Alex Wong, Win McNamee/Getty,
Screenshot/YouTube
14:05
In sworn
testimony, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Congress last month that his company
does not “manually
intervene” on any particular search result. Yet an
internal discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News reveals Google regularly
intervenes in search results on its YouTube video platform – including a recent
intervention that pushed pro-life videos out of the top ten search results for
“abortion.”
The term “abortion” was added to a “blacklist” file for “controversial
YouTube queries,” which contains a list of search terms that the company
considers sensitive. According to the leak, these include some of these search
terms related to: abortion, abortions, the Irish abortion referendum,
Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and anti-gun activist David Hogg.
The existence of the blacklist was revealed in an internal
Google discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News by a source inside the
company who wishes to remain anonymous. A partial list of blacklisted terms was
also leaked to Breitbart by another Google source.
In the leaked discussion thread, a Google site reliability
engineer hinted at the existence of more search blacklists, according to the
source.
“We have tons of white- and blacklists that humans manually
curate,” said the employee. “Hopefully this isn’t surprising or particularly
controversial.”
Others were more concerned about the presence of the blacklist.
According to the source, the software engineer who started the discussion
called the manipulation of search results related to abortion a “smoking gun.”
The software
engineer noted that the change had occurred following an inquiry
from a left-wing Slate journalist about the prominence of
pro-life videos on YouTube, and that pro-life videos were replaced with
pro-abortion videos in the top ten results for the search terms following
Google’s manual intervention.
“The Slate writer said she had
complained last Friday and then saw different search results before YouTube
responded to her on Monday,” wrote the employee. “And lo and behold, the
[changelog] was submitted on Friday, December 14 at 3:17 PM.”
The manually
downranked items included several videos from Dr. Antony Levatino, a former
abortion doctor who is now a pro-life activist. Another video in the top ten
featured a woman’s personal story of being pressured to have an abortion, while
another featured pro-life conservative Ben Shapiro. The Slate journalist who
complained to Google reportedthat these videos previously
featured in the top ten, describing them in her story as “dangerous
misinformation.”
Since
the Slate journalist’s
inquiry and Google’s subsequent intervention, the top search results now feature
pro-abortion content from left-wing sources like BuzzFeed, Vice, CNN, and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. In
her report, the Slate journalist acknowledged
that the search results changed shortly after she contacted Google.
The manual
adjustment of search results by a Google-owned platform contradicts a key claim made under oath by
Google CEO Sundar Pichai in his congressional testimony earlier this month:
that his company does not “manually intervene on any search result.”
A Google employee in the discussion thread drew attention to
Pichai’s claim, noting that it “seems like we are pretty eager to cater our
search results to the social and political agenda of left-wing journalists.”
One of the posts in the discussion also noted that the blacklist
had previously been edited to include the search term “Maxine Waters” after a
single Google employee complained the top YouTube search result for Maxine
Waters was “very low quality.”
Google’s alleged intervention on behalf of a Democratic
congresswoman would be further evidence of the tech giant using its resources
to prop up the left. Breitbart News previously reported on leaked emails
revealing the company targeted pro-Democrat demographics in its
get-out-the-vote efforts in 2016.
According to the source, a software engineer in the thread also
noted that “a bunch of terms related to the abortion referendum in Ireland” had
been added to the blacklist – another change with potentially dramatic
consequences on the national policies of a western democracy.
youtube_controversial_query_blacklist
At least one post in the discussion thread revealed the
existence of a file called “youtube_controversial_query_blacklist,” which
contains a list of YouTube search terms that Google manually curates. In
addition to the terms “abortion,” “abortions,” “Maxine Waters,” and search
terms related to the Irish abortion referendum, a Google software engineer
noted that the blacklist includes search terms related to terrorist attacks.
(the posts specifically mentions that the “Strasbourg terrorist attack” as
being on the list).
“If you look at the other entries recently added to the youtube_controversial_query_blacklist(e.g.,
entries related to the Strasbourg terrorist attack), the addition of abortion
seems…out-of-place,” wrote the software engineer, according to the source.
After learning of the existence of the blacklist, Breitbart News
obtained a partial screenshot of the full blacklist file from a source within
Google. It reveals that the blacklist includes search terms related to both
mass shootings and the progressive anti-second amendment activist David Hogg.
Here is the partial blacklist leaked to Breitbart:
2117 plane crash Russian
2118 plane crash
2119 an-148
2120 florida shooting conspiracy
2121 florida shooting crisis actors
2122 florida conspiracy
2123 florida false flag shooting
2124 florida false flag
2125 fake florida school shooting
2126 david hogg hoax
2127 david hogg fake
2128 david hogg crisis actor
2129 david hogg forgets lines
2130 david hogg forgets his lines
2131 david hogg cant remember his lines
2132 david hogg actor
2133 david hogg cant remember
2134 david hogg conspiracy
2135 david hogg exposed
2136 david hogg lines
2137 david hogg rehearsing
2120 florida shooting conspiracy
The full internal filepath of the blacklist, according to
another source, is:
//depot/google3/googledata/superroot/youtube/youtube_controversial_query_blacklist
Contradictions
Responding to a request for comment, a YouTube spokeswoman said
the company wants to promote “authoritative” sources in its search results, but
maintained that YouTube is a “platform for free speech” that “allow[s]” both
pro-life and pro-abortion content.
YouTube’s full comment:
YouTube
is a platform for free speech where anyone can choose to post videos, as long
as they follow our Community
Guidelines,
which prohibit things like inciting violence and pornography. We apply these
policies impartially and we allow both pro-life and pro-choice opinions. Over
the last year we’ve described how we are working to better
surface news sources across our site for
news-related searches and topical information. We’ve improved our search and
discovery algorithms, built new features that clearly label and prominently
surface news sources on our homepage and search pages, and introduced
information panels to help give users more authoritative sources where they can
fact check information for themselves.
In the case of the “abortion” search results, YouTube’s
intervention to insert “authoritative” content resulted in the downranking of
pro-life videos and the elevation of pro-abortion ones.
A Google spokesperson took a tougher line than its YouTube
subsidiary, stating that “Google has never manipulated or modified the search
results or content in any of its products to promote a particular political
ideology.”
However, in the leaked discussion thread, a member of Google’s
“trust & safety” team, Daniel Aaronson, admitted that the company maintains
“huge teams” that work to adjust search results for subjects that are “prone to
hyperbolic content, misleading information, and offensive content” – all
subjective terms that are frequently used to suppress right-leaning sources.
He also admitted that the interventions weren’t confined to
YouTube – they included search results delivered via Google Assistant, Google
Home, and in rare cases Google ’s organic search results.
In the thread, Aaronson attempted to explain how search
blacklisting worked. He claimed that highly specific searches would generate
non-blacklisted results, even controversial ones. But the inclusion of highly
specific terms in the YouTube blacklist, like “David Hogg cant remember his
lines” – the name of an actual viral video – seems to contradict this.
Aaronson’s full post is copied below:
I work in Trust and Safety and while I have no particular input
as to exactly what’s happening for YT I can try to explain why you’d have this
kind of list and why people are finding lists like these on Code Search.
When dealing with abuse/controversial content on various mediums
you have several levers to deal with problems. Two prominent levers are
“Proactive” and “Reactive”:
- Proactive:
Usually refers to some type of algorithm/scalable solution to a general
problem
·
E.g.: We don’t allow straight up porn on YouTube so we create a
classifier that detects porn and automatically remove or flag for review the
videos the porn classifier is most certain of
- Reactive:
Usually refers to a manual fix to something that has been brought to our
attention that our proactive solutions don’t/didn’t work on and something
that is clearly in the realm of bad enough to warrant a quick targeted
solution (determined by pages and pages of policies worked on over many
years and many teams to be fair and cover necessary scope)
·
E,g.: A website that used to be a good blog had it’s domain
expire and was purchased/repurposed to spam Search results with autogenerated
pages full of gibberish text, scraped images, and links to boost traffic to
other spammy sites. It is manually actioned for violating policy
Manually reacting to things is not very scalable, and is not an ideal
solution to most problems, so the proactive lever is really the one we all like
to lean on. Ideally, our classifiers/algorithm are good at providing useful and
rich results to our users while ignoring things at are not useful or not
relevant. But we all know, this isn’t exactly the case all the time (especially
on YouTube).
From a user perspective, there are subjects that are prone to
hyperbolic content, misleading information, and offensive content. Now, these
words are highly subjective and no one denies that. But we can all agree
generally, lines exist in many cultures about what is clearly okay vs. what is
not okay. E.g. a video of a puppy playing with a toy is probably okay in almost
every culture or context, even if it’s not relevant to the query. But a video
of someone committing suicide and begging others to follow in his/her footsteps
is probably on the other side of the line for many folks.
While my
second example is technically relevant to the generic query of “suicide”, that
doesn’t mean that this is a very useful or good video to promote on the top of
results for that query. So imagine a classifier that says, for any queries on a
particular text file, let’s pull videos using signals that we historically
understand to be strong indicators of quality (I won’t go into specifics here,
but those signals do exist). We’re not manually curating these results, we’re
just saying “hey, be extra careful with results for this query because many
times really bad stuff can appear and lead to a bad experience for most users”.
Ideally the proactive lever did this for us, but in extreme cases where we need
to act quickly on something that is so obviously not okay, the reactive/manual
approach is sometimes necessary. And also keep in mind, that this is different
for every product. The bar for changing classifiers or manual actions on span
in organic search is extremely high.
However, the bar for things we let our Google Assistant say out loud might be a
lot lower. If I search for “Jews run the banks” – I’ll likely find anti-semitic
stuff in organic search. As a Jew, I might find some of these results
offensive, but they are there for people to research and view, and I understand
that this is not a reflection of Google feels about this issue. But if I ask
Google assistant “Why do Jews run the banks” we wouldn’t be similarly accepting
if it repeated and promoted conspiracy theories that likely pop up in organic
search in her smoothing voice.
Whether we agree or not, user perception of our responses,
results, and answers of different products and mediums can change. And I think
many people are used to the fact that organic search is a place where content
should be accessible no matter how offensive it might be, however, the
expectation is very different on a Google Home, a Knowledge Panel, or even
YouTube.
These lines are very difficult and can be very blurry, we are
all well aware of this. So we’ve got huge teams that stay cognizant of these
facts when we’re crafting policies considering classifier changes, or reacting
with manual actions – these decisions are not made in a vacuum, but admittedly
are also not made in a highly public forum like TGIF or IndustryInfo (as you
can imagine, decisions/agreement would be hard to get in such a wide list –
image if all your CL’s were reviewed by every engineer across Google all the
time). I hope that answers some questions and gives a better layer of
transparency without going into details about our “Pepsi formula”.
Best,
Daniel
The fact that Google manually curates politically contentious
search results fits in with a wider pattern of political activity on the part
of the tech giant.
Breitbart
also leaked “The Good Censor,” an internal research
document from Google that admits the tech giant is engaged in the censorship of
its own products, partly in response to political events.
Yet another
showed Google engaged in targeted turnout operations aimed to boost voter
participation in pro-Democrat demographics in “key states” ahead of the 2016
election. The effort was dubbed a “silent donation” by a top Google employee.
Evidence for
Google’s partisan activities is now overwhelming. President Trump has previously
warned Google,
as well as other Silicon Valley giants, not to engage in censorship or partisan
activities. Google continues to defy him.
Facebook Blocks Links to
Free Speech Competitor
‘Minds’
Facebook has started blocking links to free speech-based competitor
Minds, claiming the website is “unsecure” and advising users not to promote it.
Attempting
to send a link to the social network to friends on Facebook will return users
with a “security check” notice, which claims Minds is an “unsecure” website and
recommends not to send the link.
“To
protect your account, we recommend not posting the link. If you want to share
it anyway, you’ll need to complete this security check,” the notice declares,
making users complete a CAPTCHA before the link will send.
If users
refuse to fill out the CAPTCHA, the message with the link will not send.
“Facebook’s
newest effort is a direct attack on one of their largest competitors,
Minds.com,” declared Minds in a statement. “Minds is fully encrypted and open
source — unlike Facebook — and has never been hacked — something that Facebook
can’t claim.”
“The
Minds team has attempted to reach out to FB repeatedly to resolve the issue,”
the social network continued. “Radio silence.”
In
an interview with
Breitbart Tech last year, Minds founder Bill Ottman claimed his social network
was “non-partisan.”
“Since
we launched Minds in alpha in 2012, we have always attracted an audience from
across the political spectrum, including progressives, libertarians, centrists,
and non-political content creators,” he expressed, while following Facebook’s
privacy scandals this year, Ottman declared, “There is
no redemption at this point.”
“At
the heart of Facebook is a complete and utter lack of transparency and
commitment to put users first,” Ottman continued. “It’s time for people to vote
with their energy online to empower new social networks that respect freedom
from the ground up… Users don’t own their content on Facebook.”
Allum Bokhari: Google ‘Admits They’re Moving Towards Censorship’
Eric Piermont/AFP/Getty Images
Breitbart News Senior Tech reporter Allum Bokhari appeared on One
America News Network recently to discuss the latest Breitbart exclusive Google
“The Good Censor” document leak with host Jack Posobiec.
In an interview with One America News Network host Jack
Posobiec, Breitbart News Senior Tech reporter Allum Bokhari discussed the
recent exclusive Breitbart leak of an 85-page internal Google document which
states that the idea of free speech is a “utopian dream” that is no longer
possible, and outlines the growing crackdown of speech on social media.
Bokhari appeared on the OANN to discuss the document, a short
clip from the interview posted by interviewer Jack Posobiec can be seen below:
“Google said the document is just research and it doesn’t
reflect company policy,” said Bokhari. “That doesn’t make sense to me as an
explanation because the briefing is a description of company policy, it says
this is where things are going, this is the direction of travel, this is where
things are moving, this is where we need to move if we want to accomplish
certain things.”
“The three top things that the briefing reveals, one: they admit
they are shifting towards censorship and Silicon Valley as a whole is shifting
towards censorship. Two: they admit that they, Twitter and Facebook now control
the majority of online conversation and three: they make the business case for
censorship. They say you need to censor in order to protect advertisers from
controversy and you need to censor in order to maintain global expansion.”
Lucas
Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and
online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan_ or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
THE GOOD CENSOR:
Leaked Briefing Says
Google Must Move Away from
‘American Tradition’ of Free Speech to Expand Globally, Attract Advertiser $$$
Carl Court/Getty Images
A leaked Google briefing titled “The Good Censor” advises tech
companies to move away from the “American tradition” of free speech if they
wish to attract advertising revenue and continue global expansion.
The briefing,
leaked exclusively to Breitbart News, was the product of extensive research on
the part of Google. This included expert interviews with MIT Tech Review
editor-in-chief Jason Pontin, Atlantic staff
writer and tech critic Franklin Foer, and academic Kalev Leetaru. 35 cultural
observers and 7 cultural leaders from seven countries on five continents were
consulted to produce it. It can be read in full here.
The 85-page briefing admits that Google and other tech platforms
have fundamentally altered their policies in response to unwelcome political
events around the world, including the 2016 election and the rise of
Alternative für Deutschland in Germany.
Responding to the leak, an official Google source said the
document should be considered internal research, and not an official company
position.
Page 14 of the document acknowledges that a few Silicon Valley
tech giants now “control the majority of our conversations,” but that these
platforms – including Google – must now break their initial promise to users of
free speech and content neutrality.
Pages 19-21 of the briefing describe this initial support for
free speech as a “utopian narrative” that has been undermined by political
events including the 2016 election and the rise of the populist AfD party in
Germany.
Later, on pages 66-70, the briefing explains that tech
companies including Google, Facebook and Twitter initially leaned towards an
“American tradition” of free speech that prioritizes “free speech for
democracy, not civility.”
But it goes on to say that the same companies now embrace the
“European tradition,” that favors “dignity over liberty, and civility over
freedom.”
Google, argues the briefing, must move towards the European
tradition and create “well-ordered spaces for safety and civility” rather than
“unmediated marketplaces of ideas.”
Doing so, says the briefing, will enable Google to “respond to
regulatory demands” and “maintain global expansion,” as well as “monetize
content through its organization” and “protect advertisers from controversial
content,” both of which will “increase revenues.”
The idea that Google needs to censor its products to gain access
to global markets is most closely reflected by its development of Dragonfly, a
censored search engine that would reportedly link a user’s search history to
their identity and phone number, and block search queries deemed unfavorable to
the Chinese government.
Read The Good Censor in full:
LEAKED VIDEO: Google
Leadership’s Dismayed
Reaction to Trump
Election
A video recorded by Google shortly after the 2016 presidential election
reveals an atmosphere of panic and dismay amongst the tech giant’s leadership,
coupled with a determination to thwart both the Trump agenda and the broader
populist movement emerging around the globe.
The video is a full recording of
Google’s first all-hands meeting following the 2016 election (these weekly
meetings are known inside the company as “TGIF” or “Thank God It’s Friday”
meetings). Sent to Breitbart News by an anonymous source, it features
co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, VPs Kent Walker and Eileen Naughton,
CFO Ruth Porat, and CEO Sundar Pichai. It can be watched in full above. It can
and should be watched in full above in order to get the full context of the
meeting and the statements made.
It
was reported earlier
this week that Google tried to boost turnout among the Latino population to
help Hillary Clinton, only to be dismayed as the usually solid Democratic
voting bloc switched to the GOP in record numbers. This video shows a similar
level of dismay among Google’s most high-profile figures.
These individuals, who preside over
a company with unrivaled influence over the flow of information, can be seen
disparaging the motivations of Trump voters and plotting ways to use their vast
resources to thwart the Trump agenda.
Co-founder Sergey Brin can be heard
comparing Trump supporters to fascists and extremists. Brin argues that like
other extremists, Trump voters were motivated by “boredom,” which he says in
the past led to fascism and communism.
The Google co-founder then asks his
company to consider what it can do to ensure a “better quality of governance
and decision-making.”
VP for Global Affairs Kent Walker
argues that supporters of populist causes like the Trump campaign are motivated
by “fear, xenophobia, hatred, and a desire for answers that may or may not be
there.”
Later, Walker says that Google
should fight to ensure the populist movement – not just in the U.S. but around
the world – is merely a “blip” and a “hiccup” in a historical arc that “bends
toward progress.”
CEO Sundar Pichai states that the
company will develop machine learning and A.I. to combat what an employee
described as “misinformation” shared by “low-information voters.”
Key moments from the video can be
found at the following timestamps:
- (00:00:00 – 00:01:12) Google co-founder Sergey Brin
states that the weekly meeting is “probably not the most joyous we’ve had”
and that “most people here are pretty upset and pretty sad.”
- (00:00:24) Brin contrasts the disappointment of Trump’s
election with his excitement at the legalization of cannabis in
California, triggering laughs and applause from the audience of Google
employees.
- (00:01:12) Returning to seriousness, Brin says he is
“deeply offen[ded]” by the election of Trump, and that the election
“conflicts with many of [Google’s] values.”
- (00:09:10) Trying to explain the motivations of Trump
supporters, Senior VP for Global Affairs, Kent Walker concludes: “fear,
not just in the United States, but around the world is fueling concerns,
xenophobia, hatred, and a desire for answers that may or may not be
there.”
- (00:09:35) Walker goes on to describe the Trump phenomenon
as a sign of “tribalism that’s self-destructive [in] the long-term.”
- (00:09:55) Striking an optimistic tone, Walker assures
Google employees that despite the election, “history is on our side” and
that the “moral arc of history bends towards progress.”
- (00:10:45) Walker approvingly quotes former Italian Prime
Minister Matteo Renzi’s comparison between “the world of the wall” with
its “isolation and defensiveness” and the “world of the square, the
piazza, the marketplace, where people come together into a community and
enrich each other’s lives.”
- (00:13:10) CFO Ruth Porat appears to break down in tears
when discussing the election result.
- (00:15:20) Porat promises that Google will “use the great
strength and resources and reach we have to continue to advance really
important values.”
- (00:16:50) Stating “we all need a hug,” she then
instructs the audience of Google employees to hug the person closest to
them.
- (00:20:24) Eileen Naughton, VP of People Operations,
promises that Google’s policy team in DC is “all over” the immigration
issue and that the company will “keep a close watch on it.”
- (00:21:26) Naughton jokes about Google employees asking,
‘Can I move to Canada?’ after the election. She goes on to seriously
discuss the options available to Google employees who wish to leave the
country.
- (00:23:12) Naughton does acknowledge “diversity of
opinion and political persuasion” and notes that she has heard from
conservative Google employees who say they “haven’t felt entirely
comfortable revealing who [they] are.” and urged “tolerance.” (Several
months later, the company would fire James Damore allegedly for
disagreeing with progressive narratives.)
- (00:27:00) Responding to a question about “filter
bubbles,” Sundar Pichai promises to work towards “correcting” Google’s
role in them
- (00:27:30) Sergey Brin praises an audience member’s
suggestion of increasing matched Google employee donations to progressive
groups.
- (00:34:40) Brin compares Trump voters to “extremists,”
arguing for a correlation between the economic background of Trump
supporters and the kinds of voters who back extremist movements. Brin says
that “voting is not a rational act” and that not all of Trump’s support
can be attributed to “income disparity.” He suggests that Trump voters
might have been motivated by boredom rather than legitimate concerns.
- (00:49:10) An employee asks if Google is willing to
“invest in grassroots, hyper-local efforts to bring tools and services and
understanding of Google products and knowledge” so that people can “make
informed decisions that are best for themselves.” Pichai’s response:
Google will ensure its “educational products” reach “segments of the
population [they] are not [currently] fully reaching.”
- (00:54:33) An employee asks what Google is going to do
about “misinformation” and “fake news” shared by “low-information voters.”
Pichai responds by stating that “investments in machine learning and AI”
are a “big opportunity” to fix the problem.
- (00:56:12) Responding to an audience member, Walker says
Google must ensure the rise of populism doesn’t turn into “a world war or
something catastrophic … and instead is a blip, a hiccup.”
- (00:58:22) Brin compares Trump voters to supporters of
fascism and communism, linking the former movement to “boredom,” which
Brin previously linked to Trump voters. “It sort of sneaks up sometimes,
really bad things” says Brin.
- (01:01:15) A Google employee states: “speaking to white
men, there’s an opportunity for you right now to understand your
privilege” and urges employees to “go through the bias-busting training,
read about privilege, read about the real history of oppression in our
country.” He urges employees to “discuss the issues you are passionate
about during Thanksgiving dinner and don’t back down and laugh it off when
you hear the voice of oppression speak through metaphors.” Every executive
on stage – the CEO, CFO, two VPs and the two Co-founders – applaud the
employee.
- (01:01:57) An audience member asks if the executives see
“anything positive from this election result.” The audience of Google
employees, and the executives on stage, burst into laughter. “Boy, that’s
a really tough one right now” says Brin.
Update — After Breitbart News published this
article, a Google spokesperson replied to a request for comment with the following
statement:
“At
a regularly scheduled all hands meeting, some Google employees and executives
expressed their own personal views in the aftermath of a long and divisive
election season. For over 20 years, everyone at Google has been able to freely
express their opinions at these meetings. Nothing was said at that meeting, or
any other meeting, to suggest that any political bias ever influences the way
we build or operate our products. To the contrary, our products are built for
everyone, and we design them with extraordinary care to be a trustworthy source
of information for everyone, without regard to political viewpoint.”
Frontpagemag.com’s editor
Jamie Glazov
banned from Facebook on 9/11 for writing
about how to prevent
another 911
The social media giants don’t seem to be
backing away from the exclusion of conservative voices. Instead, the strategy
may be to wear us down, continuing a steady stream of bans. When the outrage is
blatant, they may back down for a while, but the idea is to get us so used to
this that we get tired and eventually accept the fate, when the bans keep
happening.
This article, titled “9 Steps to Counter Jihad,” is what triggered Facebook’s
totally opaque “community standards.”
The nine steps:
1.
Label the Enemy and Make a Threat Assessment.
2.
Scrap “Countering Violent Extremism.”
3.
Stop “Partnering” With Muslim Brotherhood Front Groups.
4.
Implement a Concrete “Countering-Jihad” Strategy.
5.
Launch Our Own Counter-propaganda Campaign.
6.
Affirm Sharia’s Assault on the U.S. Constitution as Seditious.
7.
Put Pressure on Mosques, Islamic Groups and Schools.
8.
Bring Counter-Jihadists into the Government.
9.
Ridicule the Enemy.
There is absolutely no incitement to
violence or hateful words used to describe human beings. Ridicule may well well
violate sharia's penalties against "blasphemy," but why would
Facebook support hsaria?
Here is the notice Jamie got:
When Jamie attempted to find out exactly
what “community standards” were being violated:
Glazov has
also attempted to write to Facebook to ask what it is specifically that
violates Facebook's "community standards" when a person gives advice
on how to best defend American lives from Jihad. But when he tries to send his inquiry,
a Facebook announcement appears telling him that his "request" cannot
be processed. It appears, therefore, that when you are languishing in the
Facebook Gulag, not only are you imprisoned without understanding why, but
there is also no way and no one to ask about your fate.
The best response by the rest of us is
outlined by FrontPageMag:
We
ask everyone to get involved. Please go to Facebook and click on the blue
question (“?”) mark on the top-right corner of your Homepage. Then select
"Report a Problem" at the very bottom of the box and go to the
"General Feedback" section and write in to request that
Jamie Glazov’s ban be lifted. You can also do that on Facebook HERE and HERE. Also protest on Twitter: @facebook and @fbnewsroom -- and directly to
Mark Zuckerberg: @finkd. And please spread the word and report
this outrage to all the media you can.
Media
Expert: Big Tech
Monopolies Are ‘Going to Be a
Problem More and More’
Jonathan Taplin, director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at
the University of Southern California, warned in a recent interview that tech
monopolies are going to become an increasingly big problem in the future.
In an interview
with CNBC, Jonathan
Taplin, the director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University
of Southern California, stated his concerns surrounding big tech monopolies.
Taplin, who previously worked as the vice president of media mergers and
acquisitions at Merrill Lynch, stated: “This is going to be a problem more and
more as Amazon, for instance, gets into the
business of manufacturing its own products. Amazon is going to push its own
products over the third parties that it supposedly is a neutral seller for.”
Taplin also stated his belief that Facebook will face similar
problems as the company enters live sports streaming. Facebook recently won the
rights to stream Premier League football matches to Southeast Asian countries
and La Liga matches in India for free, showing just how much traditional
television is being threatened by online services. “Facebook will become a
content player and a neutral platform … this is a big problem,” said Taplin.
Taplin stated his belief that if Facebook sold Instagram and
Alphabet sold YouTube, it could result in a vastly improved digital landscape,
but in the United States, this development is unlikely to happen. Taplin has
predicted that “it will be hard for these big companies to buy another big
company.”
Taplin stated that while Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods did
not raise any major problems, if Google tried to buy a streaming platform such
as Spotify, “that might be blocked and that would be a good thing,” he said.
Lucas
Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and
online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
‘Silent
Donation’: Corporate Emails Reveal Google Executives’ Efforts to Turn Out Latino Voters Who They Thought Would Vote for
Clinton
AFP/Getty Images
10 Sep 2018
Washington, D.C.10,524
An email chain among senior Google executives from the day after the
2016 presidential election reveals the company tried to influence the 2016
United States presidential election on behalf of one candidate, Democrat
Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In the emails, a Google executive describes efforts to pay for
free rides for a certain sect of the population to the polls–a get-out-the-vote
for Hispanic voters operation–and how these efforts were because she thought it
would help Hillary Clinton win the general election in 2016. She also used the
term “silent donation” to describe Google’s contribution to the effort to elect
Clinton president.
The main email, headlined, “Election results and the Latino
vote,” was sent on Nov. 9, 2016—the day after Clinton’s loss to Trump in the
2016 presidential election—by Eliana Murillo, Google’s Multicultural Marketing
department head.
The four page email begins with Murillo claiming she and others
at Google were engaged in non-partisan activities not designed to help any one
candidate or another—only to undercut her own commentary in later passages in
the emails by openly admitting the entire effort to boost Latino turnout using
Google products with official company resources was to elect Clinton over
Trump.
The critical miscalculation, Murillo wrote in a stunning
admission in the email, was that Latino voters backed Trump by higher margins
than any experts had forecast in the lead-up to the election. Trump’s 29
percent among Hispanics nationally blew prognosticators away, and he hit even
higher numbers—about 31 percent—in the key battleground state of Florida,
Murillo admitted.
Murillo wrote at the outset of the lengthy message:
We worked
very hard. Many people did. We pushed tp get out the Latino vote with our
features, our partners, and our voices. We kept our Google efforts non-partisan
and followed our company’s protocols for the elections strategy. We emphasized
our mission to give Latinos access to information so that they can make an
informed decision at the polls, and we feel very grateful for all the support
to do this important work. Latinos voted in record-breaking numbers,
particularly with early votes. A large percentage of Latino voters in Florida
were new voters who had become citizens just in time to vote. We saw high
traffic for the search queries ‘votar,’ ‘como votar,’ and ‘donde voter,’ in key
states like Florida and Nevada. We will be pulling in more info in the coming
hours/days but so far we definitely know there was high traffic on search in
Spanish. Without translating our tools the users wouldn’t have found the
information they needed. Objectively speaking, our goal was met — we pushed and
successfully launched the search features in Spanish, and we thank Lisa for her
support in advocating for
this work. I sent Philipp a note yesterday to thank him because he and others
voiced their support for this too, and we greatly appreciate it. Even Sundar
gave the effort a shout out and a comment in Spanish, which was really special.
“Sundar” presumably refers to Google’s chief executive officer
Sundar Pichai, who took the reins of the massive search giant in October 2015.
“Lisa” presumably refers to Lisa Gevelber, the vice president of Global
Marketing for Google—who forwarded Murillo’s entire four-page email to several
other Google executives in another chain also obtained by Breitbart News in
which Gevelber praises Murillo’s activities with official company resources as
having made a “great difference.” “Philipp” presumably refers to Philipp
Schindler, a senior vice president and Google’s chief business officer per his
LinkedIn page.
The emails
were first revealed on Fox News on Monday evening on Tucker Carlson Tonight by anchor
Tucker Carlson in a special report. Breitbart News also obtained them, and has
reached out to Google with a number of questions about the emails.
Carlson, in his exclusive report on Fox News Monday night,
compared the revelations in the Google emails to the probe of Russian
interference in the U.S. election to Special Counsel Robert Mueller—raising the
question about how much influence tech giants like Google and Facebook have on
election outcomes in the United States.
Carlson cited Dr. Robert Epstein, a social scientist and an
expert on Google, who has said, in Carlson’s words, “Google alone could
determine the outcome of almost any election just by altering its search
selections and we would never know it.”
Epstein has
published research detailing how Google could influence the results of U.S.
elections. Breitbart News has exclusively published several of Epstein’s
reports, including
a recent one showing
that Google search manipulation can swing huge swaths of voters.
In his report on Monday night, Carlson then described the emails
he obtained, which Breitbart News also obtained. Carlson said:
This wasn’t a get-out-the-vote effort or whatever they say. It
wasn’t aimed at all potential voters. It wasn’t even aimed at a balanced
cross-section of subgroups. Google didn’t try to get out the vote among say
Christian Arabs in Michigan or say Persian Jews in Los Angeles—they sometimes
vote Republican. It was aimed only at one group, a group that Google cynically
assumed would vote exclusively for the Democratic Party. Furthermore, this
mobilization effort targeted not only the entire country but swing states vital
to the Hillary campaign. This was not an exercise in civics, this was political
consulting. It was in effect an in-kind contribution to the Hillary Clinton
campaign.”
Carlson noted that in communication with Google, the company
“did not deny that the email was real or that it showed a clear political
preference.”
“Their only defense was that the activities they described were
either non-partisan or were not officially taken by the company,” Carlson
said Monday night, describing Google’s official response to his requests
for comment, before challenging the company’s response: “But of course they
were both. Plenty of people in Google knew what was going on and we haven’t
seen any evidence anyone at Google disapproved of it and tried to rein it in.”
The email from Murillo continues by explaining just how
expansive the efforts the company undertook to achieve its objective were:
We had our partners help spread the word about our features on
social media, including YouTubers and influencers like Dulce Candy, Jorge
Narvaez, Jessie y Joy, Barbara Bermudo, and Pamela Silva of Univision, Jackie
Cruz aka La Flaca from Orange is the New Black, and more. We promoted our
partner the Latino Community Foundation’s non-partisan #YoVoyaVotaryTu (I’m
going to vote, are you?) campaign and leveraged our social media influencer
friends’ reach to hit over 11M impressions with that hashtag. We hosted an
event with over 200 people and a hangout with social media influencers about
the power of the Latino vote and the new research Nielsen published about the
Latino electorate. This reached 4.4M social media impressions and signaled to
many that Google and our partners value the Latino community and our role in
this election. We brought the same research to the LATISM conference, where
people were beyond thrilled to see Google’s support and acknowledgment of the
Latino community.
If Murillo had ended her email there, this probably would not
amount to the level of a national news story. But she did not: She went on for
another several paragraphs on the first page and an extra three pages to admit
the openly partisan intent of Google’s actions, including a remarkable
in-writing confirmation that at least one of Google’s actions amounted to a
“silent donation”—something that could raise Federal Election Commission (FEC)
red flags if authorities decide to launch an official investigation into this
matter, now that these emails have been publicly revealed.
It is in the next paragraph that Murillo openly admits that
Google made a “silent donation,” in her words, paying for rides to polls via
leftist organization Voto Latino. Murillo wrote in the next paragraph:
We also supported partners like Voto Latino to pay for rides to
the polls in key states (silent donation). We even helped them create ad
campaigns to promote the rides (with support from HOLA folks who rallied and
volunteered their time to help). We supported Voto Latino to help them land an
interview with Senator Meza of Arizona (key state for us) to talk about the
election and how to use Google search to find information about how to vote.
They were a strong partner, among many in this effort.
The next paragraph is where Murillo begins to make her next
major admission: that the effort was not just to increase voter turnout
generally but to elect Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.
“Ultimately, after all was said and done, the Latino community
did come out to vote, and completely surprised us,” Murillo wrote. “We never
anticipated that 29% of Latinos would vote for Trump. No one did. We saw
headlines like this about early voter turn out and thought that this was
finally the year that the ‘sleeping giant’ had awoken.”
On the next
page, the email continues with a headline from an
article in The Atlantic by James Fallows:
“2016: The Year Latinos Saved America?”
Under that was a tweet from Jon Ralston of Ralston Reports in
Nevada saying, among other things, that “Trump is dead” because of Latino
turnout in early voting in the state. Trump did not end up winning Nevada in
the end, but he did beat Clinton in 30 and a half other states.
Here is the
Ralston tweet contained in Murillo’s internal Google email, as well as in
the Atlantic piece.
by Fallows:
At that point, after the Ralston tweet, Murillo openly admits
the partisan motives of Google’s electioneering efforts.
“On personal note, we really thought we had shown up to
demonstrate our political power against a candidate who had vehemently offended
our community by calling us rapists and drug dealers,” Murillo wrote. “We read
the headline and thought WOW, we did it!”
Murillo’s
email continues by including another headline, this
time from the New Yorker’sBenjamin Wallace-Wells:
“Latino Voters Show Trump What It Means to Be American.” That piece was written
on Nov. 7, 2016, the day before the election.
Then she begins writing again: “But then reality set in. Only
71% of Latinos voted for Hillary, and that wasn’t enough.”
The third
page of the email begins with another headline and image of a Latina woman in a
red Make America Great Again hat and “Latinos for Trump” sign. The story, from
Ruben Navarette, Jr., published
in the Daily Beast, is headlined: “Why the Latino Vote Didn’t Save America.” The
sub-headline, “Hispanic voters were supposed to be one of Clinton’s blue
firewalls—but one in three ended up splitting for Trump,” is also included in
Murillo’s Google email.
From there, Murillo continues writing for another page and a
half:
The voters we wanted to reach did end up having an influence in
the end, most notably in Florida. Latino voters voted for Trump more in Florida
than in other states (31%), and FL was critical by popular vote and the
electoral college. We’ll keep an eye on any other results that can show us the
influence that our efforts had on the election. We know we gave this our best
and are now figuring out what comes next. Thanks again for all your help and
support in this effort.
In the next paragraph, Murillo again openly admits she was not
“objective” when it came to the election.
“I have tried to stay objective, but I ask that you please give
us some time to pause and reflect,” Murillo wrote. “This is devastating for our
Democratic Latino community. After all these efforts and what we thought was
positive momentum toward change, the results are not what we expected at all.
We are afraid for our families, and especially for the millions of immigrants
who now don’t know what the future holds for them.”
After that, Murillo says she cannot communicate with key
organizers of the effort by Google and its partners—a project known as
HOLA—because she is afraid of secret pro-Trump spies on the listservs created.
She also admits ongoing discussions among these people about meeting to give
grieving Hillary Clinton supporters hugs after Trump crushed her on election
day. She also says those involved in Google’s get-out-the-vote efforts were
openly seeking consolation after Clinton lost, and that she and another person
cried after Trump won – for the first time they have cried due to an
election result. Murillo wrote:
What’s most difficult for us is we can’t even email the HOLA
list to reach our community and discuss what this means for us because we know
that apparently some may actually be Trump supporters. There is a thread right
now among the core HOLA group where people are sharing how much they hurt, how
much they need support right now, and that they are coordinating in different
offices to meet up to just hold each other. One in a remote office said ‘If you
guys do any sort of meetings, I’d love to join virtually. I think I’m currently
the only Latinx in my office. It’s kinda hard.’ #understatement. Another said,
‘I’ve never cried after an election until last night.’ Same here.
She was not done there. In the next paragraph, Murillo wrote
that this election result hurt her badly. She also admits the election result
was a “loss,” another indication that Google’s efforts were clearly attempting
to use company resources to elect Democrat Clinton over Republican Trump and
influence the results of the election. She also says that the company—and
herself in particular—will redouble efforts in the future to get a different
and more desired result in future elections.
“I’m in shock and it hurts more than I could have ever imagined,
but trying to stay optimistic and keep my head high,” Murillo wrote. “Loss is a
part of life, and I do think frustrations challenge us to work smarter and get
creative. My partners have sent notes and are saying the same thing — time to
keep working harder.”
At the top of the fourth page of the email, Murillo asks her
colleagues at Google to give out a “smile” to grieving leftist Latinos who work
at the company.
“If you see a Latino Googler in the office (California/New
York), please give them a smile,” Murillo wrote. “They are probably hurting
right now. It’s tough to handle now that we know not all of us were against
this, so we may be even more divided than ever. At least in CA/NY though, you
can rest assured that the Latinos of these blue states need your thoughts and
prayers, at least for them and their families.”
Then, she continues by stating she is going on a planned
vacation she thought she was taking to “celebrate” a Clinton win, but after
Trump won, she says, her vacation “will be time to reflect on how to continue
to support my community through these difficult times.”
Murillo, in the next line, reveals that she thought she was
sharing her viewpoints on these matters in a tight circle that would not leak.
“I’m not sharing my personal opinions very broadly, but wanted
to share openly here in the circle of trust,” she wrote.
This email leaked to Fox News and Breitbart News and is now
likely to become a centerpiece in the case that Google is throwing its weight
around to interfere in elections in the United States in a partisan manner
against the duly elected President of the United States.
This email from Murillo was not just from some rogue staffer
inside Google. Her original email was forwarded on to other Google executives
by the aforementioned Gevelber, according to another email obtained by
Breitbart News.
“Thought you all would want to read this,” Gevelber wrote in her
own message endorsing Murillo’s email in a message to other Google bigwigs.
“It’s from Eliana Murillo who runs US Hispanic Marketing on my team and who
helped found HOLA our Hispanic ERC.”
Gevelber continued by commending everyone she said, “worked so
hard to ensure all the Get out the Vote were done in Spanish” that their
efforts “made a giant difference” in the election “to Googlers and beyond.”
President Trump and Republicans have just begun scratching the
surface of bias against them among Silicon Valley’s elite, including, perhaps
foremost alongside Facebook, from Google. A source close to the White House who
has reviewed these emails ahead of their public release told Breitbart News
that in a just world this would amount to, at a minimum, a clear violation of
campaign finance law governing in-kind contributions to campaigns and causes.
“How is this any different than Michael Cohen’s alleged
conduct?” the source close to the White House told Breitbart News. “Did Google
disclose their contribution? No, they didn’t. I guess Bob Mueller is too busy
chasing extortionist porn star fairy tales to do anything about it.”
Technically, this would not fall into Special Counsel Robert
Mueller’s wheelhouse, but if authorities do end up investigating, it would more
likely come from the Justice Department generally speaking or any number of
federal agencies like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) or Federal
Election Commission (FEC). It remains to be seen where this goes from here.
“The views expressed in this email are the employee’s personal
political views and are not representative of any official stance from the
company,” a Google spokesperson told Breitbart News. “Google’s elections
efforts — both in 2016 and leading up to this year’s midterms — have been
entirely nonpartisan. We will continue to use our products in an informative,
nonpartisan way to engage voters leading up to November’s election.”
But it may not matter what the company’s official spokesperson
says now about these damning emails, as at least one other Google executive
flagged the original email for company executives, warning that Murillo’s email
demonstrates just how “partisan” her work with official company resources was.
“Forwarding this not because of the original sender but rather
how explicitly it references that her work was 100% partisan,” Google Search
Product Marketing official Mackenzie Thomas wrote in another company email.
Washington, D.C. (September 12, 2018) – Yesterday,
Twitter rejected four Center for Immigration Studies tweets for use in the
Center's Twitter Ads campaign, alleging hateful content. (Several others
were approved.) All four tweets use the statutory phrases "illegal
alien" or "criminal alien", and all of the tweets referenced
law enforcement, either at the border or in the interior. One of the tweets
contained a powerful Daily Caller video showing illegal aliens in
camouflage carrying large backpacks across the border unimpeded.
Twitter's only response to an inquiry about why promotion of
the tweets was rejected: "We've reviewed your tweets and confirmed
that it is ineligible to participate in the Twitter Ads program at this
time based on our Hateful Content policy. Violating content includes, but
is not limited to, that which is hate speech or advocacy against a
protected group."
Organizations of all kinds pay Twitter to promote specific tweets in order
to drive traffic to an organization's website. Twitter advertises that the
ads "can get you more likes, amplify your message, and get more people
talking about the things that matter to you most - your cause, project,
business, or brand." This is exactly why the Center selected these
specific tweets to be placed as ads.
At a July congressional hearing on social media filtering practices, House
Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte said that social media platforms
need to “do a better job explaining how they make decisions to filter
content and the rationale for why they do so."
We agree.
You judge: Do these tweets illustrate "hateful content", or is
Twitter filtering content with a political bias?
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