Michelle Obama ‘monkey pic’ on Google
What do Dutch Freedom Party leader Geert Wilder and US presidential wife Michelle Obama have in common?
Oh, and her husband, Barack?
They’ve all been compared to monkeys.
The Wilder version was one of almost 150 lampoons signed by Turkish hacker aLpTurkTegin, said p2pnet August.
Today, when you enter Michelle Obama in Google Images, you don’t get the pic on the right: that comes from dma.org.
Nope. Instead, what you see is the page below. Or you did at 6:18 am Pacific on November 25, 2009.
Can you spot the image that’s causing all the trouble?
Says Gargle, “Sometimes Google search results from the Internet can include disturbing content, even from innocuous queries. We assure you that the views expressed by such sites are not in any way endorsed by Google.”
It adds, “We apologize if you’ve had an upsetting experience using Google. We hope you understand our position regarding offensive results.”
And president Obama?
“The New York Post is apologizing for a cartoon that critics say links President Barack Obama to a raging chimpanzee shot dead by police in Connecticut,” said MSNBC in February going on, “But the newspaper also says the image was exploited by its longtime antagonists.
“After two days of protests, the paper posted an editorial on its Web site Thursday saying the cartoon was meant to mock the federal economic stimulus bill, but ‘to those who were offended by the image, we apologize’.”
Says the Guardian of the latest furor »»»
The image, which has been appearing at the top of search results when the words “Michelle Obama” are put into Google Images, was posted on a blog called Hot Girls, which is hosted by the Google-owned blog service, Blogger.
Hot Girls’ owner has today removed the image, which appears to have originally been put up with a blog post on 21 October last year, and displayed an apology in Chinese with a very loose English translation.
Google had refused to remove the offensive image from its picture search listings, despite complaints that it is racist, instead opting to run an ad next to it explaining its policy on how search engine results work.
A spokesman for Google said that the Hot Girls blog and image may still temporarily appear when some users make Google Images searches but that it was coming out of the search engine’s indexing system.
No need to stay tuned.
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