Everyday people are appearing in Google search results for terms like 'bitcoin bro' and 'cat lady'

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• Google Images has an influential labeling power: Its algorithm determines whose face best represents a search term.
• Everyday people appear under terms like "cat lady," "feminazi," and "bitcoin bro."
• Google is only curating these online images according to relevance — humans are the ones who have attached such meanings to stereotypes through tags, captions, and accompanying text.

"If you look up the word stupid in the dictionary, there's a picture of you," went the sickest burn on the elementary school playground, back before the dictionary was dishing out sick burns of its own. Now Google basically is the dictionary, and real people's pictures come up when you perform a Google Image search for stupid. My recent results included a man with a condom over his head, a teenage boy in a hospital after attempting to complete the Duct Tape Challenge, and — I'm pleased to report — many pictures of Trump.

It's a well-acknowledged problem that Google's algorithm determines what images are associated with your name — it's decided, for example, that a still of Rachel Withers, Commuter looking distraught the morning after Election Day 2016 is the second-most important image of me to share (though this is my own fault, for attaching it to an article about being distraught).See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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