Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Apple will finally fix issue that blocked searches for 'Asian' as adult content (mashable.com)
84 points by laurex on April 2, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 105 comments



> It's been an issue for more than a year — but it's about to be fixed.

> Now, try searching for "Asian food," "Asian Americans," "Asian history," or even "local Asian market" in your Safari browser.

> All these searches are blocked. Clearly none of them have anything to do with adult content.

I can't think of a better example of Asian people being treated as invisible.

Apple, you need to do better. This isn't a typo kind of bug. Something is fundamentally wrong on your end to allow something like this to persist for over a year without being fixed.


I'd argue it's more a manifestation of "Asian" being an artificial construct that people don't use very often because it's typically meaningless.

What the hell is "Asian food?" You're either looking for "Indian food" or "Japanese food" or "Korean food." What is "Asian history?" Are you talking about Mughals in Bangladesh or Qing in China? It's all completely different.

People who are actually searching for these things use the specific term. I'm from Bangladesh. I don't look for an "Asian market." I look for a "Pakistani market" or "Halal market." I remember staring at a scantron in elementary school trying to figure out whether I should check the "Asian" box--which I ended up doing because the other categories made even less sense.

It's only in politics and porn where "Asian" is heavily used.


> I don't look for an "Asian market."

You may not, but people do: "An Asian supermarket is a category of grocery stores in Western countries that stocks items imported from the multiple countries in East, South and Southeast Asia." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_supermarket

Here in Raleigh, NC we have Grand Asia Market: "Since our humble start in 1997, we've been doing our best to provide the community with the highest quality Asian groceries." -- https://www.grandasiamarket.com/

H Mart is technically Korean, but its wiki page says: "H Mart is the largest Asian American grocery store chain, with 61 locations nationwide."


Are you in the UK? "Asian" is widely used in Australia/NZ (and I believe the US) to refer generally to countries in the Han sphere of cultural influence (China, Korea, Japan, most of SEA) - specifically not Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka. There are businesses that literally brand themselves as "Asian Supermarkets" that sell items from these countries.

Over here, there are Asian restaurants that serve a separate cuisine to what you'd find at a Chinese, Korean or Thai restaurant (closer to hawker food from Malaysia/Singapore, from what I understand, but with a more Chinese influence). Then there is "Asian Fusion" on top of that.

There are universities that offer "Asian Studies" degrees, and probably a whole lot of other community organisations I don't know about because I'm not Asian.


> I remember staring at a scantron in elementary school trying to figure out whether I should check the "Asian" box--which I ended up doing because the other categories made even less sense.

I'm from India, and this still trips me up even to this day.


On the surface, I agree. There's a big difference between Siberia, Japan, and Pakistan, sure.

But please realize the US isn't the Valley with tons of variety of Asian folk. In most of the US, you get some generic semi offensively named restaurant like 'Golden Dragon' or 'Jade Palace' that attempts to make foods from multiple countries. Pad Thai or sushi or dumplings in one sitting.

In most of the US, Asian people are sparse so stores and restaurants brand themselves as just Asian. My wife googles Asian stores to find things she likes, since her country specific stores are a real rarity.


Here in Germany we have stores that are literally named "Asia Markt" (Markt is German for Market) or "Asia Bistro". Usually you can buy food from Japan, Korea, China, and India.


I am Asian and I have Googled Asian food! In American parlance it means rice noodles, brothy soups, soy sauce, peanuts and peanut oil, green onions, etc.


What is American food?

What is European history?


"American food" has a meaning because the term "American" typically means the US, and the US has quite a few foods popular across the country and not outside the country.

"European history" works because basically all of Europe has had widespread interaction with the rest of Europe for millennia, while thanks to mountain ranges like the Himalayas and the Zagros, and the scale of the continent, huge swathes of Asia have historically had very little interaction. No Chinese dynasties have ever conquered India, and no Caliphate has ever reached China.


Just because the continent was never unified doesn't mean millions of people don't use the continent name to refer to part of it. India is often refered to as a subcontinent for this reason.

Just like how "America" doesn't always mean all of North and South America, or even all of North America.


Google never did fix the issue where pictures of black people were automatically being classified as gorillas. They just banned anything from being classified as a gorilla as a workaround.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-go...


I'm blind and it's almost impossible to Google anything related to blindness. There just aren't enough of us to register. Everything is either about blinds (like curtains or whatever). And some idiot made a movie called "blindness" that doesn't help matters. The blind internet is like 1998, just passing links around and knowing which websites to go to. It's also hard to Google questions about the NVDA screen reader, Google corrects you to NVIDIA, you have to use the - syntax to get it to beleive you.


Have you considered borrowing another language?

Eg in french, blind is "aveugle" which doesn't have synonyms or homonyms.


That's actually a good idea. Among English-speaking players of the board game Go (the English name being derived from the Japanese), the Korean name for the game ("baduk") is gaining popularity in large part because it is much easier to Google.


If it's okay, can I contact you and ask a few questions?

My email is in the profile.


NVDA is Nvidia's stock ticker symbol. That's not a correction.


At Google around 2008-2009 we had a similar issue with the word "lesbian"... it was basically impossible to get Google Suggest to suggest anything non-adult when you started typing in "lesbian", despite trying hard to filter out all adult suggestions, because even a tiny false negative rate in the adult content filter still wasn't enough. I think someone ended up just hardcoding the Google Suggest behavior for this query. I wouldn't be surprised if it still works that way now....


I remember the first time I tried DuckDuckGo I searched the word "breast" as a test. Not a single search result with the adult filter. Not even chicken breast recipes. They seemed to have improved it since then.


So, back when I worked on the Google indexing team, Bing had some Flash games that would automatically fire off Bing searches in an iframe for every puzzle guess you made. They'd give you some points that you could redeem for prizes.

I suspected a major goal for the games was to artificially inflate Bing's search market share numbers, but maybe also to gather data for machine learning and/or old-fashioned statistical analysis.

I was curious... and we at Google were careful about machine learning because we knew that, for instance, if you had an algorithm that internally rewrote every query by appending "breast", it would almost certainly cause the click-through rates to skyrocket while harming search quality. So, on my own time on my own computer, I used these Flash games as a typing tutor to re-learn QWERTY keyboard layout, and would often append "breast" to the in-game searches.

I didn't learning anything from my poking around, though I did get enough points to get 2 Coleman tents, a mult-tool, a external hard disk, a record player, a bunch of DVDs, and a few other freebies from Bing with all of my game points.


I had an amazing search result with ddg: I searched "forced parameterization" and all the images of SQL execution plans were censored :D


> non-adult

You mean "non-sexual"? Or "non-pornographic"?

I doubt the results were full of gore or tobacco.


I recall the first internet search I ever did. It was for 'mathematical models'. The first result was the Jimmy Carter interview with Playboy. The rest were not appropriate for work.


[flagged]


We first cancel all people with BLM/LGBTQ support profiles while discriminating against Asians and Indians in real life.


[flagged]


Apple has far too much money. There's no chance of being able to cancel them anyway.


> The woke crowd can't cancel Apple without having to buy a new phone and laptop to comment from. Way too much work.

That reminds me of this old video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q6KAg6qEGY

tl;dr: the cringeworthy end to some cringeworthy "occupation" of a university cafeteria. At the end some guy goes through all the bags, concerned that their stuff will be "confiscated," and it's MacBook, MacBook, MacBook...


Using woke as a derogatory term is such a bad look. The woke crowd in this case being folks who are trying to address issues of anti-Asian hate by exposing shortcomings like this. Seems weird to me to make fun of people who are trying to do that.


> address issues of anti-Asian hate by exposing shortcomings like this

This isn't doing anything to address anything that could be properly understood as "hate." That word has some very specific meanings that are very necessary and become easier to ignore when the word is too-frequently misused with some over-general meaning (that's already covered by other words).


Using "bad look" as a derogatory term is also a bad look. Focusing on optics over substance is a big part of the mess that is current discourse. I expect the vast majority of people who practice what they preach are doing a lot more practicing and very little preaching.


As an Asian, I find the progressive crowd to say one thing but do quite another with regard to helping Asians, so frankly the flak they receive is something that they earned through their own actions.


It's a fitting look, considering the woke actively discriminate against Asians, while pretending otherwise.


I don't believe "the woke crowd" does anything at all for anti-asian hate. They only post woke comments online. Those that do make a difference are a totally different breed. I'm sure you know the kind of person I'm making fun of.


Woke is a derogatory term because we don't believe it's honest. People in this thread can't even seem to decide if it's racist to find other races attractive, or racist not to.

> address issues of anti-Asian hate [...] Seems weird to me to make fun of people who are trying to do that.

So demonstrate some harm and present a coherent argument about how to reduce it.


The fetishization of Asian women is insane. If you search for "asian" on Reddit, the vast majority of results are porn subreddits.


According to Pornhub[1] their top searches world-wide were:

Lesbian

Teen (18+)

Ebony

MILF

Anal

BigDick

Hentai

Arab ...

[1]https://www.inverse.com/article/26011-pornhub-post-popular-p...

Asian was way at the bottom (and was the most pop term in Hawai'i, I guess that's expected). It looks like fetishization is an exaggeration, never the less, even if it were, who cares? People can prefer what they want, so long as it's legal.


Here’s the same chart for 2019: https://cs.phncdn.com/insights-static/wp-content/uploads/201...

1. Japanese

2. Hentai

3. Lesbian

4. Milf

5. Korean

6. Asian


If you look at the stats, "Japanese" is driven by Chinese/Central Asian viwership. N-Am and S-Am still prefer lesbians (primarily driven by women viewers, btw).

Honestly, JP porn is unwatchable. Squeaky sounds, just quite "unique" as they say. It's the porn you'd watch if you want to quit watching porn.


The issue is that china and korea banned porn so you have no other choice if want a pornstar who looks east asian. I'm ethnically chinese and I've been jerking it to japanese porn on mute for decades now.


Pornhub is blocked in China.


That’s great, I’m going by what they have on their graphic. Maybe they mean HK + the renegade province. It does not specify.


Which graphic are you referring to?


Here[1] I suppose it's more accurate to say Central Asia (inc China), and SEA and some smaller areas.

Bulgaria and Spain are in a class of their own with "Mature".

[1]https://www.joyscribe.com/pornhub-has-revealed-what-everyone...


In that graphic, the Anglosphere, particularly the US, make up the vast majority of the traffic.


Could be, but who's to say it’s never the less representative of those local preferences?


I am asian but I never use that to describe myself. There's always a narrower adjective that doesn't lump culturally distinct groups like chinese/korean/japanese/etc together.

Except when I am describing how I look.

So I don't see this a bad thing. I basically expect the same results when you search for other descriptor of appearances like blonde or big boobs. There's no other reason for subreddit communities to form around appearances other than look at gifs of them. (though there are exceptions like when you want to form communities specifically to complain about problems caused by said appearances: /r/bigboobproblems /r/ABraThatFits)


Perhaps, but Reddit ≠ the internet.


In the earlier days of the internet Russian/mail-order brides seemed far more visible than asian porn/fetishes to me.

I wonder when the tides shifted and what was responsible for it. Now if you search "russian" the results are dominated by politics.


I also just tried this and didn't get any NSFW content. Most of it is coverage on hate crimes against East Asians. Maybe there's a filter to disable somewhere.


At what point does attraction cross the line and become fetishization?


Does it become a problem if people do cross that line anyway?

Say Tiger Woods or OJ who seem to prefer blondes, or Nick Cage and Soros who seem to recently prefer East Asians. Does it matter?


Marrying an Asian person is different from sexually fetishizing Asians as a category, so I don't think Cage or Soros are relevant here.


But we can’t be certain they did not entertain a fetish before their marriages...

Question is, does it matter? What if someone likes BBW and fetishizes it, do we care? If they then marry a BBW is it no longer a fetish?


Personally, I don't care about other people's sexual preferences ans I don't see why anyone should.

The one argument you can make against fetishizing a group of people is that it's reducing members of that group to fetish objects.

So if you're an Asian woman trying to date seriously, you'll get a bunch of white men who only care you're Asian and nothing else.

I don't know how much of an issue that is in practice (and I'm sure it's different in diff parts of the world).


Hang on, presumably you're now framing this as a US thing. How do we know the demand in the US comes disproportionately from white men, is that in the stats[1]? OKCupid seems to tell a diff story.

[1]https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/howyourraceaff...


This is intellectual misdirection. Not knowing the precise moment an X becomes a Y does not prove the non-existence of Xs or Ys. For example, when does a small pile of rocks become a big pile of rocks? Regardless of the answer, there are both small rock piles and big rock piles.


There may however never be an answer because humans will never agree on the veritas of the matter. E.g. the debate on when the small human life becomes a human life worth protecting.


The meaning of small and big is relative to some context. In the context of porn, almost any word designates a fetish. If it refers to a group of humans, one could call it a stereotype or objectification. In the context of Porn [Rule 34](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34) applies, and it affects everything.


The fact that machine learning or statistical methods find that the word "asian" is so highly correlated with porn that it is basically synonymous enough to be blocked is a problem.


That is a problem, but with the algorithm or its flawed application.

I don't think it's too far-fetched to expect one of the largest and richest tech companies worldwide to be able to tell with decent accuracy how the word "asian" was used. The sophistication of their blocking method is basically on par with a basic word filter that doesn't even attempt to avoid the Scunthorpe problem.

I mean, we're not talking about reaching 99% accuracy or really advanced linguistic detection. When a company sells smart home voice assistants surely they can be expected to tell "asian food" from more lewd content apart. Keep a list of naughty websites, track what web searches regularly return those as result and then target those specific queries. Or throw some Machine Learning at it, might as well put their enthusiastically marketed AI processing unit to use.

Accurate content filtering is hard. But completely blocking anything using one of the most common words in the language just because it frequently links to porn sites? Come on.


Yes, the algorithm is definitely inappropriate and too basic. However let's not overlook that it is a societal problem that a large amount of the US population does not care about Asians at all apart from porn. When there is 100x more searches for "asian hotties" than for "asian history", you can get 99% accuracy just by blacklisting the word "asian".


These claims seem pretty far fetched. Do you have any evidence that American's mostly only care about Asians because of porn, or that there are 100x more searches for Asian porn than other Asian topics? Seems pretty unreasonable to me


The fact that Reddit's search algorithms and Apple's filters find a strong correlation between Asians and porn suggests that to be the case. The 100x was just a rhetorical example.


Your point about correlation with porn shows absolutely nothing.

Every site hosting pornographic content finds a strong correlation between anything and porn. I literally just searched "foo" on Reddit with NSFW turned on and the results are 100% porn, ranging from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure to Foo Fighters related...content.

Do people watch porn with asians? Yes, and also with about every second noun that appears in a dictionary. I highly doubt Apple's filters are applied in a fair way. Do they block queries containing gingers? Germans? Japanese? Which continents, ethnicities and countries does Apple find too sexy? I don't think a company should be in a position where this kind of question has to be asked.


What? Searching for "foo" had no porn results. "German" only had two porn results out of the top 50. "Asian" was almost all porn. I did all three searches with the same logged-in user with "show NSFW" enabled in the user settings.

Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/bjtDEfG


> However let's not overlook that it is a societal problem that a large amount of the US population does not care about Asians at all apart from porn.

Why is this a problem? The premise was hate, but now the goalposts have moved to indifference.

Have you studied Romanian history or are they beneath you racially? Or, do you disagree with the premise of the question?


I would be fine with people not caring about Asians if at the same time they didn't watch so much Asian porn.

I would also be fine if people watched a lot of Asian porn if at the same time they cared about Asian culture and history.

But the fact that people disproportionately watch Asian porn while not caring about Asian people is pretty weird and racist to me.


Why should these things be related? Novelty is actually one of the things that sexually attracts men so even if porn viewers were all amateur historians these would probably be anti-correlated.

But why does it matter anyway? Is it bad to like pierogis without having an in-depth understanding of the holodomor? Should we stop listening to foreign music until we ensure we have a "proper" understanding of the political issues the artists grew up under?

> But the fact that people disproportionately watch Asian porn while not caring about Asian people is pretty weird and racist to me.

Actually, incest porn appears to be the most watched. What does that say about the exploitation of the incestuous?


Just tried this and did not get a single NWS result. Skin care was #2


Maybe if you enabled "show nsfw content" in your settings. Screenshot for search results of "asian": https://i.redd.it/9jbms02e3mn61.png


I think you're misusing the search. If I enable nsfw by adding `nsfw:yes`, both 'asian' and 'european' show ONLY porn results both for content and communities. If I omit the `nsfw:yes`, but allow my profile to view nsfw content, both 'european' and 'asian' don't show any porn in the search results.

The search filter is either a binary, or there's just so much porn for everything that it doesn't matter.


There was no "nsfw:yes" in the search box. It was literally just "asian". I am using the search feature on the new reddit design on web: https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=asian&type=sr%2Cuser

Other ethnicities, also show up with some porn results, but not nearly as extreme as for "asian". e.g. for "white" and "black" it was about a third of the top 20.


I have 'Enable to view adult and NSFW (not safe for work) content in your feed and search results' enabled in my user profile, and this is what I'm seeing when I click that link: https://imgur.com/gm9PZqZ


Here's what I see: https://i.imgur.com/VMTdfDk.png

If you just recently enabled the setting in your user profile, probably there is just some caching on reddit's side so it is still serving the old results from before you enabled that.


Won't that bias the search towards showing you NSFW content? Since you specifically made it clear that that's what you are interested in.


Also try that on pornhub.... Half of reddit is a porn.


What other things do you expect to find from the word Asian?

Food? Try Thai, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.

Same goes for anything else I can think of except porn.


I don't think it's higher up than many other "types" it's just a broader group, like ebony, compared to all the searches that would mostly result in (or believed to result in) white women. Blondes, redheads, brunettes, cowgirls, cheerleaders, etc. all defaults to mostly white women in the results. Besides you are searching a site that is almost a SoMe version of PornHub.


Exactly that. I bet most people looking for "redhead" aren't after makeup or hair care advice.


"White is the default" is still racism, and its existence doesn't make "Asian == porn" any less racist.


And would racism not imply that people would dislike and therefore not search for this term/produce this content?


:s in this context does that make any sense? Specificity of porn query/popularity of query/result?


First of all I didn't say if it were racist or not. Secondly the default of mostly white women is because most movies/clips are of white women. There's nothing racist in the way the results are distributed. You could argue that there are more white women in porn because of racism but that is another topic. I'd like to hear how you see returning mostly results with white women on a search of "redheads" as racisme though.


[flagged]


Surely you see the difference between Asian men being into Asian women and white men being into Asian women?


No? What difference does it make?


I think the implication is that people are interested in their own race by default and everything outside of that is notable/unusual.

Not sure I buy it.


No the implication is people find people similar to the people they interact with regularly attractive by default. This doesn't preclude people from liking other types of people, but it's not common for someone to grow up surrounded by certain types of people and find none of them attractive.


I don't think that's obviously the case. What _is_ the case is most people dating people who are 1. in close geographical proximity 2. in a similar socioeconomic position, not necessarily because they prefer that, but because that's the most natural way (at least historically) to find someone to date.


It’s not far fetched to think Japanese porn producers could cause an increased global attraction to Japanese and Asian women.

The porn industry in Japan is the largest in the world, and is sold internationally.


What is the problem? I am a white dude and I like Asian women. Nothing wrong there.

I do not see it as fetish at all. In fact, it is easier to date Asian girls for me. Hence, the preference formed.


This is absolutely disgusting and blatantly racist. This should be a much bigger deal.


I'm "Asian." I don't see why it's disgusting or blatantly racist.


It would be wise to stop feeding the outrage machine for no other reason to create more outrage.


It's a tech problem, as much as tech problems can be disgusting or racist.


They can be and this is.


No it's not


Adult content filters are racist and homophobic without exemption really.


What a time to be alive. A billion dollar corporation can do something os minuscule it should not be mentioned even on the last page of the internet with letter size 2 yet it is an article on HN.


I actually have a problem with using "Asian" as descriptive of people. Asia is the largest continent with almost 60% of the world's population. It includes such diverse countries as Turkey, Russia, (east of the Urals), Armenia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, China, North Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia. There really is not much of a common culture across all those, nor is there a common ethnicity or language.

To me, Asian just seems a word that was coined by British, French, German, colonial empires to describe something "other" and to lump a bunch of peoples and cultures together.


North & South Korea, Vietnam, and Japan absolutely share common culture with China. Korea used Chinese characters (Hanja) before Hangul. Japanese Kanji consists of adapted Chinese characters. Pre-1900s, Vietnam used Chinese characters.

In the United States, "Asian" really means something more like "Sino". Maybe not the right word, but originally within varying degrees of the Chinese sphere of influence throughout history. In the UK, an Indian or Pakistani person would be considered Asian. This is not true in the United States.


Asian in the US is mostly used as a short form of "East Asian."


It was not traditionally true in the US -- I agree that "Asian" traditionally meant East Asian in the US until recently, but lately the media has been calling Kamala Harris the first Asian-American vice president because her mother was Indian.


But Asian in the UK usually refers to South Asian matters generally.


I actually have the same annoyance when US media use the word "European".

Like, a French person, a Portuguese, a Norwegian and a Bulgarian are going to have virtually nothing in common, but in international internet conversation it's assumed that they're all part of the same group.


Similarly when Americans use the generic term “white people”


Excuse me, what is the white people branch?




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: