Analytic detection of porn keywords can produce accidental homophobia

Evidence

It is worth noting that blocking the word “gay” may not have been intentionally homophobic, though it came across that way to critics. A data analytic approach may have spurred this decision, without anyone thinking carefully about the social ramifications. There probably were many explicit Tumblr blogs using that keyword to identify gay porn; if Tumblr ran an analysis to identify the terms most commonly associated with porn, it might have identified #gay as a term commonly used to tag porn. — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet, 559

Categorization

• XREF: Reinforces the earlier chapter’s point that hate speech rules silently encode assumptions; here an automated derivation produces an unjust outcome despite neutral intent. — connects to: Google censors autocomplete but refused to censor anti-Semitic search results — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms,…, 561