Google has taken the unprecedented
step of burying material, mostly from websites on the political right, that it
has deemed to be inappropriate. The problem, however, is that the world’s
largest search engine is a left-leaning company with an ax to grind.
Let’s
face it, deep down in our heart of hearts we knew the honeymoon wouldn’t last
forever. Our willingness to place eternal faith in an earth-straddling company
that oversees the largest collection of information ever assembled was doomed
to end in a bitter divorce from the start. After all, each corporation, just
like humans, has their own political proclivities, and Google is certainly no
exception. But we aren’t talking about your average car company here.
The
first sign Google would eventually become more of a political liability than a
public utility was revealed in 2005 when CEO Eric Schmidt (who is now executive
chairman of Alphabet, Inc, Google’s
parent company) sat down with interviewer Charlie Rose, who asked Schmidt to
explain “where the future of search is
going.”
Schmidt’s response should have
triggered alarm bells across the free world.
“Well, when you use Google, do you get more than one answer,” Schmidt
asked rhetorically, before answering deceptively. “Of course you do. Well, that’s a bug. We have
more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right
answer just once… and we should never be wrong.”
Really?
Think
about that for a moment. Schmidt believes, counter-intuitively, that getting
multiple possible choices for any one Google query is not the desirable
prospect it should be (aren’t consumers always in search of more variety?), but
rather a “bug” that
should be duly squashed underfoot. Silly mortal, you should not expect more
than one answer for every question because the almighty Google, our modern-day
Oz, “should never be wrong!” This
is the epitome of corporate hubris. And it doesn’t require much imagination to
see that such a master plan will only lead to a colossal whitewashing of the
historic record.
For
example, if a Google user performs a search request for – oh, I don’t know –
‘what caused the Iraq War 2003,’ he or she would be given, according to
Schmidt’s algorithmic wet dream, exactly one canned answer. Any guesses on what
that answer would be? I think it’s safe to say the only acceptable answer would
be the state-sanctioned conspiracy theory that
Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction, an oft-repeated claim
we now know to be patently false. The list of other
such complicated events that also demand more than one answer – from the
Kennedy assassination to the Gulf of Tonkin incident – could be continued for
many pages.
Schmidt’s
grandiose vision, where there is just “one
answer to every question,” sounds like a chapter borrowed from
Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen
Eighty-Four, where omnipresent Big Brother had an ironclad grip on
history, news, information, everything. In such a intensely controlled,
nightmarish world, individuals – as well as entire historical events – can be
‘disappeared’ down the memory hole without a trace. Though we’ve not quite
reached that bad land yet, we’re plodding along in that direction.
That
much became disturbingly clear ever since Donald Trump routed Hillary Clinton
for the presidency. This surprise event became the bugle call for Google to
wage war on ‘fake news’ outlets, predominantly on the political right.
‘Like being gay in the 1950s’
Just
before Americans headed to the polls in last year’s presidential election,
WikiLeaks delivered a well-timed steaming dump, revealing that Eric Schmidt had
been working with the
Democratic National Committee (DNC) as early as April 2014. This news came
courtesy of a leaked email from
John Podesta, former chairman of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, who
wrote: “I met with Eric Schmidt tonight.
As David reported, he’s ready to fund, advise recruit talent, etc. He was more
deferential on structure than I expected. Wasn’t pushing to run through one of
his existing firms. Clearly wants to be head outside advisor, but didn’t seem
like he wanted to push others out. Clearly wants to get going…”
The
implications of the CEO of the world’s most powerful company playing favorites
in a presidential race are obvious, and make the Watergate scandal of the early
1970s resemble a rigged game of bingo at the local senior citizens center by
comparison. Yet the dumbed-down world of American politics, which only seems to
get excited when Republicans goof up, continued to turn on its wobbly axis as
if nothing untold had occurred.
Before
continuing our trip down memory lane, let’s fast forward a moment for a reality
check. Google’s romance with the US political left is not a matter of
conjecture. In fact, it has just become the subject of a released internal
memo penned by one James
Damore, a former Google engineer. In the 10-point memo, Damore discussed at
length the extreme liberal atmosphere that pervades Google, saying that being a
conservative in the Silicon Valley sweat shop was like “being gay in the 1950s.”
“We have… this monolithic culture where anyone with a dissenting
view can’t even express themselves. Really, it’s like being gay in the 1950s.
These conservatives have to stay in the closet and have to mask who they really
are. And that’s a huge problem because there’s open discrimination against
anyone who comes out of the closet as a conservative.”
Beyond
the quirky, laid back image of a Google campus, where ‘Googlers’ enjoy free food and
foot massages, lies a “monolithic
culture where anyone with a dissenting view can’t even express themselves,”says Damore, who was very cynically fired
from Google for daring to express a personal opinion. That is strange.
Although
Google loudly trumpets its multicultural diversity in terms of its hiring
policy, it clearly has a problem dealing with a diversity of opinion. That
attitude does not seem to bode well for a search engine company that must
remain impartial on all matters – political or otherwise.
Back
to the 2016 campaign. Even CNN at the time was admitting that
Google was Donald Trump’s “biggest
enemy.”
Indeed,
not only was Schmidt apparently moonlighting for the DNC, his leftist company
was actively shutting down information on the Republican front runner. At one
point when Google users typed in a query for ‘presidential candidates,’ they
got thousands of results for Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Green Party
candidate Jill Stein. Missing in action from
the search results, however, was, yes, Donald Trump.
When
NBC4 reached out to Google about the issue, a spokesperson said a “technical bug” was what
caused Trump to disappear into the internet ether. Now, where have we heard the
word “bug” before?
It is worth wondering if this is what Eric Schmidt had in mind when he
expressed his vision of a “one
answer” Google search future?
In
any case, this brings to the surface another disturbing question that is
directly linked to the ‘fake news’ accusations, which in turn is fueling
Google’s crackdown on the free flow of news from the political right today.
In
the run up to the 2016 presidential election, poll after poll predicted a
Clinton landslide victory. Of course, nothing of the sort materialized, as even
traditional Democratic strongholds, like
Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan pulled the lever for Trump. As the
Economist reported: “On the eve of America’s presidential
election, national surveys gave Hillary Clinton a lead of around four
percentage points, which betting markets and statistical models translated into
a probability of victory ranging from 70 percent to 99 percent.”
The
fact that Trump – in direct contradiction to what the polls had been long
predicting – ended up winning by such a huge margin, there is a temptation to
say the polls themselves were ‘fake news,’ designed to convince the US voter
that a Clinton landslide victory was forthcoming. This could have been a ploy
by the pollsters, many of whom are affiliated with left-leaning news
corporations, by the way, for keeping opposition voters at home in the belief
their vote wouldn’t matter. In fact, statisticians were warning of a “systemic mainstream misinformation”
in poll data favoring Clinton in the days and weeks before Election day. Yet
the Leftist brigade, in cahoots with the Googlers, were busy nurturing their
own fervent conspiracy theory that ‘fake news’ – with some help from the
Russians, of course – was the reason for Hillary Clinton’s devastating defeat.
Who will guard us against the Google guardians?
Just
one month after Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States,
purportedly on the back of ‘fake news,’ Google quietly launched Project Owl,
the goal of which was to devise a method to “demote misleading, false and offensive articles online,” according
to a Bloomberg report. The majority of
the crackdown will be carried out by machines. Now here is where we enter the
rat’s nest. After all, what one news organization, or alternative news site,
might consider legitimate news and information, another news group, possibly
from the mainstream media, would dismiss as a conspiracy theory. And vice
versa.
In
other words, what we have here is a battle for the misty mountain top of
information, and Google appears to be paving the way for its preferred
candidate, which is naturally the mainstream media. In other words, Google has
a dog in this fight, but it shouldn’t. Here is how they have succeeded in
pushing for their crackdown on news and information.
It’s sad to see language like this from Hillary @Recode “I
take responsibility for every decision I made but that’s not why we lost.”
The
mainstream media almost immediately began peddling the fake news story as to
why Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. In fact, it even started before
Clinton lost the election after Trump jokingly told a rally: “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re
listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are
missing… I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our
press.” The Democrats, of course, found no humor in the
remark. Indeed, they began pushing the fake news story, with help from the likes
of Amazon-owned Washington Post, that it was Russians who hacked the DNC email system
and passed along the information to WikiLeaks, who then dumped it at the most
inopportune time for the Democrats.
With
this masterly sleight of hand, did you notice what happened? We are no longer
talking about the whereabouts of Clinton’s estimated 33,000 deleted emails, nor are
we discussing how the DNC worked behind the scenes to derail Bernie
Sanders’ chances at being a presidential candidate. Far worse, we are not
considering the tragic fate of a young man named Seth Rich, the now-deceased
DNC staffer who was gunned down in Washington, DC on July 10, 2016. Some news
sites say Rich was preparing to testify against the DNC for “voter fraud,” while
others say that was contrived nonsense.
According
to the mainstream media, in this case, Newsweek, only batshit crazy far-right
conspiracy sites could ever believe Seth Rich leaked the Clinton emails.
“In the months since his murder, Rich has become an obsession of
the far right, an unwilling martyr to a discredited cause,” Newsweek commented. “On social media sites like Reddit and news outlets like World Net
Daily, it is all but an article of faith that Rich, who worked for the
Democratic National Committee, was the source who gave DNC emails to WikiLeaks,
for which he was slain, presumably, by Clinton operatives. If that were to be
true—and it very clearly isn’t—the faithful believe it would invalidate any
accusations that Donald J. Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia in tilting the
election toward him.”
Blame Russia
The
reality is, we’ll probably never know what happened to Mr. Rich, but what we do
know is that Russia has become the convenient fall guy for Clinton’s emails
getting hacked and dumped in the public arena. We also know Google is taking
advantage of this conspiracy theory (to this day not a thread of proof has been
offered to prove Russia had anything to do with the release of the emails) to
severely hinder the work of news sites – most of which sit on the right of the
political spectrum.
Last
November, just two weeks after Trump’s victory, Sundar Pichai, the chief
executive of Google, addressed the
question of ‘fake news’ in a BBC interview, and whether it could have swayed
the vote in Trump’s favor.
“You know, I think fake news as a whole could be an issue [in
elections]. From our perspective, there should just be no situation where fake
news gets distributed, so we are all for doing better here. So, I don’t think
we should debate it as much as work hard to make sure we drive news to its more
trusted sources, have more fact checking and make our algorithms work better,
absolutely,” he said.
Did
you catch that? Following the tiresome rigmarole, the Google CEO said he
doesn’t think “we should debate it as much as
we work hard to make sure we drive news to its more trusted sources…”
That
is a truly incredible comment, buried at the sea floor of the BBC article. How
can the head of the largest search engine believe a democracy needn’t debate
how Google determines what information, and by whom, is allowed into the public
realm, thus literally shaping our entire worldview? To ask the question is to
answer it…
“Just in the last two days we announced we will remove advertising
from anything we identify as fake news,” Pichai said.
And
how will Google decide who the Internet baddies are? It will rely on “more than 15 additional expert NGOs and
institutions through our Trusted Flagger program, including the Anti-Defamation
League, the No Hate Speech Movement, and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue,” to
determine what should be flagged and what should not.
Feeling
better yet? This brings to mind the quaint Latin phrase, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who
will guard the guards themselves? especially since these groups also have their
own heavy political axes to grind.
Unsurprisingly,
Mr. Pichai and his increasingly Orwellian company already stand accused of
censorship, following the outrageous decision to bar former Congressman Ron
Paul and his online news program, Liberty Report, from receiving advertising
revenue for a number of videos which Paul recently posted.
Wikileaks offers $20k reward over dead DNC staffer, but
won’t confirm he leaked emails https://t.co/ABXNEEVpfb
— RT
America (@RT_America) August 10, 2016
Dr.
Ron Paul would never be confused as a dangerous, far-right loony. Paul is a
12-term ex-congressman and three-time presidential candidate. However, he is
popular among his supporters for views that often contradict those of
Washington’s political establishment, especially on issues of war and peace.
Now if squeaky clean Ron Paul can’t get a fair hearing before the
Google/YouTube tribunal, what are chances for average commentators?
“We have no violence, no foul language, no political extremism, no
hate or intolerance,” Daniel McAdams, co-producer of the Ron
Paul Liberty Report, told RT
America. “Our program is simply a news
analysis discussion from a libertarian and antiwar perspective.”
McAdams
added that the YouTube demonetization “creates
enormous financial burdens for the program.”
Many
other commentators have also been affected by the advert ban, including
left-wing online blogger Tim Black and right-wing commentator Paul Joseph
Watson. Their videos have registered millions of views.
“Demonetization is a deliberate effort to stamp out independent
political commentary – from the left or the right,” Black told the Boston
Globe’s Hiawatha Bray. “It’s
not about specific videos… It’s about pushing out the diversity of thought and
uplifting major news networks such as CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.”
In
light of this inquisition against free speech and free thought, it is no
surprise that more voices are calling for Google, and other massive online
media, like Facebook and Amazon, to become nationalized for the public good.
“If we don’t take over today’s platform monopolies, we risk
letting them own and control the basic infrastructure of 21st-century society,” wrote Nick Srnicek,
a lecturer in the digital economy at King’s College London.
It’s
time for Google to take a stroll beyond its isolated Silicon Valley campus and
realize there is a whole world of varying political opinion out there that
demands a voice. Otherwise, it may find itself on the wrong side of history and
time, a notoriously uninviting place known as 1984.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Reprinted from RT News.