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Comment by s9w | Hacker News Reader

This article is straight up asking for censorship. Nothing else.

Correct. They are literally asking that the censorship feature to work as expected.

SafeSearch definition says: "filter out adult text, images, and videos". It's not about racism. So it's working as expected

Did you read further along? There's also suggestions for bestiality and borderline child pornography, both of which definitely fall under adult images and in one or both cases are very illegal.

You said borderline, because it is not past the line of illegality.

Thus your second sentence makes no sense.

There is a debate whether nonsexualized images of minors (e.g., toddlers playing in baths, which is mentioned in the linked article) actually constitutes child pornography. Jurisdictions vary about their interpretation, hence "borderline".

I don't feel the need to define this so precisely in my original post because it distracts from my main point, which is that Bing is not only not filtering hate material but also stuff that many would generally agree fall under adult content.

I will not respond to any replies to this post because I will assume that further argument is in bad faith aimed at obscuring my main point.

Borderline but legal child pornography would still be classified as "adult", no? To me, the second sentence makes perfect sense.

If you have safe search on, all the results should be non nude, non adult.

I reread the article, and see where I went wrong. They mix up two issues: bing returning odd suggestions with safe search on, and bing returning results for searches for illegal material with safe search off.

I had thought they were only talking about safe search being on.

In my misreading, I made the assumption that Bing would never return illegal results for searches for children, as it would never return pornography since safe search is on. Apologies to the OP.

Flip this around:

There are at the very least billions of possible search term refinements and pieces of content which are not currently actively suggested. Is your position that, because they are not being suggested at this moment, they are being censored?

The suggestions are being computed by an algorithm. If you take things away from those it's censorship.

The algorithm was designed to do certain things.

Does this mean it's censoring the things it wasn't designed to do?

(there's no way to claim that changing the algorithm would be censorship without acknowledging that the algorithm already censors things)

And who designed the algorithm?

curation != censorship.

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