Edit: Added Twitter commentary
Edit: At 5:27pm PT on 2022-11-02, Dr. Bateson tweeted: Omg, it’s officially gone!! Google no longer says I’m a politician!!!.Google’s knowledge
Yet again someone is compelled to take to Twitter to issue a complaint to Google about incorrect information about them in search results and to appeal for correction.1
This time it is Regina Bateson, an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Public & International Affairs at the University of Ottawa.
Google is calling her a politician. She isn’t one. She, rightfully, wants it corrected.
This short blog post is partially an attempt to provide “web evidence” to aid their appeal for correction. It is also important to make note of these failures—not just the incorrect information but the work required to correct them. Just yesterday I had a conversation with someone who offhandedly passed on conventional wisdom, the searching-sublime,2 about how easy it was to search for everything. It is important to puncture perceptions of Google omniscience, to add friction to the automation bias and the granting of authority to whatever shows up at the top of Google search results.3 Perhaps reflecting on these will help us stop ‘just googling’ and reimagine what just–reasonable, responsive, responsible–search engines might be.
The Web’s evidence
Regina Bateson is not a politician. Dr. Bateson (Ph.D. in Political Science, Yale) is a political scientist and professor at the University of Ottawa. This is documented throughout the web: her faculty page at the University of Ottawa, her personal website, her ORCiD, The Conversation, WBUR (Boston’s NPR news station), etc. In 2014, MIT News also identified her as a political scientist. Though she ran for office once she is not, by most any definition, a politician. The Google-provided label is incorrect, deceptive, and non-representative. Why doesn’t Google correct their search results? Or why does it take so much work and time for corrections to happen?
Here is @regina_bateson on Twitter (Bateson, 2022):
Hey @Google, quick FYI: I am not a politician. I ran for office ONCE in 2017-2018, but I’m actually a political scientist, author, etc.
On Sept. 27 your team agreed to remove the term “politician” from my Knowledge Panel–but it’s still there. Why? How can I change this? HELP!!!
Addenda
Twitter commentary
Quote-tweet from Vivek Krishnamurthy (law professor at University of Ottawa and director of the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC)), of a quote-tweet from Regina Bateson, asks about how this, “Google’s failure to correct a false, AI-generated”Knowledge Panel" description of a person", interacts with new and proposed laws:
Another account mentioned an earlier case where a privacy expert apparently had to go to great lengths, and get media attention, to get Google to correct a knowledge panel that put his photo on a description of someone else with the same name: Leo Kelion (2019) “Google faces winged-monkey privacy protest” in the BBC.Hey #lawtwitter: does Google's failure to correct a false, AI-generated “Knowledge Panel” description of a person violate PIPEDA? If not, shouldn't we make sure that this sort of thing is actionable under C-27? These kinds of false descriptions can cause folks real harm. https://t.co/3hkAC8vZBD
— Vivek Krishnamurthy ((???)) November 1, 2022
“Omg, it’s officially gone!! Google no longer says I’m a politician!!!”
Omg, it’s officially gone!! Google no longer says I’m a politician!!!
— Regina Bateson ((???)) November 3, 2022
It took 4 YEARS but I am v glad to finally have accurate search results.
THANK YOU (???) (???) (???) (???) (???) (???) & all who helped in this effort! 🎉🎉🎉 pic.twitter.com/dZAku7KDCi
She also tweeted: “I suspect (though can’t prove) this label made my path back into academia harder than it would’ve been otherwise.”
Well, it was understandable when I was running for office & maybe for a couple months or a yr after. But years 2,3 & 4 were just unnecessary. I suspect (though can’t prove) this label made my path back into academia harder than it would’ve been otherwise. VERY GLAD it’s gone!! 😊
It has been, she tweeted in September, “years of trying to get it changed”.
Footnotes
This post is shaped by, but not about, thinking and writing with Emma Lurie for a paper, recently accepted at New Media & Society: “Search quality complaints and imaginary repair: Control in articulations of Google Search” (initially presented at a Data & Society workshop in early 2022: The Social Life of Algorithmic Harms)↩︎
This loose treatment of Google as all-knowing sits in ironic tension with contemporaneous searching-disappointed from perceptions of increasing capture of Google results by spam and commercialization. Like these semi-viral tweets here:
Every week Google search becomes worse and worse and we’re so used to it nobody even talks about it anymore.
— SwiftOnSecurity ((???)) April 24, 2020For many classes of topics/questions Google Search has become super SEO'd, surfacing very low quality often ad-heavy/paginated content. I find myself appending “reddit” to a lot of queries and often getting much better results.
— Andrej Karpathy ((???)) March 7, 2021the best thing about saying “google it” much like “it’s not my job to educate you, google is for free’ is that when you google anything nowadays the first 3 or 4 pages are SEO’d out marketing garbage
— Tales from the Crypto.com Arena ((???)) January 14, 2022
↩︎Google search is becoming one of those dying malls. You still go there out of habit, but once you get there, none of it is what you want. You can remember when it was a useful place to visit, but now it's weirdly hollow and you leave without getting what you came for
— Emily Velasco ((???)) October 25, 2022A tweet of mine from 2017:
What do we call the production of epistemic automaticity from Google's algorithms' automated search results?
— Daniel Griffin ((???)) May 24, 2017