Google, censorship, and politics
According to Project Veritas, Google is determined to use its power to prevent Trump, or “another Trump,” from becoming president:
The report includes undercover footage of longtime Google employee and Head of Responsible Innovation, Jen Gennai saying:
“Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation, it’s like a small company cannot do that.”
…Additional leaked documents detail how Google defines and prioritizes content from different news publishers and how its products feature that content. One document, called the “Fake News-letter” explains Google’s goal to have a “single point of truth” across their products…
[A Google] insider [whistleblower] shed additional light on how YouTube demotes content from influencers like Dave Rubin and Tim Pool:
“What YouTube did is they changed the results of the recommendation engine. And so what the recommendation engine is it tries to do, is it tries to say, well, if you like A, then you’re probably going to like B. So content that is similar to Dave Rubin or Tim Pool, instead of listing Dave Rubin or Tim Pool as people that you might like, what they’re doing is that they’re trying to suggest different, different news outlets, for example, like CNN, or MSNBC, or these left leaning political outlets.”
To those of us who have followed Google over the last couple of years, and especially during the last year, this is no revelation. But these efforts by Google and others raise this important legal issue: can Google do this and retain its current legal status?
While the First Amendment generally does not apply to private companies, the Supreme Court has held it “does not disable the government from taking steps to ensure that private interests not restrict . . . the free flow of information and ideas.” But as Senator Ted Cruz points out, Congress actually has the power to deter political censorship by social media companies without using government coercion or taking action that would violate the First Amendment, in letter or spirit. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes online platforms for their users’ defamatory, fraudulent, or otherwise unlawful content. Congress granted this extraordinary benefit to facilitate “forum[s] for a true diversity of political discourse.” This exemption from standard libel law is extremely valuable to the companies that enjoy its protection, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but they only got it because it was assumed that they would operate as impartial, open channels of communication—not curators of acceptable opinion.
When questioning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this month, and in a subsequent op-ed, Cruz reasoned that “in order to be protected by Section 230, companies like Facebook should be ‘neutral public forums.’ On the flip side, they should be considered to be a ‘publisher or speaker’ of user content if they pick and choose what gets published or spoken.” Tech-advocacy organizations and academics cried foul. University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron argued that Cruz “flips [the] reasoning” of the law by demanding neutral forums. Elliot Harmon of the Electronic Freedom Foundation responded that “one of the reasons why Congress first passed Section 230 was to enable online platforms to engage in good-faith community moderation without fear of taking on undue liability for their users’ posts.”
As Cruz properly understands, Section 230 encourages Internet platforms to moderate “offensive” speech, but the law was not intended to facilitate political censorship. Online platforms should receive immunity only if they maintain viewpoint neutrality, consistent with traditional legal norms for distributors of information…
Courts have held that “otherwise objectionable” does not mean whatever a social media company objects to, but “must, at a minimum, involve or be similar” to obscenity, violence, or harassment. Political viewpoints, no matter how extreme or unpopular, do not fall under this category.
Much more at the link.
This may sound like an arcane legal issue, but its enormous potential importance is quite obvious. Google and Facebook are huge internet forces, and it is very difficult for a political point of view to compete in the marketplace of ideas if they decide to ban it.
On the other hand, words like “obscenity, violence, or harassment” have always been somewhat difficult to precisely define, and it has only become harder to agree on when a line has been crossed, because we are so much less unified culturally.
And of course, when conservatism itself, and/or “mere words” that happen to hurt someone’s feelings, have been defined as obscene or violent or harassing, we’re sliding down a very slippery slope indeed.
The Gramscian march proceeds.
There is little reason to be hopeful about the truly nefarious designs of Big Tech, with its obvious contempt for free speech and the marketplace of ideas, but, at least, Harmeet Dhillon’s lawsuit on behalf of James Damore seems to be moving forward, albeit very slowly.
To every action there’s a reaction.
Something all these caring, bright, even brilliant, people don’t seem, for some reason, to be able to understand.
It seems that Weimar was such an excellent idea that one must globalize it.
One small step is to use a different search engine like duckduckgo. I’ve used it for 3 years and it yields good results.
Sure seems to me like this degree of political skew represents an in-kind contribution to the Democratic Party and its candidates, and should be reported as such:
FEC definition of a contribution: “A contribution is anything of value given, loaned or advanced to influence a federal election.”
These Google plans/actions are obviously intended to influence a federal election, and it would be hard for someone to argue that they are not of value.
https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate-taking-receipts/types-contributions/
This is something entirely separate from the Section 250 issue.
Alphabet is well positioned to progress distribution of disinformation at liberal levels.
It seems to me that the overriding question is this: Is BigTech a consortium of private companies or are they public conveyances (of information)? They seem to be private companies functioning as public conveyances. As the latter, their ability to censor the flow of information should be severely curtailed. I am not optimistic, however, given past inaction on this same point with media news divisions and 501(c)3 organizations which, in theory, are prohibited from political proselytizing and action.
That article was like when I first read the Hamas Covenant and discovered Hamas wasn’t doing one thing while saying another. They were saying one thing and doing it — nakedly boasting of their goal to eliminate Israel and working towards the goal.
Yeah, I knew Google was up to no good, but I assumed it was underneath a bunch of jargon and secret handshakes. Now they are on record declaring they consider themselves responsible as a corporation to prevent Trump or others like him from being elected.
Break this mother* up.
These supposedly holier than thou companies are a direct threat to our Republic.
Who ever was naive enough to believe that they were actually going to promote free speech, rather than strangle it?
Or, perhaps that was the whole idea all along, that from their inception these overwhelmingly leftist companies were determined to destroy their enemies on the Right by suppressing their ability to speak, and to spread their ideas.
Why the hell should some little dweeb, sitting behind a screen in Silicon Valley, or a whole board or conference room full of them, have any power at all to set up their own arbitrary “standards,” to make the decision about what is “acceptable speech’ and, then, to be able to ban speech they deem “unacceptable”?
Break up these companies, regulate the hell out of them, and make them subject to suit.
The problem here, as well, is that these company’s decisions are so arbitrary and transparently phony–speech or images that they don’t like–things put up on their sites by organizations or people who are overwhelmingly conservative/on the Right –are banned because they violate some never actually defined “community standard,” or supposedly encourage violence, or hate, or feature “nudity,” when any reasonable person can see that they don’t encourage these things, and do not contain any nudity.
Meanwhile, postings from those on the Left, which frequently are appeals to hatred and violence, remain up on their sites.
The problem here, as well, is that these company’s decisions are so arbitrary and transparently phony–speech or images that they don’t like–things put up on their sites by organizations or people who are overwhelmingly conservative/on the Right –are banned because they violate some usually never actually defined “community standard,” or supposedly encourage violence, or hate, or feature “nudity,” when any reasonable person can see that they don’t encourage these things, or do not contain any nudity.
Meanwhile, postings from those on the Left, which frequently are appeals to hatred and violence, remain up on their sites.
“Break up these companies, regulate the hell out of them, and make them subject to suit.”
I see no other peaceful alternative.
To paraphrase Kennedy; “Those who make peaceful resolution impossible will make violent resolution inevitable”
There was a time when the days were sunny, the breezes were mild and the Nasdaq was rising steadily like a hot air balloon. O halcyon days!
‘Twas the end of the nineties. Google had emerged at the head of the search pack. (I worked for a competitor, Inktomi, whose CEO announced we were going to steal Google’s lead. I noticed most employees had Google as the startup screen on their web browser, so I had my doubts.) Back then Google had its wonderfully terse and apropos motto: “Don’t Be Evil.” Because we knew who was Evil. Bill Gates and Microsoft.
Compared to Microsoft, Google wasn’t Evil. They hadn’t sucked up nearly all the ad revenue on Planet Earth. They weren’t customizing their search engine for near-totalitarian regimes. And it was Good.
Fast forward twenty years and Google has become the Evil they once beheld. Arguably worse. Bill Gates only wanted to dominate your desktop with Microsoft products, not prevent the Wrong People from becoming President.
“prevent the wrong people…”
I never imagined when I voted for djt I, along with 62,000,000 others, that I was voting for a POTUS that would stand against the decades long corruption of DC. Nothing in my 70+ years of life could surprise me more than djt. I will glady vote for him in 2020. Want to occupy something? Occupy DC. Den of thieves and whores.
A couple of things I picked up at ChicagoBoyz yesterday —
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/06/13/exclusive-facebooks-process-to-label-you-a-hate-agent-revealed/
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/60004.html#comment-1019632
Trent Telenko Says:
June 14th, 2019 at 7:56 am
It appears the Twitter censors are out in force regards “Iran’s Limpet Mine Tanker War” as my tweets about my blog post here have vanished from _my own_ Twitter feed.
The good news? There appears to be an underground of James Damore types embedded in Big Tech. They can’t fire all of them. So great,they can help take it down from within.
And I’ll bet Jen Gennai can’t code her way out of a paper bag.
Free the censors:
In my ideal world social media publishers could legally adopt a very simple user agreement that simply stated their policy to not restrict anything.
The free market would respond with a number of useful products to handle everything. Apps would proliferate to protect children, provide fact checking, and provide filtering through investigation into the actual backgrounds of those posting (foreign governments, lobbyists of all stripes, religious fanatics, clueless idiots, extortionists, etc.).
?
An entire new knowledge industry driven by the profit motive and competition would provide the information needed far better than the media companies and government monitoring agencies.
can Google do this and retain its current legal status?
Of course they can. And they probably will, since we have a political class, and their main end is to increase their power and perks.
The right question is whether they should (no) and how we go about changing our society so that they no longer can.
That’s a harder, longer road, requiring us to get our fellow citizens turned around. (Though, in the short term, Cruz and his allies should make sure Google, et al, can be spanked heartily by removing that Section 230 protection.)
“Don’t be evil”, said the Russian guys who agreed to censor search results at the request of the Chinese government…
This is all getting a tad depressing.
Time for the humorous tidbit of the day:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/booker-farrakhan-after-blasting-biden-for-hurtful-comments
To quote Lord Acton which, for the sake of accuracy and completeness I searched out on Duckduckgo.com, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.” Sums up the tech barons.
David Foster is thinking FEC instead of FCC with his in-kind contribution tack. That’s very interesting but, how is the Google version of that different than the NYTimes or WaPo? Actually, I think it is different, but the regulators would have factor in the secretive/deceptive nature of the Google effort, and maybe the Section 230 stuff.
huxley makes the point that Google is now “on record” which is correct, but they didn’t “go on the record” voluntarily. It still is operating with “a bunch of jargon and secret handshakes,” if it weren’t for Project Veritas.
As to breaking them up, it would certainly cause some disruption, but the bigger long term results of that are not clear. Voluntary break ups of large corps. is not uncommon, because in some cases the net shareholder value goes up after the break up. So Page and Brin could become richer as a consequence.
Furthermore, if they have previously and continue to eject employees James Damore, why would we expect a bunch a smaller Alphabet spin-offs to behave differently than the original?
I think it would be more effective to pursue anti-trust action in their social media spheres, and then insert “special master” regulators inside the companies; right at the point where the censorship occurs. Special masters are not a new thing.
_____
The very first day the “Don’t be Evil” slogan was released, I assumed it signified an effort to be as evil as possible. I suspect that Bill Gates merely wanted to be as rich as possible. Bad, but not as bad.
_____
The one factor that Neo didn’t mention is the censorship version of “prosecutorial discretion.” Google can use the regulatory rules (with or without trickery) to censor every single one of the conservatives who cross the line. But what about leftists who cross the line? An element of that are the masses of the left that are very good at being triggered and screaming very loudly about it. Google is just responding to public pressure don’t you see?
I suspect that Bill Gates merely wanted to be as rich as possible. Bad, but not as bad.
There’s no indication that Gates is a political sectary. Cynics have offered that the Clinton anti-trust crew went after Microsoft because he hadn’t participated in pay-for-play and hadn’t built relationships with politicians. Gates as an actor in the civic sphere is known to have learned from his mother, who was the sort of patrician lady on the boards of half the philanthropies in town. If my own up-close-and-personal observation of that type is a representative experience, he was raised with an understanding of public life that doesn’t map very well to any well formulated social ideology and, back in the day, would have been called ‘moderate Republican’. Steve Jobs was raised in a skilled worker’s household and appears to have been a screwball libertarian to the extent he had any politics at all.. Twenty years ago, you read publications like Wired and you got the impression people who worked in tech had libertarian sympathies but didn’t get worked up about anything going on outside of techworld. That places like Google and Facebook are chock-a-bloc with liberal head cases explains the abandonment of the common-carrier model. Threats from Obama-era financial sector regulators might explain why the credit card companies, Patreon, and Pay Pal have been assisting in the deplatforming.
Again, this is the gleichschaltung. Sixty years ago, the Post Office went after people who sent smut through the mail, but otherwise common carriers were common carriers.
why would we expect a bunch a smaller Alphabet spin-offs to behave differently than the original?
We might if we thought the fish was rotting from the head down. This presumes that the Tech Lords actually differ from the recruiting pools and have shaped their own work forces to reflect their disordered values. Again, tech wasn’t leftist in 1995. Why is it leftist now?
Did you catch this?
https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/24/called-kkk-member-asking-amazon-support-ideological-diversity/
Keep in mind the $PLC was exposed as a crooked direct-mail mill by Alabama newspapers in 1995. The use of them as a gatekeeper by Amazon is indicative of a complete lack of due diligence or an indicator that people in crucial positions at Amazon are quite malevolent.
I wonder how many people heckling the author at the meeting are sorosphere rent-a-crowd.
Amazon will sell you the rope they will come to hang you with. But free shipping!
Art Deco,
I’ve followed the Gates Foundation (GF) a bit over the years. It seemed non-ideological originally. Maybe 25 years ago, some teachers union group claimed to have a great new concept if only they had some money; and the GF funded them. Several years later, the GF evaluated it as a complete waste of money. Live and learn. Now I’m reading that the GF is funding the promotion of Common Core, and one of their hand picked guys was installed at the head of the College Board and is dismantling the integrity of the SAT exam.
To clarify my previous statement, I don’t have a problem with someone who wants to become wealthy per se. It is a question of how far one is willing to go in the effort that matters. BillG probably stretched his ethics more than a little, though never indicted on anything.
_____
Good point about the rot possibly being at the head of Alphabet. It occurred to me after posting my comment that it could make buying politicians, or buying their silence, more difficult. Unless a group of them set up a PAC or similar.
Why has tech gone left since 1995? Old tech vs. New tech? Most of old tech was outside the Bay area. Even inside the Bay area, there was Fairchild and Intel. Intel was run by a guy from Iowa and a hatchet man from Hungary.
Autodesk and Adobe were probably left, but not that big of a deal. Apple was/is on the left, except maybe when Scully/Spindler/Amelio ran it. Scott McNealy running Sun Microsystems was a closet conservative. 3Com/Metcalf might have been a conservative; Novell probably left.
New tech: To cut it short (too late), check out Zuckerberg’s Svengali, Sean Parker. IMHO he is one scary dude.
______
About the $PLC and Amazon. I vote for malevolent. The WaPo wasn’t too terribly bad, until Bezos got his hands on it. He certainly knew what he was doing when he installed that (expletive) Marty Barron at the top.
It’s not Google but ALphabet.
They kind of pulled a veil over people’s eyes with that one.
And Western falls on its own.
When I told them the End was Nigh, they responded “but the good times are still here”. Well… that is not incorrect but… the good times are usually right before a revolution and total civilization collapse. Iran and Cuba both had great economies before Marxists took over. The “good times” is not exactly an indication of anything. Except perhaps for secret combinations of Marxists to begin looting and raping the country’s resources and manpower.
Break up these companies, regulate the hell out of them, and make them subject to suit.
There’s an easy counter strategy for that, if I was working for the Deep State strategic team.
First of all, the entire edifice would be Alphabet as our stalking horse. We would setup what you call Google and Amazon, to be the sparks of a neo fascist trigger. This will get the public to call on anti trust policies and laws. These laws when put into power by the government, will be triggered and hijacked by Deep State actors in the government, to be used against all corporations that resist the Deep State. Hence, the sacrifice of a few weak Leftist corporations, is a small price to pay for the total annihilation of American capitalism.
End Game ; )
Dick Illyes on June 25, 2019 at 6:07 am said:
Free the censors:
In my ideal world social media publishers could legally adopt a very simple user agreement that simply stated their policy to not restrict anything.
The free market would respond with a number of useful products to handle everything. Apps would proliferate to protect children, provide fact checking, and provide filtering
* * *
Way too simple — and useful — but gives the Gatekeepers no control, so how will them make sure we all Do the Right Thing?
I think this was linked on another Neo thread, but it’s appropriate here.
RTWT, but here are some tastes:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/06/14/what-is-the-real-orwellian-nightmare-now/
This is intended as a serious question, not as a disguised charge against P.V. or anybody else.
I watched the P.V. video at Neo’s link, which also carries a detailed transcript. It’s certainly chilling. And I’m very, very suspicious of Google, YT, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and any others on that bandwagon.
Is it the current opinion among us who frequent Neo’s site (redundant — SNARK!) that P.J. is reliable? What inclines you to trust, mistrust, or remain neutral about their reliability?
For instance. In the current instance, I daresay the clips of Jen Gennai are the real deal, but if I were a Donkey-lover, I might argue that the identity of the “Google insider” in the Darth Vader outfit is completely unknown. For all I know, it’s James Earl Jones — though that seems highly unlikely, ha-ha-ha.
Thanks. :>)
. . .
Aesop, the first part of your quote from Mick Hume is a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention at
https://www.samizdata.net/2019/06/42136/
newneo-phites (*g*) might be interested. A lot of discussion about Mr. Hume’s analysis, accompanied by a lot of discussion about “vhat isss ‘freedom,’ anyvay?”
No edit.
(redundant — SNARK!)Forgot to say — I just used Google to search for “Dave Rubin” and got lots of hits, including this one:
“Can BIG TECH Be Stopped? | Dave Rubin, Yaron Brook, Brian Amerige, Greg Salmieri | Rubin Report” at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xQxjosx-dk
Google reports 1.25 million hits for ‘ Dave Rubin ‘ . On the first page there are just three negatives, both at the bottom: One from The Washington Examiner, one from rationalwiki.org (which apparently thinks Classical Liberalism = Objectivism) and one from vox.com.
However, I haven’t checked succeeding pages.
As for YouTube, Dave Rubin’s channel is there with lots of vids. And on its Main Page, UT is suggesting (to me — probably different results for, say, Bernie fans) lots of conservative videos.
For the past few months, I have noticed a selective censorship and moderation of various comments, usually bringing up topics like this here.
Ymarsakar on June 28, 2019 at 8:25 am said:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Also for fake news, check out the Apollo money laundering scheme. That’s definitely a thing to fake.
Also, an LDS prophet or was it leader, once mentioned that “god would never let man on the Moon” or some such. That was pretty funny, wasn’t it Aesop. His descendants are still trying to cover that one up a bit out of embarassment.
No need, guys. He was not incorrect after all.
*The comment goes through first and is not machine blocked or moderated. Normally a human or script then takes it off from public view. It isn’t an attack on a person here, although it is often perceived as such by people triggered.
So certain topics can’t be talked about here, such as the moon thing.
Certain topics triggers the ego defense of group think or certain ideologies. This is then perceived, as an attack. The same phenomenon happens with SJW groups at Ravelry, FB, Alphabet, Amazon, etc. They perceive somebody talking about something, as a threat, because it threatens their ego and beliefs.
This is why humanity has human nature problems and Attack issues. It’s not the gods attacking humanity, it’s human delusions attacking each other.
Ymar, please forgive me if I’m being dense, but in your comment on June 29, 2019 at 7:14 am, when you write
do you mean by “here” this site, thenewneo.com, and if so in which discussion; or do you mean somewhere else, and if so, where?
Ymarsakar:
Perhaps you don’t read all my comments to you, because quite some time ago (and it would take me quite a while to find it now, but I would say maybe 2 or 3 months ago), I explained in a comment to you that you were posting way more than you used to about certain theories and/or beliefs of yours such as flat earth. I said that you are free to post occasionally about such things, but that this blog isn’t a platform for comment after comment that pushes certain beliefs I’m not in agreement with.
As a blogger, I can make whatever decision I want about comments here, and I can ban whoever I want for whatever reason I want. And yes, I definitely censor what goes on here. Otherwise, this entire site would be taken over—for example—by porn and by insults from trolls.
Many people have special interests. You certainly have several, and I have been VERY lenient about allowing you to post many many things with which I strongly disagree and/or that are off-topic. But there is a limit in terms of number, and I will exercise that limit from time to time.
I do it to other people as well who use this blog for a lot of off-topic discussions on topics they are especially interested in that are not the topics of this blog or its posts.
I also ban porn, really vicious insults, etc., but that’s not the issue here.
do you mean by “here” this site, thenewneo.com, and if so in which discussion; or do you mean somewhere else, and if so, where?
I mean here this site here. The comments are dated and they use the moderation system here.
I explained in a comment to you that you were posting way more than you used to about certain theories and/or beliefs of yours such as flat earth.
The comments you moderated were not about the FE theory but talking to Aesop about the history of LDS leaders and the moon.
I also ban porn, really vicious insults, etc., but that’s not the issue here.
The issue is that the subject makes you and others uncomfortable, that’s the issue.
Ymarsakar:
I have had the same rules for everyone for a long time, not just for you. I don’t allow comment after comment about some extraneous topic that involves what I consider to be a conspiracy theory.
This is a personal blog, not a website like Ravelry that purports to be a knitting community, and I don’t ban or censor people lightly but I absolutely have always banned people and censored comments here, and have always defended my right to do so.
It’s nothing new here. If, for example, some commenter decided to post comment after comment after comment about that person’s idea that JFK was murdered by Lyndon Johnson, I would ban that person or at least unapprove those comments. I decide whether or not I want to turn this blog into a forum for a conspiracy or other theory I don’t share and don’t credit. I do not want this blog to turn into that, and I made that decision from the start. There are many places online where a person can discuss JFK assassination conspiracy theories or flat earth theories (or other theories I don’t credit) to their heart’s content and they are free to do so there.
However, if I wrote a post about flat earth theories, or a post about JFK assassination conspiracy theories, I would have somewhat more tolerance for quite a few comments about those things in the threads for those particular posts, because they would be on topic. But not in other post threads, and not generally.
There is nothing personal about it, and nothing new. I have been blogging for almost 15 years now and I’ve been doing those things all those years, and most of the time no one would notice it except the person whose comments are censored. If I did not do it, many many extraneous topics and conspiracy theories would totally take over the comments on this blog.
And by the way, I also censor serious insults to me (not criticisms, but insults) if I see them. I also stop people from seriously insulting each other, especially if there’s a lot of back-and-forth on it. If you’ve read the comments here regularly, which you seem to do, you may have seen me do this from time to time, and I have devoted a post or two to explaining the rules about this. But it’s fairly labor-intensive, and of course I don’t spend all my time doing it and so I sometimes miss some insults. Nor do I censor mild insults or a little bit of back-and-forthing. It’s a judgment call.
You have been commenting here for many many years, but it’s only recently (probably in the past year or two; I’m not exactly sure when it began) that I’ve noticed you commenting over and over about flat earth. I have been extremely patient with you because you are a long-established commenter here, but my patience is not infinite. I am extremely loath to ban you, so please abide by the rules as I’ve stated them several times.