"Naked 15 year old girls" - Facebook's search suggestions come under scanner again

Facebook had a nightmarish last year thanks to Cambridge Analytica and other major scandals. Even this year hasn’t been any good so far with the ashes of the recent Facebook Research app scandal still emitting smoke. And now, another disturbing development has come to light.

Jane Manchun Wong, who stormed the Twitter scene by churning out leaks by reverse engineering applications and software, has shared a tweet from a Spanish user where-in you can see a screenshot containing search results for a couple of queries written in the Facebook search bar.

While the Tweet as well as the screenshot contains information in Spanish, Jane has provided close to accurate translations in English. Take a look:

Here’s what she said further:

Note that I couldn’t reproduce this behavior by doing a search from within my Facebook account. Here are the results I could see when I typed “girls” in the search bar:

So it does seem to be a region specific issue at the moment. But that doesn’t make it acceptable. I think Facebook should take notice about this and remove such search suggestions asap.

Not the first time

Well, this is not the first time Facebook’s search suggestion have come under lens. Back in March last year, the social networking giant had to issue a statement after it came to light that searches beginning with the words ‘video of’ returned autocomplete suggestions of sexual and/or child abuse content.

Check out what top search results were in Facebook for “video of” pic.twitter.com/byXSqUYqom

— BbooBeep (@hoss_boss1) March 16, 2018

Facebook wanted to show video search results for free sex and children… disturbing. pic.twitter.com/v3uYZRRvKy

— Hillary for Prison (@HRC4Prison) March 16, 2018

Here’s what the company had said at that time:

As soon as we became aware of these offensive predictions we removed them. Facebook search predictions are representative of what people may be searching for on Facebook and are not necessarily reflective of actual content on the platform. We do not allow sexually explicit imagery, and we are committed to keeping such content off of our site

More recently, Guardian again reported how Facebook search directs users to unscientific, anti-vaccination propaganda when they search for information on vaccines. While that’s no doubt totally unacceptable, what makes it ironic is this came to light after a strong, pro-vaccination stance by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg back in 2015 where he had said:

Vaccination is an important and timely topic. The science is completely clear: vaccinations work and are important for the health of everyone in our community

Definitely not the only company

Facebook is not the only tech giant that has been embroiled in such controversies. Take a look at this article from The Guardian (again) where they’ve compiled multiple controversies surrounding Google’s auto-complete suggestions – from compromising rape victims’ anonymity to hateful and racist material to extreme perversive suggestions, the company had to face all such allegations.

Similar controversies have also surrounded Microsoft, with reports revealing how the company’s Bing search engine “suggested related keywords and images that provide pedophiles with more child pornography.”

While it’s easy to brush these controversies as rare and back that argument with the fact that corporations do take steps to fix the highlighted problem very quickly, the affect such content and search results have on young minds is irreparable.

What’s your take on the matter? Share your thoughts on this story in the comments section below.

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