Safari’s “Siri Suggested” Search Results Highlighted Conspiracy Sites ⇥ buzzfeednews.com

Charlie Warzel, Buzzfeed:

Apple’s Safari, one of the internet’s most popular web browsers, has been surfacing debunked conspiracies, shock videos, and false information via its “Siri Suggested Websites” feature. Such results raise questions about the company’s ability to monitor for low-quality information, and provide another example of the problems platforms run into when relying on algorithms to police the internet.

This isn’t a case where Google-suggested autocompletions are finding their way into Safari; I see the same results as Warzel and I have DuckDuckGo as my Safari search engine. This is just as toxic as Google suggesting the wrong voter registration dates or stating a bunk answer for who invented email — something they’re still doing, by the way.

Unfortunately, while Google provides a small “feedback” button for users to report problematic results, Apple’s procedure is, well, much worse:

“Siri Suggested Websites come from content on the web and we provide curation to help avoid inappropriate sites. We also remove any inappropriate suggestions whenever we become aware of them, as we have with these. We will continue to work to provide high-quality results and users can email results they feel are inappropriate to applebot@apple.com.”

It’s pretty quaint that a trillion-dollar company suggests you report problems to them by sending a direct email — to an address that, for what it’s worth, I did not know existed. As of writing, DuckDuckGo returns no results for it, while Google’s results almost entirely consist of answers that contain “applebot.apple.com”. There is one mention of that address on Apple’s website in this sole knowledgebase article.¹