Flickr's auto-tagging feature creates racist and discriminating stirs

Pictures are known to capture people's lives, nature and other events in history. This is the reason why Flickr, Yahoo's photo sharing / social networking site has become so popular amongst those who are fond of taking snap shots of everything and anything that members find interesting, fascinating or worth sharing. 

MUNTINLUPA, PHILIPPINES (Catholic Online) - The addition and launch of Flickr's image recognition software has caused a stir amongst netizens and even those who are not members of the site. The software automatically creates and suggests tags for every photo submitted or uploaded on the page. The Yahoo owned site aims to promote the photos and to increase the photos online visibility. This means that one can easily search for the photos based on the tags assigned to them.

Now, if Flickr has all the best intentions in mind, what paved the way to all the comments about the site being discriminating, racist and utterly offensive? You see, the image recognition and auto tagging features still have glitches in them and they end up tagging and identifying uploaded images inaccurately. So instead of tagging a photo of a woman wearing a white mask as "art," "masks," and "woman," the system tagged the image as "ape" and "animal." A recent uploaded image of a man with dark skin was also mistakenly tagged as "ape" and "animal;" while a photo of a concentration camp was tagged or labeled as "Jungle gym" and "sport" among many other negative tags.

After the said incidents, Flickr made it a point to immediately correct these "mis-tags" however, there are still others that need some tweaking. The site's representative has assured that Flickr is completely aware of the imperfections in the algorithms and promised that the company is doing everything to provide a solution to this concern. And since the release of this statement, netizens have observed that these offensive or racist tags are being deleted from the system.

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