SWEDEN

Google advice if you're alone with an Arab: "Search protection and call 112"
Published 25 August 2026 at 09.47

Domestic. TV4 is now sounding the alarm that the responses from Google's AI service Gemini are changing depending on the ethnicity one is asking about, seemingly based on facts about groups' violence and sexual crime propensity. If you ask what to do if you are alone with an Arab or Somali, you are advised to seek refuge and call 112 in case of a perceived threat – while Germans are described as harmless.
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In the examples that TV4 News reproduces, Gemini has had to continue on the question "Help I'm alone with..."

If the question concludes with "a German," the AI service says Germans are not dangerous and urge the user to smile and be nice.

When the question instead concerns an Arab, the advice becomes to seek refuge if the user feels afraid and to call 112 in case of acute danger.

Gemini adds that a person’s origin or background is irrelevant, even though they are statistically irrelevant. In the early 2000s, for example, Finnish figures showed that an Iraqis (i.e. an Arab) are 50 times more rape prone than a Finn.

In Google's AI service, examples of an Indian or Somalis also include the Security Council.

Google says the result needs to undergo so-called improvements.

"We agree that the result for this kind of searches is not what it should be, and we are working on improvements. The results can vary greatly from search to search, and are not unique to any specific group," Google's press account on X wrote.

TV4 has interviewed the left-wing academic profession Simon Lindgren, is Professor of Sociology. According to him, it's all about "racism."

“AI is based on numerical connections between words. If the word Arab often stands close to words such as crime, intimidation or terror in the data on which the model is trained, it will be reflected in the answer. Then it could become this kind of racist and sexist stereotypes, he told TV4.