What If Google Says You’re Gay?
Lawyers for footballer (that’s soccerer for most of us) Ashley Cole want the search engine to explain why it thinks he’s gay.
Just look at the image on the right to see what they mean. When you search for Cole’s name, Google asks if you were really searching for “ashley cole gay”.
So, what’s going on? Well, there’s a big hubbub in the UK after The News of the World and The Sun wrote articles about allegedly bisexual Premiership soccer stars. Of course, they didn’t name any names, but a lot of people seem to think they were talking about, you guessed it, Ashley Cole.
See, Google only shows those suggested results when a large number of searchers, after searching for something, immediately add another word to their search query. In this case, Google wants to know if you meant “ashley cole gay” because a lot of other people searching for him certainly seem to think so.
Graham Shear, solicitor for Mr Cole, said that he is interested in the origin of Google’s decision to display the “gay” results alongside general searches for his client.
He said: “I am keen to find out whether the decision to automatically include the term ‘gay’ to the keyword ‘Ashley Cole’ was an editorial decision or one made by a computer based on the volume of searches for ‘Ashley Cole’ linked to the word ‘gay’.
“I would be interested in when and what prompted this and whether the process started since we launched the cases against the News of the World and The Sun or before.”
Mr. Shear, in asking for this information, is about to ruin his case. When Google explains that the only reason this happened is because a large portion of the general public thinks Cole is gay, it’ll vindicate the newspapers involved. Bad lawyering, man.
(via Digg)
As an aside: Google Suggest doesn’t suggest he’s gay. Well, not yet at least.
Is Soccerer like Soccer, but only more so?
Comment by Brock | March 10, 2006
Actually, I think he is going to use it to try to make his case. If he can show that a large number of people were *led to believe* that Cole was gay because of the newspapers articles, then it supports his case. Google would simply be proof of that.
Comment by Nicholas | March 10, 2006
Brock, a Soccerer is a person who plays soccer. Or at least, its a word I invented to mean so.
Nicholas, the newspapers never said who was gay. That a significant number of Google users leapt to the conclusion that it was Cole, or worse, that they already were searching for that fact, proves that it was a common belief Cole might be gay.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | March 10, 2006
Actually, Cole could help his case significantly with this information. I’m from the UK, and our law says that in order to prove deformation (loss of reputation), the article must be shown to have given readers specific innacurate information about an individual or given limited information (ie. not naming the individual concerned) but enough that the readers could reasonably find more inaccurate information on the subject, thus defaming the claimant, in this case Cole.
The fact that Google’s algorithm to suggest ‘ashley cole gay’ when ‘ashley cole’ is evidence to support the claim that the articles in the Sun and News of the World did give this inaccurate information, and enough of it to enable the readers to reasonably obtain enough information to defame Cole’s reputation.
Complicated, isn’t it!
Comment by Huw | March 10, 2006
But Huw, the newspapers didn’t mention Cole. They mentioned a gay “soccerer”. If Google had made it that when you search for “gay footballer” it suggested “gay footballer Cole”, that would be one thing, but these people were specifically searching for Cole, then specifically, through no prompting, types in “ashley cole gay”. That means the searchers knew of a suspicion of his being bisexual, despite it not being mentioned in the paper. Since the paper didn’t give them that information, it stands to reason someone else did, and that means the papers aren’t at fault.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | March 10, 2006
That is, unless the papers hinted at Cole, like saying, “We won’t say who it is, but he kicked 37 goals last season”.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | March 10, 2006
I think what happened was that there were vague rumours around saying that Cole was gay. When the Sun and News of the World put out the story that there were definitely bisexual ’soccerers’ (we just call them footballers over here!) people put the rumours and the ‘confirmed’ story together to come up with fact, ‘Ashley Cole is gay’. Cole’s case is that the Sun and News of the World knew about those rumours, and played to them in the articles, tacitly making clear who they were talking about, without directly saying ‘he kicked 37 goals last season’. The whole of his case is based around precisely that point - did the Sun and the News of the World make it clear who they were talking about, either tacitly or otherwise. The Google evidence shows that people clearly did put two and two together, and come up with Cole. The question the court must answer is whether that is the fault of the Sun and News of the World, and whether the rumours are true, but I agree that it is by no means a certainty that the articles did directly or indirectly intentionally link Cole to the story.
Comment by Huw | March 10, 2006