Search for 'sedition' and 'anti-national' on Google Maps, will lead you to JNU

This comes in the wake of the recent JNU row that led to the arrest of three students on charges of sedition and criminal conspiracy

Type in words like "anti national" or "sedition" in Google Maps, and it will take you to Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi.

This comes in the wake of the recent JNU row that led to the arrest of JNU student union (JNUSU) President Kanhaiya Kumar and other two students Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya on charges of sedition and criminal conspiracy.

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According to a Hindustan Times report, the glitch noticed on Friday morning, irked students and faculty members at JNU.The JNUSU said it would approach to Google Map India to fix the search result.

The JNUSU Vice-President Shehla Rashid was quoted by Hindustan Times as saying: “On the face of it, it looks offensive. We will contact Google authorities and find out why and how such a thing can happen. There would be some technical issues involved but we need to find out why is JNU being shown in the map for location search of anti-national”.

The Dean School of International Studies, Anuradha Chenoy was also quoted by Hindustan Times as saying: “I don’t know how this thing works on internet. But it should be corrected. JNU should contact Google and get it rectified”.

How it happened

With the lot of articles flooding around the JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar case on the internet, keywords such as JNU, anti-national and sedition have been associated to the university on the web. 

Google’s algorithms crawl websites to optimise search queries. Thus, as more articles and text appear on the web comprising of the words JNU, sedition and anti-national, the algorithm throws up all related results when someone looks.

Patriotism

If you type Patriotism on Google Maps, it will lead you to JNU as well.

 

Not the first time

This isn’t the first time Google Maps has suffered such a glitch. In May 2015, search for racist slur “nigger house” directed one to the White House in Washington DC as a result. “Some inappropriate results are surfacing in Google Maps that should not be, and we apologise for any offence this may have caused. Our teams are working to fix this issue quickly,” Google was quick to clarify, but didn’t explain why the error happened. A year later, it seems like the cause of the problem is yet to be rectified.

However, this new faux pas by Google is likely to rattle the peace that finally seemed to have descended on the controversy-laced varsity. Even now if you type 'anti-national' on Google Maps, the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus turns up!