This is a weird one that I first became alerted to by this Scott Adams’ Tweet:
I didn't think this was real until I tested it. https://t.co/LrfIsfKDCC
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) September 13, 2020
Search for “American Inventor” on Google Image Search.
Spoiler: On the first page teaser strip, you get Thomas Edison, eight black people, and a picture of Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell with coloration that makes him look black:
Clicking on the “Images” search tab likewise seems to bring up 90% black inventors.
Missing from the first image results:
Of the black inventors shown, probably only George Washington Carver ranks among the top ten American inventors.
Someone has obviously gone to a great deal of time and effort to falsify history for political reason. Particularly suspicious is the elevation of Lewis Howard Latimer, an Edison underling who helped develop a better light bulb filament, to the second position on the list, shortly after Democratic president nominee Joe Biden announced that it was Latimer rather than Edison who invented the light bulb.
Even stranger: It’s not just Google. As similar image search at Duck Duck Go now brings up similar results. Ditto Yahoo.
Weirdly, Bing brings up non-racially-gamed results in its first page teaser strip:
However, if you click on the IMAGES tab, Bing too shows the same racist gaming.
I can think of three possible explanations for the multiple racist results to be shown across all image search services:
- Someone at Google has made the conscious decision to feature black inventors at the expense of all other races and the other search service are somehow using Google image search as their own image search engine.
- Coordinated efforts across image search companies to distort the search results.
- Someone is employing a web spider to automatically game image results to favor black Americans (this could explain how the dark-skinned image of Alexander Graham Bell makes the cut).
All of these are causes for concern.
We’re getting to watch the Ministry of Truth falsify history in real-time for political reasons.