Men’s RIghts Redditors’ ears are spouting steam in the wake of the latest outrage from Google.
Uh, what exactly is the latest outrage from Google, you ask? According to a fellow called rabel111, the internet behemoth has declared “war on men and boys.”
In a post on the Men’s RIghts subreddit with 476 upvotes, rabel111 informs his colleagues that
Recent changes to Google’s search algorithm appears to redirect searches for “misandry” to web pages discussing “misogyny”. Just how sexist can Google get?
The Men’s RIghts crowd is not happy about this revelation. “This scum company has now descended from the gutter to the sewer,” declares Ratcat77 in a comment with 96 upvotes.
No_Seaworthiness9625, in another popular comment with 86 upvotes, says only “googlehatesmen #boycottgoogle.”
“Switch to DuckDuckGo!” recommends Heavy_Grand2526. “Stop supporting Google and their selfish dystopian agendas.”
SnooJokes1401 also recommended DuckDuckGo, declaring that “[t]hey’re all about getting the truth to you, not about being a ‘safe space.'”
There’s just one problem with Rabel111’s claims: they’re completely ridiculous. Google isn’t “redirect[ing] searches for ‘misandry’ to web pages discussing misogyny'” as part of some vast and nefarious plot to make the world worse for men and boys.
Do the search yourself; you will get plenty of hits for “misandry” and only a small fraction devoted to “misogyny.”
When I searched for “misandry,” the first batch of hits I got mentioned misandry 291 times, which works out to ten times as many references as there were to “misogyny.” Try your own search and see what you get.
Now before anyone jumps out of their skin, it’s true that Google tailors its search results to fit the search patterns of individual users. But I search for “misogyny” fairly regularly and “misandry” almost never; surely that would mean more results for “misogyny” than gotten by your average searcher, not the other way around.
Anyway, more than a few Men’s Rights Redditors tried their own searches and got, well, pretty much what I got: searching for “misandry” brings up a lot of results for … “misandry.” Every single commenter who tried the experiment themselves got a similar result.
But, judging from the number of upvotes the “Google’s war on men and boys” headline got, and the relative popularity of comments like the angry anti-Google ones from Ratcat77 and No_Seaworthiness9625, it’s a safe bet that most Men’s RIghts Redditors either didn’t see or deliberately ignored the ample evidence against rabel111’s altogether unreasonable accusations.
Because that’s; the kind of “activists” they are — perpetually getting angry over literally nothing, and grasping at any straw that allows them to see themselves as victims.
One of many reasons the Men’s Rights movement is less a civil rights movement than a gaggle of drama kings forever searching for outrages where there are none.
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Is that why I can search for “AML 5 compliance declaration template” and still just get goats bouncing on sheet metal?
@Alan: Maybe the goats prefer to jump up and down on templates engraved on sheet metal?
Fascists gotta fash, I guess …
That’s also a good description of my father, who was perpetually getting angry at his own family. I’m sure these guys are mad at something: it’s just not what they claim it to be. I’m pretty sure that what enrages these guys — and also enraged my father — was daily life, which proved to them time and again that they are not kings whose word is never questioned. They are not kings whose every wish is fulfilled immediately. They are not kings who are also immortal.
I have it on excellent authority that the only king who is immortal is King Arthur. I’m sure that British Mammotheers will back me up on this. But — if Camelot can be believed — even he was faced with his beloved wife’s adultery. So even in Camelot, where by law, for example, the fog must disappear by 8:00 am, problems arose. Big problems, wrenching problems.
After decades of grappling with my own problems (health issues, economic issues, relationship issues, and career issues, not to mention mosquitos biting me, the tofu has gone bad, my cat misbehaves, and so on), I have concluded that problems are endemic to life. But I have only a girl brain, which has no Big Ideas. Clearly, these guys are Thinking Big, and are most likely on the verge of an Enormous Breakthrough, after which they will face no problems at all. Yay, MRAs. You go.
King Arthur cannot return too soon. Please, sire, don’t hold that 1776 spat against me.
Yeah not really seeing what the MRA are seeing here. Seems like a really big stretch.
There are many reasons to hate google. This is not one of them.
And these are the people who claim everyone who disagrees with them is a “snowflake” and “just looking for something to be offended by”. They could power up a drive-in with all their projections.
@Kat
Sorry about the crappy dad. :/
brb googling “goats bouncing on sheet metal”
…
… … !!!
ok so clearly goats bouncing on sheet metal is one of the things that has been missing from my life until today. 11/10 would bounce again (or ideally would provide all goats – or rather, all goats living in human-made environments – with their rightful access to sheet-metal bouncing facilities).
@Queen of the Harpies
Thanks for your kind message.
Sorry Kat, but another immortal king, Friedrich Barbarossa, is waiting in a cave to come to the rescue of Germany. I guess the world wars were not serious enough to bring him out. Maybe Brexit or AfD will do the job.
“Google’s war on men and boys” FFS
The only war on men I’m seeing from Google is Youtube’s algorithmic war of MRA and far-right brainwashing. Which is probably not just about money, either. People I’ve known with connections inside the company have described a war of attrition between progressive and far-right employees, the latter constantly trying to get the former fired for “reverse racism” etc.
Most of what I’ve heard on this was from back before the pandemic, and things may be changing since the employees unionized, but I would still assume the bigoted algorithms reflect bigotry within Google.
@ Cyborgette
Well, I use DuckDuckGo like a good little MRA, which allegedly resets my cookies and all that every time I log off. If I understand correctly, this means every time I get on YouTube I should be seeing a generic recommendation list they offer to all new users instead of anything personalized.
So… the fact that I am constantly being recommended Jordan Peterson motivational videos upon entry suggests YouTube has failed in their campaign against men.
Oh, and I run into him a lot on Instagram too, but in all fairness I am always fat fingering and randomly hitting different things on there, so that may be exactly what it thinks I want.
(Also, as a total tangent, Bollywood fashion is a thing for me on there because I interacted with some post and don’t know how to stop that. I much prefer that to Peterson though, so not really motivated to do anything about endless displays of Indian wedding dresses and stuff. Some of that is pretty cool.)
@.45
DuckDuckGo can’t wipe your Youtube cookies AFAIK. Youtube videos viewed from DDG (including embedded view) will still count towards the recommendation algorithm’s profile of you. That said it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Youtube just rec’d Jordan Peterson by default now.
These days I recommend against DDG for a very different reason though – it relies on Bing as its underlying search engine, and Bing has a far bigger problem with fascist propaganda in search results than Google. Please see here: https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/bing-search-disinformation
The way I first got familiar with this was searching trans related stuff on DDG, and seeing that the top recommendations were all TERF or alt-right stuff. All search engines have a bit of this problem (there’s a reason I don’t recommend that cis people “Google it”, and feel compelled to actually educate them when they ask stuff). But DDG is particularly bad. At the moment my preference is Startpage (an anonymizing frontend for Google), but at the end of the day I think that capitalism is the problem, and no search engine or frontend should be fully trusted.
@ Cyborgette
*Peevish Sheldon from Big Bang voice* I accept your premise. However, I have not been watching anything resembling motivational speaking, Jordan Peterson, Mr. Beast, SSSniperwolf (not a NeoNazi apparently, but a reference to a video game), etc, etc.
It would make more sense to recommend 80s rock music or something because I often go on YouTube to look up old songs. Can’t it tell I have never clicked on any of the above? Try something new?
Edit: As for fascist search results, I haven’t noticed much when I search random factoids with DDG. Apparently word meanings, various product reviews, and where to find certain resources in a given video game are not high on the list of things to try to influence people to the Far-Right with.
David, “is a collective MRA hallucination” is a phrase that could be used about many if not most of the topics around here.
But more importantly, goats bouncing on sheet metal is real and delightful.
“However, I have not been watching anything resembling motivational speaking, Jordan Peterson, Mr. Beast, SSSniperwolf (not a NeoNazi apparently, but a reference to a video game), etc, etc.
It would make more sense to recommend 80s rock music or something because I often go on YouTube to look up old songs. Can’t it tell I have never clicked on any of the above? Try something new?”
I have/had this problem (doesn’t seem to be an issue right now), and it baffled me for ages. I’m left politically but I’m allergic to watching leftists talk about politics, never mind fascists or their fellow travellers. Then I remembered that I sometimes watched videos of people playing games. I don’t know if that applies to you, but I reckon the recommendations stemmed from that