Thursday, June 27, 2019

BILLIONAIRE HIGH TECH'S ASSAULT ON AMERICA - GOOGLE EXECS SOME OF THE WORST LIARS IN THE WORLD

Google execs some of the worst liars in the world



Sen. Ted Cruz was questioning a Google executive today about a Project Veritas report charging that Google steers conservative queries to liberal sites.  
The exec agreed that Google should not  be a political tool for any one political viewpoint and denied knowledge of Google trying to prevent another “Trump situation” in 2020.  Maybe we can help her out.
I Googled “bad things said about donald trump” because we all know that lots of people say very bad things about Trump all the time.  Google apparently doesn’t understand the difference between “about trump” and “by trump”, so it steered me to liberal sites.  See for yourself.
Lies apply only to people with souls, the soulless get an eternal free pass.  Just ask Google.



Google Doubles Down on Deceiving Customers About Its Political Manipulation

June 26, 2019 Updated: June 26, 2019

After multiple sources corroborated the longstanding accusation that Google stealthily infuses its political preferences into its products, the company has continued to claim neutrality, leading to incongruous answers by its executives to lawmakers’ questioning.
A June 24 exposé by Project Veritas showed several Google employees and a cache of internal documents describing methods Google has used to tweak its products to surreptitiously push its users toward a certain worldview.
One employee even appeared to say, when caught on hidden camera, that Google’s goal was preventing President Donald Trump, or anybody like him, from being elected again—an assertion confirmed by another employee who spoke under the condition of anonymity.
Google spokespeople have failed to produce an official response, but two of its executives were questioned about the revelations—one at a June 25 Senate hearing and one at a House hearing the following day.
During the June 26 House Homeland Security Committee hearing, Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) confronted Derek Slater, Google’s global director of information policy, with one of the leaked documents on “algorithmic unfairness” (pdf).
“Imagine that a Google image query for ‘CEOs’ shows predominantly men. Even if it were a factually accurate representation of the world, it would be algorithmic unfairness,” the document says, explaining that in some cases “it may be desirable to consider how we might help society reach a more fair and equitable state, via … product intervention.”
“What does that mean Mr. Slater?” Lesko asked.
“I’m not familiar with the specific slide,” he said. “But I think what we’re getting at there is when we’re designing our products, again, we’re designing for everyone. We have a robust set of guidelines to ensure we’re providing relevant, trustworthy information. We work with a set of Raters around the world, around the country, to make sure those Search Rater Guidelines are followed, those are transparent, available for you to read on the web.”
“All right. Well, I personally don’t think that answered the question at all,” she replied.
Similarly, Maggie Stanphill, Google’s head of Digital Wellbeing, was questioned by Senate Commerce Committee member Ted Cruz (R-Texas) the day before.
He asked whether Stanphill agreed with a quote from one of the leaked documents saying that Google should “intervene for fairness” in its machine-learning algorithms. Stanphill said she didn’t agree with it.
But Google has already put the “fairness” doctrine into practice, based on what the employees and the documents in the Project Veritas report say.

‘Algorithmic Unfairness’

“Our goal is to create a company-wide definition of algorithmic unfairness that … establishes a shared understanding of algorithmic unfairness for use in the development of measurement tool, product policy, incident response, and other internal functions,” says a document last updated in February 2017.
“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,” the unidentified insider said.
For instance, when one types in the Google search bar “men can” and makes a space, the search engine suggests phrases like: “men can have babies,” “men can get pregnant,” and “men can have periods.”
When one types in “women can” and makes a space, the suggestions would show phrases like: “women can vote,” “Women can do anything,” and “women can be drafted.”
This isn’t because these phrases are so popular among users, but because the “fairness” algorithm pulled them from so-called “sources of truth”—they reflect the political narrative Google desires, the insider said.
Moreover, Google has adopted the doctrine while keeping its users in the dark, he said. One of the document says “it is not a goal at this time to release this definition [of algorithmic unfairness] externally.”

Known Bias

Google and other tech platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, have publicly endorsed a model of content policing that reflects certain political leanings.
All of them, for instance, prohibit “hate speech,” a concept much more broadly adopted by the political left, a 2017 Cato survey (pdf) showed.
Moreover, the concept is so subjective it’s impossible to enforce fairly and impartially, said Nadine Strossen, a law professor and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Even if we have content moderation that is enforced with the noblest principles and people are striving to be fair and impartial, it is impossible,” she said, testifying at the June 26 House hearing. “These so-called standard are irreducibly subjective. What is one person’s hate speech … is somebody else’s cherished loving speech.”
“I did read every single word of Facebook’s [content policing] standards and the more you read them, the more complicated it is. And no two Facebook enforcers agree with each other and none of us would either. So that means that we are entrusting to some other authority the power to make decisions that should reside in each of us as individuals, as to what we choose to see and what we choose not to see and what we choose to use our own free speech rights to respond to.”
Though private companies, even the ones as large and influential as Google and Facebook, are not bound to protect free speech for the individual, “it is incredibly important that they be encouraged to do so,” she said.
Ranking member Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) added his own skepticism regarding Google’s impartiality, given that YouTube, which is owned by Google, took down the Project Veritas exposé the same day it was published, due to privacy complaints that appear to have been filed by one of the Google employees caught on camera by a Project Veritas reporter.
“I have serious questions about Google’s ability to be fair and balanced when it appears that it colluded with YouTube to silence negative press coverage,” Rogers said in his opening statement. “Regulating speech quickly becomes a subjective exercise for government or the private sector. Noble intentions often give way to bias and political agendas.”
Trump briefly commented on the issue during a June 26 Fox Business interview.
“They’re trying to rig the election,” he said, suggesting Google “should be sued.”
Strossen suggested that rather than by censorship, offensive and false content should be as much as possible countered by “media literacy,” counterspeech, “user empowerment tools,” and “through radically increased transparency.”


4 Companies Move to Blacklist Project Veritas in Quick Succession After Big Tech Exposés

James O'Keefe
BNN
LUCAS NOLAN
309
5:08

Investigative journalism group Project Veritas has dropped multiple major stories this month on Big tech — here are 5 times Big Tech tried to censor them as a result.

Recently, investigative journalism group Project Veritas has published multiple stories that have hit Silicon Valley tech giants such as Google hard, revealing the company’s lack of respect for Congress and attempts to censor conservative opinions. As a result, Project Veritas has faced multiple attempts at censoring their stories off the Internet. Following a tweet from Project Veritas, Breitbart News has compiled a list of the various ways that Project Veritas has been censored in just the month of June alone.
1: YouTube Bans Videos About Veritas Investigation Into Pinterest
A recent investigation by Project Veritas revealed that Pinterest added Bible verses to a “sensitive terms” list and censored a major pro-life website as “pornography.” Shortly after this, the Project Veritas’ video featuring testimony from a Pinterest insider was removedfrom YouTube:
Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe said in a statement: “The established media and technology are so afraid of investigative journalism they need to censor it. YouTube calls REPORTING on someone by showing their face and name, and how they added a pro-life group to a porn blacklist, a ‘privacy complaint.’ Would they do this to NYT?”
2: Twitter Suspends Project Veritas Account Over Pinterest Story
Twitter also didn’t seem to take kindly to Project Veritas revealing information leaked to them by an insider at Pinterest. Following the posting of the Pinterest story to Twitter, Project Veritas saw its account temporarily suspended from the platform:
This took place shortly after the removal of the Pinterest story from YouTube, adding further credence to claims that tech firms are colluding to shut down conservatives on their platforms.
3: Reddit Bans Project Veritas
Social media site and self-proclaimed “Front page of the Internet,” Reddit also recently banned Project Veritas’ account after the organization tried to post a link to their Google insider story.
A few days later, Reddit “quarantined” the Trump-supporting subreddit The_Donald which had over 750,000 subscribers at the time of its quarantining. Users attempting to visit the subreddit are met with a warning page, deterring them from accessing the community. Reddit described its reasoning for censoring the subreddit stating:
There will sometimes be communities that, while not prohibited, average redditors may nevertheless find highly offensive or upsetting. In other cases, communities may be dedicated to promoting hoaxes (yes we used that word) that warrant additional scrutiny, as there are some things that are either verifiable or falsifiable and not seriously up for debate (eg, the Holocaust did happen and the number of people who died is well documented). In these circumstances, Reddit Administrators may apply a quarantine.
4: YouTube Bans Video of Undercover Google Investigation
Some commenters found it unsurprising that Google-owned video hosting platform YouTube would take action to censor the most recent Google investigation by Project Veritas as it could prove very damaging to the company going forward. In the video, Google executive Jen Gennai made multiple damaging comments about the company to undercover Project Veritas investigators, stating:
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, 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?
Shortly after Project Veritas published its investigation, along with video footage of Gennai making these comments, Veritas’ videos were removed from YouTube.
5: Vimeo Follows YouTube’s Lead, Removes Video
And shortly after YouTube’s removal of the video, another hosting platform called Vimeo removed the same video. Vimeo stated that the video was not allowed on its platform as: “You cannot upload videos that are hateful, defamatory, or discriminatory.”
One of the only platforms still hosting the video — which once again is simply an investigation into Gennai’s comments and footage of her making said comments — is BitChute, a free-speech centered video sharing platform. The full video can be watched on BitChute here.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has also uploaded the Project Veritas to his YouTube account, as tweeted out by James O’Keefe:
As the 2020 elections draw near and social media once again becomes a political battleground, users should expect to see more of this sort of censorship as the Masters of the Universe attempt to “prevent another Trump situation,” to use Google executive Jen Gennai’s own words. Breitbart News will continue to investigate these Silicon Valley tech firms and will report on the ongoing work by Project Veritas which appears to have greatly angered the tech giants.
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

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