It took a remarkably short time for Google, which made its name helping people find things on the World Wide Web, to start abusing its newfound power.
With barely even a pause to reflect, it seems, the company has begun to force on the world the weird puritanism of “woke”-ness, in which whispering to young children about odd sexual practices is acceptable, yet typing the word “housewife” is the dirtiest sin.
The company has now deployed an “inclusive language” function to help stamp out politically incorrect words, reports DailyMail.com. That is, when users search for information using a word Google programmers find distasteful, they are prompted to use a different word. Typing in “landlord” prompts a warning that the word “may not be inclusive to all readers,” as if that is some kind of necessity, and a prim suggestion to try the words “property owner” or “proprietor” instead.
Terms Americans grew up with such as “policeman,” “mailman” or “housewife’ should also be replaced by “police officers,” “mail carriers” and “stay-at-home spouses,” according to Google’s new puritanism, since the worst thing one can do is to offend others’ hypersensitive feelings with the way one talks.
The word “humankind” is a suggested alternative to what the company sees as the controversial word “mankind.”
The chiding service is currently being introduced to what Google calls enterprise-level users.
The woke-language intrusion is, predictably, falling all over itself in several respects. A transcription of an interview with ex-Klu Klux Klan leader David Duke, in which he uses racial slurs and discusses hunting black people, sailed through with no warnings. However it did suggest that President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address should say “for all humankind” instead of “for all mankind.”
Silkie Carlo of the group Big Brother Watch told the Sunday Telegraph: “Google’s new word warnings aren’t assistive, they’re deeply intrusive. This speech-policing is profoundly clumsy, creepy and wrong, often reinforcing bias.”
A Google spokesman said: “Our technology is always improving, and we don’t yet [have] a solution to identifying and mitigating all unwanted word associations and biases” that might exist in the human mind.
Only remember next time you see their search page and their logo: they’re working on it.
