News Desk |
Google has offered a statement of clarification on what is considered to be an ethical breach in which the Google search results showed images of Pakistan flag in search of ‘best toilet paper in the world’.
The news was widely covered in international media outlets. The international media stated that the Google image results have been manipulated to return the images of Pakistan’s national flag.
It was also said that it has been done by the enraged protestors in the aftermath of Pulwama attack. The controversial images soon emerged after the Pulwama attack on February 14th. Many blog posts commenting on the incident reported of the flag-toilet paper connection that soon became a trending topic on social media.
However, Google glitch is not new of its kind as in July last year, Donald Trump’s imaged popped up on google image as people searched for word “idiot”.
Google search now returns the result with links of news stories on the connection. Anyone searching images for the “best toilet paper in the world” gets a page dominated by the green and white flag. Many of the images are from news stories about the connection. The Google images are currently showing the images of the screenshots of the social media posts and Google search results that show the connection of toilet paper and flag but not the real image of Pakistan’s national flag.
After much frenzy on social media and protests from Pakistan Google has now released a clarification statement. It stated that “While we continue to investigate the matter, we have not found any evidence that Google Images was ranking the Pakistani flag in response to this particular search.”
“Many news outlets wrote about an old screenshot from a meme website that is inconsistent with our UI and dates back to 2017, and we have not seen any independent verification that these results ever appeared as depicted,” Google spokesperson added. “Since these news stories published, images from those articles are now ranking for this query, as the pages contain words relevant to the search.”
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However, Google glitch is not new of its kind as in July last year, Donald Trump’s imaged popped up on google image as people searched for word “idiot”.