Google apologises after racial slur appears in suggested question about population of Sheffield

Internet giant Google has apologised after a racial slur appeared in its ‘people also ask’ function about the population of Sheffield.
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A screenshot shared by anti-racism campaign group AskMAMA shows how the the search engine used the inflammatory word as part of a follow up question it offered about the city.

The image shows how, when researching the region’s demographics, Google suggested through its ‘people also ask’ function: “Is Sheffield full of *****?”

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Google has apologised after a racial slur appeared in a 'people also ask' suggestion before offering population data about Shefffield.Google has apologised after a racial slur appeared in a 'people also ask' suggestion before offering population data about Shefffield.
Google has apologised after a racial slur appeared in a 'people also ask' suggestion before offering population data about Shefffield.
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TellMAMA, which campaigns against racial attacks against Muslims, reported the harmful result.

Google has now manually removed the suggested and apologised.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the internet giant said: “We apologise to anyone who may have been affected by these questions. We have systems in place to prevent hateful or disparaging content from appearing in this feature. If our automated systems don’t catch questions that violate our policies, we take swift action to remove them when we’re made aware of them, as we did in this case.”

In a statement, TellMAMA said it was “concerning” the result was able to happen at all.

The inflammatory suggestion - "is Sheffield full of p***s?" - expanded to show demographic data about the city.The inflammatory suggestion - "is Sheffield full of p***s?" - expanded to show demographic data about the city.
The inflammatory suggestion - "is Sheffield full of p***s?" - expanded to show demographic data about the city.
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‘People also ask’ functions by showing what it claims are questions “that people commonly search for” related to a user’s original search.

In the image of the inflammatory result, the suggestion returned demographic data about Sheffield’s population.

Google claims its search feature policies are in place to forbid content that promotes or condones violence, or content that seeks to incite hatred against minoritised groups.

TellMAMA has ‘trusted flagger’ status with all major social media platforms, allowing it to more swiftly raise issues and see action taken.

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