[cliveb]

Recommender system algorithms typically personalize search results based on similarities to items recently watched, purchased or simply added to a shopping basket. More advanced recommenders suggest based on past history (well YouTube seems to). I don't find personalization by similarity offensive. If I watched a Netflix movie starring Sidney Poitier, I'd expect recommendations to view movies from top Black actors of all time. I see this as ranking on similarity not on racial bias. http://www.imdb.com/list/ls051979184/

[kodis]

Exactly right, but that wouldn't result in as controversial a headline.

[Turing_Machine]

Yup. When I was reading the Horatio Hornblower books a while back, and Amazon suddenly started recommending books by Patrick O'Brian and Dudley Pope, I didn't arrive at the conclusion that Amazon's algorithm was "racist" with respect to 19th Century British naval culture.