Michelle Obama monkey and really offensive image on Google Image search results is back to the talk of the day. In case you don’t know what I am talking about, then go to Google Image and search for “Michelle Obama”. This is it! (See updates below)
On the first result itself is a racist and offensive image of Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle Obama deformed in a monkey like photo. The fact that this picture is appearing on Google’s search result is creating the e-havoc. In fact, there was a similar picture on the results some time ago and it was removed by Google (details here) after receiving complaints.
Google said that the other website was also involved in malware distribution and as such it was breaching it TOS. However soon after removing that other similar picture from the results, here is a new one appearing again! This time Google has refused to remove it saying that the site hosting the image is in no way contradicting its TOS. (Visual Defamation?)
Google is even using Adsense ads on its Image Search result to explain why it is not removing the picture. See the photo above showing the black circled region showing the ads. This ads leads to a Google page where they explain as stated below:
In one way Google is right to not be removing this picture as explained above but on the other side there is also the ethic factor. Can anyone just go around and make fun of everyone in this simple way by uploading a photo?
Furthermore, the person who did this photo editing did a really absurd job! What did he intend to say? That black people are monkeys? It is time to stop this type of skin colour difference. Being white is in no way better than being black and so is the opposite too. We have fools in both white skin and black skin. So none is perfect.
Update: The blogger behind the mentioned mockery photo of Michelle Obama has removed the photo. The photo from the Google Search cache is expected to be cleared out automatically as time goes on. However for the answer to a WHEN, on this one only Google can answer. In the meantime Google stays firm on its decision to not manually remove the photo. As explained above, doing so will in a way influence the integrity of Google’s results. On the other side many people ask that the photo is flushed from Google Images results.
Update 2: The photo is no more to be seen on Google Images. As such even we have censored the SCREENSHOT above so as to no further propagate this very controversial photo. All end well finally
