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[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.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @05:58AM
Two major counter-points here. Most media today is deeply dependent upon Google for revenue. This comes both in the form of ads, which are delivered by Google in some cases, and by directing users to their sites for which Google plays a tremendous role. This alone makes it highly unlikely to see significant investigative or otherwise 'aggressive' reporting against Google from most major media outlets. This is not to say they remain entirely deferential, but rather that they are going to be unlikely to engage in any behavior beyond the minimum standard to fulfill their basic journalistic obligations. The point here is that when you see somebody going beyond the norm to expose bad behaviors by Google, it's unlikely to come from established sources - because those established sources have immense amounts to risk and little to gain by engaging in such.
The second is media bias. Most media today leans left to far left. The New York Times, for instance, has gradually morphed from a completely balanced and authoritative source to one that now is full of partisan ranting and unabashed ideological endorsement and evangelism. This is certainly, in part, playing to their audience for the sake of revenue generation - but I also think that these media outlets tend to be full of people that do genuinely endorse these ideologies and are increasingly deciding it is their role to try to nudge (or hammer blow as it may be) society in that direction. A problem here is that Google's bias also is aligned with a far left ideology. So now we have yet another confounding factor. Not only are we unlikely to find established sites going beyond to norm to expose or report on such issues, we're also less likely to find partisan left sites reporting on such.
This two biases alone leave you with the reality that truly and deeply informative news is unlikely to come from the sites we'd like it to come from, unless it's on a topic such as Trump - where you can find their vetting of sources tends to be [drum roll] quite liberal. And for some reason we also tend to hold smaller sites to a higher standard that large sites. For instance the media we wanted to believe ran widespread stories on Nathan Phillips and 'The Catholic Schoolboys Harassing Him.' It was completely and absolutely fake with the boys being the ones who were being approached and "harassed" by numerous actors, including Phillips. Another example would be these same sites claiming Trump's son received an email from Wikileaks offering him access to hacked DNC emails before the documents were made available to the public. Before being key, and fake. The sites all accidentally got the date wrong, somehow. The email was sent after the archives were already publicly available for all. You could list countless incidents of misleading and fake stories from these sites just in the past couple of years, yet we pretend that these sites are authoritative and reputable. By contrast if we can find any sliver of bad behavior on a smaller site, we'll use it to smear them to no end. Quite bizarre behavior.