'Correct The Internet' highlights Search misinformation with Cristiano Ronaldo, Christine Sinclair

Though this one-minute campaign illustrates how search results are skewed to disadvantage female sportspeople, the message that "the internet has learned our bias" is alarmingly widespread. Correct The Internet says it is "the collective work of an international group of like-minded people that seeks to highlight and correct inaccuracies in internet search results and make sportswomen more visible as a result". What do you think? That this is great, we need to tackle these everyday injustices one by one, or it's just a cool illustration that won't address the real issues underlying programming bias? Will youngsters in particular be struck by the apparent inconsistency and start to recognise that the internet itself can be manipulated/manipulative? This campaign is backed by many well-known athletes and high-profile sporting organisations including English rugby’s Red Roses’ player Shaunagh Brown, and Football Fern Meikayla Moore, and is supported by Women in Sport Aotearoa, Ngā Wāhine Hākinakina o Aotearoa (WISPA), Women Sport Australia and New Zealand Football. The UN’s Department of Global Communications says: “With growing reliance on internet search engines to find information, algorithms assume that human biases, conscious and unconscious, are the natural order of things and elevate results that conform with that. [....] campaigns like Correct The Internet are a great way to unmask how the same biases have entered the virtual world.” Gorilla Technology agrees: “Search engine algorithms draw on human created content, designed to give us what we are looking for, instantly. Because search engines take so much notice of what is made popular by major publishers, social media platforms and content creators, search results will reflect certain people's or organisations' inherent preferences. This can lead to biased search results that include information that is not factually correct.” With the virtual world increasingly interwoven with the real world, it will be interesting to see how the principle of 'Correct The Internet' plays out across the broader landscape. Meanwhile, feel free to comment here on our independent public review site!

Keywords: Correct The Internet, sex bias in sports search results, algorithm bias, misinformation through AI, Cristiano Ronaldo, Christine Sinclair, search results bias, misinformation through search, DDB NZ