Hyderabad: What is anti-national in Hyderabad? It is University of Hyderabad as per Google Maps. On Friday, many people were shocked to see that when they searched for ‘Anti national Hyderabad’ Google Maps returned the result as University of Hyderabad. When one searches for ‘Anti national New Delhi’ or ‘Sedition’, it would return Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) as the result. The bug soon started spreading over social media.
However, a social media update by Shehla Rashid, vice president of JNU students union, said, “Spoke to the authorities at Google. They have said that it’s a bug and will be fixed soon. My own take on it is that Google Locations are linked with the user reviews, apart from Wikipedia and news results. If we search “leftist”, for example, that too redirects us to JNU on the map, because many user reviews describe it as “leftist”. RSS trolls have systematically flooded the Google Reviews of the place (JNU) with tags like anti national, terrorist etc. And then, when the algorithm was successfully manipulated, they took screenshots and are now circulating it.”
