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posted by martyb on Monday July 01 2019, @12:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the Google-Biasing-Results? dept.

[Editor's note: This story has an interesting viewpoint given the proliferation of "Deep Fake" videos we recently covered here. I see it as a portent of discussions to come. How much can we trust reporting? How much slanting and posturing of "reports" and "studies" are going to be promulgated in the lead-up to the next presidential election? Is this item all a bunch of crap or an indication of things we can expect to come? How much can we trust, and how to we go about assessing the veracity of what is presented to us by not only the main-stream media, but also social media, too? We hereby disclaim any assurance as to the credibility of the accusations made here and present it solely as an example of what may be coming -- and an opportunity to practice techniques at validating/corroborating or challenging/refuting it. The story submission appears after the break.]

NOTE TO READERS - this is scummy content and scummy journalism, at best. That said, it is news, as the story has been commented on by two congressional questionings and the president. Ugh.

Congressional testimony and comments by the president are being made on a Project Veritas video/report, which details how Google biases their search results to favor certain political narratives. REP Dan Crenshaw (TX) and SEN Ted Cruz (TX) have made comments on the Google reports (link below). President Trump made the comment "they're trying to rig the election".

Basically, Project Veritas had an internal whistleblower at Google who detailed how they bias content against conservative sources. The leaked internal project documents (which may be fake) present a relatively technical discussion on how to bias existing trained neural networks. These are somewhat correlated with leaked internal E-mails (which may be fake) describing how the algorithms are modified to create more 'fair' results as part of "search engine fairness". The whistleblower was interviewed, but their face was masked and voice changed (may as well be fake). This is then correlated against a certainly-illegally-obtained-and-selectively-edited interview with a Google executive, which appears to be at a hotel bar from Project Veritas "undercover" agent. This was all combined into a report from Project Veritas that indicates that Google is politically biasing search results as a byproduct of algorithmic tampering and human influence. Ugh.

Predictably, the Project Veritas video was banned everywhere (YouTube, Reddit, Twitter), with accounts suspended/banned from certain platforms. Some people would say that it is an attempt to silence the "report". Some other people would say that this "report" is dubious at best. I think reasonable people would say, at a minimum, posting illegally-obtained material to the internet warrants a ban. Personally - if Veritas wants to do this 'reporting' then it needs to *report* - and not produce material that is illegally obtained or fake.

Original Source: https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/24/insider-blows-whistle-exec-reveals-google-plan-to-prevent-trump-situation-in-2020-on-hidden-cam/
Summary: https://thinkprogress.org/trump-believes-google-is-trying-to-rig-the-election-project-veritas-video-cb82f03caee3/
Washintgon Times: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jun/24/google-exec-project-veritas-sting-says-only-big-te/
Congressional Testimony: (1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueCMWBixP4Y (2) https://youtu.be/ik_kzn3etsE?t=44

Final note:
Among other things, the "leaked internal E-mails" indicate that Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager are Nazis. At the time of writing, this "story" was picked up by Fox News, TheBlaze, and the Washington Times, according to duckduckgo News ( https://duckduckgo.com/?q=jordan+peterson+nazi&iar=news&ia=news ). This "story" doesn't exist according to Google News ( https://www.google.com/search?q=jordan+peterson+nazi&source=lnms&tbm=nws ). The combination of the report, its details, and my own observations when comparing against DDG results have influenced me to switch my search engine to DDG rather than Google. Something is going on.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday July 01 2019, @02:13PM (8 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 01 2019, @02:13PM (#861929) Journal

    Their entire purpose is to make money. That is done, of course, by spying on you and manipulating you.

    The fact that their purpose is to make money, and that they are giving you "free" services seems contradictory -- unless those "free" services are part of how they make money. Nothing new. Just like Network TV back in the 1960's and 70's. By the late 1970's it was so bad most people were sick of it and anxious for the promise of cable tv. But once again, advertising, as it does with every medium it ever touches, turned cable tv into a vast wasteland.

    Since Google, Facebook, Twitter are tied up with advertising, is it any surprise what will inevitably happen to them?

    Just look at what advertising has done to every medium it has ever touched in the past century.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by Gaaark on Monday July 01 2019, @03:40PM

    by Gaaark (41) on Monday July 01 2019, @03:40PM (#861984) Journal

    The medium is the tracking.
    --Marshall McLuhanGaaark

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
  • (Score: 2, Flamebait) by Spamalope on Monday July 01 2019, @04:51PM (3 children)

    by Spamalope (5233) on Monday July 01 2019, @04:51PM (#862044) Homepage

    The purpose was to win the competition to make money. They have. Now it's 'make the world better' aka make everyone's politics ours or else. Thus the ideological purity tests.

    I'm seeing this happen to liberal commentator Tim Pool, as soon as he started talking about bad behavior on the extreme left as well as right. (auto unsubbed; not showing in feed; not showing in suggested - whereas they had been before the mass change)

    I watched Jordan Peterson's psych lectures a few years before controversy made him a public figure. He's got good material about authoritarianism - not 'it's bad' but why it is, why it's a danger and the things that have worked to counter it. Also what's going on today that's a danger. (ex: teaching about left authoritarian genocide removed from Western schools - Holocaust yes; Holodomor, Great Leap Forward no)

    His lectures showed up in my feed normally until he had recognition, then when he was trending he disappeared instead of being featured.

    I'm seeing the blandest of bland content removed and the author smeared. A lawyer who covers the legal aspects of current events. He covered the deposition of Alex Jones with a 'even if you have a good case, you still have to prepare aka don't give the defendant room to weasel' vlog because the lawyer suing made mistakes he wanted to illustrate. Very little was said about Alex himself, and that was all negative. There was nothing even near questionable, it was bland legal explanation. The video was demonitized, confirmed on appeal, then removed with a defamatory message saying the video was removed for hate speech. There is an unwritten rule that some people are unpersons and some topics are untopics. Mention them and things happen. I saw that Scott Adams has been doing A/B testing by saying words or not at the end of his video to determine what some of the 'topics that can't be said' are, and he's getting results.

    All the things I'd see if the allegations were true, I am seeing.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @11:29PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 01 2019, @11:29PM (#862202)

      teaching about left authoritarian genocide removed from Western schools - Holocaust yes; Holodomor, Great Leap Forward no

      They're not being removed because they were left authoritarian, but because they are less important to the Jews.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @04:23AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @04:23AM (#862274)

      There should be more study of the famine, the Left Opposition, Stalinism's reaction to the kulaks, and the founding of the Fourth International.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @11:51AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @11:51AM (#862341)

      I'm not sure why you're currently modded flamebait, I'm not from the US, so maybe there are.. erm, dare I say it.. "triggers" in your post that make sense to a US centric mind.

      But what you're saying is absolutely true. Of course, it's always been true.. and the topics that it is 'true' about constantly changes, morphs, and is modified.

      Of course the problem here is that things are very, very difficult to manage. Literally, you just can't censor "bad stuff" correctly. Censorship is censorship, and as soon as you censor the 'delivery mechanism", eg.. Google's platform, you're putting power where it shouldn't be.

      Realistically, Google shouldn't censor. Just like the cable company shouldn't censor. That individuals be just as liable as TV networks used to be. And this is primarily, quite important.. because we may not always have a centralized form of control. Worse, if you censor Google, then it just goes underground anyhow!

      So, either one of two things will likely happen.

      1) More speech censorship. Things like "you can't say this in public" akin to 'swearing' laws in the 1900s. This can, has happened all over the world, including in the US. Doesn't mean you can't speak of such things privately, with I suppose IM clients, chat clients being "private" and public webpages being "like the street". Much like "in your house" and "public forum".

      Note that this is well established. Private and public are different. For example, try having sex on a park bench, or your couch. Big difference.

      2) A fully, non-anonymized internet will appear. Perhaps IP addresses statically assigned to individuals, with massive fines for people appearing anonymously. I'd suspect that many power brokers in the US want just this.

      Amusingly, #2 would actually HURT quite a bit of Google's business model. After all, a lot of their power comes from taking the unknown, and linking it to a person and habits. If the person part is already linked, then it's a lot easier to create a database of habits.

      But anyhow, my point is.. the platform is the wrong place to censor.

  • (Score: 2, Touché) by fustakrakich on Monday July 01 2019, @05:58PM (1 child)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Monday July 01 2019, @05:58PM (#862100) Journal

    ust look at what advertising has done to every medium it has ever touched in the past century.

    The Sunday Classifieds are still secure...

    --
    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday July 01 2019, @06:04PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 01 2019, @06:04PM (#862102) Journal

      Sunday classifieds are not what I had in mind. Touche.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @04:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @04:46AM (#862279)

    I definitely would not assume, at this point, that their entire purpose is to make money.

    Google has taken an extremely political trajectory in how the company operates. It's easy to dislike Trump which is unfortunate because that masks what is happening. Google, one of the largest companies in the world, seems to be increasingly overt in their effort to try to decide the outcome of democratic elections. Think about that for a minute. It's easy to say we live in a corporatocracy since corporate money always plays such a big role in elections. But this is going way beyond this and this is not a corporation aiding politicians, but instead a corporation deciding it, itself, will determine who gets to win democratic elections.

    Now pair that with what Google is and has. Google is a company primarily focused on the invasion of individual privacy. This is ostensibly so they can deliver more profitable ads, but regardless they are collecting sensitive information on billions of people. Most of everything you've done on your [Android] phone - Google has. What you've searched for - Google has. Any site you've visited that has Google analytics - Google has it all. And if you were naive enough to use 8.8.8.8 as a domain name server (as I was) - Google has it all. Google has collected embarassing, compromising, and other sorts of information on a large chunk of the entire human species. And now, this same company, is going sharply political.

    Let's assume Google is able to start manipulating democratic elections to fit their desires. Where do those desires take them? I don't think it's to just add a few more zeroes to the accounts of Sergey Brin and Larry Page. One last note on the topic of those two individuals. Many do not seem to know that Google is a public company only on the surface. Much like Zuckerberg and Facebook, Brin and Page organized the share structure of Google into regular shares - which are the ones traded on the market - and exclusive shares which they allocated primarily to themselves with 10x the voting power. Brin and Page, alone, still have majority control of Google. The actions they've taken in recent times are not simply because they're beholden to share holders. Sergey and Larry could take the company in whatever direction they would like. And this is what they've chosen.