonM
I find it hilariously dumb that people are hyperventilating over what, at
first glance, looks like a fairly obvious cache corruption bug of some kind.

The Orwellian implications of not showing Churchill's /image/ in the carousel
of Prime Ministers after a search are precisely nil.

~~~
seesawtron
Nothing is "fairly obvious" in today's world. You can choose to ignore
everything and assume that the state is run by organisations that care about
the "greater good". This is of course a effortless thing to do. Or you can
start to re evaluate your dependence on a single centralized source of
information and how there exist no measures to control that source by a
publically elected body making it an extremely powerful agency for mass
propaganda IF it decided to do so.

It's more than just about whether this was an honest glitch or an intentional
response to adhere to ongoing anger of public so as to show support. Either
way, it is necessary to think how long such powerful agencies can exist
without intentionally or unintentionally contributing to Orwellian dystopia.

~~~
JamisonM
This is a good example of what I find very funny.

Your comment would be an entirely appropriate reaction to, say, the well-
documented evidence of YouTube's recommendation engine pushing people toward
radicalization - which seems like a very dystopian thing, aligns very well
with their profit motive, and if demonstrated to be accurate, effective, and
intentional would be of genuine concern.

This is literally just a trifle.

------
shadowgovt
Among the many, many, many things that _could_ cause this:

If the specific source image Google had cached as "Churchill" got scrubbed for
some reason (any reason, really, including possibly copyright issues), there's
no guarantee the subsystem that vends those summary images has a backup
Churchill image to vend, and it may have nothing to show until the cache is
repopulated.

Meanwhile, an Image Search for his name shows as much Churchill as you want.
Nothing really to worry about here. Unless we're generally commenting on how
one bug can have significant impact on surface-level results (which has always
been true, and that's why there's more than one search engine in the world).

------
akitzmiller
Please, people. If Google wanted to make a statement about imperialists and
white overlordship, there are more impactful ways to do so than hiding
Churchill's picture.

This is just a glitch

~~~
shadowgovt
Exactly. Currently the statement Google makes about imperialists and white
overlordship is that we probably meant _imperialism_ and white overlordship.
:-D

[https://www.google.com/search?q=imperialists+and+white+overl...](https://www.google.com/search?q=imperialists+and+white+overlordship)

------
raarts
Someone told me a few months ago to search Google images for 'white family' vs
'black family'.

And the results were remarkable. White families turn out to be a lot more
colored then black families are white.

Regardless the reasons I don't like people or programs messing with my search
results. Does Google consider me a bigot and tries to change my view of the
world? Will this prove to other people I must be racist because search results
are personalized? Or is Google racist for being better at recognizing black
than whites?

Maybe some insiders can explain?

~~~
thu2111
I used to work at Google. In the old days, before it was apparently internally
hijacked by social activists.

These sorts of things can occur by accident. It sounds implausible but it used
to happen all the time. Thing to remember is that even after decades of work
Google is not really a question answering machine. It's still, at its core,
matching words and phrases to things it found on the internet.

The most famous problem was "Google-bombing" where people realised they could
control the top result for obscure phrases by using links, like [is george
bush an idiot]. There was one related to Jews as well that I don't remember.
Some mitigations were added and it went away as a problem.

The [white families] vs [black families] thing sounds a lot like the older
example of [white inventors] vs [black inventors]:

[https://external-preview.redd.it/N6gh6oArK2EWeIoaPJkoD-
mDcsu...](https://external-preview.redd.it/N6gh6oArK2EWeIoaPJkoD-
mDcsuJ_ShHwrt7VAGcJvU.png?auto=webp&s=b62ff16d727eb53a40124486a75ccbc541a9633c)

As you can see if you search Google Images for [white american inventors] then
you get the same results today. This isn't caused by racism in the algorithm
or at Google but rather the fact that you're searching in English and most
English speakers on the internet are from America or western Europe i.e.
white. Thus it's rare to prefix professions with "white" when describing
photos because that's the assumed default. How many articles are out there
discussing "white inventors", do you think? Or even "white families"? Blacks
on the other hand are a minority of the population and especially rare in
things like "inventing", which is a rather archaic job description and thus
biases old to begin with. It's practically guaranteed that any page matching
the phrase "white american inventors" is going to be primarily a discussion of
race, not inventing.

To see that this is true just search Google Images for [family]. What a shock
- all the photos are of white people.

Now that said, back when I was working there people would understand these
things, and give Google the benefit of the doubt. They were right to do so
because in my entire time there I never saw any evidence of specific biases
being introduced into web search for political reasons, nor did I see any
evidence the executives in charge of web search were biased. For a search
engine that trust seemed important, at least at the time. These days Google
has changed and now routinely brags about its extreme biases. Firing Damore
was a turning point. Now people see things like those search results or
Churchill disappearing and assume the worst, instead of assuming the best.
Because the true explanations are usually proprietary and arcane, this is
leading to a downward spiral of trust.

It's especially hard to defend Google's lack of bias these days, even knowing
things like the above explanations, because they keep doing dumb stuff like
publishing papers on "debiasing AI", which when read turn out to be about
biasing AI towards left-wing sensibilities. For example making it believe
incorrect things about gender distributions amongst the professions. Is Google
search still unbiased? Well ... I search using DuckDuckGo these days by
default. Just in case.

~~~
raarts
Thanks for your answer. Unfortunately not explaining these things in public
feeds public distrust, and to be fair, I now look at google more suspiciously
as well. Because well, things like this keep popping up, conservative
employees being afraid to speak out, the collective crying session video after
Trump was elected, please let everyone go back to implementing great software
and products. I need a search engine I can trust is not tampered with.

------
nihil75
So it's not happening on a per-country basis.

Reports are coming from Serbia, Australia, South Africa and I can confirm
Netherlands as well.

Don't over react, don't spread misinformation.

~~~
lern_too_spel
The right wing outrage machine has been triggered. This will be rolled into
the QAnon conspiracy canon by EOD.

~~~
berbec
Churchill was about to leak internal Clinton emails of the pizzaria-sex
trafficking ring.

~~~
lern_too_spel
"Erasing history" is the new "war on Christmas" Boogeyman. The same people who
used to think Starbucks putting "Happy Holidays" on coffee cups was a
manifestation of a nefarious plot by the executives to dismantle Christianity
now believe that removing statues glorifying the Confederacy and racists
indicates some plot by intellectuals to remove them from history books and
search engines.

~~~
dang
Please don't use HN for ideological flamewar. It is tedious and it destroys
what this site is supposed to be for.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
lern_too_spel
To my mind, I was simply explaining the reason why all the comments in the
linked article and the top comment in this thread assumed that Google
intentionally removed Churchill's picture despite how ludicrous that belief
seems. That explanation necessarily involves mentioning the conspiracy
theorists who are inclined to believe certain wacky things based on perceived
attacks against their political beliefs.

Thank you for the clarification.

------
mhh__
If this is anything other than an accident this is absolutely insane.

~~~
dilandau
Google and others are literally tripping over each other to virtue-signal
these days. That said, this has to be a bug.

------
anewdirection
Why is this flagged? This is a very interesting bug. I would love to see a
post mortem on how such things happen behind the scenes. Are there relly too
many morons busy pushing ideologies in the comments to actually explore this?

~~~
dang
Yes, unfortunately the thread is a combination of (1) people jumping
indignantly to the extremely unlikely conclusion that Google is censoring
Churchill, and (2) people arguing angrily about Churchill and (you guessed it)
Hitler. Curiosity might have a faint chance against one or the other of those
but not both at the same time, so I don't think it makes sense to turn off the
flags.

If more substantial information comes up about why this was happening, it
might be possible to have a curious discussion. The vast majority of the time,
these things turn out not to have been intentional or anything close to
sinister. Internet users just like to assume otherwise because it's more
outrageous and more fun.

------
pkaye
Maybe Churchill invoked the "right to be forgotten" laws?

------
imgabe
Weird, I'm in Hong Kong and it doesn't show up here either. Unless I'm
misunderstanding the implication is that this is somehow related to the
protests? That seems like an odd way for Google to try to erase history, by
just removing a picture, not the whole entry and not targeting any of the
other myriad leaders people could object to, like Thatcher. It seems more
likely that it's a glitch of some kind.

------
starpilot
Please, it's just his photo not showing up, google still serves his Wikipedia
page just fine. This seems like an error and not censorship.

------
X6S1x6Okd1st
Oddly I can't find him in the "people also search for" when searching for
other leaders and his family

------
jedimastert
This seems to be an issue with the structured information coming from
Wikipedia. His picture still shows up in image searches, it's like his profile
picture just got deleted or something.

If this was actually an attempt by Google to censor something then they're
doing a pretty poor job at it...

~~~
Veen
I’m not sure that the point is censorship, but a signal of solidarity with
far-left activists in the UK who are engaged in a campaign of vandalism
against statues of historical figures they disapprove of, most prominently
Winston Churchill.

------
_bxg1
I have to say, it's weird to think they would do something like this
intentionally _without_ coming out and saying it, since the entire point would
be PR.

Does anyone have proof or confirmation that it's intentional?

------
baryphonic
And now it's being flagged on HN?! What in the world is wrong with these
people?

~~~
dang
Please see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23515496](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23515496)

~~~
baryphonic
Thank you and my apologies for making a mountain out of a molehill. Mr
Churchill's image is back where we expect it this morning.

------
buboard
huge if true

~~~
jpxw
It is true - try it out for yourself. Google “UK prime ministers” or “WW2
leaders”.

~~~
buboard
it's black , also no image in the wikipedia box. (i'm in greece)

------
mnm1
Not to worry. They still have pictures of Hitler and Stalin. Those guys
must've been the good guys since their pictures are still on google.

------
mmusc
Yeah so now we're in a world where Winston Churchill is censored. But Hitler
is not.

I understand it's just a picture but it's a slippery slope.

A search engine should return results based on your search query. What if the
person searching wants to learn about the very subject they are trying censor.

There's a big difference between moving/removing a statue and purging all
records online.

