STOP GOOGLE CENSORSHIP.
BREAK UP THE MONSTER!
Facebook, Google Pour Big Money into Lobbying Congress While Blacklisting Conservatives
Facebook and Google increasingly influence Congress as the social media giants censor conservative and alternative voices, dominate the Internet, and violate Americans’ privacy.
Facebook announced on Thursday that they have banned several conservative personalities such as Infowars host Alex Jones, Infowars contributor and YouTube personality Paul Joseph Watson, journalist and activist Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulus. The social media giant also banned Louis Farrakhan from its platforms.
Facebook said that they banned these personalities because they were “dangerous.”
Amid calls for greater regulation of social media companies’ potential anticompetitive behavior, censorship of conservative and alternative voices, and privacy violations, Facebook and Google have remained at the top of Open Secret’s database of top spenders lobbying Congress.
So far in 2019, Facebook spent $3,400,000 and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, $3,530,00 in lobbying Congress. Alphabet also ranked as the eighth total highest spender in lobbying in 2018, spending $21,740,000, while Facebook spent $12,620,000.
Facebook’s influence has continued to rise over the years. In the early years of President Barack Obama, Facebook spent below one million dollars in 2008 and 2009. From 2011 to 2018, Facebook’s lobbying spending skyrocketed and reached historic highs in 2018, when they spent $12.6 million.
In 2019, Facebook lobbied heavily on H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, a Democrat bill which would restore the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission (FCC) net neutrality regulations, which arose as the result of Google’s heavy lobbying of the Obama administration. In 2019, Google also lobbied on the Save the Internet Act.
In 2018, one of Facebook’s bills on which they lobbied Congress was H.R. 2520, the Browser Act, sponsored by then Rep. and now Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), which would require social media companies such as Facebook and Google to obtain explicit permission from users for collecting their private data. The Browser Act would also stipulate that these social media companies cannot deny services to users who do not opt-in to these companies’ collection of their private data. In 2017, the Browser Act was the most important issue on Capitol Hill.
Sen. Blackburn said that her legislation would establish one set of rules that would balance the relationship between ISPs and Facebook and Google. The legislation would also prevent the social media giants from unfairly profiting off of Americans’ private data without their explicit consent.
“We need one set of rules for the entire internet ecosystem with the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] as the cop on the beat,” said Senator Blackburn. “The FTC has the flexibility to keep up with changes in technology and its principal mission is consumer protection. The BROWSER Act will enable consumers to make more educated decisions regarding the nature of their relationship with tech companies.”
In contrast, Alphabet’s most prominent issues in Congress in 2019 and 2018 related to labor and antitrust, as well as telecommunications and technology.
Facebook and Google’s dominance on the Internet has become increasingly apparent as Google has approximately 90 percent of web search traffic, whereas in digital advertising, Google and Facebook amount to nearly two-thirds of American digital ad spending, with Amazon at a “distant third” at under nine percent.
In 2018, Google lobbied Congress fourteen separate times on multiple pieces of legislation that would have increased liability for companies that enabled sex trafficking.
Facebook and Google’s influence in Congress extends to its trade group, the Internet Association. In the fourth quarter of 2018, the Internet Association spent $840,000. In total, the social media giants spent $2.6 million in 2018 for lobbying. In 2019, the association has spent $690,000 so far. Over the last two years, the Internet Association has focused on the Save the Internet Act as well as on legislation that would increase edge providers’ liability for hosting content that enables sex trafficking.
Facebook and Google influence political elections as well. During the 2018 election cycle, Alphabet donated:
- $223,269 to former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s (D-TX) Senate campaign to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), a prominent critic of Silicon Valley censorship.
- $149,741 to Rep. Jacky Rosen’s Senate campaign (D-NV) to unseat Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV).
- $135,625 to Rep. Josh Harder’s congressional campaign.
- $124,508 to former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp’s unsuccessful re-election campaign.
- $97, 364 to former Sen. Claire McCaskill’s failed re-election campaign.
During the 2018 midterm elections, Facebook donated:
- $75,005 to O’Rourke’s Senate campaign.
- $37,954 to Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) 2017 special Senate election against former Alabama judge Roy Moore.
- $34,534 to Heitkamp’s Senate election.
- $31,326 to McCaskill’s Senate campaign.
- $29,387 to Rosen’s successful campaign to unseat Heller.
As Facebook and Google and other social media giants continue to increasingly censor and blacklist conservative and alternative voices, more and more conservative voices have called for addressing the social media giants’ dominance of the Internet. Facebook and Google’s influence in Congress also relates to political confrontations; during a hearing in December 2018, the then-ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee delivered a sharp rebuke of Republican accusations of Google’s political bias affecting its search engines, even though Google was his top donor.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in April, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said he envisions three potential remedies for big tech’s violation of free speech and dominance on the Internet.
Cruz’s three solutions include:
- Amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
- Antitrust measures to address big tech’s dominant status on the Internet.
- Addressing potential cases of fraud and deception.
“No one wants to see the federal government regulating what is allowed to be said, but there are at least three potential remedies that can be considered by Congress or the administration or both,” Cruz said.
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
In a recent article, the New York Times tells the story of a father who attempted to seek telemedicine treatment for his son amidst the coronavirus pandemic, sending photos of his son to the doctor for inspection at the request of the medical office. Google tagged the images as child abuse material, disabled his account, and reported him to the police.
Read more at the New York Times here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan
Then again, Google’s links to the violent far-left extremist “Antifa” movement are well-documented, and the company has so far failed to explicitly disavow the movement, despite its official classification as a domestic terrorist organization.
Big Tech vs Free Speech: Breitbart Exposed the Masters of the Universe in 2018 Townhall
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ALLUM BOKHARI
5 May 20193,031
6:11
Note from senior management: In April of 2018 Breitbart News held a town hall event that shed light on the dangers of Big Tech. As these self-appointed Masters of the Universe continue to show their true agenda, which is to censor conservatives, this video and its content is more relevant than ever.
The key takeaways from the Breitbart News Town Hall, entitled “Masters of the Universe: Big Tech Vs. Free Speech and Privacy,” focus on Google, Facebook, and Twitter meddling in elections, censoring conservatives, and ignoring the privacy and security of their users:
1. The outcome of elections now depends on the tech giants
Dr. Epstein, whose research has focused on the impact of tech bias on voter choices, explained the massive impact that the masters of the universe can have on democratic elections.
“We estimated that if these companies were all working together and supporting the same candidate, and really pulling out all the stops and using all the methods they have to manipulate, they could shift 10 percent of the voting population of America, with no-one knowing that they had done this, and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to track.”
“10 percent could be shifted — that’s a lot of votes, with no-one knowing that they’ve done this.”
Epstein also talked about how the tech giants are already interfering in politics.
“The fact is, we don’t know what rules they’re applying. There’s lots of evidence now that they are systematically suppressing political views that they don’t like. And not just on the right, by the way, but progressives as well – they just go after anyone they want to and there’s nothing we can do about it, there’s no recourse.” Epstein views Facebook as a threat to elections along with Google.
2. Big tech has already meddled in American elections
At the town hall, psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein, an expert on how search engines affect voter decisions, explained his research showing that the Masters of the Universe already had a measurable impact on the 2016 presidential election — in favor of Hillary Clinton.
“There are two main things that we have found,” said Epstein. “We came up with a system, a monitoring system for monitoring search results on Google, Bing and Yahoo for nearly six months before the election in 2016. This story about our findings was broken by the Washington Post in early 2017 and here’s what we found. We found that Google’s search results favored Hillary Clinton in all ten positions of those search results on the first page for almost all of those six months leading up to the election. Now that’s enough to shift two to three million votes, at least, without anyone knowing that they have been manipulated.”
3. We still know very little about who’s responsible for censorship, and how it’s done
Breitbart News senior editor-at-large and president of the Government Accountability Institute Peter Schweizer used the town hall to highlight the lack of transparency on the part of tech giants. Since his comments at the town hall, exclusive stories from Breitbart have shone some sunlight into the inner workings of Silicon Valley censorship — including Google and YouTube’s manual interference in so-called “controversial search queries” including “abortion” and “abortions,” but much about tech censorship remains hidden from view.
“On the one hand, you have situations on YouTube where they shut down a site or say it is inappropriate,” Schweizer said. That could be somebody at a relatively junior level at YouTube who just decides ‘I don’t like what Dennis Prager’s teaching is on Judeo-Christian values or whatever, it’s offensive to me so I’m just going act in my capacity to censor it,’ they do that all the time.”
Schweizer also highlighted radicalism from low-level employees at tech companies. “Part of the problem is that it is not just a leadership issue, it’s not just a problem of corporate policy, it’s a question of Google employees or YouTube employees deciding to take matters into their own hands,” he said.
“There are several proposals, one of the suggestions is that we should take Google’s algorithm make it a public utility, that’s one of the solutions” continued Schweizer. “That is an interesting idea, I do not know if that is the best solution. The other one is to require some truth-in-advertising, or some transparency, so we know what is in the algorithm.”
4. Tech platforms aren’t free — you pay them with your personal data
At the town hall, Breitbart News editor-in-chief Alex Marlow explained how big tech makes money.
“Selling our info is the correct answer and that’s what we’re here to talk about tonight” said Marlow “You guys are not the consumers, you guys are actually the product, you guys are being sold and it’s being done completely clandestinely. Never in the history of the American republic and really the Western world have so few unelected people achieved so much power and so much influence in such a short period of time and they’ve done it almost entirely clandestinely and without free flow of information. They know where you are right now and yet we don’t even know their names.”
Dr. Epstein also highlighted how far Google goes to collect user data — including reading drafts of your emails before they’ve even been sent.
“All gmails, outgoing, the ones you write, and incoming — no matter what email service they’re coming from — they are all recorded, analyzed, every detail is put into your personal profile.”
“Big news companies all use Google to run their email system,” continued Dr. Epstein. “All those emails are running through Google servers. Google has full access — I’m talking about some of the top journalists in the world, who are investigating Google — they’re sharing all of their communications, all of their work products, all of the drafts — they’re sharing it all with Google!”
“I don’t know any major media source, except maybe — believe it or not — Breitbart that doesn’t run [emails through Google servers].”
5. A free and open internet is a major threat to mainstream media
This is why mainstream media gatekeepers like CNN’s Oliver Darcy are the most militant in their efforts to strip social media platforms of their disruptive power. They are the people, after all, who are being disrupted.
At the Breitbart News town hall, Ann Coulter explained how this disruption helped issues suppressed by the mainstream media rise to the fore.
“The Internet is so important for getting news. No one would even know what is going on in South Africa” she continued, referring to the ongoing racial killings of white South African farmers.”
“No one under fifty is getting their news from the mainstream media anymore,” Coulter also added.
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Google Blocks Gateway Pundit from News Search Results
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/12/29/google-blocks-gateway-pundit-from-news-search-results/
David Silverman/Getty Images
29 Dec 20181,749
3:14
Google has rejected an application from conservative website The Gateway Pundit to appear in Google News search results.
In an email to the Gateway Pundit, Google claimed that it could not provide specific reasons why the site had been rejected. Instead, the tech giant provided two “common reasons for rejection,” although it would not say if they were the actual reasons the conservative website was rejected.
Per Google’s rules, publishers must submit an application to have their site appear in Google News search results. Once rejected, a publisher must wait 60 days before applying again.
Breitbart TV
Report: YouTube Cowers to Liberals Again After Pro-Life Videos Top ‘Abortion’ Search Results
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Here is the message Google sent to The Gateway Pundit.
Review Complete: Site Rejected
Thanks for your interest in sharing your content via Google News. Unfortunately, we can’t include your website in Google News at this time.
Before you request inclusion again, review our content policies and technical guidelines. You can also visit the Google News Help Forum, where Google News employees and publishers often share helpful tips and expertise. Members of the forum may provide specific suggestions and feedback for your website.
While we can’t provide specific feedback for publishers seeking inclusion, here are the top 3 most common reasons for rejection.
· Unoriginal content: Google News values original reporting. If your site shows syndicated content, make sure it’s properly attributes and makes up less than 50% of the content on your site. Advertising and other paid promotional material on your pages should not exceed your content.
· Unclear ownership or authorship: Google News strives to show readers news from transparent sites with verifiable author information. Make sure site ownership, mission, and contact information (such as email and physical addresses and phone numbers) are available. Articles should display author information.
After a minimum of 60 days, you can submit your website for review again using the Request Inclusion in Google News button next to your site in the Publisher Center.
The Gateway Pundit does not appear to be in violation of the “unoriginal content” nor the “unclear ownership or authorship” criteria.
The vast majority of articles on The Gateway Pundit are original writeups from its reporters. The site has also published multiple exclusive stories over the past year, including comments from U.S. Senators, a letter from President Trump to Vladimir Putin, as well as information on outgoing defence secretary Gen. Jim Mattis’ long-rumored presidential bid.
Both ownership and authorship on The Gateway Pundit is also more than clear. The website’s “about” page clearly identifies the owner of the site as Jim Hoft, the website has a contact form, and the vast majority of articles have an author byline. (You currently have to scroll past 52 articles with author bylines before you find a piece with an “Assistant Editor” byline — a common device occasionally used by publishers).
Google suggests that the inclusion of phone numbers and physical addresses can help publishers pass the application process — but if that’s a necessary criteria, it seems wholly unreasonable in an era when mobs of masked radicals harass the families of conservative pundits in their homes.
Then again, Google’s links to the violent far-left extremist “Antifa” movement are well-documented, and the company has so far failed to explicitly disavow the movement, despite its official classification as a domestic terrorist organization.
A Dad Took Pictures of His Son at a Doctor’s Request, then Google Labeled Him a Sex Offender
In a recent article, the New York Times tells the story of a father who attempted to seek telemedicine treatment for his son amidst the coronavirus pandemic, sending photos of his son to the doctor for inspection at the request of the medical office. Google tagged the images as child abuse material, disabled his account, and reported him to the police.
The New York Times reports that during the pandemic, many healthcare practitioners introduced telemedicine options, performing consultations for patients via video calls, text messages, and photos.
Sabo mocks Google CEO Sundar Pichai (unsavoryagents.com)
The NYT tells the story of one man, simply named Mark to preserve his anonymity, that in February 2021 noticed that his son appeared to be suffering from a medical issue affecting his genitals which were swollen and painful. Mark’s wife called an advice nurse at their health care provider and scheduled an emergency consultation by video.
The nurse instructed Mark and his wife to send photos of the medical issue to the doctor ahead of time so that he could review them before the consultation. Mark and his wife did so, using their iPhone to take photos of their child’s genitals.
The doctor quickly diagnosed the issue and prescribed antibiotics which treated the problem. But just two days after taking the photos of his son, Mark received a notification on his phone informing him that his account had been disabled because of “harmful content” that was “a severe violation of Google’s policies and might be illegal.” A link titled “learn more” directed him to a list of possible reasons, including “child sexual abuse & exploitation.”
Mark immediately filled out a form requesting a review of Google’s decision and explaining his son’s medical issue. But quickly Mark found that not only had he lost access to his emails, contact information for friends and former colleagues, and documentation of his son’s first years of life, but also his Google Fi account shut down which meant that he had to get a new phone number with another carrier.
A few days later, Google responded that it would not be reinstating his account. Later, Mark learned that Google had also flagged a video he made and the San Francisco Police Department had begun to investigate him.
The NYT writes:
In December 2021, Mark received a manila envelope in the mail from the San Francisco Police Department. It contained a letter informing him that he had been investigated as well as copies of the search warrants served on Google and his internet service provider. An investigator, whose contact information was provided, had asked for everything in Mark’s Google account: his internet searches, his location history, his messages and any document, photo and video he’d stored with the company.
The search, related to “child exploitation videos,” had taken place in February, within a week of his taking the photos of his son. Mark called the investigator, Nicholas Hillard, who said the case was closed. Mr. Hillard had tried to get in touch with Mark but his phone number and email address hadn’t worked.
“I determined that the incident did not meet the elements of a crime and that no crime occurred,” Mr. Hillard wrote in his report. The police had access to all the information Google had on Mark and decided it did not constitute child abuse or exploitation.
Mark asked if Mr. Hillard could tell Google that he was innocent so he could get his account back. “You have to talk to Google,” Mr. Hillard said, according to Mark. “There’s nothing I can do.”
Read more at the New York Times here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan
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