Google, the biggest search engine in the world, is a handy tool for getting a snapshot of social attitudes.
Including thin privilege.
The following are screenshots of real examples. Try them out…
what the. No.
I just googled “jews are” and the first autocomplete result was “jews are the problem”. This does not mean that the majority of people are massive anti-semites. I just googled “I shouldnt” and the first autocomplete result is “I shouldnt be alive”. When I googled “Frank shouldn’t” (random name example), there were no results, just as there are no results for “thin people shouldnt”. Ipso facto, Frank has Frank privilege and is allowed to do everything? Google autocomplete doesn’t work like that. It just pulls random quotes off the internet… not even the whole quotation, not in context, nothing. While I agree with the principles of thin privilege, this does not demonstrate it.
Why not? Most people don’t make body-size, racial, or religious Google searches as a matter of course - i.e., this isn’t a majority/minority argument. What these experiments are saying is that those who are focused on body size, race, and religion are preferentially searching for reinforcement of negative views against certain groups and positive views of other groups. It points to social issues, fissures, rumblings, evidence of cultural attitudes, biases, and obsessions.
These images don’t ‘prove’ anything in a rigorous scientific sense. But they most certainly are compelling evidence of thin privilege and anti-fat bias.
