CONSTRUCTING THE NARRATIVE: GOOGLE USES SPECIAL MEASURES TO LIMIT SPREAD OF NON-MSM NEWS

Tuesday, 25 June 2019

CONSTRUCTING THE NARRATIVE: GOOGLE USES SPECIAL MEASURES TO LIMIT SPREAD OF NON-MSM NEWS

Jen Gennai speaking to the Project Veritas undercover investigator. Click to see full-size image.

On June 24^th, investigative website Project Veritas released a video showing a Google whistleblower talking about the tech giant’s activities in avoiding a “Trump Situation” happening once more in 2020.

An interesting fact is that YouTube is actively downing the video and its mirrors.

Project Veritas website was under attack around 21:00 GMT+0 and was inaccessible.

In the video, the whistleblower describes that Google has the ability to avoid a new “Trump situation” in 2020 by throttling conservative voices across its platforms, the company’s executives were willing to employ their capabilities, the whistleblower suggested.

In addition to the whistleblower’s testimony, the video shows documents, as well as an undercover video of a senior Google executive – Jen Gennai.

“They’re going to redefine a reality based on what they think is fair and based upon what they want, and what and is part of their agenda,” the Google insider said.

In the video, Google’s Head of Responsible Innovation Jen Gennai criticizes Elizabeth Warren’s “misguided” suggestions on “breaking up Google”. She explains “smaller companies don’t have the resources,” unlike Google, to “prevent the next Trump situation.”

Gennai works in the same division run by Kent Walker, a Google VP who assured employees “history is on our side”. Gennai says the following in the video:

“Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided. Like that will not make it better it will make it worse. Because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation. It’s like, a small company cannot do that.”

“We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn’t just us. It was, the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like. Everybody got screwed over so we’re rapidly been like, ‘what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again?’”

“We’re also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?”

According to the insider, after Trump’s election in 2016, the company completely changed:

“Right after Donald Trump won the election in 2016, the company did a complete 180 in what they thought was important,” he said. “Before, they thought self-expression, giving everyone a voice was important, but now they’re like hey, there’s a lot of hate, and because there’s a lot of hate and misogyny and racism, that’s the reason Donald Trump got elected. And so we need to fix that.”

How?

“We need to start policing our users because we don’t like to have an outcome like that. We don’t want to have an outcome like that happen again,” he said.

Project Veritas posted what were identified as internal Google documents on “machine learning fairness” and “algorithmic unfairness,” which was defined as “unjust or prejudicial treatment of people that is related to sensitive characteristics such as race, income, sexual orientation, or gender.”

“The reason we launched our A.I. [artificial intelligence] principles is because people were not putting that line in the sand, that they were not saying what’s fair and what’s equitable so we’re like, well we are a big company, we’re going to say it,” Gennai said.

What does “fairness” mean to Google?

“Fairness Is a dog whistle. It does not mean what you think it means,” said the anonymous insider.

“What they’re really saying about fairness is that they have to manipulate their search results so it gives them the political agenda that they want,” he said. “And so they have to re-bias their algorithms so that they can get their agenda across.”

According to James O’Keefe, Project Veritas head and founder, what google was doing sounds more as “Social engineering” and less as “Search querying.”

Some of the presented alleged Google documents suggested that search results can be used to promote political agenda.

Typing “women can” into the search engine provides auto-completed results empowering to women.

Conversely, typing “men can” provides results intended to break gender stereotypes.

Click to see full-size image

Some of the other shown documents provide alleged evidence that Google actively prioritizes some news publishers over others.

One document titled “Fake News-letter” promotes a goal of establishing a “single point of truth” for the definition of “news”. Google says it removes “low-quality sources” and “misinformation”.

“We have gotten accusations of around fairness is that we’re unfair to conservatives because we’re choosing what we find as credible news sources and those sources don’t necessarily overlap with conservative sources …” Gennai said.

According to the insider, “establishment-unfriendly” content creators like David Rubin are routinely suppressed because they’re tagged as “right wing.”

“What YouTube did is they changed the results of the recommendation engine. And so what the recommendation engine is it tries to do, is it tries to say, well, if you like A, then you’re probably going to like B. So content that is similar to Dave Rubin or Tim Pool, instead of listing Dave Rubin or Tim Pool as people that you might like, what they’re doing is that they’re trying to suggest different, different news outlets, for example, like CNN, or MSNBC, or these left leaning political outlets.”

Content creator Lauren Chen backed up the whistleblower’s claims, saying that her popular videos were getting fewer views and they weren’t being recommended by the system any longer.

Lauren Chen

@TheLaurenChen

· 14h

Replying to @TheLaurenChen

Finally, in February 2019 after YouTube’s announcement, our recommended views dropped even more.

Again, these number don’t speak to the TOTAL number of views I was getting (that number has fluctuated), merely the proportion of them that the algorithm was responsible for.

Lauren Chen

@TheLaurenChen

As it stands, channel like mine are in YouTube purgatory.

Our channels aren’t deleted, but we’re not growing since our content isn’t being offered to new viewers.

YouTube is filtering what it recommends through an ideological bias.

This is NOT how “platforms” behave.

1,117

8:22 PM – Jun 24, 2019

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Scott Adams called Google “the Gatekeepers to reality” and that they weren’t credible.

Finally, the whistleblower said that US Senator Josh Hawley is currently fighting to strip social media platforms like YouTube of their Section 230 protections.

The insider said that Google violates “letter of the law” and “spirit of the law” on Section 230

“With Section 230, tech companies get a sweetheart deal that no other industry enjoys: complete exemption from traditional publisher liability in exchange for providing a forum free of political censorship.

There’s a growing list of evidence that shows big tech companies making editorial decisions to censor viewpoints they disagree with.

Even worse, the entire process is shrouded in secrecy because these companies refuse to make their protocols public. This legislation simply states that if the tech giants want to keep their government-granted immunity, they must bring transparency and accountability to their editorial processes and prove that they don’t discriminate.”

If that decision is made, big tech companies and their platforms, such as YouTube, Google, Twitter, etc. will have the ability to earn immunity, instead of receiving it automatically under Section 230. They would have to prove to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) by “clear and convincing evidence” that their algorithms and content-removal practices are politically neutral. Nonetheless, even if this formal decision is made, it does not mean that the situation will become different because there are multiple options to censor independent point ofviews for companies like Google.

While the Google whistleblower quoted by Project Veritas speaks mostly about “Trump Situation”, there is little new in scripted censorship of independent points of views on plantforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Since the very start of the conflict in Ukraine, Google has been increasing pressure on independent media organizations limiting their views and censoring the most popular videos. For example, SouthFront has repeatedly faced blatant censorship attempts on YouTube and overcome them thanks to your support. Nonetheless, the technical measures employed by YouTube has drastically limited SouthFront videos’ views on the platform.

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