Following the lead of United Nations Women, an equality campaign run out of the UN’s human rights office has developed a series of ads demonstrating what happens when people do a Google search that begins with the words “gays should,” The Huffington Post reports.
The first results that frequently come up include gays “should be executed,” “should not adopt,” “should be shot” and “should not be allowed to adopt.”
When UN Women typed in the words “women should,” the results generated answers such as “should serve men,” “should be property,” “should not wear pants” and “should be seen and not heard.”
Pink News says that Google sent a statement saying the search engine’s autocomplete function is meant to provide “predictable searches” to help people find what they are looking for more quickly.
The report quotes a spokesperson as saying, “the search queries that you see as part of autocomplete are a reflection of the search activity of all web users and the contents of web pages indexed by Google.”
A number of commenters point out that the results are no less disturbing when other groups are subjected to similar searches. For example, the words “Conservatives should” yield responses like “should die” or “should be killed” or “should move to Russia.”
Why you can trust Xtra
