[HN Gopher] Apple will finally fix issue that blocked searches f...
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Apple will finally fix issue that blocked searches for 'Asian' as
adult content
Author : laurex
Score : 65 points
Date : 2021-04-02 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sea.mashable.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sea.mashable.com)
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| 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.
| mdoms wrote:
| This is an utterly insane point of view. What are you talking
| about? Should "human", "male" and "blonde" also be considered
| problematic? Those descriptors scoop up far greater and more
| diverse groups than "asian".
|
| > To me, Asian just seems a word that was coined by British,
| French, German, colonial empires
|
| How you "feel" about etymology isn't relevant, nor correct.
| Truth isn't something you conjure up with your feelings.
| xenihn wrote:
| 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.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Asian in the US is mostly used as a short form of "East
| Asian."
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| 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.
| Clampower wrote:
| Similarly when Americans use the generic term "white people"
| StreamBright wrote:
| 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.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Adult content filters are racist and homophobic without exemption
| really.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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.
| mdoms wrote:
| This is absolutely disgusting and blatantly racist. This should
| be a much bigger deal.
| rayiner wrote:
| I'm "Asian." I don't see why it's disgusting or blatantly
| racist.
| Clampower wrote:
| It would be wise to stop feeding the outrage machine for no
| other reason to create more outrage.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| It's a tech problem, as much as tech problems can be disgusting
| or racist.
| mdoms wrote:
| They can be and this is.
| jamie77444 wrote:
| No it's not
| lacker wrote:
| 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....
| salamandersauce wrote:
| 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.
| KMag wrote:
| 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.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I had an amazing search result with ddg: I searched "forced
| parameterization" and all the images of SQL execution plans
| were censored :D
| lupire wrote:
| > non-adult
|
| You mean "non-sexual"? Or "non-pornographic"?
|
| I doubt the results were full of gore or tobacco.
| Panino wrote:
| > 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.
| rayiner wrote:
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| What is American food?
|
| What is European history?
| bhupy wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| GeekyBear wrote:
| 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...
| porphyra wrote:
| The fetishization of Asian women is insane. If you search for
| "asian" on Reddit, the vast majority of results are porn
| subreddits.
| Daho0n wrote:
| 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.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Exactly that. I bet most people looking for "redhead" aren't
| after makeup or hair care advice.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "White is the default" is still racism, and its existence
| doesn't make "Asian == porn" any _less_ racist.
| Daho0n wrote:
| 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.
| maxrev17 wrote:
| :s in this context does that make any sense? Specificity of
| porn query/popularity of query/result?
| maxrev17 wrote:
| And would racism not imply that people would dislike and
| therefore not search for this term/produce this content?
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| 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.
| 88840-8855 wrote:
| 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.
| TakuYam wrote:
| At what point does attraction cross the line and become
| fetishization?
| porphyra wrote:
| 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.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| 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.
| porphyra wrote:
| 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".
| Rule35 wrote:
| > 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?
| potatoman22 wrote:
| 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
| porphyra wrote:
| 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.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| 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.
| samus wrote:
| 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| 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?
| colinfirthisok wrote:
| Marrying an Asian person is different from sexually
| fetishizing Asians as a category, so I don't think Cage or
| Soros are relevant here.
| mc32 wrote:
| 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?
| colinfirthisok wrote:
| 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).
| mc32 wrote:
| 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/howyourr
| aceaff...
| pengaru wrote:
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| 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.
| Cenk wrote:
| 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
| mc32 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway_porn wrote:
| 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.
| PentelicoMarble wrote:
| Pornhub is blocked in China.
| mc32 wrote:
| That's great, I'm going by what they have on their
| graphic. Maybe they mean HK + the renegade province. It
| does not specify.
| PentelicoMarble wrote:
| Which graphic are you referring to?
| mc32 wrote:
| 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...
| porphyra wrote:
| In that graphic, the Anglosphere, particularly the US,
| make up the vast majority of the traffic.
| mc32 wrote:
| Could be, but who's to say it's never the less
| representative of those local preferences?
| gnicholas wrote:
| Perhaps, but Reddit [?] the internet.
| xenihn wrote:
| Just tried this and did not get a single NWS result. Skin care
| was #2
| porphyra wrote:
| Maybe if you enabled "show nsfw content" in your settings.
| Screenshot for search results of "asian":
| https://i.redd.it/9jbms02e3mn61.png
| lakecresva wrote:
| 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.
| porphyra wrote:
| 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.
| lakecresva wrote:
| 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
| porphyra wrote:
| 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.
| xenihn wrote:
| 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.
| keenreed wrote:
| Also try that on pornhub.... Half of reddit is a porn.
| reaperducer wrote:
| If you're positing that white westerners are responsible for
| fetishizing Asian women, then you haven't spent any time in a
| Japanese convenience store in the last 50 years.
| PentelicoMarble wrote:
| Surely you see the difference between Asian men being into
| Asian women and white men being into Asian women?
| randyrand wrote:
| 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.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| No? What difference does it make?
| colinfirthisok wrote:
| 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.
| Larrikin wrote:
| 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.
| colinfirthisok wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway_porn wrote:
| 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)
| tarboreus wrote:
| 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.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| Have you considered borrowing another language?
|
| Eg in french, blind is "aveugle" which doesn't have synonyms or
| homonyms.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| So Apple is admitting to being racist? Shouldn't we cancel them
| now?
| Daho0n wrote:
| The woke crowd can't cancel Apple without having to buy a new
| phone and laptop to comment from. Way too much work.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > 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...
| sweetheart wrote:
| 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.
| seriousquestion wrote:
| It's a fitting look, considering the woke actively
| discriminate against Asians, while pretending otherwise.
| Daho0n wrote:
| 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.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| 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.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > 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).
| Rule35 wrote:
| 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.
| nitrogen wrote:
| 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.
| ronsor wrote:
| Apple has far too much money. There's no chance of being able
| to cancel them anyway.
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