Racist Michelle Obama ‘monkey’ picture disappears from Google Images

We may now live in more enlightened times than ever before, but isms such as sexism, racism, and ageism, and phobias such as homophobia and xenophobia still exist in a significant portion of the population. And the Wild West that is the Internet has offered these ignorant people a way of expressing themselves.

While most of us, regardless of whether we agree with his and his party’s politics or not, saw the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States of America as a day to celebrate because of what it represented, some people saw it as an excuse to roll out their old racist views, ones they may have sat on for years.

This unfortunately led to a clearly racist picture of First Lady Michelle Obama appearing on the first page of Google Images. The picture, which will be available to see to those willing to search hard enough for it, had been digitally altered to depict Obama as a monkey.

Google decided not to remove the image from its search results but did place adverts on the search explaining that decision and how its editorial process works. Part of it read:

Sometimes Google search results from the Internet can include disturbing content, even from innocuous queries. We assure you that the views expressed by such sites are not in any way endorsed by Google. We do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it.

This led to extensive news coverage of the image and Google’s position on its presence in search results. Lo and behold, a few days later and the image has disappeared from Google Images. The Guardian first noticed it and has traced the missing picture back to a blog called Hot Girls. This Blogger-hosted site reportedly removed the image and posted an apology of sorts as a replacement.

An Enlgish translation of the original Chinese text reads:

I am very sorry for this article, and that this is the program automatically issued a document from the article. Do not the subject of race and politics make the discussion too radical and sincere hope that the world is very peaceful.

Which just about passes as an apology and suggests the blogger didn’t intend for the picture to be contextualized as racist. Or maybe the negative press coverage heralded the removal and apology.

Either way, this opens a debate as to whether these kinds of images should be shown in search results or not. Personally, I think Google acted in the only way possible. If it were to police search results and remove everything that was objectionable to one or more people then the Web would become a much smaller place. Rather than shoot the messenger, more should be done to dissuade people from posting this kind of stuff in the first place.

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