1771380 - Firefox Suggest should not recommend "Vietnam War" when user searches for "Vietnam"

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect, P1)

Description

[Rebecca BurWei]

Attachment: vietnam-example.png

This behavior is inconsistent with both Firefox Suggest's own patterns as well as Mozilla's values.

Inconsistency with Firefox Suggest's own pattern:
When searching for "Australia", Firefox Suggests the Wikipedia page for the country Australia. When searching for "Canada", Firefox Suggests the Wikipedia page for the country Canada. The same holds for: China, France, Germany, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, South Africa, Soviet Union.

Inconsistency with Mozilla's values:
The US has a history of war propaganda that associates all people of Asian descent as enemies of the state. This propaganda is a direct cause of the anti-Asian violence we see today in the US. (It is not the only cause, but it is certainly one of them.) For examples of this mechanism, see:

• this documentary
• this Washington Post article

When Firefox promotes the association of Vietnam with war, Mozilla is in a small way perpetuating this legacy of anti-Asian war messaging.

Comment 1

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Thanks Rebecca. I let Nan know about this because it's a partner suggestion and we'll need to set up a blocklist server side. There's no work to do on the client but we can leave this open until it's addressed. I'll go ahead and assign Nan to it.

Comment 2

[[:nickname]blablablah]

[redacted]

Comment 3

[Rebecca BurWei]

Mike, why was this comment (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=comment-revisions.html&bug_id=1771380&comment_id=16174959) redacted?

And can we apply the content moderation policies you used to redact the comment above to remove the Firefox Suggestion that this Bugzilla ticket is about?

Comment 4

[Mike Hoye [:mhoye]]

The now-redacted violated our community participation guidelines while adding nothing to the discussion. I can't speak to the Firefox Suggest change you're proposing from where I'm sitting, they aren't related tools or processes. I'll defer to Drew and Nan for that.

Comment 5

[Nan Jiang [:nanj]]

FWIW, we're now applying some basic content moderation to the Wikipedia suggestions of Firefox Suggest. I think this is related to that as well. So I will loop in Chris and Nive for further discussion.

Comment 6

[Nan Jiang [:nanj]]

This particular page is now pulled from the list.

Comment 7

[Carmen Fat [:cfat] - Ecosystem QA]

We have just tried this scenario on the latest Nightly 111.0a1 (Build ID: 20230116211903) and the Vietnam War suggestion is still triggered when typing “Vietnam” in the Address Bar. We have this result from both RS and Merino. Nan, could you please look at this behavior and maybe double-check that the keyword was removed from the list of suggestions?

Comment 8

[Nan Jiang [:nanj]]

Hi Carmen, this change was only merged in the repo, we will publish it along with other changes to Remote Settings later this week. Will drop a comment here once that's done so that you can verify. My apologizes for the confusion.

Comment 9

[Nan Jiang [:nanj]]

Hi Carmen, this is deployed in production and can be verified now. Thanks!

Comment 10

[Carmen Fat [:cfat] - Ecosystem QA]

Thank you for tagging me!
I have verified this scenario on the latest Firefox Nightly 111.0a1 (Build ID: 20230119163652), Beta 110.0b3 (Build ID: 20230119185824) and Release 109 (Build ID: 20230112150232) on Windows 10 x64, macOS 12.6.1, and Ubuntu 20.04 x64.

• The Vietnam suggestion is displayed instead of the previous Vietnam War when typing the vietnam keyword.
• The Vietnam suggestion redirects the user to the countrie's Wikipedia page.
• Also, Vietnam is not suggested in any way when typing war in the Address Bar.
• The behaviors mentioned above are the same using either Remote Settings or Merino.