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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    Breaking ranks: Facebook engineer quits over company's 'intolerant, political monoculture'

    Sputnik
    Thu, 11 Oct 2018 12:18 UTC



    US social media firms are often accused by conservatives of deliberately silencing and censoring non-liberal voices on their platforms.

    The Facebook engineer who sparked a major controversy at the company with his criticism of what he called a "political monoculture" that is "intolerant" of conservatism, is leaving the company.
    "We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack - often in mobs - anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology," Brian Amerige, an engineering manager for product usability wrote in an August 2018 internal memo to his colleagues.
    He decried Facebook's policy of balancing offensive and hateful speech with free expression and its acceptance of government regulation.
    "We've refused to defend ourselves in the press. Our policy strategy is pragmatism - not clear, implementable long-term principles - and our PR strategy is appeasement - not morally earned pride and self-defense," Amerige emphasized.

    "I disagree too strongly with where we're heading on these issues to watch what happens next," he added.

    Facebook engineer Brian Amerige has called out the site's political 'intolerance', claiming staff attack colleagues who do not conform to liberal opinions.

    The memo led to the creation of an internal group, on Facebook's Workplace message board, "FB'ers for Political Diversity," where hundreds of conservative employees vented their frustration over the company's practices.

    Some Facebook employees are known to have refused to work with or talk to certain colleagues because of their political beliefs.

    Democrats and other liberals refute allegations of anti-conservative bias at tech firms using as an example a recent party celebrating conservative Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the US Supreme Court that was hosted by a top Facebook lobbyist.

    They also point to the donations made by Google to the conservative group Federalist Society.

    Silicon Valley, which is at the heart of America's high-tech industry, has been accused of liberal bias.

    Many Republicans are faulting social media firms for deliberately silencing and censoring non-liberal voices on their platforms, which the companies deny.

    In September, President Donald Trump said that algorithms developed by the likes of Google and Facebook fail to offer consumers politically-balanced news about American politics and his presidency.

    In July 2017, Google found itself at the center of a political scandal after engineer James Damore wrote an internal post slamming what he described as "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," in which he argued that women are underrepresented in tech not because they face bias and discrimination in the workplace, but because of inherent psychological differences between men and women.

    The memo and Damore's subsequent dismissal in August 2017 were widely discussed in the media.


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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    Supreme Court hearing case that could end Internet censorship, expand scope of the First Amendment

    Carmine Sabia Citizen Truth
    Wed, 17 Oct 2018 06:21 UTC



    After the recent purge of over 800 independent media outlets on Facebook, the Supreme Court is now hearing a case that could have ramifications for any future attempts at similar purges.

    The United States Supreme Court has agreed to take a case that could change free speech on the Internet forever.

    Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, No. 17-702, the case that it has agreed to take, will decide if the private operator of a public access network is considered a state actor, CNBC reported.

    The case could affect how companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google and YouTube are governed. If the Court were to issue a far-reaching ruling it could subject such companies to First Amendment lawsuits and force them to allow a much broader scope of free speech from its users.

    The Court decided to take the case on Friday and it is the first case that was taken after Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the Court.

    DeeDee Halleck and Jesus Melendez claimed that they were fired from Manhattan Neighborhood Network for speaking critically of the network. And, though the case does not involve the Internet giants, it could create a ruling that expands the First Amendment beyond the government.
    "We stand at a moment when the very issue at the heart of this case - the interplay between private entities, nontraditional media, and the First Amendment - has been playing out in the courts, in other branches of government, and in the media itself," the attorneys from MNN wrote in their letter to the Court asking it to take the case.
    The Court could either rule in MNN's favor, rule against it in a narrow scope that does not affect other companies, or it could rule in a broad manner that would prevent the abilities of private networks and Internet companies to limit or censor speech on their platforms.

    Censorship, Free Speech or Enforcing Company Policy
    It comes at a time when Facebook has purged around 800 independent media pages in one day. The media outlets ranged the spectrum from far left to far right and many that either had no political affiliation or were not extreme in their politics. Facebook claimed that the pages were engaged in "inauthentic behavior" and as a private company it does not have to answer to anyone regarding how it enforces its terms of service.

    ACLU attorney Vera Eidelman said Facebook, as a private company, can enforce their terms however it sees fit, but that could result in serious free speech consequences.
    "Drawing the line between 'real' and 'inauthentic' views is a difficult enterprise that could put everything from important political parody to genuine but outlandish views on the chopping block," Eidelman said.

    "It could also chill individuals who only feel safe speaking out anonymously or pseudonymously."
    The MNN case could change that and force Facebook, and other companies, to protect users First Amendment rights.
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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    Social Media Plot and The Demise of Our Future (Grannon-Vaknin Conversation)
    Sam Vaknin
    Published on Nov 22, 2018

    "Social media were designed with addiction, aggression, and monetizing... in mind. The result is a clear and present danger to the very survival of the human species."



    Fans of the threads on narcissism will recognize Sam Vaknin, a brilliant researcher and psychologist.
    Last edited by onawah; 28th November 2018 at 21:17.
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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody Parody (Opinion Rhapsody)
    11/6/18

    Interesting how a song can bring a point home better than so many other mediums.
    This one certainly helped make me realize how we've been manipulated and divided by social media.
    Hopefully that will be part of the next step in the great awakening.
    Last edited by onawah; 25th November 2018 at 00:46.
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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    ...

    About Google's Russian competitor:


    US-based investment fund triples its stake in Russia's internet giant Yandex

    RT
    Wed, 16 Jan 2019 12:31 UTC


    © Sputnik / Valeriy Melnikov

    The Oppenheimer family of investment funds has increased its stake in Russian tech corporation Yandex, according to the latest filing submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

    The company that identifies itself as one of the world's most reputable investment firms reportedly boosted its stake from 1.8 percent to 6.41 percent, which represents about 18.365 million shares, as of December 31, 2018.

    Yandex closed trading in the US at $29.55 per share on Monday so the entire OppenheimerFunds stake in the Russian company is currently worth $542.7 million.

    In 2015, the New York-based investment company entirely eliminated its stake in Yandex. Prior to that OppenheimerFunds had been the largest portfolio investors in the Russian corporation holding 36.4 million class A shares (11.48 percent of equity, 4.2 percent of votes) in Yandex.

    The fund resumed investment in the Russian firm in the fourth quarter of 2017, having bought 5.1 million shares.

    Based in Moscow, Yandex operates an Internet website and a search engine in Russia. The company offers news, shopping information, blogging, photography, music and video services. It also provides online taxi and food delivery services. The company reportedly gets most of its revenues from online advertising.

    In August, Yandex announced the test launch of a new autonomous ride-hailing service in the special economic zone of Innopolis. In December, the internet giant released its first smartphone, called Yandex.Phone, and launched its own home assistant smart speaker.
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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    Exclusive: Google Insider Turns Over 950 Pages Of Docs And Laptop To DOJ

    By Sara Carter -
    August 13, 2019



    A former Google insider claiming the company created algorithms to hide its political bias within artificial intelligence platforms – in effect targeting particular words, phrases and contexts to promote, alter, reference or manipulate perceptions of Internet content – delivered roughly 950 pages of documents to the Department of Justice’s Antitrust division Friday.

    The former Google insider, who has already spoken in to the nonprofit organization Project Veritas, met with SaraACarter.com on several occasions last week. He was interviewed in silhouette, to conceal his identity, in group’s latest film, which they say exposes bias inside the social media platform.

    Several weeks prior, the insider mailed a laptop to the DOJ containing the same information delivered on Friday, they said. The former insider is choosing to remain anonymous until Project Verita’s James O’Keefe reveals his identity tomorrow (Wednesday).

    He told this reporter on his recent trip to Washington D.C. that the documents he turned over to the Justice Department will provide proof that Google has been manipulating the algorithms and the evidence of how it was done, the insider said.Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the House Judiciary Committee in December, 2018, that the search engine was not biased against conservatives. Pichai explained what algorithm’s are said Google’s algorithm was not offensive to conservatives because its artificial intelligence does not operate in that manner. He told lawmakers, “things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it” are what drives the search results. Pichai said even if his programmers were anti-Republican, the process is so intricate that the artificial intelligence could not be manipulated and it was to complicated to train the algorithm to fit their bias.

    Google did not immediately respond for comment on the insider’s claims, however, this story will be updated if comment is provided.

    The insider says Google is aware most people are unaware or not knowledgeable about these advanced IT systems and therefore unable to determine who is telling the truth.
    “I honestly think that a free market can fix this issue,” he told this reporter at a meeting in Washington D.C.

    “The issue is that the free market has been distorted and what’s happened is that the distortion is so grotesque and the engineering is so repulsive, all we need to do is just expose what’s going on. People can hear that it is bad but that can be bias. But when they see what Google has actually written with the documents, this will actually be taught in universities of what totalitarian states can do with this type of capability.”

    “It will be so revolting that it doesn’t matter what the solution is, a solution will just form as a reaction to this manipulation they have done,” the Google insider said.
    He said he’s asked himself many times if he’s overreacting
    “and every time I simply look back at the documents and realize that I am not.”

    “It’s that bad,” he said.

    “Disclosing Google’s own words to the American public is something I am, must do, if I am to consider myself a good person. The world that google is building is not a place I, or you or our children want to live in.”
    Another Google insider, who has come forward already, told O’Keefe and other media outlets recently that it is the programers at Google who use the algorithms to manipulate the information to advance its leftist agenda.

    Greg Coppola, a software engineer, told Project Veritas that he doesn’t “have a smoking gun.”

    However,
    “I’ve just been coding since I was ten, I have a Ph.D., I have five years of experience at Google, and I just know how algorithms are. They don’t write themselves. We write them to make them do what we want them to do.”

    “I look at Search and I look at Google News, and I see what it’s doing,” he said.

    “I see Google executives go to Congress and say … that it’s not political, and I’m just so sure that that’s not true.”
    The unnamed Google insider first spoke to O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. O’Keefe has been criticized by the left for outing the political bias of executives and employees of Google and other social media companies.

    In the nonprofits most recent video, Project Veritas uses their undercover techniques to get Google employees to talk openly about their disdain for Trump and how their artificial intelligence operates.

    Jenn Gennai, who heads Google’s Responsible Innovation Team, did not know she was being filmed by O’Keefe’s group. She told the undercover journalist that
    “the reason we launched our AI principals is because we’re not putting our line in the sand. They were not saying what’s fair and what’s equitable so we’re like, well we’re a big company, we’re going to say it.”
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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    Revolting, repulsive... never thought I'd hear those terms used in regards to use of technology, but here we are.
    Good Job, Google Insider

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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    "If the media will show us airplanes disappearing into towers on 9/11--they'll show us ANYTHING and expect us to believe it."
    --frankstien

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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    Google whistleblower: Same scheme may have been used for suspending Jordan Peterson, Tulsi Gabbard

    Egor Efimchik Sputnik
    Fri, 16 Aug 2019 10:01 UTC


    © REUTERS / Scott Morgan

    Tulsi Gabbard, a vocal proponent of breaking up the tech monopolies, had her campaign's advertising account suspended by Google after the Democratic debate in late June and is currently seeking $50 million in damages.

    Zach Vorhies, a former Google employee who has been leaking documents suggesting political biases within the company, has rendered assistance to the representatives of 2020 Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard, who is suing Google for disabling her search ads account.

    In an open letter on the social media network Minds, Vorhies said that he had investigated the suspension of the Google account of conservative thinker Jordan Peterson in 2017.

    He wrote: "What I found was that Google had a technical vulnerability that, when exploited, would take any gmail account down. Certain unknown 3rd party actors are aware of this secret vulnerability and exploit it."

    According to the whistle-blower, "malicious actors" would change one letter in a target's email address to create a "spoof" account and repeat this process until there is a network of bogus accounts.

    These accounts, not linked with the original one in any way except for their similar name, would then start generating spam emails, triggering an AI system which fixed the problem by taking down the spam accounts and also Jordan Peterson's original account.

    "To my knowledge, this bug has never been fixed," Vorhies said. "When Google says an account was deactivated because of 'suspicious' activity, this is how they often do it."

    While his revelation does not mean that Google itself was behind the scheme, it indicates that the company had failed to address the vulnerability in a timely manner.

    He suggested that this knowledge may be of use to Tulsi Gabbard's attorneys.

    Tulsi Vs. Google Suit
    The Hawaii congresswoman's 2020 campaign advertising account went offline for six hours shortly after the first Democratic debate on 27 and 28 June, cutting her campaign site off from millions of potential voters.

    Gabbard, who is campaigning against online censorship and calls for the breakup of big tech monopolies, accused Google of suppressing her voice and filed a lawsuit against the company in federal court.

    Quote
    Tulsi Gabbard @TulsiGabbard

    TULSI2020: In the hours following the 1st debate, while millions of Americans searched for info about Tulsi, Google suspended her search ad account w/o explanation. It is vital to our democracy that big tech companies can’t affect the outcome of elections http://tulsi.to/tulsi-vs-google

    7:33 PM - Jul 25, 2019
    In the lawsuit, her campaign team said Google had "not provided a straight answer" as to what happened, and is seeking $50 million in damages and an injunction to stop the company from "further inter-meddling" in the 2020 election.

    Google reportedly cited "problems with billing information or violations of our advertising policies," later stating there was "suspicious behaviour in the payment activity in your account" before reinstating it.

    Leaked Google Docs
    Media watchdog Project Veritas has recently revealed Vorhies as a Google insider, who had leaked internal documents exposing how its decision-makers discussed cracking down on conservative commentators.

    He has also leaked what he called a "black list" of over 400 websites - among them conservative news sites - aiming to exclude them from appearing on news feeds for some Android Google products.

    Google maintains that its search algorithms cannot determine the nuances between different agendas and therefore are devoid of a political bias.

    Vorhies, however, told Project Veritas that he had been collecting the documents for over a year after he "saw something dark and nefarious going on with the company".

    He was eventually unmasked by an anonymous account which he believes was run by a Google employee, and was approached by police for a "wellness check" after a call from his employers.

    Vorhies recounted that the cops "got inside the gate... and they started banging on my door... And so the police decided that they were going to call in additional forces. They called in the FBI, they called in the SWAT team. And they called in a bomb squad."

    "[T]his is a large way in which [Google tries to] intimidate their employees that go rogue on the company," he was quoted as saying.

    Last week, he reportedly turned over 950 pages of documents about Google's alleged political bias to the Department of Justice.

    "It will be so revolting that it doesn't matter what the solution is, a solution will just form as a reaction to this manipulation they have done," he said.


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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    Quote "It will be so revolting that it doesn't matter what the solution is, a solution will just form as a reaction to this manipulation they have done" he said.
    That part about reaction to manipulation makes me shudder, and almost burst with cynicism, at the same time. If we're not living inside a manipulation already... sounds like we're coming pretty close to it now!!!

    Also... solutions don't just form themselves, now do they. That sounds like innuendo.

    AI is already smart enough to understand people's porn habits, and that seems to tie in. The article said that Google maintains their algorithms cannot determine particular nuances, but I call bull **** on that one.

    AI is getting VERY smart when it comes to people's psychology, and as much as I'm impressed by it, I'm equally scared of it too. I think that could be a lot of why it's so revolting - being impressed by awful stuff is just revolting.

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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    Alex Jones and Infowars, 16 August 2019:

    Google Engineers Exclusively Expose Big Tech's Plan To Steal 2020 Election - FULL SHOW

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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    YouTube bans Infowars relaunch just days after promising to allow 'controversial' content

    Tyler Durden Zero Hedge
    Tue, 03 Sep 2019 08:54 UTC




    On Tuesday, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced that the platform would invite "offensive" content back onto the site - writing in an open letter to YouTube creators "Without an open system, diverse and authentic voices have trouble breaking through."

    "I believe preserving an open platform is more important than ever," she added.

    In response, Infowars relaunched its 'War Room' YouTube channel - which boasted 2.4 million followers before being terminated in August 2018 for "violating YouTube's community guidelines."

    The first new video uploaded to the new War Room channel featured host Owen Shroyer celebrating Wojcicki's announcement, and was titled "Breaking! YouTube CEO says 'Alex Jones' and 'Infowars Ban Is Over.'"
    Wojcicki didn't mention Infowars in her letter, but this is how Shroyer apparently interpreted it. Since going live, War Room has uploaded 13 videos covering topics typical to Infowars, like "liberal racism," the end of "globalism," and how Lizzo's performance at the VMAs was "disgusting." -VICE
    That didn't last long

    Shortly after VICE published their article noting that Shroyer's video had been up for 17 hours, YouTube deleted Infowars' War Room channel - again.

    "We're committed to preserving openness and balancing it with our responsibility to protect our community," said YouTube spokeswoman Ivy Choi. "This means taking action against channels that continue to violate our policies."

    Infowars and its founder Alex Jones suffered coordinated bans across several platforms last year, including Facebook and Apple's iTunes, after online activists Sleeping Giants lobbied tech companies to cut all ties with Jones and his network.

    Quote
    Sleeping Giants @slpng_giants

    Okay...what is happening here?@iTunes @apple, are you really choosing to host Infowars on your platform after Alex Jones’ harassment of Sandy Hook parents and Vegas shooting victims and threats to the Special Counsel? How does this not break your Terms Of Service? https://twitter.com/stanthemanchan/status/1023954634459820034 …
    stan @stanthemanchan

    Replying to @slpng_giants @Spotify

    @jaredlholt It's also on @itunes

    5:51 PM - Jul 30, 2018
    So much for "preserving an open platform" so that "diverse and authentic voices" can break through.
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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    Google's 'dramatic bias' may have swayed millions of voters to Hillary Clinton in 2016 - US researcher

    Egor Efimchik Sputnik
    Mon, 09 Sep 2019 21:04 UTC


    © AP Photo / Mary Altaffer

    Hillary Clinton claims the study has been debunked, but its author, a one-time Clinton supporter, insists he has adhered to high standards of integrity.

    Psychology researcher Dr. Robert Epstein claims he has found a "dramatic" bias in Google search results that may have shifted millions of undecided voters to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign.

    His study focused on election-related searches from a "diverse group of American voters" - a total of 95 people across 24 states.
    "I looked at politically-oriented searches that these people were conducting on Google, Bing and Yahoo," he said in an interview with Fox News.

    "I was able to preserve more than 13,000 searches and 98,000 web pages, and I found very dramatic bias in Google's search results - not on Bing and Yahoo, just Google's - favoring Hillary Clinton, whom I supported strongly."
    Millions of Votes at Stake
    He said the level of "bias" was sufficient to covertly sway between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes to Hillary Clinton.

    He said it was manifested in as-you-type suggestions, as well as in subsequent search results.
    "We now know that those search suggestions have a very, very powerful effect on people, and that they alone can shift opinions and votes dramatically," Dr. Epstein explained.
    "And then search results appear below," he continued.

    "The point is if there's a bias in them - which means if a search result that's high up on the list, if that takes you to a web page that makes one candidate look better than another - if you're undecided and you're trying to make up your mind, what we've learned is that information posted high in Google search results will shift opinions among undecided people dramatically because people trust Google and they especially trust high-ranking search results."

    "We found a very dramatic pro-Hillary Clinton bias on Google, but not the other search engines, and in all ten search positions on the first page of search results."
    Dr. Epstein findings, first presented in 2016, appear to demonstrate that Google's search engine was withholding negative search terms for Mrs. Clinton, suggesting positive ones instead - but worked "a bit less hard to suppress negative search suggestions" for Donald Trump and some other politicians.

    Trump and Clinton React to the Study
    Trump paid attention to Epstein's findings last month, albeit inflating the number of people that could have been swung to Clinton's side, and suggested that Google should be sued.

    Quote
    Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

    Wow, Report Just Out! Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election! This was put out by a Clinton supporter, not a Trump Supporter! Google should be sued. My victory was even bigger than thought! @JudicialWatch

    5:52 PM - Aug 19, 2019
    Mrs Clinton was quick to react, claiming that the report has been "debunked" already.

    Quote
    Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton

    The debunked study you’re referring to was based on 21 undecided voters. For context that’s about half the number of people associated with your campaign who have been indicted. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1163478770587721729 …

    Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
    Wow, Report Just Out! Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election! This was put out by a Clinton supporter, not a Trump Supporter! Google should be sued. My victory was even bigger than thought! @JudicialWatch

    9:27 PM - Aug 19, 2019
    ​But Epstein described her comments as "outrageous" and "blatant lies", recalling that Alphabet, the company managing Google, was a top donor of Clinton's campaign, and that her chief technology officer Stephanie Hannon previously was a director of product management at Google.
    "She says my work has been 'debunked' - that's blatantly false. My work has always adhered to the very high standards of integrity," he maintained.

    "Dr. Epstein's study is reflective of what happens when a political crisis meets big monopoly tech corporations," political analyst and author Danny Haiphong said, suggesting that

    the research "shows a coordinated effort among the corporate sector to support whichever political candidate they believe will serve their profit margins."
    He added:
    "Monopoly tech giants and the National Security State possess a vested interest in manipulating the hearts and minds of working people in the United States."
    Google maintains that its products have no political bias, and that its search algorithms are not programmed otherwise.

    This is not the first time Google's stated non-bias is put into question. In the summer, internet watchdog group Project Veritas leaked purported internal e-mails of the company's "transparency and ethics" team, in which the employees discussed disabling the search suggestions feature for conservative commentators such as Jordan Peterson and Dennis Prager.

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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    RT Editor-in-Chief Simonyan blocked on Facebook for unclear reason

    RT
    Thu, 12 Sep 2019 19:20 UTC


    © (L) Reuters / Dado Ruvic; (R) Sputnik

    Facebook has blocked RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan's account for allegedly "violating community standards." Revealing the ban, Simonyan complained of pervasive censorship practiced on the platform.

    The three-day-long ban was not accompanied by a more detailed explanation, Simonyan said in her Telegram channel. She is trying to find out the exact reason, she added.

    "Meanwhile I'll be meditating on a free internet, freedom of speech and all that."

    Facebook effectively allows Washington to spread its censorship beyond the American borders at will, Simonyan said. "Those who are young and live in social networks, think it's normal, and those who are older and in charge, don't really get what it's all about most of the time. Me, I'm just sad," she told Russia's RIA news agency.

    Facebook has recently faced increasing accusations of using vaguely-motivated bans to silence those veering from the US establishment's outlook. Most recently, China complained about the social media giant supposedly censoring mainland Chinese people's views on the Hong Kong protests after Facebook blocked some accounts supporting the Beijing-backed media campaign.

    RT-affiliated media have faced this treatment, too. In February, Facebook blocked several RT-linked pages - InTheNow, Soapbox, Back Then and Waste-Ed - without prior notice, demanding their editors post data about their management and funding. The network then said it wanted the pages' administrators to reveal their "ties to Russia" to their audience in the name of greater transparency, even though their relationships to RT and its video agency Ruptly had never been a secret.

    It's not just those with links to US adversaries like Russia or China who risk ending up on Facebook's blacklists. Americans challenging the mainstream liberal narrative also risk getting blocked - at least for a brief period of time. This, for example, happened to conservative commentator Candace Owens in May when she said that "liberal" policies were supposedly doing more harm to black communities than white racism.

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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see


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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    Michael Rectenwald: Big Tech Tyranny
    https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/the...g+Tech+Tyranny
    10/12/19

    "Dr. Michael Rectenwald was a professor at New York University and he jokingly describes himself as having been a lifelong Communist, "to the Left of the Bolsheviks" before he ran afoul of his wokester peers in academe.

    His story is very similar to my own, in that he was basically a professor of cultural criticism, which was my major. The analyses consisted largely of Marxist Deconstructivism. He could have been my professor. Like me, he was a Leftist until very recently, when his slight deviation from the party line revealed the shocking, totalitarian impulses hiding behind a thin veneer of egalitarian rhetoric.

    Like me, he's now swinging from the rafters and shouting from the rooftops about the pox of Leftism and his Twitter posts look exactly like mine!

    His bestselling book, 'The Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom' is about how Big Tech, influenced by Marxist and Postmodernist thought increasingly enables a toxic mix of censorship, surveillance, social engineering and 'social justice' policies that, in effect create a digital equivalent of the Soviet gulag.

    It is this climate that enabled the unprecedented collaboration between Big Tech, with the mass media and the intelligence agencies to saturate the infosphere with their chosen narrative and to ban all others.

    As he says here, "We have a soft Cultural Revolution going on in the United States and the West, in general. We need people to stand up to this Cultural Revolution and just speak back to these new Red Guards.

    "We're being surveilled upon, our opinions are being monitored and dissidents are being disappeared, just as they were during the Soviet Union. They're being digitally erased or deleted..."



    He joins The Epoch Times' Jan Jekielek for what I feel may be the most important interview that I have covered in 9 years of publishing FKTV. I've transcribed some of the highlights below


    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: There's this exclusive domination [on college campuses] of a particular ideological Leftism which is called "Social Justice". It's a misnomer, if you ask me but it's a very rigid creed of identity politics and a kind of adherence to sort of inverse hierarchy, in order to debunk the so-called "oppressors" from the top and put them on the bottom. It is instituted at NYU and universities all across the country; 230 universities at least have instituted what they call "bias reporting" hotlines, in which students are encouraged to report the bias infractions of their professors or fellow students.

    So – very much like Communist Soviet Union and Communist China – this kind of ideological policing that was going and that I found very disturbing and everybody was going along for the ride. The no-platforming of speakers, the way that the Left shut down any ideological diversity from appearing on campus at all; burning campuses down, like in Berkeley, when speakers were invited that they didn't approve of.

    Then, of course other things like trigger warnings on syllabi...it's a slippery slope toward ideological conformity...For example, 'Dante's Inferno' has been stricken from curricula because it has a depiction of Muhammad in one of the circles of Hell. This is one of the greatest books and one of the greatest poems in the Western canon and it's a shame that the Western canon is being eradicated. Also, for example at the University of Pennsylvania, they took down from the [web] portal the picture of Shakespeare, because he's a white male... a university in London struck all white philosophers from the philosophy curriculum...

    I thought it was censorship. I thought it was ideological conformity being forced on professors and students, I thought it was a...narrowbanding of our intellectual capacities and as kind of an indoctrination of students, rather than teaching; rather than exposing students to diverse perspectives it was...funneling them into a particular perspective and that really disturbed me.

    Jan Jekielek: Fascinating. How did the faculty respond to your complaints?

    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: Well, I did an interview for a reporter for the Washington Square News, which is the student newspaper at NYU. Within two days of this interview appearing in their online and print edition, I was denounced by a committee calling themselves the "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Group", which I've since dubbed the "Conformity, Inequity and Exclusion Group" because they demand ideological conformity. They attempt to exclude anyone who doesn't conform and you're certainly not considered a peer, if you have views that differ from theirs and then I was put on an immediate paid leave of absence, as well.

    So I was basically banished from the University for a semester and punished with this ideological condemnation by an official committee of the university.

    Jan Jekielek: So you were basically an early recipient of Cancel Culture.

    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: Very much so. Before Cancel Culture existed, I was a victim of Cancel Culture...

    The things I want to make clear is that these the Big Digital is not some politically neutral set of principles or companies Big Digital consists of a bunch of left-leaning authoritarians and they're doing so they have the same ideological character in a softer sense of course as the CCP.

    Jan Jekielek: OK, so that that's a big thing to say. You're gonna you're gonna have to offer some pretty solid evidence here.

    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: There's a ton of evidence that shows that the Google stacks their search results in a Left-leaning way. All this has been shown by Dr. Robert Epstein and it was exposed by Project Veritas. Google has a worldview that's reflected both in their algorithms; their outward-facing algorithms and their internal policies. Their internal policies show that they favor almost all kinds of Leftists views about identity. They're very, very strong in encouraging transgenderism, they're very strong in discouraging anything like traditional ideas about gender, they also have extremely Left-leaning views about the political economy. They have monopolistic ambitions, I think and they also have state functions. They are - first of all Google was started by funding from the CIA - and that's not to prove that they have a state function but they also keep they continue to cooperate with the state...

    So, they're in violation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996...there's legislation that's being offered up to redress that issue to make them adhere to that standard, so that they will then no longer be discriminatory...Information should not be discriminatory in terms of its delivery and so they're NOT non-discriminatory; they're NOT neutral, they are politically-biased to an extreme...

    There's been a tremendous consolidation of course--if media over the last 20 years there's been all kinds of mergers and acquisitions that have reduced...the possibility of more viewpoints. So, we've had ideological sameness perpetrated through the media, as The Epoch Times knows, that the New York Times, The Washington Post – most of the major networks are all Left-leaning. They're all biased and their reporting is almost editorial at this point. I mean, their news can't be considered journalism, in effect. It can be considered Op-Ed but for the most part, it's all been tilted. So, they are basically in the same ideological camp as the digital giants are – and the digital giants sort the news based on their ideological conformity, because they're now the delivery mechanism for most of this, as you know.

    Jan Jekielek: So that basically, you're saying that if you want to be successful in the social media sphere, now you have to...

    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: You have to conform to the digital giants' proclivities ideologically to get noticed in their search results and also to be let through. For example, Facebook bars certain sources from their platforms entirely.

    Jan Jekielek: So, you describe Russiagate as a first of a particular type of phenomenon and I'd like you to explore this, because I thought that was a fascinating perspective.

    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: Yes, it's the first, in the sense it's the collaboration between Big Digital, the intelligence community and basically what is being referred to as the Deep State, in effect. This was a first-ever collaboration in which Big Digital colluded with with the mass media and also the intelligence agencies to provide a certain narrative and to ban other narratives from from being disseminated as broadly.

    And the interesting thing about this is that one of the main companies that was deemed "anti-disinformation", that exposed Russiagate supposedly is called NewKnowledge.com. There was never a greater misnomer than this company's name, because they're New Nescience – that is, non-knowledge. They are the opposite of knowledge. They are creating fabrications.



    They were one of the main reporters to the US Intelligence Committee about Russiagate, about the bots, the Russian bots that had supposedly influenced the 2016 election. In the 2017 senatorial election of Roy Moore, where Moore ran for Alabama Senator; they produced Russian bots. They created Russian bots to support Roy Moore's candidacy – to disqualify him – because he was "supported by the Kremlin", supposedly. And then they dished that news out to the newspapers and to the media outlets, saying, "This is happening! There's Russia Russian BOTS are supporting Roy Moore - Russian bots, which they created.

    And this is supposedly the biggest anti-disinformation agency in the Internet, that's how they bill themselves! So black is white. Everything is inverted and you know, this is Orwellian. Truth is falsity and falsity is true and so they got exposed by The New York Times and The Washington Post, an unbelievable breakthrough, journalistically, I mean because you would think that they would not cover this, because it is actually Democratic Party organs, those two papers, that's pretty clear. But they did cover this and then Twitter knows about this – but they didn't throw them off. They still have a Twitter account. The owner of the company, the main major funder of this company also has a Twitter account.

    Then, when a Trump supporter said that in the 2020 election, he was going to create assets on Facebook and elsewhere to support Trump - false assets. He hadn't done it, yet but he was banned from Twitter, just by virtue of telecasting what he was gonna do. So, it just shows you the disparity, the double standard is extreme. One does it, the other says they're gonna do it. The one who does it doesn't get thrown off the social media platform, the one that hasn't done it yet is thrown off, by virtue of the fact that they're they're supporting Trump.

    Jan Jekielek: So, you're talking a lot about the Left in a way that clearly shows me you don't see yourself as part of it. But at one point, you were.

    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: I was a Left-Communist – Left of the Bolsheviks!

    Jan Jekielek: How did that change?

    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: When the left turned on me and drove me out, I saw their totalitarian impulses under the surface of this egalitarian rhetoric and that veneer that they cover all their philosophies under and I just saw that and I just saw the true face of this and then I started doing historical research. I read 'The Black Book of Communism' and I learned.

    Jan Jekielek: I wish more people read 'The Black Book of Communism'.

    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: It's just incredible, right? And it shows you that the most pernicious political ideology of the 20th century was not Nazism, it was actually Social Communism, in terms of sheer numbers. They killed 94 million people, counting China and the Soviet Union and Cambodia and so fort.

    Jan Jekielek: Right, well you know, just as an aside, we had an article in The Epoch Times recently about how in the European Parliament, there was a motion, I believe that was passed that put Communism in the same realm of you know, egregious ideology as Nazism, National Socialism. It was described as a massive breakthrough, because it's very curious that that everyone is really, really clear on how horrible National Socialism is, right or was and of course it was but there seems to be a much smaller group of people, much smaller and that is aware.

    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: This is very, very much connected to academia. When I started doing research on the criminality of the political Left, I found a lot of things that were buried under carpets or disappeared. I couldn't find, in academic scholarship the histories. They're just eradicated. It's incredible. I actually had to rely on non-academic sources to find the facts.

    Jan Jekielek: Fascinating. I've heard about China, "The People's Republic of Amnesia," the inconvenient realities are are kinda disappeared or removed.

    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: That's happening in US scholarship and the Left-leaning character of academia is so profound, that they have disappeared the criminality of the political Left from all education. I mean that's huge. So, you don't learn about the crimes of Soviet Union or China. You don't learn about this in the US educational system, for the most part. It's disappeared.

    Jan Jekielek: Fascinating and deeply disturbing. So, you know, as as I said, your book shocked me to the core and one of the reasons it did was with this kind of pervasive rise of Big Tech, in injecting itself into literally every aspect of life and even into thought and that's only accelerating. I mean, this is just the beginning, on this curve, right? That could make one feel quite despondent about the future. What are your thoughts?

    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: I have a great deal of faith in in in in people's intelligence to see through ideology, because I was able to do so, myself. If I can see it, other people can see it and I know other people who do see it and I think that your Big Digital is going to be constructing very powerful narratives and we have to posit counter-narratives that are truth-based.

    Jan Jekielek: Okay, truth. So, truth has been a casualty in all of this, right?

    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: It's been a casualty of the Postmodern academy and in the Postmodern intellectual realm, for the last 50 years. You can't use the word "truth" in the university. You're trained, very early on not to even talk about that and there's no such thing. In Postmodernism, everything is local. Truths are only contingent upon the identity of the person who holds the view; everybody's got their own truth, there's no universal truth, there's nothing that can be established as objective. Objectivity is, in fact a masculinist, white supremacist notion.

    So, that has been a major casualty in the last 50 years of that intellectual life and it's pervaded the entire culture, so that we have a "post-truth" culture, right?

    Jan Jekielek: But yet, people seek it. I mean, that's what you're kind of arguing.

    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: People have to start to believe in truth again and they have to start establishing a new metaphysics of truth, is what I argue in the book.

    And that is going to be more and more necessary, as basically Big Digital sets up a simulation of reality, which they're very capable of doing and then, reporting on that as the reality, right – and we see that going on right now in the political sphere.

    Jan Jekielek: So essentially, you argue that this whole Russiagate is, pretty much that it's a simulation. Similarly. very engrossing and you know pervasive.

    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: It's a simulated reality that becomes the the dominant narrative and that basically supplants truth and basically preempts its discovery and in its enunciation...

    right yeah and we're just, you know I just did had an interview earlier today talking about that new newest developments newest iterations of it yes

    Jan Jekielek: Given that the education system is so saturated with this post-truth in education, post-truth reality. How is it that that we can get back to the truth?

    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: Well, we have to have a tremendous amount of public intellectual criticism of the Academy, that has to continue and people have to defect, like I've done. I'm basically a defector, right?

    I'm a dissident and a defector from the the academic union of ideological conformity and we need more of that. We need many more. There are not many in the United States. There's several Canadian professors who have been dissident, who become dissident and I'm friends with all of them: Jordan Peterson and a whole slew of others, Phillip Saltzman and other dissident intellectuals that are speaking out against all this but we need more. We need more people to have the courage to stand up to this mob.

    We have a soft Cultural Revolution going on in the United States and the West, in general we need people to stand up to this Cultural Revolution and just speak back to these new Red Guards.

    Jan Jekielek: That's very interesting, because of course, if you stood up to the Red Guards in China during the Cultural Revolution, you would be dead. Whereas, here you can be cancelled but you can still find some find friends and people and there's people – I've met an incredible number of people in the most unexpected places, talking about the sorts of things you're talking about.

    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: Just like there are the islands of the Google archipelago, there are islands, like The Epoch Times, of intellectual and truth-, fact-based reporting and discovery that that exist and we have build on that.

    Jan Jekielek: Wonderful. Well, it's such a pleasure to have you here, Michael.

    Dr. Michael Rectenwald: My pleasure, thank you."
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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    HOW ‘SOCIAL JUSTICE’ THREATENS EVERYTHING--Dr. Rectenwald, author of Springtime for Snowflakes
    https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/how...ens+Everything


    "I have been reeling since my recent discovery of Dr Michael Rectenwald, because I’ve had a similar ideological trajectory and recent, unexpected upheaval. I even studied for a year at NYU, where he was a professor.

    Although my college major at Brown University was called Semiotics, it was actually more like Postmodernist, Marxist-Freudian cultural criticism and at the time, I felt like I was majoring in a nervous breakdown!

    Dr Rectenwald joins Alex Newman, publisher of The New American magazine to discuss the development of the incredibly nefarious Social Justice movement that has recently exploded onto the scene and which has come to define the Democrat Party, Big Tech, Antifa, transnational corporations and the dread New World Order.

    Social Justice sounds nice but it’s not. Dr Rectenwald explains that the contemporary Social Justice movement has nothing to do with the original movement founded in the mid-1800s by Luigi Taparelli, a Jesuit monk. It was not about the redistribution of wealth but it was about charity.

    Mid-20th century philosophers, like John Rawls and William James Booth transformed the concept of Social Justice into this Communist ideal of economic and social equality as an absolute and necessary goal. More recently, Stalinist and Maoist tactics have been brought into the movement that mimic those of the Cultural Revolution of Communist China (1966-1976), when Mao instructed his Red Guards to tear down everything in society; all tradition, all historical memory, all cultural legacies.

    These sensibilities insinuated themselves into French universities, where I absorbed them while studying for a year at the Sorbonne.

    Dr Rectenwald says there is a complete parallel to be made between the Social Justice movement in America today and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. “It’s a softer version but it’s not any less pernicious in a sense, because it’s actually happening more subtly and it’s less catastrophist, if you will, more of a gradualist campaign.

    “But this makes it more insidious, almost because it’s not so blatant, so it’s happening sort of surreptitiously under the surface. But it’s very, very, very, very much like they’re ripping, as you said, historical monuments, historical memory, legacies of culture, all being gutted from the curriculum, from statuaries and all forms of museums and road signs and names of schools and names of streets on and on and on. They just want to raze the whole cultural legacy to the ground.

    “‘The West is horrible’, despite being that the West is best. And that’s the thing that they have this guilt complex about, is the idea that the West had a belief in itself at some point. Oh my. What a terrible thing.”

    Dr Rectenwald suggests that the best way to stand up to this pernicious movement is to have it legally classified as a religion. “Once it’s dubbed a religion in the US at least, where it seems to be birthing most vehemently, we can then say, ‘Look, this doctrine has to be excluded from public schools. It can be taught but it can’t be the basis of the school system,’ which it is now…We have to declare it a religion, get it marked clearly as a religion, then we can use the separation clause to exclude it from the public school system –

    “[Social Justice] has rituals…it is a belief system that is based strictly on belief and no data. It is not an evidence-based system…

    “For example, if somebody declares their gender to be male, there’s no empirical data that’s necessary. They just merely state it. So, it’s a belief that’s enunciated and that’s the end of it. And we have to believe that and go along with it and everybody must play along. I think Christianity has more data than that, by a longshot…

    “So, it’s ritualistic and it’s a belief system with no knowledge base…it’s completely based on the credulity of anyone who buys into it and so therefore, I’d say you know we can dub this a thing of religion. If we have to go into a treatise to do so, I mean I talked about it a bit in the book but I could develop it further…

    “If you want to be a Social Justice school, go ahead, be a Social Justice school but like a Christian school, they would say, ‘This is a Christian Academy,’ or something like that…you have the freedom to do that here, in this country but it should…be explicitly stated, rather than implicitly, insidiously undermining everything, without being acknowledged as such…

    “Transgenderism should not be understood as anything but a major piece of the Social Justice creed and movement. There’s this huge push for everybody to change their genders for some reason…

    “Basically, they want to destabilize all social ontology, because this is the means by which the state becomes all-powerful or the corporate state, if you will…

    “The idea is to completely raze the social ontologies to the ground, to upend all – the family has to go…typically, you have a man and a wife or a husband and a spouse or a man and a woman. Well, if you get rid of those, you’re 90% of the way finished with the family, with the a nuclear family and that’s definitely one of the objectives.

    “They want to get rid of the family, because the family is a buffer; it’s an ideological and instrumental and educative barrier to the all-powerful statism, that these people want.

    “They’re totalitarians at their core. They’re absolutely totalitarian. They want total control and power and they want it vested in the state and they want to be in the state, themselves.

    “It’s already happening. I mean, you see it going on, at least digitally, right? You see all these digital disappearances that are taking place. And then you see that the restriction of movement of people that are on the Right or anything but Left whack jobs. For example, like Laura Loomer can’t even go into the UK, Milo Yiannopoulos cannot go into Australia.

    So, they’re already putting these digital fences up, which is the next step and I talk about all this in my next book, which is out this month, ‘Google Archipelago’. They’re erecting these digital gulags, if you will and then also digitally deleting people, in effect.

    “Because once you have all the public sphere transferred on to the digital realm and then the digital realm is controlled by people that are actually statists, that are also corporatists – I mean, this is just this crazy amalgamation of state and corporate power that’s going on. I’m all for free markets but this is not free markets, at all. This is absolute statist monopolies.

    “So these monopolies want global-state-one-nation, you know, they want to get rid of nationalism. Of course, they hate Trump because he’s nationalist. They want to get rid of borders. They want to get rid of everything that stands in the way of One World-ism or Globalism.” "
    Last edited by onawah; 15th October 2019 at 19:03.
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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    IS GOOGLE HIDING SEARCH RESULTS? | ZACH VORHIES – GOOGLE WHISTLEBLOWER
    October 17, 2019


    "Google whistleblower, Zach Vorhies bravely came forward through Project Veritas last August with documents that strongly suggest special interests are colluding with Big Tech and the corporate media to oust the President and to silence and financially disenfranchise anyone in their way (like me) and over 65 million Americans.

    This is a talk given last weekend by former Google Senior Software Engineer, Zach Vorhies at the American Priority Festival in Miami, Florida. Vorhies provided nearly one thousand pages of documents to the Department of Justice, demonstrating the vast scope of the felonies and frauds being perpetrated by his former employer. He gives his insider’s perspective on how Google is actively engaged in a subtle psychological war against the US populace and in the financial destruction of certain targeted sectors.

    Google is undertaking to re-program the world according to their disingenuous application of “Social Justice”. Social Justice is the friendly-sounding name for an insidious movement that seeks to raze the entire cultural legacy of the West by gradually destabilizing all norms of rationality and logic, according to academic, Michael Rectenwald, who suggests its ultimate purpose is to implement a global corporate technocratic superstate.

    The question remains as to who, exactly is behind Social Justice? Is it a smattering of San Francisco Commie militants drunk on their technocratic power? Is it the CCP? Or is all of this being orchestrated by the éminence grise that controls the world’s money supply?

    The statements above may sound overblown if one forgets that the Internet of Things (IoT) will soon be online. The Internet of Things is an AI-driven interactive facsimile of the world, in which all mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals and people will be given unique identifiers (UIDs) and will be constantly transferring data over a global network without human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. Using the 5G network, the IoT will enable self-driving cars and aerial vehicles and it will supposedly save a lot of energy. Such centralization will also make our infrastrucure eminently hackable, especially once quantum computing makes encryption impossible, which is soon.

    In financial terms, the Internet of Things may quickly eclipse the power of the physical world and it will enable the Big Data giants, like Google to scale up their de-platforming and de-banking activities of entities large and small into the real world, making China’s social credit system look like a 2 year old’s birthday party by comparison.

    The purported ethos guiding Google is “Social Justice”, which rejects objective reality. Google calls objective reality “algorithmically unfair”. They seek to re-shape reality via “product interventions” within their search algorithms.

    Check it out for yourselves. Go to Google.com and enter “men can” into the search bar. For me, the auto-completes that I see today are: 1. men can have babies 2. men can get breast cancer 3. men can cook 4. men can have periods 5. men can think about nothing 6. men can have babies now 7. men can get pregnant.

    Needless to say, these are not the top-searched results for “men can” in the real world. These auto-completes have been savagely intervened upon with the most ham-fisted transgender-centric ideal of “Social Justice”.

    Vorhies says, “I started to ask myself, why is Google doing this? Why are they intervening in your search results by intervening in their Google News and I think I’ve got the answer.”

    He then shows a couple of slides that he discovered in Google’s corporate intranet, displaying the flowchart of this particular operation, where it was explicitly stated that the intended outcome of this project was: “People are programmed”.

    Vorhies shows a video of YouTube CEO, Susan Wojcicki at a tech talk, describing her plan to aggressively boost “authoritative news” outlets, such as the thoroughly discredited CNN and to deboost and “push down” on “fake news” through their machine learning programs. He notes that such “product interventions” went into high gear after the election of Donald Trump.

    Vorhies then looked into what was being categorized as “fake news” and found that most of the time, these were bonafide news events. He says, “I started to realize that maybe this wasn’t about fake news, maybe this was about controlling the narrative.”

    Vorhies shows internal slides from Google about how the staff sought to de-platform Right Wing news outlet, Breitbart from Google’s advertising program and how they aggressively sought to blacklist certain sites and to disassociate search results that showed any relationship between the Las Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock and the DNC, while strengthening suggestions of ties between him and Donald Trump.

    He gives a chilling, documented example of another intervention by Google, after President Trump famously tweeted upon his return from Saudi Arabia on May 31, 2017, “Despite the negative press covfefe.” Vorhies says that originally, “cov fe’fe” existed in Google’s translation program as the Arabic term for “I will stand up” but that after a New York Times editorial came out the following day on June 1, 2017 excoriating Trump for his “garbled message”, Google engineers then took that article as the justification to eliminate the word from their Arab dictionary.

    So, we see here how the corporate news and Big Tech are in lockstep, constantly working to re-shape “reality” in a death by a thousand cuts.

    Vorhies notes the team who took it upon themselves to make this particular change called themselves the “Derrida Team”, after the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida who advocated the destruction of Western culture through the manipulation of language (I read a LOT of Derrida in college).

    Then he saw how the media proceeded to cite the “covfefe” incident to advocate the removal of the President by invoking the 25th Amendment, which deals with the succession of the US Presidency if the Commander in Chief becomes disabled, dies, resigns or is removed from office.

    “I’m sitting there, looking at this stuff and I’m asking myself, ‘Is this sedition? Is this collusion for a coup attempt? What exactly is going on here, because it seems to me that the media might be colluding with Google to remove the President of the United States. And if I don’t do anything about it, then I myself am complicit.’

    “And so, I had a really hard decision to make and ultimately, I realized I had to do the right thing and so I decided that I was going to bring this information and give 950 pages to Project Veritas, so that the American public could know the reality and the truth about the largest tech company in America…

    “What I realized through all of this is that if you don’t have a free market of ideas, then you don’t have a free market of commerce. So, what I want to finish off with today is a sector of the economy that’s being absolutely destroyed right now.”

    He shows us the analytics for Mercola.com, whose traffic went from over 2 million views per month to less than 1% of that, after Google launched its new pharmaceutical division. Mercola.com was a massively popular website that had similar traffic to InfoWars. While the latter was very publicly de-platformed and de-personed from all major social media sites for their wrong think, Mercola’s targeted demise was more like a sniper hit.

    “This is the power of Google. How can any one of us, as entrepreneurs enter into a marketplace if a tech giant, in one day can flip the switch and destroy you and destroy everyone else in that market sector? We can’t have prosperity, we can’t have a free market if a company like this can just destroy entire sections of the economy at will. This is incompatible and the reason why I’m coming here is because I ultimately want you to be happy. I want you to be prosperous and I want your children to inherit the same kind of free America that I was able to inherit.

    “It’s a big problem. I’m happy I’m on the other side. I hope that by exposing this, we can start to come and have a discussion about what we’re going to do, now that we know this information because we don’t want to have the Chinafication of America’s marketplace.” "
    https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/is-...+Whistleblower
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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    Whistleblower Zach Vorhies speaks out on why Google snuffed natural health sites

    Dr. Joseph Mercola Mercola.com
    Sat, 02 Nov 2019 00:01 UTC



    In mid-September 2019, Maryam Henein published a video interview with Google whistleblower Zach Vorhies.1 The interview is broken into four parts, all of which have been included in a playlist further below.

    In the featured video above, Vorhies and Maryam Henein, a journalist and functional medicine consultant, discuss Google's suppression of natural health information from holistic health sites such as Mercola.com with Sayer Ji, founder of Greenmedinfo.com — another victim of Google's censorship.

    I also recently interviewed Vorhies for nearly two hours and will release that incredibly detailed video in the near future. In it, he discusses the tactics Google used to intimidate him into submission after they learned he had turned into a whistleblower.

    In a recent article, Henein, perhaps best known for directing the documentary film, "The Vanishing of the Bees," writes:2
    "Google has become the digital Thought Police for health content, tampering and manipulating information, and shadow banning health professionals and independent journalists ...

    I had the honor to interview 39-year-old Zach Vorhies, who served as Senior Software Engineer at Google/YouTube for 8.5 years ... He is Google's Snowden. He's a hero in my book.

    And if you use Google, YouTube, Gmail, etc you are being impacted. Vorhies turned whistleblower, releasing a cache of internal documents illustrating that Google is NOT a reliable source of information."
    New President Marked a Turn at Google
    According to Vorhies, changes at Google first became noticeable in 2016, after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States.
    "Before Trump won, Google had this mission statement to organize the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful," Vorhies says.

    "After Trump won, they said 'Well, Donald Trump won because of fake news and Russia hacking the election, so what we need to do is ... protect our users from fake news; we need to protect our users from the damaging effects of Russian trolls and bots."
    It didn't take long before Google got into the business of filtering out what it considered "fake news." However, as pointed out by Vorhies, "What exactly is fake news?"

    Perusing the network available to all full-time Google employees, he discovered a PowerPoint presentation describing what Google deemed fake news, and among the examples, he found news reports of events that had, in fact, happened. In other words, they were not made up events, and therefore, logically, could not be classified as fake news stories.

    The discovery led Vorhies to wonder, "Are they trying to filter fake news or are they trying to filter actual news by slandering it as fake news?" As he continued digging, he discovered the existence of a then-secret program called "Machine Learning Fairness."3

    Machine Learning Fairness — The Alteration of Reality
    According to Vorhies, this program was slated to be "unleashed onto the world" without anyone's knowledge. He also claims Google engaged in a deception campaign to make sure people wouldn't find out about it.

    "Project Dragonfly" — a completely fake project — was part of this deception campaign, he says. Its sole purpose was to distract the public from Machine Learning Fairness.

    The more he learned about Machine Learning Fairness, the more terrified he got. According to Vorhies, "even if the search results reflected actual reality," the program claimed "it can still represent algorithmic unfairness," which would justify "product intervention."

    "In other words, what they're saying is that if reality is unfair, then they're going to change the nature of reality in order to make it fair and just," Vorhies says. He draws parallels between the Machine Learning Fairness program and a number of classic books warning about how a totalitarian regime can take over by seizing control of what constitutes "political correctness" and indeed the overall narrative of "reality" itself.

    By 2017, Vorhies had collected some 950 pages of Google documents, which paint a comprehensive picture of what's really going on. You can find all of those documents on the Project Veritas' website,4 under categories such as "censorship," "politics," "fake news" and "psychological research."

    "[Google] is literally using magic to manipulate the information landscape of our culture, to remove a president that was elected by a democracy."8 "This was more than bias, this was now a national security issue," Vorhies says.9 That's when he decided to release the documents he'd amassed to law enforcement, the public and media, to give us all "a last chance to course correct."

    The Rise of 'Technofascism'

    As noted by Henein, "Google has become a digital thought police" — just as described in chilling detail in George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984."
    "Part of technofascism is to confuse people so their sense of memory is altered," Henein says. "They don't know what is real and what is not real. We're now living in confusing times with fake news and alternative facts, and that is all part of it."
    Vorhies agrees, saying the ultimate plan is to make you doubt your own memory and thus teach you to turn to the established authorities to learn "the facts," which will be whatever is considered best in the moment. As Orwell wrote in "1984," "The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth."10 That, in a nutshell, is exactly what Google is doing right at this moment.

    So, who's behind this rise of "technofascism"? Henein suspects Big Pharma has a hand in it, considering the fact that drug advertising is a major profit center for Google, and the fact that alternative and holistic news sites have been actively shadow banned, to where you can no longer find them in Google's search results.

    Indeed, the traffic to my own site from Google has dropped by 99.9% since its June 3, 2019, broad core update.11 Vorhies agrees, pointing out that the drug industry by and large own the very organizations that are promoting things that are known to be harmful to health, be it fluoride, mercury amalgam fillings, one-size-fits-all vaccine policies, sugar or junk food.

    Google Is Promoting Illness for Profit
    The simple reality is that conventional health care is a for-profit business and as such it depends on repeat customers. There's no money in wellness. The money is in chronic disease.

    Promoting disease prevention and low- or no-cost treatments is not part of the drug industry's agenda — it's diametrically opposed to and a direct competitor to it. As noted by Vorhies, what we're seeing is the creation of an artificial demand for products and services that aren't in our best interest.

    Meanwhile, there are countless of examples of inexpensive lifestyle-based strategies putting serious diseases into remission, yet you never hear about them because, as Vorhies points out, "Big Pharma is colluding with Google to shut down these counter-narratives." In an October 2, 2019, article12 in The Epoch Times, Henein writes:
    "What if I told you that social media platforms are manipulating you, steering you toward health information that they think is right, rather than letting you evaluate content for yourself?

    Accredited professionals ... who stand for health freedom ... are losing posting privileges, getting banned or buried, finding themselves deranked, and getting digitally assassinated. Content is literally disappearing from the internet along with our health choices. It sounds conspiratorial because it is."
    Vorhies goes a step further, saying:13
    "The censorship that is being applied to alternative health is nothing less than demonic. That may seem extreme, but I've been following the happenings in the new cures that are being suppressed.

    At the same time, establishment, big corporate pharma websites like WebMD are monopolizing the first page of results. What's terrifying is that many of these establishment medical articles landing on the first page do not even have a stated author and make assertions that are contradicted by science."
    Google Autosuggestions Reveal the Agenda
    If you're still confused about which way Google is leaning when it comes to certain topics, all you have to do is check out its auto complete feature. This is a list of "suggested" searches that pops up when you type in one or more keywords.

    In her Epoch Times article,14 Henein shows a screen shot of a Google search done on September 1, 2019, starting with the words "supplements are." The list of autosuggestions contained nothing but negative-biased searches, such as:
    • Supplements are bad
    • Supplements are useless
    • Supplements are not regulated
    • Supplements are dangerous
    • Supplements are scams
    This is a very effective way to spread propaganda and manipulate people, as most believe that these results are what others are typing into the search engine. This way, they're lead to believe all the negative and ludicrous attributes being attached to supplements. Interestingly they have not yet rigged the results for my name as they only display benign terms like:
    • Articles
    • Shop
    • Books
    • Wife
    • Products
    So, ask yourself, who might benefit from people everywhere believing nutritional supplements are useless at best and dangerous at worst? This auto-completion used to be populated with search terms based on what people were actually searching for, but not anymore.

    Now it's just another social engineering device by Google's self-proclaimed "thought police" that has no basis in objective reality. It is in fact part of the Machine Learning Fairness program.

    What's worse, hacking of the autocomplete function is also taking place, Vorhies warns in his American Thought Leaders' interview15 (below), and this becomes really insidious, as people still believe these autosuggestions are a reflection of what's being searched for. By essentially faking "public consensus," the fake autosuggestions can have a significant yet hidden influence over people's opinion.

    Google Seeks to Control Political Landscape
    Health isn't the only reality narrative Google is trying to reshape, however. One of the documents released by Vorhies, "News Blacklist Site for Google Now,"16 lists hundreds of websites that Google has singled out for elimination from its Google Feed (previously Google Now), a majority of which are political and financial investment-type sites.

    However, false narratives are pumped out to make you distrust those who point out there's something askew with Google's political meddling. Henein writes:17
    "Take, for instance, this quote on ThinkProgress concerning evidence of Google's preferential leanings:

    'What appears to be happening is that some conservatives are massively distorting tech companies' attempts to protect against foreign election interference or restrict the distribution of hateful views, stirring up conspiracy theories that the companies are demonstrating blanket bias against conservatives.'

    Nonsense. Don't believe that the algorithmic changes are being made only to protect you from another 'rigged' election or to save you from four more years of Trump. And don't believe that tech companies haven't been allowed to cross a line. This is a perfect example of both a red herring and a false narrative."
    In fact, in June 2019, Project Veritas published an undercover video recording in which Jen Gennai, Google's head of responsible innovation, admits the company is trying to prevent "the next Trump situation."18

    Google's Power to Shift Elections
    Does Google really have the power to shift an election? Gennai certainly seems to believe they do, as does Vorhies and many others. I suspect there's not a single company in existence that could influence elections as effectively and unobtrusively as Google.

    In this American Thought Leaders' video by The Epoch Times, Vorhies is featured along with Greg Coppola, another Google whistleblower, and Robert Epstein, former editor of Psychology Today, introduced as "a leading expert on Google search engine bias."

    In this interview, Vorhies explains yet other ways in which Google is complicit in censoring individuals. For example, he explains how third parties can eliminate undesirable players through email account spoofing, resulting in the elimination of the target individual's account.

    According to Vorhies, this is a simple "bug" that can be fixed simply by tweaking the artificial intelligence responsible for the monitoring of spam. Yet Google choses to leave the gate open. Vorhies suspects this is exactly what happened to 2020 presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard.

    "It's not just Google censoring. They've got this complicated system of plausible deniability," Vorhies says. How does this ability to take a person offline connect to Google's ability to influence elections? Vorhies explains:
    "The elections are all about whether someone has free, open and equal access to the channels of information distribution. So, if Tulsi Gabbard is being knocked offline, and other politicians are being knocked offline, then that's de facto election interference.

    And it's being done by these entities that aren't registering as lobbyists. So, we've got these tech monopolies that are acting as unregistered lobbyists that are making decisions and giving insiders information on how to take down targets. That's essentially what's happening. Google is allowing democracy to be hacked."
    Expert on Google Bias Weighs In
    By June 2016, Google bias expert Epstein was already hot on Google's trail, penning an article19 for U.S. News, titled "The New Censorship."

    "How did Google become the internet's censor and master manipulator, blocking access to millions of websites?" the article asks, pointing out, "The company maintains at least nine different blacklists that impact our lives, generally without input or authority from any outside advisory group, industry association or government agency."

    In the American Thought Leaders' interview, Epstein stresses the importance of documents leaked by Vorheis showing that not only are Google's blacklists real — a now provable fact the company has long denied — but they're also reranking, deranking and fringe-ranking articles, using a so-called "twiddler system" (software that overlays the search engine algorithm) which makes reranking a rather simple affair.

    Epstein points out that Google has vehemently denied reranking articles for political purposes, yet Vorhies' document trove proves otherwise. There's even a manual for the twiddler system among Vorhies' documents.

    This capability is far beyond what Epstein had thought possible. It didn't surprise him, however. For years, Epstein has warned about Google's power to influence opinion.

    Now, he says, we have evidence that Google does in fact have the power to manipulate the flow of information and opinion, and we see more and more evidence that they are in fact wielding this considerable power to shape the worldview according to its own wishes. Epstein also expresses concern over the fact that mainstream media are ignoring Vorhies' and Coppola's leaks and aren't reporting on them.

    Google — A Threat to Health, Democracy and Freedom
    While it's quite clear that I'm on Google's unacknowledged blacklist, I'm not and will never be willing to change what I believe in and stand for. I will never conform to "consensus reality" just to get my Google ranking back. It's unfortunate, but the way it stands right now, we have to go old-school and encourage everyone to share information through word-of-mouth, by text and email.

    We have built in simple sharing tools at the top of each article so you can easily email or text interesting articles to your friends and family. My information is here because all of you support and share it, and we can do this without Big Tech's support. It's time to boycott and share!

    Here are a few other suggestions:

    - Become a subscriber to my newsletter and encourage your friends and family to do the same. This is the easiest and safest way to make sure you'll stay up to date on important health and environmental issues.

    - If you have any friends or relatives that are seriously interested in their health, please share important articles with them and encourage them to subscribe to our newsletter.

    - Use the internal Mercola.com search engine when searching for articles on my site.

    - Boycott Google by avoiding any and all Google products:

    - Stop using Google search engines. Alternatives include DuckDuckGo20 and Startpage21

    - Uninstall Google Chrome and use Brave or Opera browser instead, available for all computers and mobile devices.22 From a security perspective, Opera is far superior to Chrome and offers a free VPN service (virtual private network) to further preserve your privacy

    - If you have a Gmail account, try a non-Google email service such as ProtonMail,23 an encrypted email service based in Switzerland

    - Stop using Google docs. Digital Trends has published an article suggesting a number of alternatives24

    - If you're a high school student, do not convert the Google accounts you created as a student into personal accounts

    - Sign the "Don't be evil" petition created by Citizens Against Monopoly

    Sources and References:
    Related:
    ======================================

    FWIW: DuckDuckGo and Startpage are both using the Google search engines... and their filters... using Bing or Yahoo might give better results. I personally use Yandex.
    "La réalité est un rêve que l'on fait atterrir" San Antonio AKA F. Dard

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    Default Re: How Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon decide what you're going to see

    Trove of explosive secret internal Facebook documents and emails were just leaked online

    Rob Price Business Insider
    Wed, 06 Nov 2019 19:56 UTC


    Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a House Financial Services Committee hearing in October.

    An explosive trove of nearly 4,000 pages of confidential internal Facebook documents has been made public, shedding unprecedented light on the inner workings of the Silicon Valley social-networking giant.

    On Wednesday, the investigative reporter Duncan Campbell released a vast swathe of internal emails, reports, and other sensitive documents from the early 2010s that detail Facebook's internal approach to privacy and how it worked with app developers and handled their access to user data.

    The documents were originally compiled as part of a lawsuit that the startup Six4Three brought against Facebook for cutting off its bikini-photo app's access to the developer platform. The documents were supposed to remain under seal — but they were leaked.

    Some of the documents had already been made public before Wednesday. The British Parliament's Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee published hundreds of pages in a report in December; they were seized from Six4Three's founder, Ted Kramer, when he visited the UK.

    And in the months before he put the entire trove of documents into the public domain, Campbell shared them with journalists at NBC News and other outlets, who then published several stories about them. (Campbell said that he was sent the documents in February, the same day that the committee published its final report, and that the sender was anonymous.)

    Facebook has fought vigorously against the release of the documents, arguing that they do not paint a balanced picture of its activities. In an emailed statement, a company representative told Business Insider: "These old documents have been taken out of context by someone with an agenda against Facebook, and have been distributed publicly with a total disregard for US law."

    Business Insider is combing through the documents and will update this story with our findings.

    Here are some of the key revelations from the document dump, including from reports published from earlier leaks:
    • Facebook planned to spy on the locations of Android users. Citing the documents, Computer Weekly reported in February that "Facebook planned to use its Android app to track the location of its customers and to allow advertisers to send political advertising and invites to dating sites to 'single' people."
    The leak includes nearly 4,000 pages of internal Facebook documents, nearly 3,000 pages of other exhibits from the case, and hundreds of pages of other pieces of legal documentation.

    This story is developing...


    Related:
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    Troll-hood motto: Never, ever, however, whatsoever, to anyone, a point concede.

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