What is, at this moment, the most important image in the world? Arguably, and sadly, it is the cartoon depicting the prophet Mohammad with a bomb in his turban that appeared originally in a Danish newspaper last fall and has been reprinted, over the last few days, in newspapers in France, Norway, Germany, the United States and elsewhere. It’s curious that if you do an image search on “danish cartoon” or “Mohammad cartoon” on Google right now the controversial cartoon appears among the first results, but if you do the same search at Yahoo or MSN it’s nowhere to be seen.
I assume this just shows that Google has the superior image search engine, and not that Yahoo and MSN are filtering out an image that Muslims consider blasphemous. But what if Yahoo and MSN were filtering out the cartoon? Would they necessarily be doing the wrong thing? And is Google necessarily doing the right thing by displaying the cartoon? I know what I personally believe. I believe it would be wrong to filter out the image. I would be appalled, and angered, if it were being suppressed.
But it doesn’t cost me anything to be righteous.
What if I were to leave my beliefs about freedom of speech and freedom of the press aside and look at the question from the perspective of a shareholder or a manager or an employee of a search company? I would have to consider the fact that simply distributing an image of Mohammad might well be considered blasphemous by many people around the world – including many customers and potential customers – and that their perception of my company might be damaged as a result. I’d have to consider the fact that Western retail chains have removed Danish goods from their stores in Islamic countries: Was that wrong or right? And I’d certainly have to think hard about the arson attacks on the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Syria today, and the many other threats of violent retaliation. Should the company ignore them and hope for the best? Or should it worry? Is my company putting itself at risk? Would the risk – to the company’s reputation, among other things – be greater if it started to censor politically sensitive information?
An editorial in today’s Financial Times chides Google for speaking of its commerical enterprise in moralistic terms. The paper says that Google’s “mission statement – ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ – sounds straightforward. But Google needs to think more carefully about how it interprets its mission, and be more honest about its commercial self-interest.” In a world in which the mere existence of a political cartoon can stir violence and sow fear, the noble goal of making information accessible is also a risky and even a dangerous goal. Newspapers have always known that, and search engines are learning it.
Still a ways to go. Bookstores were threatened over selling The Satanic Verses. I don’t think anyone has gone after Google’s servers – yet!
Ultimately it is a question of values. Is transparency of information and free speech worth more than censoring for one’s personal good, or the public good? That is the ultimate question that content companies have to answer. After watching Good Luck and Good Night, I’m convinced it was the same decision they had. To push the establishments lack of transparency and straightforwardness in ire of the (what they believed to be, the “so-called”) common good.
This is a situation where no matter what the company does it will be wrong. If they don’t keep the cartoon available then they are censoring. They will get chewed up by the press and the online community for limiting freedom of speech. If they do keep the cartoon available then bad things will happen. The current bad thing is that both the Dutch and Norwegian embassies in Damascus were torched. There will probably be other retributions in the following days.
This is an ethical dilemma in which there are no easy answers. I certainly don’t have one. I just hope that there are people looking for solutions that can allow freedom of speech but limit or avoid deadly repercussions.
Thinking happy thoughts, happy thoughts, happy thoughts….
between wall street, the Feds, China and now this poor Google has had a rough few weeks…I for one want to stand up for that small company compared to all the big bullies,
I cannot support the freedom to be irresponsible or ignorant and be free from reprecussions.
They knew what they did with the cartoon and that was to offend Muslims. If someone created a cartoon of Jesus dropping bombs on children and wedding ceremonies to make a point about Christian America, you better believe it would be death threats and sniper rifles being polished….
You wrote: I assume this just shows that Google has the superior image search engine, and not that Yahoo and MSN are filtering out an image that Muslims consider blasphemous. But what if Yahoo and MSN were filtering out the cartoon?
I think there is a third possibility here that you are not considering. It could actually be that the cartoon is not showing up on Yahoo and MSN…not because they’re filtering it, but because they actually have a better image search than Google. Rather than the other way around.
Google’s greatest strength (boosting rankings by popularity) is also its greatest weakness (boosting rankings by popularity). It is obvious why Google is retrieving this particular image ranked highly to the query “danish cartoon”: there is a lot of buzz/blog text around this image at the moment. But does this recent buzz make the image relevant to the query? It makes the image popular, but let me ask again: Does the buzz make it _relevant_?
So perhaps Yahoo and MSN are not including the image not because they’ve censored it, but because, all buzz aside, this particular image is not really relevant to the phrase “danish cartoon”. I’ll venture a guess that there are dozens and dozens of different danish cartoons, drawn by danish cartoonists, that are more relevant.
Now, if the user really does mean this particular image.. well.. that is wonderful. But let the user specify this by adding more keywords to the query, such as the name of the cartoonist. But don’t assume that search engines which do not retrieve this particular image are doing worse than others that are. They just might be using criteria other than short term popular buzz to assess relevance.
In the long term, I actually trust a search engine more that isn’t as swayed by buzz.
Ron: I think you’re trying to draw an equivalence here that simply doesn’t exist.
JG: That’s a stretch. On the search for “danish cartoon” at both Yahoo and Google, there were plenty of photographs of protests against the cartoon, so they’re certainly influenced by “popular buzz” as much as Google is. As they should be. For any given searcher at any given moment, “popular buzz” and “relevance” are probably pretty closely correlated.
I agree with Kim, we must think happy thoughts, but on the other hand this does not seem to be such a difficult ethical dilemma. I may fling my arms as I like – its my freedom, but my freedom ends where someone else’s nose begins.
Zaheer, Yeah, but some people have a more expansive sense of where their nose begins and ends than other people do. Nick
Ok, fair enough. I am perhaps trying to stretch a bit too far. I guess my feeling is just that Google pretty much pioneered the web version of popular buzz (pagerank), and so while MSN and Yahoo obviously are affected by it, Google consciously goes after it.
But whatever the case, what frustrates me most is that Google (or Yahoo or MSN or whoever) makes the decision for me that popular buzz and relevance are correlated. There is no way for me to specify, in any of these search engines, what I really mean by my query. If Google et al decides that popular buzz is strongly correlated with relevance, and ranks all the images/documents in its collection using buzz as a highly-weighted feature, I’m stuck with having to scroll through all the buzz results before I get to what I actually want.. a site filled with cartoons from Denmark.
As such, I am tyrannized by the majority. D’ya know what I mean?
There are other sites out there, such as Vivisimo and Gigablast, that offer a sort of “aspect” retrieval. In other words, they provide a set of topics that somewhat partition the results set, and let me quickly click that topic to better refine what I am after. Google, on the other hand, simply decides for you what the most relevant aspects are (buzz included), and gives you a single ranked list, with no way of more clearly specifying “no, I mean all the other danish cartoons.”
Yahoo research has a demo in which you can search for something, and then use a slider bar to dynamically rerank the list, in terms of whether you want the results to be “more commercial” or “more non-commercial”. In other words, they give you a direct handle into one of the features that they use for ranking, and let you directly manipulate the weight assigned to that feature.
What I would like is a similar slider on Google, so that I could slide/choose between more “buzzy” sites and more “long term/stable” sites… depending in my information need, not the tyranny of the information need of the majority.
Anyway, I quite enjoy reading your posts. Thanks for putting this stuff out. Oh, and as my comment above was my first ever to your blog, I just have a quick comment about the preview vs. post buttons: When I previewed my comments, it squished all my paragraphs together into a single paragraph. So I put in paragraph html tags to open it up. This looked fine in the preview, but in the final post, it now looks like there is double spaces between the paragraphs rather than single spaces. What I mean is that there is a slight bug somewhere.. the text that gets rendered by the preview button is different than the text that gets rendered by the post button. Just FYI. Thanks!
The primary issue here is whether or not it was legitimate for the Danish newspaper to publish the cartoon. Reasonable people can argue about where the boundaries of free speech should be drawn, but I don’t think any reasonable person would assert that speech should be unbounded. To cite a familiar example of illegitimate speech, nobody disputes that it’s wrong to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. Similarly, the Rwandan broadcaster Radio Milles Collines played an important role in inciting the 1994 slaughter of up to 800,000 Tutsi Rwandans by broadcasting an endless stream of Hutu supremacist propaganda in the months before the genocide began. Although the head of that station didn’t personally kill any Tutsis, he was later tried and convicted of incitement to genocide.
I think the Danish newspaper was wrong to publish a cartoon that most Muslims would inevitably interpret as a gratuitous insult to their religion. I think CNN, the BBC and other international media organizations were right to refrain from reprinting the cartoon despite its obvious news value once the controversy had already erupted. I have no idea whether any of the search engines filtered out the cartoon itself, although it was not easy to find on Google just now. (I searched under “Danish cartoon” and only found the actual cartoon several pages down in the results). But I don’t see any moral or legal distinction between a search engine and a conventional news organization when it comes to publishing hate speech. I think the Mohammad cartoon is a clear case of hate speech. If I ran Google or Yahoo I would certainly filter it out.
Danish Cartoon: Should the search engines index it?
Nicholas Carr has written a very thoughtful post which is worth reading in full. What is, at this moment, the most important image in the world? Arguably, and sadly, it is the cartoon depicting the prophet Mohammad with a bomb
Prior to the advent of islam, the middle east was a proud, progressive, creative and innovative region of powerful kingdoms, i.e. Persia, Assaria, Phonecia, Egypt, Babylona, etc.
After the advent of Islam, each and every middle eastern (muslim) country has become backwards, corrupt,intolerent, primitive and a region of basket case economies.
If they do not want to become like the west, why not be like the east. Just look at the far east asian countries which have prospered!
It amazes me to see how primitive and backwards the islamic countries have become.
Islam is truly a religion of intolerence, violence and backwardness. As it is born out of violence since the days of its belligerent mohammed, it will forever be a religion of violence as we see today!
Islam is a religion of hyprocracy. Just look at their untastful holocaust cartoons of the jews and the west which pales in comparison to the Danish cartoons and you’ll understand.
Moreover, I don’t understand how educated muslim women would still support islam knowing that the religion is a religion of violence and sexist hyprocrits. I come from a Chinese muslim family and have lived in Indonesia and Malaysia (both relatively moderate islamic countries), and know what I’m talking about. I could only imagine what Pakistan and the rest of the mideast are like.
I can only subscribe to that. Furthermore I recall a wedding I attended, between a Muslim girl and a Catholic. Both Americans. Now the wedding was a typical American wedding with nothing special with respect to the Muslim origins of the bride, still, the moment the unique groomsmen gifts were handed over and the bride’s parents saw a David’s star on a pair of cufflinks the groom got from one of his friends – who was of Jewish origin, things got complicated. And we’re talking about people who lived in the Western world for the better part of their lives
I can only subscribe to that. Furthermore I recall a wedding I attended, between a Muslim girl and a Catholic. Both Americans. Now the wedding was a typical American wedding with nothing special with respect to the Muslim origins of the bride, still, the moment the unique groomsmen gifts were handed over and the bride’s parents saw a David’s star on a pair of cufflinks the groom got from one of his friends – who was of Jewish origin, things got complicated. And we’re talking about people who lived in the Western world for the better part of their lives