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So whenever I visit a school
and talk to students,
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I always ask them the same thing:
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Why do you google?
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Why is Google the search engine
of choice for you?
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Strangely enough, I always get
the same three answers.
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One, "Because it works",
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which is a great answer,
that's why I google, too.
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Two, somebody will say,
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"I really don't know of any alternatives."
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It's not an equally great answer
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and my reply to that is usually,
"Try to google the word 'search engine',
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you may find a couple
of interesting alternatives."
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And last but not least, thirdly,
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inevitably, one student will raise
her or his hand and say,
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"With Google, I'm certain to always get
the best, unbiased search result."
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Certain to always get
the best, unbiased search result.
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Now, as a man of the humanities,
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albeit, the digital humanities man,
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that just makes my skin curl,
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even if I, too, realize that that trust,
that idea of the unbiased search result
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is a cornerstone in our collective
love for and appreciation of Google.
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I will show you why that, philosophically,
is almost an impossibility.
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But let me first elaborate
on a basic principle
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behind the search query
that we sometimes seem to forget.
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So whenever you set out
to Google something,
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start by asking yourself this,
"Am I looking for an isolated fact?:
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What is the capital of France?
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What are the building blocks
of a water molecule?"
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Great -- google away.
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There's not a group of scientists
who are this close
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to proving that it's actually London
or H30,
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you don't see a big conspiracy
among those things.
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We agree, on a global scale,
what the answers are
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to these isolated facts.
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But if you complicate your question
just a little bit and ask something like,
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"Why is there
an Israeli-Palestine conflict?"
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You're not exactly looking
for a singular fact anymore,
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you're looking for knowledge,
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which is something way more
complicated and delicate.
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And to get to knowledge,
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you have to bring 10 or 20
or 100 facts to the table
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and acknowledge them and say,
"Yes, these are all true."
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But because of who I am,
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young or old, black or white,
gay or straight,
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I will value them differently.
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And I will value them differently
and I will say,
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"Yes, this is true, but this is more
important to me than that."
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And this is where it becomes interesting
because this is where we become human.
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This is when we start to argue,
to form society
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and to really get somewhere.
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We need to filter all our facts here
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through friends and neighbors
and parents and children
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and coworkers and newspapers
and magazines
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to finally be grounded in real knowledge,
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which is something that a search engine
is a poor help to achieve.
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So I promised you an example
Just to show you why it's so hard
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to get to the point of true, clean,
objective knowledge --
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that's food for thought.
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I will conduct a couple of simple queries,
search queries.
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We'll start with "Michelle Obama",
the First Lady of the United States.
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And we'll click for pictures,
it works really well, as you can see.
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It's a perfect search result,
more or less,
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it's just her in the picture,
not even the President.
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How does this work?
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Quite simple,
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Google uses a lot of smartness
to achieve this,
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but quite simply, they look at two things
more than anything.
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First, what does under the picture
on each website.
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Does it say "Michelle Obama"
under the picture?
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Pretty good indication
it's actually her on there.
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Second, Google looks at the picture file,
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the name of the file as such
uploaded to the website.
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Again, is it called "Michelle Obama.jpeg"?
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Pretty good indication it's not
Clint Eastwood in the picture.
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So you got those two and you get
a search result like this, almost.
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Now, in 2009, Michelle Obama
was the victim of a racist campaign
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where people set out to insult her
through her search results.
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There was a picture distributed widely
across the Internet
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where her face was distorted
to look like a monkey.
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And that picture was published all over.
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And people published it
very, very purposefully
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to get it up there in the search results.
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They made sure to write "Michelle Obama"
in the caption
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and they made sure to upload the picture
as "Michelle Obama.jpeg" or the like.
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You get why, to manipulate
the search result.
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And it worked, too.
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So when you picture-Googled
"Michelle Obama" in 2009,
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that distorted money picture
showed up among the first results.
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Now, the results are self-cleansing,
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and that's sort of the beauty of it
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because Google measures relevance
every hour every day.
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However, Google didn't settle
for that this time,
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they just thought, "That's racist
and it's a bad search result
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and we're going to go back
and clean that up manually.
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We are going to write some code
and fix it",
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which they did,
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and I don't think anyone in this room
thinks that was a bad idea.
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But then, a couple years go by,
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and the world's most googled Anders,
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Anders Behring Breivik,
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did what he did.
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This is July 22 in 2011
and a terrible day in recent history.
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This man, a terrorist, blew up
a couple of government buildings,
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walking distance from where we are
right now in Oslo, Norway
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and then he traveled to the
island of Utøya
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and shot and killed a group of kids,
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almost 80 people died that day.
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And a lot of people would describe
this act of terror as two steps,
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that he did two things:
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he blew up the buildings
and he shot those kids.
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It's not true.
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It was three steps.
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He blew up those buildings,
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he shot those kids,
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and he sat down and waited
for the world to google him.
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And he prepared all three steps
equally well.
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And if there was somebody who
immediately understood this,
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it was a Swedish web developer,
or search engine optimization expert
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in Stockholm named Nikke Lindqvist,
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he's also a very political guy
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and he was right there on social media,
on his blog and Facebook
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and he told everybody, "If there's something
that this guy wants right now,
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it's to control the image of himself.
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Let's see if we can distort that.
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Let's see if we, in the civilized world,
can protest against what he did
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through insulting him in his search results."
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And how?
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He told all of his readers the following,
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"Go out there on the Internet,
find pictures of dog poop on sidewalks,
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publish them in your feeds,
on your websites, on your blogs,
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make sure to write the terrorists'
name in the caption,
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make sure to name the picture file
"Breivik.jpeg",
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let's teach Google that that's
the face of the terrorist."
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And it worked.
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Two years after that campaign
against Michelle Obama,
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this manipulation campaign
against Anders Behring Breivik worked.
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If you picture-googled him weeks after
the July 22 events from Sweden,
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you'd see that picture of dog poop
in your search result, as a little protest.
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Strangely enough, Google
didn't intervene this time,
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they did not step in and manually clean
those search results up.
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So the million-dollar question is,
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is there anything different between
these two happenings here?
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Is there anything different between
what happened to Michelle Obama
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and what happened
to Anders Behring Breivik?
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Of course not.
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It's the exact same thing,
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except Google intervened in one case
and not in the other.
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Why? Because Michelle Obama
is an honorable person, that's why,
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and Anders Behring Breivik
is a dispicable person, that's why.
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See what happens there?
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An evaluation of a person takes place
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and there's only one player in the world,
one power-player in the world
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with the authority to say who's who,
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"We like you, we dislike you.
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We believe in you,
we don't believe in you.
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You're right, you're wrong.
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You're true, you're false.
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You're Obama, and you're Breivik.
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That's power if I ever saw it.
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So I'm asking you to remember
that behind every algorithm
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there's always a person,
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a person with a set of personal beliefs
that no code could ever completely eradicate,
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and my message goes out to
not only Google,
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but to all believers in the faith
of code around the world.
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You need to identify your own, personal bias.
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You need to understand that
you are human
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and take responsibility accordingly.
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And I saw this because I believe
that we've reach a point in time
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where it's absolutely imperative
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that we tie those bonds together again, tighter:
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the humanities and the technology.
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Tighter than ever.
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And, if nothing else, to remind us
that that wonderfully seductive idea
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of the unbiased, clean search result
is and is likely to remain, a myth.
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Thank you for your time.
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(Applause)