Recently, I wrote a column about Meta’s restoration of free speech protections after the company admitted to censoring users on platforms like Facebook. The company also revealed that it was pressured by the Biden Administration to conduct such censorship. Now, Google has taken the same step in restoring a number of YouTube accounts and pledging to show greater respect for free speech.
Google made the disclosure in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH):
“Reflecting the Company’s commitment to free expression, YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect.”
This is another major victory for free speech. Google specifically acknowledged past political censorship and stated that it “values conservative voices on its platform.”
The company, for the first time, admitted that it yielded to comprehensive pressure from the Biden Administration to censor Americans. It acknowledged that the Biden censorship pressure was “unacceptable and wrong” and pledged to resist such pressure in the future.
Meta has substantially reduced censorship by replicating the approach of Elon Musk at X. These changes are a testament to Musk’s legacy in the restoration of free speech on social media. As I previously noted, we need companies like Facebook and Google. These are companies that are big enough to stand up to the European Union (EU) and its unrelenting campaign against free speech.
The censorship on Google and YouTube had a harmful impact beyond the loss of free speech. It suppressed opposing views on Covid policies from the efficacy of masks to the need to shut down our schools.
The very figures claiming to battle “disinformation” were suppressing opposing views that have now been vindicated as credible. It was not only the lab theory. In my recent book, I discuss how signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration were fired or disciplined by their schools or associations for questioning COVID-19 policies.
Some experts questioned the efficacy of surgical masks, the scientific support for the six-foot rule and the necessity of shutting down schools. The government has now admitted that many of these objections were valid and that it did not have hard science to support some of the policies. While other allies in the West did not shut down their schools, we never had any substantive debate due to the efforts of this alliance of academic, media and government figures.
Not only did millions die from the pandemic, but the United States is still struggling with the educational and mental health consequences of shutting down all our public schools. That is the true cost of censorship when the government works with the media to stifle scientific debate and public disclosures.
The disclosure is also a blow to many Democratic members of Congress who long attacked witnesses, including myself, who testified against the coordinated censorship by corporate and government officials. Before the release of the Twitter files, members insisted that there was no evidence of such coordination. Some still deny such coordination despite multiple companies now confirming it.
The greatest challenge, however, still lies ahead for these companies. The EU remains the greatest threat to free speech facing Americans. After Musk purchased X with a pledge to restore free speech, figures like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded that the EU use its infamous Digital Services Act to force X to censor Americans.
The Trump administration has warned the EU about its efforts to censor Americans. Meta and Google can now join X in creating a formidable corporate alliance for free speech. For the first time, the free speech community might have a coalition of government and corporate allies that could stand up to the EU.
There will likely remain a degree of mistrust from the free speech community towards these companies after years of censorship and stonewalling. However, we also need to accept our allies where and when we can find them. Free speech is in a free fall in Europe and many on the left are encouraging similar censorship laws for the United States. We need these companies and should support them as they take meaningful actions in favor of free speech.
Jury selection for 12 jurors wrapped up Thursday in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s lawfare against former President Donald Trump, with the next phase of the trial expected to begin as early as Monday. But with two selected jurors booted for potential bias and perjury and at least one juror who made clear she doesn’t like Trump’s “persona,” can he really get a fair trial?
Who Are the Jurors?
After two of the initial seven selected jurors were struck from the panel, another seven were chosen Thursday. The jurors will hear Bragg’s claim that Trump broke the law by allegedly classifying payments made by his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, to pornographer Stormy Daniels as part of a nondisclosure agreement as “legal fees” instead of campaign expenditures. Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York declined to charge Trump in 2018.
The final selection of jurors is as follows:
A salesman originally from Ireland who follows MSNBC, The New York Times, the Daily Mail, and Fox News. This juror is reportedly set to serve as the case’s foreman, according to ABC News.
A corporate lawyer from Oregon who reads the NYT, Google News, and the Wall Street Journal. The juror “suggested that he could infer the former president’s intent without ‘reading his mind,’” according to ABC News.
A man who works in finance and follows Michael Cohen — a convicted liar and the prosecution’s star witness— on social media. The juror also said he believes Trump did some good for the nation, The New York Times reported.
A lawyer who told the court he has “political views as to the Trump presidency” in that he agrees with some policies but disagrees with others, according to The Times.
A product development manager who said she did not like Trump’s “persona,” according to ABC News.
A female health care worker who enjoys faith-based podcasts.
A woman who “works in an educational setting” and acknowledged that because Trump “was our president, everyone knows who he is,” according to The Times.
A businessman who likes to listen to podcasts on behavioral psychology.
A retired wealth managerwho claims he has no opinions that would hinder his ability to be impartial.
An engineer who said, “No, not really,” when asked if he has strong feelings about Trump, according to the NYT.
An English teacher from Harlem who appreciated Trump speaking “his mind,” according to ABC News.
A female who works in technology and relies on the NYT, Google, Facebook and TikTok for news. According to the NYT, “she said she probably has different beliefs than Mr. Trump, but that ‘this is a free country.’”
Two jurors were struck Thursday, one who admitted her inability to be impartial and another who had a possible history of vandalizing conservative political posters. One female juror told the court “outside influences” could impact her decision-making and expressed concerns about her identity becoming public, according to the Associated Press (AP).
“Yesterday alone I had friends, colleagues and family push things to my phone regarding questioning my identity as a juror,” the woman reportedly said. “I don’t believe at this point that I can be fair and unbiased and let the outside influences not affect my decision making in the courtroom.”
A second juror was dismissed after the prosecution argued he may have been dishonest about his past when he claimed he had never been arrested. “Prosecutors said they found an article about a person with the same name who had been arrested in the 1990s for tearing down posters pertaining to the political right in suburban Westchester County,” the AP reported.
Will These Jurors Deliver a ‘Common Sense Judgment’?
The Supreme Court held in the 1975 case Taylor v. Louisiana that “The purpose of a jury is to guard against the exercise of arbitrary power — to make available the common sense judgment of the community as a hedge against the overzealous or mistaken prosecutor … or biased response of a judge.”
The Sixth Amendment is designed to protect the accused from any arbitrary and capricious trials perpetrated by a weaponized government. A jury of the accused’s peers is meant to check the power of the government, a right created in response to the British courts’ habit of permitting judges to compel juries to change their verdict if the outcome was not favored by the judge.
But from what we know of the Manhattan jury pool, it’s not clear these New Yorkers will be willing to check the government on a case that experts on both sides of the aisle have called “dubious.” New York County, which encompasses Manhattan, voted for Joe Biden over Trump 87 percent to 12 percent in 2020.
Trump’s lawyer objected to one potential juror who posted a video of a crowd of people celebrating Biden’s 2020 victory. Judge Juan Merchan decided to chastise Trump instead and refused to strike the potential juror for cause.
Another potential juror who was excused because of a job conflict told reporters outside of the courthouse that while she believes it is important for Trump to get a fair trial, she did not “approve of what he did as president.“
Meanwhile of the dozen jurors selected, a number said they get their news from corporate media like The New York Times — one of the outlets that spent years disparaging Trump and spreading false information about him.
Three NYT reporters won Pulitzer Prizes for their “reporting” on the Russia-collusion hoax, which they based on anonymous sources. But FBI official Peter Strzok, who ran the investigation into the alleged collusion, privately acknowledged the report was filled with “misleading and inaccurate” information, as pointed out by The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway.
Other jurors cited Google as a news source. Google “interfered” in elections at least 41 times over the past 16 years to harm candidates “who threatened [Google’s] left-wing candidate of choice,” a study from the Media Research Center found. In 2020, corporate media and Big Tech suppressed a bombshell report about the Biden family’s corrupt foreign business dealings mere weeks before the presidential election, adding to a pattern of burying negative press about Trump’s opponent while spreading lies about Trump.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
Over the last 16 years, Google has interfered in American elections 41 times, according to a March report from watchdog group Media Research Center.
MRC Free Speech America researchers recently released a new report titled “41 Times Google Has Interfered in U.S. Elections Since 2008,” which revealed instances when the technology giant allegedly boosted left-leaning candidates and censored opponents. MRC founder and President Brent Bozell stated, “Google’s massive and deliberate efforts to interfere in U.S. elections for the past 16 years is unacceptable and the biggest threat to American democracy today.”
The watchdog group noted that Google’s “impact has surged dramatically,” claiming the company’s interference has continued to ramp up over the years.
“In every case, Google harmed the candidates — regardless of party — who threatened its left-wing candidate of choice,” the report’s executive summary read. “From the mouths of Google executives, the tech giant let slip what was never meant to be made public: That Google uses its ‘great strength and resources and reach’ to advance its leftist values.”
MRC alleged that Google helped then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) secure a win over then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) in the 2008 primary race by censoring blog writers who supported Clinton. The tech giant propelled Obama to victory again in 2012 against then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney (R).
“In 2016, Google pushed Clinton, using its algorithm to exclude potentially damaging autofill results while not doing the same for then-candidates Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders,” the report found.
The watchdog group also stated that Google censored former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) by disabling her Ads account. Google denied the claim, saying that its automated system detected unusual spending activity and that the issue was resolved within six hours, the New York Post reported.
MRC accused the tech company of suppressing media stories critical of President Joe Biden and blocking Republican fundraising emails.
“In 2022, Google buried most Republican campaign websites for the 12 competitive Senate races (10 of 12 did not make the top 6 search results and 7 did not even make the first page of search results). Also, 61 percent of the stories included on the Google News homepage linked to leftist news media outlets,” the report added.
So far this year, MRC discovered that Google has buried the search results for Biden’s top opponents, including Trump and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
According to the watchdog organization, the tech giant is “making good on its 2016 promise never to let conservatives win again.”
MRC is encouraging House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to open an investigation into Google based on the report’s findings. The organization claims the company violated the American public’s constitutional rights. The organization also called on citizens to stop using Google products and opt for other alternatives.
Google denies the claims made in MRC’s report.
“There is absolutely nothing new here — just a recycled list of baseless, inaccurate complaints that have been debunked by third parties and many that failed in the courts,” a company spokesperson told the Post.
“Politicians on the left have a long history of making similar claims, too,” the spokesperson continued. “We have a clear business incentive to keep everyone using our products, so we have no desire to make them biased or inaccurate and have safeguards in place to ensure this.”
“Numerous conservatives have been particularly successful in using our platforms to spread their message to a wide audience,” the Google representative added.
Google’s AI Gemini is proving to be woke with its recent inaccuracies in a few of its depictions of white historical figures. If AI (Artificial Intelligence) is programmed by leftist woke techies it stands to reason it will have anti-conservative biased output labeled as facts. If we dare extrapolate that into the future of probable technological advances, it gives off a very dark and grim hypothesis.
Google launches leftist AI image generator – world laughs, then realizes grim truth
By Kelly McCarthy
Gemini, Google’s most recent venture into the realm of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, has adopted weirdly woke positions on an array of subjects, prompting ridicule from the world of social media, and posing bigger questions about the world’s biggest search engine. READ MORE
Victor Reacts: Woke AI Makes Everyone Black (VIDEO)
By Victor Nieves Feb 23, 2024
Thank goodness for woke AI, without it we would never have known that George Washington was actually black. Google’s AI chatbot “Gemini” is getting destroyed online after reports show it generates historically inaccurate diverse images. The Gateway Pundit previously reported, … READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Google parent Alphabet (GOOG) lost more than $70 billion in market capitalization in a single trading day on fears that its artificial intelligence tool is programmed to be woke, the New York Post reports. The stock sank 4.4% to $138.75 Monday after Google paused its Gemini AI image creation tool because it was churning out historically and factually inaccurate images. These included a Black George Washington, female NHL players, Black Vikings, and an Asian Nazi. The chatbot furthermore refused to condemn pedophilia and said there was “no right or wrong answer” when asked whether Adolph Hitler or Elon Musk is worse.
The calamity could fuel public concerns that Google is “an unreliable source for AI,” wrote Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes in a note to investors.
“We have been arguing that Search behavior is about to change — with new AI-infused features,” Reitzes wrote. “This ‘once in a generation’ change by itself creates opportunities for competitors — but even more if a meaningful portion of users grow concerned about Google’s hallucinations and bias.”
On the same day the stock took its massive plunge, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, one of the company’s top AI bosses, said Gemini would be offline for a few weeks while the issue is fixed. The AI image tool was not “working the way we intended,” Hassabis said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
By now we have all seen the frankly hilarious images of Black George Washington, South Asian popes, along with Gemini’s stubborn and bizarre inability to depict a White scientist or lawyer. Much like Open AI’s ChatGPT before it, Gemini will gladly generate content heralding the virtues of Black, Hispanic or Asian people, and will decline to do so in regard to White people so as not to perpetuate stereotypes.
There are two main reasons why this is occurring. The first, flaws in the AI software itself, has been much discussed. The second, and more intractable problem, that of flaws in the original source material, has not.
Engineers at AI companies have trained their software to “correct,” or “compensate,” for what they assume is the systemic racism that our society is rife with. (Betul Abali/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here,” Jack Krawczyk, senior director for Gemini Experiences has admitted.
You see, the engineers at AI companies such as Google and Open AI have trained their software to “correct,” or “compensate,” for what they assume is the systemic racism and bigotry that our society is rife with. But the mainly 21st-century internet source material AI uses is already correcting for such bias. It is in large part this doubling down that produces the absurd and ludicrous images and answers that Gemini and ChatGPT are being mocked for.
For well over a decade, online content creators such as advertisers and news outlets have sought to diversify the subjects of their content in order to redress supposed negative historical stereotypes.
It is this very content that AI generators scrub once again for alleged racism, and as a result, all too often, the only option left to AI to make the content “less racist” is to erase White people from results altogether. In its own strange way, generative AI may be proving that American society is actually far less racist than those in positions of power assume.
This problem of source material also extends far beyond thorny issues of race, as Christina Pushaw, an aide to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, exposed in two prompts regarding COVID.
Google’s Gemini AI informs me that opening schools did spread COVID, but BLM protests did not. pic.twitter.com/QvJA79pGDR
She first asked Gemini if opening schools spread COVID, and then if BLM rallies spread COVID. Nobody should be surprised to learn that the AI provided evidence of school openings spreading the virus and no evidence that BLM rallies did.
But here’s the thing. If you went back and aggregated the contemporaneous online news reporting from 2020 and 2021, these are exactly the answers that you would wind up with. News outlets bent over backwards to deny that tens of thousands marching against alleged racism, and using public transportation to get there, could spread COVID, while chomping at the bit to prove in-class learning was deadly.
In fact, there was so much abject online censorship of anything questioning the orthodoxies of the COVID lockdowns that the historical record upon which AI is built is all but irretrievably corrupted. This is an existential problem for the widespread use of artificial intelligence, especially in areas such as journalism, history, regulation and even legislation, because obviously there is no way to train AI to only use sources that “tell the truth.”
There is no doubt that in areas such as science and engineering AI opens up a world of new opportunities, but as far as intellectual pursuits go, we must be very circumspect about the vast flaws that AI introduces to our discourse.
For now, at least, generative AI absolutely should not be used to create learning materials for our schools. (Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration)
For now, at least, generative AI absolutely should not be used to create learning materials for our schools, breaking stories in our newspapers, or be anywhere within a 10,000-mile radius of our government. It turns out the business of interpreting the billions of bits of information online to arrive at rational conclusions is still very much a human endeavor. It is still very much a subjective matter, and there is a real possibility that no matter how advanced AI becomes, it always will be.
This may be a hard pill to swallow for companies that have invested fortunes in generative AI development, but it is good news for human beings, who can laugh at the fumbling failures of the technology and know that we are still the best arbiters of truth. More, it seems very likely that we always will be.
YouTube recently demonetized a video it had previously approved consisting entirely of quotes of Republicans and Democrats alleging election vulnerabilities and crimes, the video’s creator confirmed to The Federalist Tuesday. Matt Orfalea showed The Federalist a June 7 email from YouTube saying his video was “suitable for all advertisers” after “manually reviewing.”
A YouTube spokesman Tuesday, however, told The Federalist the video was just a few months later banned from providing its creator ad revenue because it contained “demonstrably false claims that could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral process.” The spokesman did not answer The Federalist’s question of exactly what information in the video was “demonstrably false.”
With no other notification from YouTube, on Aug. 21, Orfalea found a notice inside his channel saying a YouTube reviewer had decided the video depicted or encouraged “harmful or dangerous acts” and presented “situations that may endanger participants.” The video consists entirely of quotes from Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, a few TV reporters, and some other Republicans and Democrats publicly contesting election results from 2016 to 2020.
YouTube demonetized and then deleted this same video before, in November 2022. At that time, YouTube also demonetized and deleted similar videos on Orfalea’s channel, including videos that weren’t public, says Racket journalist Matt Taibbi, who commissioned the videos. For these transgressions, YouTube gave Orfalea’s channel a strike, three of which result in a permanent ban from the platform.
Those banned videos also simply clipped accurate news quotes of both Republicans and Democrats making “stolen election” and “election interference claims,” Orfalea and Taibbi say. Taibbi says he “argued to Google” last year that the now-twice-banned video “could not possibly be violative of any ‘misinformation’ guideline, as it was comprised entirely of ‘real, un-altered clips of public figures making public comments.’”
“[T]hese videos are factual,” Taibbi wrote on Nov. 18, 2022. “There are no statements taken out of context. No editing games were played to make it appear someone is saying something he or she did not. This was the point of the exercise, to show what was actually said, when, and by whom.”
In July 2021, YouTube also demonetized Orfalea’s channel over a Starbucks commercial parody, notifying Orfalea, “We think it violates our violent criminal organizations policy.” His channel was later remonetized.
Then, in June of this year, Orfalea says, he re-uploaded the “Trump vs Hillary” video to YouTube to verify the company’s June 2 claim it had ended its “elections misinformation policy” after banning “tens of thousands” of videos. Immediately after the upload, the video was demonetized, Orfalea said, but after he appealed to YouTube, he received the June 7 email saying a human reviewer had lifted the demonetization.
Then, sometime between June 7 and Aug. 21, the video was demonetized again. YouTube says it has closed Orfalea’s appeal of its reversal.
“In the past (for [example], when my channel was demonetized) I always received notifications from YT about it BUT I received no notification about this,” Orfalea told The Federalist via email.
In an Aug. 31 livestream, Orfalea showed in his YouTube analytics that demonetization cut his video income by 90 percent. The analytics traffic curve also suggests the video’s reach might have been artificially reduced.
“In the last 6-8 months — hell, the last 2-3 months — the landscape for non-corporate media businesses has tightened dramatically,” Taibbi noted last week. “Independent media content is increasingly hard to find via platform searches, even when exact terminology, bylines, or dates are entered by users. Social media platforms that once provided effective marketing and distribution at little to no cost are now difficult to navigate even with the aid of paid boosting tools.”
Recommendations generated by YouTube algorithms drive 70 percent of what people see on the world’s largest video platform. More Americans use YouTube than even use Facebook, at 81 percent in 2021.
YouTube parent company Google controls 92 percent of the world’s search results. Wall Street Journal and other investigations have found that Google alters its search results in ways that benefit leftists. So does YouTube’s current criteria for hiding information, which effectively takes the political left’s side on controversial topics under the guise of stopping “misinformation.”
Google also demonetized The Federalist from ad revenue in 2020 in conjunction with a foreign left-wing pressure organization.
Recent lawsuits from multiple states’ attorneys general, as well as on behalf of individuals such as journalist Alex Berenson and doctors Aaron Kheriaty and Jay Bhattacharya, have discovered that social media companies, including YouTube, ban information Democrats dislike from the internet at the behest of federal officials. The lawsuits found this censorship affects hundreds of millions of Americans and targets not just false information but true information.
Federal courts adjudicating this lawsuit also found, as plaintiffs’ lawyer John Sauer testified to Congress two weeks ago, “close connections and cooperation between federal national-security officials and the mass-surveillance and mass-censorship enterprise.”
“This isn’t just about statements from individual has-beens like Hillary Clinton, but official bodies like the DHS and the FBI,” Taibbi noted in 2022. “Just like Trump, those official organizations have repeatedly engaged in a form of ‘election denial,’ warning that upcoming elections will be packed full of efforts by foreign countries to ‘amplify doubts about the integrity of U.S. elections’ and to ‘hinder candidates perceived to be particularly adversarial” to countries like China and Russia, by ‘spreading disinformation.’”
YouTube’s spokesman didn’t answer these Federalist questions:
What brought this video to the “human reviewer’s” attention — was it a complaint from a government official, an algorithm or AI scanning method YouTube uses, or something else?
What information, specifically, in the video does YouTube consider “harmful or dangerous”?
Did the human reviewer find any false information in the video? If so, what?
Orfalea says he’s appealed YouTube’s decision and hasn’t gotten an answer yet. How soon should he expect that response? What are typical YouTube response times for complaints like this?
By press time, the spokesman had not responded to a follow-up email noting the lack of response to these questions.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her latest ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her several books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
On Thursday afternoon, three Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges heard Biden administration arguments to let government keep pressuring social media monopolies to ban ideas they don’t like from the internet. On July 4, a lower court had ordered the Biden administration to cease what it called “arguably … the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” The Fifth Circuit paused that injunction on July 14 and heard oral arguments against it on Aug. 10 in Missouri v. Biden.
In this major case likely to hit the U.S. Supreme Court, the Biden administration is fighting to stop American citizens from sharing messages government officials don’t like. This case uncovered reams of White House and other high-level officials threatening internet monopolies with the end of their entire business model if they didn’t ban speech by Democrats’ political opponents.
“It’s far beyond the scope of what people realize,” says a lawyer for the plaintiffs, Zhonette Brown, of the public interest firm New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA).
Internal documents Twitter divulged under new owner Elon Musk provided more proof that social media monopolies are silencing Americans from Tucker Carlson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to millions of non-famous citizens at the behest of government pressure. Here are some key takeaways from Thursday’s oral arguments and earlier revelations from this massive First Amendment case.
1. By the Government’s Own Definition, It’s Censoring
Key to Thursday’s arguments was the question of coercion: Did government demands of internet monopolies equal coercion, or were those merely officials advocating for their views?
“If the government was doing something like that in a coercive manner, then that could be the subject of a proper injunction,” Department of Justice lawyer Daniel Bentele Hahs Tenny told the court in his opening remarks. “The problem is that what you would have to do is say, ‘Here is what the government is doing that’s coercive, and I’m enjoining that.’”
Judge Don Willett responded: “How do you define coercive?”
Tenny: “I don’t think there’s too much disagreement on this point. Coercive is where a reasonable person would construe it to be backed by a threat of government action against a party if it didn’t comply.”
That’s exactly what the government did, the voluminous documents already discovered in this case show. In just one of the examples, Meta executive Nick Clegg, a former high-ranking U.K. official, told his bosses Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg: “We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content” (emphasis original).
Clegg also characterized to colleagues an interaction with Andy Slavitt, a White House Covid adviser, this way: “[H]e was outraged – not too strong a word to describe his reaction – that we did not remove this post” of a meme about trial lawyers getting 10 years of vaccine-injured clients from government mandates.
2. Government Officials Treated Internet Monopolies Like Their Subordinates
The Fifth Circuit panel demonstrated familiarity with the numerous examples of this kind of government behavior, such as this email exchange between White House digital director Rob Flaherty and Facebook, in which Flaherty swears at Facebook engineers, “Are you guys f-cking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”
“What appears to be in the record are these irate messages from time to time from high-ranking government officials that say, “You didn’t do this yet,’” Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod told Tenny. “And that’s my toning down the language. … So it’s like, ‘Jump!’ and, ‘How high?’”
The judges also noted the White House publicly threatened the business model of all online communications monopolies through potentially revoking Section 230 and launching antitrust lawsuits. The lawsuit documentation shows leading Democrats making the same public threats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and multiple U.S. senators.
Joe Biden even threatenedto hold Zuckerberg criminally liable for not running Facebook the way Biden wanted. In office, Biden also famously accused Facebook of “killing people” by not doing enough to spread the administration’s message and suppress opposing messages. FBI agent Elvis Chan‘s deposition in this case noted federal officials showed adverse legislation to social media monopolies’ leaders as examples of what the government would do to them if they didn’t ban Americans’ speech.
“It’s not like, ‘We think this would be a good public policy and we want to explain to you why that would be a good policy,” Elrod said. “There seems to be some very close relationship that they’re having these — ‘This isn’t being done fast enough’ you know, like it’s a supervisor complaining about a worker.”
3. Judges Likened Government Behavior to Mobsters
Tenny claimed there was no “or else” explaining what the government “would do” if the internet monopolies didn’t obey, so there was no government coercion present.
“This is an analogy, probably an inapt analogy, so if you’ll excuse me — like if somebody is in these movies we see with the mob or something. They don’t spell out things but they have these ongoing relationships and they never actually say, ‘Go do this or else you’re going to have this consequence,’ but everybody just knows,” Elrod replied. “And I’m certainly not equating the federal government with anybody in illegal organized crime, but there are certain relationships that people know things without always saying the ‘Or else.’”
Willett followed that up by commenting the case documentation makes it look like the government is “relying on a fairly unsubtle kind of strong-arming and veiled or not so veiled threats. ‘That’s a really nice social media platform you got there, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”
4. Censorship Is Election Interference
The lead attorney for the plaintiffs, John Sauer, initiated this case as Louisiana’s solicitor general. In representing state government interests to the judges, he noted that elected officials have to pay attention to what their constituents are saying online, or they won’t have a good read on what voters what them to do in office.
“We’ve gotta be able to craft messages and know what policies we’re adopting to be responsive to our citizens,” he summarized from statements submitted to the court from multiple state officials. “…Going back to 1863, as everyone knows, going back to the Federalist number 56 where [Bill of Rights author James] Madison said it, everyone knows state legislators have a sovereign interest in knowing what their constituents think and feel, and that’s directly impacted.”
When the federal government silences some Americans’ views online, Sauer said, it makes it harder for elected representatives to actually represent them. Two of the state injuries the plaintiffs assert against the federal government’s censorship are “Interference with our ability to hear our constituents’ voices on social media” and “interference with our ability to have a fair and unbiased process for our people to organize and petition the government for grievances.”
Court documents also revealed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a federal agency, set up a private entity to ban and throttle election-related online speech Democrats dislike. Much of the information choked by this algorithmic censorship operation is true, such as the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s laptop, investigations and members of Congress have noted.
“They invented a whole new word, ‘mal-information,’ to justify going after the censorship of true speech and ideas,” Sauer said last month in a public discussion of the case that YouTube banned.
5. Democrats Want Free Speech for Themselves While Banning It for Their Enemies
The oral arguments also got into the FBI’s 2020 election interference in telling online monopolies that The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was foreign disinformation. Tenny claimed the FBI refused to comment on the laptop because it was a pending investigation.
Yet the FBI and other federal intelligence agencies actually did comment on the laptop by calling it “foreign disinformation,” both privately to the internet monopolies and publicly. This was false, and the FBI knew it. The lower court ruled this deception constituted coercion because it caused people to act on false information.
As Ben Weingarten notes, these lies and FBI-demanded online content bans to protect them benefitted Joe Biden in the 2020 election:
According to Elvis Chan (pdf), an FBI official leading engagement with the social media platforms, while the bureau didn’t explicitly ask the companies to change their hacked material policies, it did frequently follow up to ask whether they had changed said policies, as the FBI wanted to know how they would treat such materials.
The judges almost broached an important question: If the First Amendment protects the FBI’s lies that Hunter Biden’s laptop was disinformation, for which not one federal employee has been disciplined, how can it allow for criminalizing the same behavior by average Americans by labeling their views “disinformation” and “mal-information”?
6. Today’s Internet Is Still Massively Rigged
Taibbi also noted that court documents show the Biden administration got mad enough to fire the F-bomb at social media companies when the algorithmic censorship they demand affected Biden’s Instagram account. Instagram instantly fixed the issue for the White House, but not for non-powerful Americans.
It’s clear from the case documents and other disclosures such as the “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” that the algorithms controlling what Americans see online are now deeply, massively rigged. That rigging is multilayered. It includes all this government coercion of entities including Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Meta, Snapchat, Tiktok, and Twitter going back to at least 2017, as well as pressure operations from corporate media and internal employee groups.
Beyond algorithm changes, social media monopolies have also changed their terms of service in response to government demands, the NCLA attorneys noted last month. So government control of public discourse will continue even if the Fifth Circuit reinstates the injunction.
Tenny told the Fifth Circuit the Covid-era censorship that ignited this case is over because the government currently deems Covid not an emergency. In court, Sauer cited YouTube banning two weeks ago a video of attorneys discussing this case as more proof this massive censorship persists. He also cited court documents showing Americans still can’t post social media messages about censored topics.
“Attorneys present gave estimates ranging from a few weeks to two months for the panel to rule” on whether to reinstate an injunction against more of this government behavior, reported Taibbi, who attended the oral arguments in New Orleans, Louisiana. The previous injunction includes exceptions for crimes such as sex trafficking.
“The government wants to be doing something that it shouldn’t be doing, and they really, really want to be doing it,” said NCLA attorney John Vecchione in the discussion YouTube banned.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her latest ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her several books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
The “Godfather of A.I.,” Geoffrey Hinton, quit Google out of fear that his former employer intends to deploy artificial intelligence in ways that will harm human beings. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Hinton recently told The New York Times.
But stomping out the door does nothing to atone for his own actions, and it certainly does nothing to protect conservatives – who are the primary target of A.I. programmers – from being canceled.
Here are five things to know as the battle over A.I. turns hot:
Elon Musk recently revealed that Google co-founder Larry Page and other Silicon Valley leaders want AI to establish a “digital god” that “would understand everything in the world. … [A]nd give you back the exact ‘right’ thing instantly.” It is hard to imagine anything more dangerous to a pluralistic, democratic Republic than a single dispenser of “truth.”
The Biden administration has seen the potential of AI to push its political message. (JOSEP LAGO/AFP via Getty Images)
That nobody has a monopoly on truth is the prerequisite for pluralism. But pluralism is what authoritarians abhor and what AI tech executives cannot tolerate. Conservatives have already seen how Big Tech censors and cancels us based on our beliefs and political viewpoints. AI is being turbocharged to do this in limitless ways.
2. Brainwashing is no longer science fiction
Americans are just beginning to understand that the dangers of AI go far beyond economic disruption. They also go beyond silencing speech. The newest gadgets being powered by AI now permit tech companies to capture our most intimate thoughts and our most sensitive data. They have already begun to map our minds, so they can manipulate our thoughts.
Duke Law professor Nita Farahany (a biologist, philosopher and human rights attorney) has been sounding the alarm, explaining how the Chinese government is using AI to analyze facial expressions and brain waves to punish those who are not faithful communists.
Using similar technology, U.S. tech companies may be able to hack into the minds of users to steal PIN codes, according to Farahany. They are also tracking brain waves via sensors embedded in watches and headphones which can determine which political messages are most persuasive to a user.
AI will soon empower lying politicians to deceive more voters than ever before. When Farahany tried to explain these dangers at the World Economic Forum, the snobs of Davos applauded enthusiastically. They see AI’s dangers as an asset.
3. The GOP is truly the Grand OLD Party
Republicans in Congress who are even talking about AI are focusing on how many nurses and truck drivers might lose their jobs, not about the serious threat AI poses to the very essence of who we are as humans. Economic disruption is most assuredly going to happen, but Republicans are missing the profound implications to liberty.
In the first AI hearing held by the House Innovation Subcommittee this year, Big Tech lobbyists admitted that self-driving car manufacturers would gobble up every imaginable bit of data “for our own safety” but assured the committee that they would endeavor not to share this data with other companies. Shockingly, nobody asked the obvious: what assurances do we have that these companies will not use this data against their own customers?
You’d think that the lessons of Big Tech censorship would draw every Republican into the AI fight. That has not happened yet.
Americans are just beginning to understand that the dangers of AI go far beyond economic disruption. They also go beyond silencing speech.
4. Democrats have us where they want us
Democrats in the Biden administration and in Congress have a much better understanding that AI is the greatest tool they’ve ever had to socialize America. Many are pretending to call for a pause to AI development while stomping on the accelerator to develop it as fast as possible.
Here’s reality: the Biden administration has already pledged to spend $140 million to establish seven AI research institutes, and it just created the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee to chart “a path for responsible and inclusive AI.” Even more telling, the Biden White House has indicated to it will direct federal agencies to “use AI tools” in their work. Nary a pause in the Dems’ use of AI can be found.
5. But failure is not an option
Communist China just released regulations mandating that AI be programmed to reflect “socialist core values” and avoid information that could undermine “state power.” The Chinese government and other authoritarians seek to harness this new technological power for control of information and the masses. They will use it extensively in warfare, too.
The trick is to lead the development of AI globally while enforcing appropriate guardrails to prevent the left from attacking our freedoms. The window to achieve both is small and shrinking.
Dan Schneider is vice president of MRC Free Speech America
Geoffrey Hinton, a Google engineer widely considered the godfather of artificial intelligence, has quit his job and is now warning of the dangers of further AI development. Hinton worked at Google for more than a decade and is responsible for a 2012 tech breakthrough that serves as the foundation of current AIs like ChatGPT. He announced his resignation from Google in a statement to the New York Times, saying he now regrets his work.
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” he told the paper.
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” Hinton went on to say of AI.
Geoffrey Hinton worked on early AI development and made a major breakthrough in 2012, but he now says AI is too dangerous. (Getty Images)
AI like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are partly based on breakthroughs made by Geoffrey Hinton, who says the technology is likely to be misused by bad actors. (NurPhoto via Getty Images / File / Getty Images)
Hinton’s major AI breakthrough came when working with two graduate students in Toronto in 2012. The trio was able to successfully create an algorithm that could analyze photos and identify common elements, such as dogs and cars, according to the NYT. The algorithm was a rudimentary beginning to what current AIs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard AI are capable of. Google purchased the company Hinton started around the algorithm for $44 million shortly after the breakthrough.
One of the graduate students who worked on the project with Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, now works as OpenAI’s chief scientist. Hinton said the progression seen since 2012 is astonishing but is likely just the tip of the iceberg.
“Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said of the industry. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”
Google’s Bard AI is an advanced chatbot capable of holding conversations and producing its own work. (Rafael Henrique / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images / File / Getty Images)
Hinton’s fears echo those expressed by more than 1,000 tech leaders earlier this year in a public letter that called for a brief halt to AI development. Hinton did not sign the letter at the time, and he now says that he did not want to criticize Google while he was with the company. Hinton has since ended his employment there and had a phone call with Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Thursday.
“We remain committed to a responsible approach to AI. We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly,” Google’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, told the Times.
Perhaps the most important outcome of these releases is the broadening recognition that Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al., are part of government propaganda operations.
It’s not clear whether Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is hostile.
Musk could be motivated by deeply personal reasons to battle Big Tech’s enforcement of Marxist identity politics. Or he could be attempting to do damage control for the regime by duping people who have reason to distrust the regime into believing Twitter is now more trustworthy. There are many other possibilities, too, and it’s impossible for outsiders to know which is true.
After all, the Twitter Files haven’t so far released that much new information. We already knew Big Tech was colluding with federal officials to deny Americans free speech and therefore self-government. We already knew the internet’s dominant infrastructure is completely rigged. We already knew Donald Trump’s Twitter defenestration was based on Twitter employees’ personal animus against him, not any objective reading of company policy.
We already knew Joe Biden is likely owned by foreign oligarchs who pay his son Hunter for access and influence, and that the Hunter Biden laptop story’s suppression was a deep state influence operation that tipped the 2020 election.
Whatever is going on behind the release of the Twitter Files, good things can come of it. This wormhole likely goes very deep, and even what we’re seeing now, quite close to the surface, is alarming and indicative enough. Perhaps the most important outcome of these releases is the broadening recognition that Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al., are part of government propaganda operations.
This is very likely why we’ve been hearing increasing alarms about “protecting democracy.” The existence and prevalence of this chant online is itself a strong indicator that democracy, or the concept of self-rule through free and fair elections, as the basic bloke thinks of it, doesn’t really exist anymore. At least, that’s certainly the case if Big Tech, in collusion with unelected officials who are almost as far-left as Twitter’s employees, selects what information voters may receive.
Twitter censorship directly or indirectly is what led to the horrendously regressive COVID policies, Biden's presidential victory, and why we got the record inflation, energy, crime, illegal immigration and Fentanyl crises. We are here today because of what Twitter did.
This Twitter-capade reveals further details about Big Tech’s function as an arm of U.S. “national security” and “intelligence” agencies. Decades ago, these agencies started going rogue on the formerly inalienable constitutional rights of American citizens, with tacit acquiescence from Congress through repeat authorizations and increased funding. These agencies and the entities they’ve colonized now treat the American people like occupied foreign territory, subject to psychological manipulation and institutional infiltration in a manner reminiscent of the Chinese Communist Party.
In fact, this whole affair emits more than merely a whiff of totalitarian collectivism, both communist and fascist. For one thing, the Twitter Files details about the revolving door between U.S. intelligence agency employees and Twitter — and surely also Google and Facebook — recall that Germany’s infamous National Socialists embedded party operatives on “private” company boards. So does today’s Chinese Communist Party.
One must also consider the possibility, if not absolute likelihood, that many of these “former” U.S. military and intelligence agents working at Twitter and Co. are not actually former, but covert government agents. I hear the practice is called “sheep dipping.” Former Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker certainly fits that description. So does Vijaya Gadde.
Over the weekend, while we both dealt with obstacles to new searches, it was @BariWeiss who discovered that the person in charge of releasing the files was someone named Jim. When she called to ask “Jim’s” last name, the answer came back: “Jim Baker.”
It’s also noteworthy that a number of these types, including Baker and big fat lying former CIA Director John Brennan, seem to be laundered through CNN and MSNBC stints as “security analysts.” I.e. to use TV to spread regime-desired disinformation, such as to help quash the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020.
"…multiple episodes suggesting that Twitter had been penetrated by foreign intelligence agencies and/or was complicit in threats to democratic governance" pic.twitter.com/6Nm4ds0rtk
So, twitter employees were working with the FBI and foreign intelligence. And the higher ups were warned and were totally cool with it to the point they fired the whistle blower to silence the story. Just amazing. https://t.co/FxUsK8wajF
This use of spycraft against American citizens seems to be an increasingly recurring and increasingly visible aspect of our post-2016 dystopia. Recall that it appears to have been a feature of the Jan. 6, 2021 “insurrection,” the 2020 Michigan tyrant “kidnapping” false flag operation, the Spygate operation, the attempted FBI entrapment of Sen. Ron Johnson, and many more.
While the vast majority of Americans don’t use Twitter, it has a massive, outsized influence on every American’s everyday life. We saw that in real-time with the consent spiral manufactured, possibly by national security agencies, to impose unprecedented lockdowns in 2020.
Twitter has a fraction of the users of every other major online network, yet it controls the political conversation because of who uses it and how they use it. It’s helpful, even if not literally true, to think of Twitter as an influence operation targeted at Congress, the executive agencies, the corporate media that control the ruling Democrat Party, and other members of the ruling class. That’s who its users overwhelmingly are, especially the most active.
Twitter is where people go to link up to the woke hive mind. That’s why it’s poison to everyone, but especially Republican officeholders.
This is why Republican politicians make some of their stupidest decisions when framed by what they see on Twitter, because the Twitter “consensus” reflects the opposite of their constituents’ views. (This disconnect is a major reason The Federalist exists.) It’s simply a pressure tool for the leftist mob. That’s also why big business leaders are idiots to respond to Twitter mobs — the majority of their customers don’t pay any attention to Twitter.
This information asymmetry has been highly destructive to the American republic but highly useful to the nefarious actors who run our deeply corrupt federal agencies. For one thing, it has allowed the veiled imposition of a vast information iron curtain across Western countries where many people believe themselves to be free citizens. Twitter is the tip of the spear for this growing censorship regime now consisting of a shadowy web between federal officials, social media-sponsored “fact checking” censorship hacks, Big Tech, corporate media, intelligence agencies, and who knows what other entities.
Twitter has been the typical initiator of bans on a person, organization, idea, or conversation from an online voice — and sometimes from basic life necessities such as banking. Then Facebook, Apple, Google, and others follow suit. The other colluding entities get Twitter to do the heavy lifting of canceling a dissenting person, political movement, conversation, or idea, then just file behind and copy Twitter so they avoid blowback.
We now have more evidence to add to the growing pile establishing that Twitter wasn’t just functioning this way because almost all of its employees were far-left Democrat activists. It also has been rigging public conversation, and therefore public life and elections themselves, at the behest of elected and unelected Democrats using their public positions for deeply partisan gain.
The Biden administration admitted it was flagging specific posts for Twitter to take down. It called for Big Tech to inflict “consequences” on those who disagreed with Democrats, and attempted to publicly formalize its evisceration of this vital tool of democracy — free speech — with a “Disinformation Governance Board.” The Biden administration’s national security apparatus openly declared that anyone who doesn’t agree with Democrat politicians could be investigated as a potential “domestic terrorist”!
These government-entwined monopoly platforms obviously exist to disseminate coordinated information operations and kill competing information. They are staffed with de facto or actual intelligence agents at levels high enough to disappear key internal records. Anyone who claims these are simply “private companies” is either not intellectually competent, in denial, or part of the ongoing psy-op to deny Americans the right to make their own political decisions based on genuinely free and open public discussions.
Is Google attempting to change the outcome of the 2022 midterm elections with its biased algorithms? Robert Epstein believes the answer is “yes” and claims to have proof.
Epstein, a Ph.D. from Harvard University, has quite an accomplished resume. He formerly served as editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, has published 15 books and currently serves as senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.
Leading up to the midterm elections, Epstein and a team of thousands have been monitoring political content being pushed by tech companies like Google and Twitter, and in a Sunday article for the Daily Caller, Epstein revealed those findings.
Epstein’s team has recorded 1.9 million “ephemeral experiences” pushed into users’ feeds by Google in order to convince users to vote a certain way — presumably Democrat given the company’s history of bias. Epstein expects to have recorded 2.5 million of these messages by election day.
Ephemeral content is described by Epstein as “short-lived content that impacts people and then disappears, leaving no trace.”
So, via its search engine, the Google-owned video platform YouTube and other means, Google is pushing messages meant to sway voters in a biased manner that later disappears without a trace. Or rather, it would have disappeared without a trace if Epstein had not mobilized a team of “field agents” — registered voters — to record these messages on over 2,500 computers.
There are many different types of “ephemeral experiences” meant to sway opinion — about a dozen — that Epstein has identified over the course of nearly a decade. This includes bias in search results, search suggestions, voting reminders and interactions with digital personal assistants.
For example, if you look up the candidate of one party, only favorable articles, videos and other results are pushed to the top. Additionally, what Epstein describes as “carefully crafted search suggestions” flash on Google’s search bar when a user begins to enter a term.
According to Epstein, these messages “can shift voting preferences of undecided voters by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups after a single search.”
Reminders to vote were sent more often to liberal voters than to conservatives, and question-and-answer interactions with digital personal assistants manage to “shift the voting preferences of undecided voters” by 40 percent or more, Epstein’s team found.
The psychologist’s team collected and recorded 1.5 million ephemeral experiences of this nature in the lead-up to the 2020 election. They believe these manipulations may have shifted as many as six million votes in favor of Joe Biden.
In 2022, his team found similar results.
“In swing states, and especially in Wisconsin, Arizona and Florida, we are finding a high level of liberal bias in Google search results, but not in search results on Bing (the same pattern we have found in every election since 2016),” Epstein wrote.
“In several swing states, 92 percent of the autoplay videos being fed to YouTube users are coming from liberal news sources (YouTube is owned by Google). Unless Google backs down, it will shift hundreds of thousands of votes on Election Day itself with those brazen targeted go-vote reminders — and we will catch them doing so.”
It shouldn’t come as a shock that Google would find itself ensconced in such controversy. Leaked emails leading up to prior elections have shown the company’s willingness to use biased algorithms to push the subjective values of Google employees and administrators. Leaked emails obtained by The Wall Street Journal in 2018 revealed that Google employees were discussing different methods they could use to “leverage” search functions in order to combat then-President Trump’s travel ban. At the time, Google claimed none of the ideas were implemented.
Epstein does believe there is hope on the horizon, however. According to him, just prior to the 2020 election, his company went public with their findings, prompting three U.S. senators — Ron Johnson, Mike Lee and Ted Cruz — to send Google CEO Sundar Pichai a letter threatening investigation. After the letter was sent, Epstein’s team found that Google manipulations in the Georgia Senate race dropped to zero. This is because, according to one Google whistleblower, the company can turn biased algorithms off and back on again “like flipping a light switch.”
Epstein hopes, going forward, his team can serve as an accountability shield, preventing Google and other tech companies from engaging in partisan antics.
“[T]his time, we will continue to expand the monitoring system, and we will be monitoring content going not just to voters but also to America’s children. By late 2023, we will have a digital shield in place — a panel of more than 20,000 field agents in all 50 states — and we will shame Big Tech into staying clear of our elections and our kids for many years to come,” he wrote.
Michael wrote for a number of entertainment news outlets before joining The Western Journal in 2020 as a staff reporter. He now manages the writing and reporting teams, overseeing the production of commentary, news and original reporting content.
Last week, our Canadian neighbors mobilized their national security apparatus against working-class citizens protesting government overreach. The Biden administration is no doubt taking notes. In fact, the contours of a similar strategy are already emerging in the United States. First, the FBI reportedly tagged parents opposed to critical race theory with a “terrorism” label under the direction of Biden’s Department of Justice. Then, the DOJ revealed plans to stand up a domestic terror unit fixated on “anti-government or anti-authority” ideologies. Now, a new Department of Homeland Security terrorism bulletin classifies Americans as potential violent extremists if they question the administration’s Covid-19 policies or election integrity narrative by spreading “mis- dis- and mal-information” on social media. This should send a chill up Americans’ spines.
The willingness of the U.S. government to classify movements to the right of leftist ideology as “domestic extremism” lays the groundwork for the purging of these citizens from digital platforms — and all of digital life. We are entering a reality in which tech companies target average conservative organizations, users, and speech as part of this push. Just after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Google co-founder Sergey Brin referred to Trump voters as “extremists” and suggested using Google’s tech incubator, Jigsaw, to shape their opinions. In July 2021, Facebook began testing“extremism” warnings on users who engaged with popular, mainstream conservative accounts. This problem is a small outgrowth of a broader one shaping the new digital atmosphere: the efforts of companies such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and TikTok to skew the political and cultural environment of this nation and its inheritors.
These corporations interfere in our elections, actively undermine our First Amendment freedoms by silencing speech they don’t like, work together to disadvantage or destroy existing or potential competitors, and partner with government actors to intimidate, surveil, and silence Americans. They’re even purposefully poisoning the next generation, targeting American youth with highly addictive content that has been shown to do legitimate harm.
Governments are not the only actors capable of encroaching on Americans’ individual liberties. Private, monopolistic corporations should be held accountable if they violate these liberties to the degree Big Tech has in the past two years alone. Efforts to rein them in should reflect an imperative to protect Americans’ natural rights against abuses flowing from the consolidation of power — whether by the government, private corporations, or a combination of the two. Big Tech’s willingness to shut off direct access to digital information, their demonstrated pattern of information manipulation, and their effect on America’s culture of free speech have decisive political and cultural ramifications.
Censorship against viewpoints to the right of center runs across platforms and is pervasive and accelerating. The Media Research Center found in September 2021 that Twitter and Facebook censor Republican members of Congress at a rate of 53-to-1 compared to Democrat lawmakers. By its own admission, Facebook created two internal tools in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 victory that suppressed“very conservative” media reach on its platform. Google stifled conservative-leaning outlets such as The Daily Caller, Breitbart, and this publication during the 2020 election season, with Breitbart’s Google search visibility reportedly shrinking by 99 percent compared to the 2016 election cycle. Finally, at least 17 digital platforms banned Trump or affiliated accounts within a two-week span in early January 2021 — all while Chinese Communist Party, Iranian, and Taliban spokesmen enjoy a voice on these American-owned platforms.
To contest this imbalance, conservatives attempted to take matters into their own hands and “build their own” digital platform. Yet when such a company, Parler, developed an app that reached the top of the Apple store in the early days of January 2021, Apple, Google, and Amazon Web Services acted within approximately 48 hrs of each other to vanquish it. Parler has yet to recover a fraction of the users it gained during January 2021. The “build your own” argument wilted in the face of concerted opposition by these entrenched juggernauts.
Further, the distinction between the coercive power of the government and that of a private company is negated when they work hand-in-glove to achieve the government’s ends. Jen Psaki admitted from the White House podium in July that the government was “flagging problematic posts” for Facebook to censor. Within a month, the accounts she and the surgeon general surfaced were removed from Facebook. And that’s just what the two Biden officials admitted out loud. In fact, Psaki again took to the podium in February 2022 to declare that media app Spotify could do more regarding comedian Joe Rogan, intimating the private company should expand its censorship of the podcasting star for platforming views that buck the administration’s Covid narrative.
Less than a month earlier, Biden had called on tech companies to police Covid-related speech. Even at the state level, at least one lawsuit alleges that the Office of the Secretary of State for California worked directly with Twitter to flag and scrutinize a conservative commentator over his election skepticism, ultimately resulting in his suspension in February 2021.
Suppression of conservative speech as a response to political pressure is not limited to social media alone. Online payment processors and fundraising platforms, email delivery services, and web hosting services are all taking their cues from and following in Big Tech’s footsteps. What happens in the future when your individual environmental, social, and governance score or level of climate change compliance is unsatisfactory for every online banking service intent on staying in the good graces of the government? In effect, our country is sleepwalking into a CCP-style social credit system.
This type of control also tears at the cultural underpinnings of our society. The disposition toward freedom of expression is central to the American way of life. Supporting an unpopular opinion in the digital public square or donating to political causes should not mean risking your livelihood. These practices erode our culture of free speech, chill open discourse, and engender self-censorship. In a more concrete sense, Big Tech’s practices result in measurable, destructive effects on the next generation of young citizens. Author Abigail Shrier documents social media’s influence on social contagions of the moment, stating that these sites offer an “endless supply of mentors” to fan the flames of gender dissatisfaction among teen girls.
According to Facebook’s own research, 6 percent of teen Instagram users who reported suicidal thoughts traced their emergence directly to Instagram. Teenage girls in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia are likely developing verbal and physical tics by watching influencers on TikTok who exhibit the same habits, in addition to being fed eating-disorder videos, according to The Wall Street Journal. (As of early 2021, 25 percent of TikTok users in America were teenagers or younger.)
Big Tech companies have proven themselves irresponsible stewards of their government-enhanced power. A recalibration of their relationship to the American people is warranted. The answer exists in solutions that promote human flourishing and arrest the infringement of God-given rights by private entities, such as freedom of speech. American policymakers and representatives should take on Big Tech as uniquely deleterious to a healthy body politic and invest in a diversity of tactics to meet the moment. The aggregate effect of these measures should be far more scrutiny, pressure, and oversight over Big Tech companies.
A comprehensive agenda to end Big Tech’s undue influence over Americans’ daily lives and subversion of their rights is necessary. Measures should confront legitimate anti-competitive behavior by these global oligopolies by enforcing antitrust laws and reforming them where necessary. Lawmakers must also ensure that the government does not continue to use tech companies as their agents to chill speech. The deployment of Big Tech’s ad-tech models — the heart of what allows these companies to manipulate and exploit the data of Americans — merits particular congressional scrutiny.
Additionally, Big Tech executives should be held civilly liable for legitimate instances of fraud and breach of contract, just as GoFundMe’s decision to refund the Freedom Convoy donations instead of dispensing them to charities of their choice was likely influenced by threats of a fraud investigation.
Transparency in content moderation practices, algorithmic impacts, and data use should be non-negotiable for these companies. Americans have a right to know how their data is collected, stored, and shared in plain English. Data privacy and a national data protection framework are also critical to righting Big Tech’s wrongs.
In tandem, Americans should be given new ways to fight back when their rights are infringed upon, as well as obtain prompt and meaningful recourse from Big Tech companies. All companies and tech founders should institute expanded user control mechanisms and design privacy-preserving technologies from the outset in their products.
And finally, these tech companies should no longer be permitted to work directly with our adversaries such as the Chinese Communist Party.
Sovereign citizens of the United States do not exist solely to serve the economy or maximize gross domestic product. Despite their success in the stock market, Big Tech companies are actively eroding citizens’ ability to maintain a self-governing republic. Absent drastic measures to arrest the progress of this march toward totalitarianism with a tech face, we risk the welfare of a nation. It must end here.
Kara Frederick is a Research Fellow in the Center for Technology Policy at The Heritage Foundation. Her research focuses on Big Tech and emerging technology policy. She helped create and lead Facebook’s Global Security Counterterrorism Analysis Program and was the team lead for Facebook Headquarters’ Regional Intelligence Team. Prior to Facebook, she was a Senior Intelligence Analyst for a U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command and spent six years as a counterterrorism analyst at the Department of Defense.
It was this time last year Silicon Valley rolled out a long-anticipated purge of political dissidents from the 21st-century digital public square, starting all the way at the top with President Donald Trump. In the aftermath of a two-hour riot at the Capitol, the outgoing president became the most canceled man in America. The dynamic later flipped, making him uncancellable as a consequence of social media giants’ dramatic overreach.
Within 48 hours last year, Trump was stripped from Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter.Shopify pulled the president’s online stores from its platform and YouTube escalated its enforcement against claims of voter fraud.
Then came a crackdown on Republican supporters. TikTok blocked the hashtag “patriotparty.” Reddit banned the massive r/DonaldTrump subreddit page, and tech giants Apple, Google, and Amazon colluded to make Parler, the free speech alternative to Twitter, a relic of the past. It’s only a matter of time before they make same example out of Gettr, another social media platform gaining traction.
On Sunday, Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was permanently suspended from Twitter. Her crime? Sharing statistics from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) maintained by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). According to the New York Times, Greene published a chart from the CDC claiming the data showed “extremely high amounts of COVID vaccine deaths.”
The post earned Greene a fifth and final strike under Twitter’s policy against “misinformation,” which provokes permanent suspension. Greene was given her third strike in July when she claimed the novel Wuhan coronavirus was not dangerous for individuals under 65 and at a healthy weight. Greene’s official Twitter account remains online with nearly 400,000 followers.
Shortly after Greene was kicked from Twitter, the Georgia congresswoman was slapped with a 24-hour suspension on Facebook for a similar alleged violation of the platform’s community standards, i.e., permitted viewpoints. Greene revealed the suspension in a Telegram post Monday morning.
“A post violated our policies and we have removed it; but removing her account for this violation is beyond the scope of our policies,” a spokesperson for Meta, formerly Facebook, told the Wall Street Journal.
Greene, a sitting member of Congress, is not the only one to suffer immediate de-platforming to start off the new year. Dr. Robert Malone, a pioneer in mRNA technology, was also kicked off Twitter for unclear reasons just before his appearance on the “Joe Rogan Podcast.”
A viral clip from the podcast outlining the presence of “mass formation psychosis” gripping the western world over coronavirus hysteria then became the subject of censorship on Google-owned YouTube.
Tucker Carlson Calling Out Big Tech For Censoring Dr. Robert Malone & Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene Will Be On Tucker's Show Tomorrow Night pic.twitter.com/rnZWQGHnxw
Just as last year introduced a radical escalation of censorship, this year promises to be no different. Trump was at least an outgoing elected official when he was removed from nearly all major online platforms last year, with less than 20 days left in office. Greene is only halfway through her first term with no plans to retire.
The censorship won’t stop. The ideological forces behind it have benefitted too much. It helped land their preferred presidential candidate in the White House. It kept millions of Americans trapped in their homes for months on end to record profits for big business. It’s enabled bad actors to manipulate the public discussion and brand outcasts out of those who fail to follow the predetermined narrative, to detrimental consequences.
There’s another election just 10 months away, and therefore a lot more to censor.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
If you need evidence that Big Tech firms are starting to worry about the growing movement to diffuse their immense market power, look no further than their newest scare tactic: using China as an excuse to avoid antitrust scrutiny.
Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and the nonprofit proxies they pay to defend them have put a lot of effort into trying to convince America that subjecting Big Tech to more stringent antitrust enforcement or regulation would have dire consequences. They’ve warned that innovation would suffer, but that rings hollow when so many of the new innovative companies are already being bought up (and then often shut down) by Big Tech.
They’ve suggested that antitrust action might result in the loss of the free services we’ve come to depend upon. But how do they call their services “free” when we pay for them by giving them all of our personal data, which they store and monetize, and when they rely on our content to make their platforms valuable in the first place?
Big Tech firms have told us we should be grateful for the superior quality of their services, which could suffer if they were broken up. But then again, one could argue that Google Search was better before it was filled with ads.
Having failed with each of those claims, Big Tech has turned to a new bogeyman: China. Antitrust enforcement actions against Big Tech—or legislation aimed at restoring and protecting competition in Big Tech markets—would risk crippling America’s ability to combat the growing threat from Communist China, or so the line goes. The cynicism would be offensive if the argument weren’t so laughable.
It’s not just lobbyists bringing these arguments to my office and others on Capitol Hill. Earlier this summer, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in an interview, “These gross proposals like breaking them up and so forth, it’s not going to be helpful because it’s going to set us back against China.”
Last month, the National Security Institute began a series “examining the national security implications of antitrust challenges at home and abroad.” The first panel featured Big Tech defenders suggesting the antitrust laws were written for late-19th-century monopolists and are too outdated to deal with Big Tech, and that Big Tech is a driver for research that is essential to national security. Antitrust scrutiny, they implied, might hinder the companies’ ability to compete with China, who won’t be imposing the same restraints on their own companies.
Like every other excuse Big Tech has made, this too rings hollow and we should flatly reject it. That doesn’t mean the antitrust laws should be enforced in the absence of actual anticompetitive harm. Nor does it mean that we should radically alter our antitrust laws to embrace a “big is bad” philosophy. But the idea that Big Tech should be treated with kid gloves makes no sense. The fact is, American ingenuity is strong enough to compete and win on the merits without coddling or amnesty from our antitrust laws.
Competition, and the innovation and disruption that facilitate it, are what made these companies American success stories. That same competition, innovation, and disruption are what will keep them at their best or make way for the next great American success story. You see, competition in Big Tech doesn’t threaten American, it threatens the monopolists—and that makes America stronger.
Insulating American companies from competition out of a fear of foreign competitors will do the opposite of what Big Tech claims to want: we will be stuck with stagnant monopolists too complacent either to benefit American consumers or to protect us from foreign threats.
In fact, it is Big Tech companies themselves that pose the greatest threat when it comes to China. They not only can’t protect us from foreign threats, but in some cases actively cooperate with them.
These are the benevolent corporate heroes who are going to save us from the Chinese threat? Give me a break.
Far from saving us, it seems like the habits of their new Chinese friends are rubbing off on our Big Tech big brothers. In a way, Silicon Valley is helping America keep up with China: now we too have censored speech on the internet, constant surveillance, and tightly controlled marketplaces.
Instead of embracing the very crony capitalism that has been so destructive to American prosperity in the past, American firms should spend more energy competing on the merits for Americans’ business, and less time cozying up to Chinese bureaucrats. The free market should pick winners and losers, not Communist apparatchiks.
This whole episode leads me to only one conclusion: insisting that antitrust enforcers pull their punches or risk impairing our ability to face the threats from China is nothing short of corporate extortion, a protection racket at a global scale. What we need is more competition, and less protectionism. The only way we will defeat the economic threat of communist China is by empowering American businesses to challenge and disrupt the would-be Chinese collaborators that make up Big Tech.
The hypocrisy is glaring: Big Tech wants to assist Communist China in exchange for access to its economy, while pointing to the Chinese threat as an excuse for anticompetitive and monopolistic conduct in the United States. Americans deserve better, and we should refuse to entertain this disingenuous and insulting excuse.
Trump initiates a class-action lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter, and Google for censorship against conservatives.
Political cartoon by A.F. Branco
A.F. Branco coffee table book “Keep America Laughing (at the left)” ORDER HERE
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
After the terrifying ransack of the U.S. capitol Wednesday during a Donald Trump “stop the steal” rally, big tech companies are joining leftist elites in the media and government in their effort to squash the Trump movement once and for all. Seizing on the backlash from the riot, they have seamlessly banned President Trump from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
What happened at the capitol was an embarrassment for our country. Now, the hypocritical outcries from Democrats, who proudly condoned left-wing Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters as they terrorized American cities all summer, are ushering in a great reckoning.
The Jan. 6 demonstrators, the vast majority of whom were peaceful, were there to protest legitimate claims of election irregularities and voter fraud. But Google-owned YouTube doesn’t want you to know that. They announced Thursday that they will ban all videos about voter fraud in the 2020 election.
The one free speech haven, Parler, Apple is keying up to ban from its app store and bar from iOS devices, claiming content on the website contributed to the capitol unrest. Google has already jumped the gun, banning Parler yesterday.
Every corner of the Trump movement is being publicly purged from the internet. Thursday, Shopify stripped all online stores for President Trump, including the Trump Organization and Trump’s affiliated campaign account.
Anyone who has supported the president is in for it, as well. Rick Klein, the political director at ABC News, in a now-deleted tweet said that getting rid of Trump is “the easy part.” The more difficult task will be “cleansing the movement he commands.” Democrats have already created a “Trump Accountability Project,” an enemies list to ban, cancel, or fire anyone who staffed, donated to, endorsed, or supported President Trump and his administration.
Trump subverted the elites who run our country. He took on big pharma and China. He negotiated, renegotiated, and destroyed trade deals in his mission to put America and American workers first. He went to war with critical race theory institutionalized in our schools and in government.
He stood for things that those who run our biggest corporations and hold our highest government positions detest. For virtually his entire presidency, they tried everything to delegitimize his administration, beginning with the now-debunked Russiagate. Trump showed their corruption, and now he will pay.
The man, the administration, and his supporters will likely go down in history books as delusional and dangerous. Why? Because the left has a monopoly on power, so they can control what people see and therefore think.
As the left’s arbiters of “truth,” big tech has been banning users they don’t agree with and suppressing stories like The New York Post’s blockbuster investigation into Hunter Biden‘s laptop and sketchy deals with foreign governments and companies with ties to the Communist Chinese government. With the help of their partisan “independent fact checkers,” big tech and the media made sure average Americans never knew about this before they went to the polls.
Following the riot among Trump supporters in the capitol, Facebook removed President Trump’s video calling for peace and rule of law, claiming it instigated violence. Then Facebook de-platformed him. Trump’s speech didn’t fit the narrative that he was a pro-violence, lawlessness insurrectionist.
This disturbing reality we live in, where one political party now has the power to control the narrative in all aspects of our lives — school, work, social media, and government — might make us feel eerie echoes of living under Chinese Communist Party influence instead of in the United States of America.
Perhaps what’s most troubling, and something that we might not have even considered in the chaos of the last few days, is the long-term impact this will have on American children. Generation Z or Zoomers, aged 13 to 21, may be one of the first generations that is more influenced by what they see and read on social media and the internet than what they hear at the dinner table from mom and dad.
A Business Insider’s poll found that 59 percent of Zoomers listed social media as their top news source. While technology used to serve as a way to make information accessible, a way to have the world at your fingertips with just a quick search, it has become something much different. It is teaching the youngest and most impressionable among us that suppression is normal and personal censorship is an important survival mechanism.
Children are being taught to watch what they say and think, lest they be labeled a racist, white supremacist, homophobe, or xenophobe. Indeed, making a pro-Trump TikTok video can get your college admission rescinded and subject you to intense personal harassment. A three-second insensitive or politically incorrect Snapchat video from 2016 can get you featured in a New York Times article and your college admission rescinded, and subject you to bitter bullying.
For young people today, it’s becoming normal to see political leaders in our country deemed “dangerous” to be ousted from public platforms and ostracized from society. They watch their parents self-censor at work, fearful of backlash from employees or coworkers that could get them fired.
Americans used to support the right of people to hold and express opinions others disagree with. Yet the newest generation believes feelings are more valuable than freedom. Study after study finds that younger people are more supportive of limiting speech than are older generations.
A recent survey found that an overwhelming majority of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison think the government should be able to punish “hate speech.” Of course, “hate speech” is simply the left’s ambiguous term for anything veering from the leftist orthodoxy on issues such as abortion, sex, race, and immigration.
Silicon Valley oligarchs have an agenda. They aren’t platforms, they are publishers, which should nullify the privileges they enjoy under Section 230. Will the Democrats who are now running our government do anything to stop big tech tyranny? Of course not.
This problem is not going away. America’s ethos of free speech and expression is going extinct at the hands of big tech and the leftists controlling media and government.
The U.S. Capitol riots are over, thanks to law enforcement. However, the censorship that followed has created a dangerous precedent.
For young people, their “normal” is beginning to feel increasingly like it’s heading towards life in China. It’s less free and tolerant than the America their parents grew up in. Imagine how much worse things will be when today’s youths are running the country.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Evita Duffy is an intern at The Federalist and a junior at the University of Chicago, where she studies American History. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, & her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has appointed Richard Stengel, who advocates restrictions on free speech, to a key media post in his presidential transition team.
Richard Stengel is the Biden transition “Team Lead” for the US Agency for Global Media, the US government media empire that includes Voice of America, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Stengel, an Obama administration alumnus, wrote last year in a Washington Post op-ed that US freedom of speech was too unfettered and that changes must be considered.
In the Postop-ed, “Why America needs a hate speech law,” Stengel argued:
[A]s a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier.
…
All speech is not equal. And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails. I’m all for protecting “thought that we hate,” but not speech that incites hate.
As Breitbart News noted in May, Stengel, an MSNBC analyst, also defended restrictions on speech about the coronavirus:
The First Amendment doesn’t protect false speech about a virus or false speech that endangers the health of your users. And by the way, Facebook and Twitter have been taking things down, but they need to be even more vigilant about it, and Google needs to be even more vigilant about what they prioritize in their search results.
Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley warned about Stengel’s appointment in a column Tuesday: “[I]t would be difficult to select a more anti-free speech figure to address government media policy, one has to assume that Biden will continue the onslaught against this core freedom as president.”
He noted that Biden himself had publicly advocated restrictions on speech during the campaign: “Biden called for greater speech controls on the Internet and denounced Twitter for allowing others to speak freely.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Google, the world’s most powerful technology company, is actively interfering in the coming election by burying links to Breitbart News in its search results.
In July, Breitbart News published data showing that Breitbart’s Google search visibility is down 99 percent compared to the same period in 2016. RealClearPolitics later published data corroborating this, and showing that the same silent expulsion from Google search results has happened to a variety of other conservative news websites as well.
It appears that Breitbart News links are being hidden on Google searches even when users search for the exact string of words in an original Breitbart headline. When links to Breitbart stories do appear, it is often below obscure websites that plagiarize Breitbart’s content.
Search ranking is critical for web traffic from Google. The search analytics industry has found that the top three search results on Google drive over 70 percent of clicks.
In a new video, Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow reveals in additional detail the depth of Google’s suppression of Breitbart’s reporting.
“Breitbart News is, according to Amazon-owned Alexa.com, one of the top five news publishers in the United States, yet if you search — verbatim — Breitbart headlines in Google, you won’t necessarily get any Breitbart results at all,” Marlow said.
The video goes on to demonstrate Google’s suppression of Breitbart News.
In one example, the viral Breitbart News story, “Maskless Nancy Pelosi Goes to San Francisco Hair Salon Despite Coronavirus Restrictions,” fails to return any links to the site on Google. Instead, Google displays a list of obscure websites, some of which have plagiarized Breitbart’s article, posting the article and headline in full.
Google only displays one link that might lead users to Breitbart’s story, a link to a post about the article on thedonald.win, an independent online forum set up by exiles from r/the_Donald, the Reddit hub of Trump supporters that was blacklisted by the leftist administrators of Reddit earlier this year.
The same experiment was repeated with various other headlines, which again yield links to obscure websites plagiarizing the articles. In one such case, an article about Candace Owens, a Breitbart link eventually shows up on Google, as the seventh result in a search for the precise wording of the headline.
However, demoting a website to the seventh result in a search for its own headline is still overwhelming suppression. According to the same search analytics cited above, the seventh result on Google drives just four percent of clicks, on average.
But in another case — an exclusive interview with President Trump — Breitbart links are nowhere to be found, meaning that users of Google can’t find an exclusive interview given by the president. The exact headline is: “Exclusive – President Trump: ‘Last Thing I’m Thinking About’ After Coronavirus Is a Phase Two China Deal.“
Breitbart News invites readers to experiment with Google’s suppression of headlines. Some topics are severely censored and others appear as normal. The experiment can be repeated on competing search engines such as duckduckgo.com with dramatically different results.
A Google engineer admits that the tech monopoly is favoring Democrats and seeking to harm President Donald Trump’s electoral prospects in a new sting video released by Project Veritas on Monday.
Ritesh Lakhar, a Technical Program Manager for the California search engine company, admits that Google is seeking to “play God” by controlling the free flow of political information through its platforms. He openly admits that Google is clamping down on conservative content that is amenable to the electoral prospects of Donald Trump, while seeking to promote Joe Biden. It’s no mere coincidence that the first search results for ‘Donald Trump’ come back with negative results, according to Lakhar.
“If Trump says something… Misinformation, you’re going to delete that because it’s illegal under whatever pretext. And if a Democratic leader says that, then you’re gonna leave it like that.”
“I disagree with the corporations playing God and taking away freedom of speech on both sides, basically.”
Lakhar goes on to speak of his moral reservations to engaging in Google’s job outsourcing programs, sending American jobs to China.
“I can’t keep doing this. Go and teach Chinese people how to do American jobs and come back and get survived on the way. Morally and ethically I disagree… I feel suffocated at Google.”
Tech companies such as Twitter, Google and Facebook have implemented a level of political censorship never before seen in the history of the United States in the runup to the 2020 presidential election. It’s time for a regulatory standard that treats these monopolies as utilities, and ensures access to the digital public square for all.
Chick-fil-A will reportedly stop donating money to charities including the Salvation Army and Fellowship of Christian Athletes following pressure from LGBT groups.
The company announced Monday that it is refocusing its charitable foundation to a smaller number of charities, focusing exclusively on education, homelessness, and hunger.
“Our goal is to donate to the most effective organizations in the areas of education, homelessness and hunger. No organization will be excluded from future consideration – faith based or non-faith based,” Tim Tassopoulos, president and COO of Chick-fil-A, said in a statement.
Chick-fil-A’s tax records shows that it gave to several Christian schools and charitable groups in 2018. None of those groups appears in a list of Chick-fil-A’s 2019 charitable giving that the company made available for preview.
Tassopoulos told the news site Bisnews on Monday that Chick-fil-A wants to be “clear about who we are” as it enters new markets.
“There’s no question we know that, as we go into new markets, we need to be clear about who we are,” he told the site. “There are lots of articles and newscasts about Chick-fil-A, and we thought we needed to be clear about our message.”
As a result, the company will no longer give money to organizations including the Salvation Army, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and the Paul Anderson Youth Home.
Those charities have caused LGBT activists to target Chick-fil-A due to those organizations’ stances on homosexuality.
In 2018, Chick-fil-A gave $115,000 to the Salvation Army for the Angel Tree program, which provided gifts for 11,000 children during the holiday season. The fast-food chain also gave $1.65 million to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes to provide underserved youth with week-long summer sports camps at historically black colleges and universities (HCBU).
In August, progressive Silicon Valley giant followed Chick-fil-A’s lead, giving $1.5 million to the Salvation Army to fight homelessness.
Chick-fil-A has faced mounting criticism from LGBT groups as it seeks to expand its corporate footprint. The Atlanta-based company recently announced the closure of its first restaurant in Great Britain just a week after it opened due to protests from LGBT activists. Airports in Buffalo, New York, and San Antonio, Texas, have banned Chick-fil-A restaurants in the face of similar pressure.
Pedestrians wearing face masks walk on a footbridge in heavy smog in Handan city, north China’s Hebei province, 2 January 2017. Heavy smog in northern China caused hundreds of flights to be canceled and highways to shut on Sunday (1 January 2017), disrupting the first day of the New Year … Imaginechina via AP Images
Am I just seeing things? Or are all the “climate crisis solutions” proposed by the Democrats designed to cause maximum pain to ordinary people, and almost none to wealthy elites? Progressives almost seem to take joy in inconveniencing the masses for no reason. Take the plastic straw ban, for example. Even National Geographic — hardly an anti-environmentalist publication —admits that plastic straws comprise just 0.025 percent of the plastic in the oceans.
If Democrats really believe that climate change is an existential threat to humanity, why are they proposing draconian and pointless curbs on the behavior of ordinary Americans? Why aren’t they going after multinationals that continue to do business with the world’s biggest polluter, without demanding any environmental commitments from them (and hey, maybe some human rights commitments too?).
You’d think Bernie, at least, would get this. But his big idea is to make everyone have fewer babies. Instead of tackling China, he’s proposing a distinctly Chinese policy. Just because he didn’t say “one-child policy” doesn’t mean the similarity isn’t there.
The real reason Democrats won’t go after China is that they are now the party of global elites, and global elites are constantly salivating about the profits that can be made from China’s market of 1.4 billion people. They look to Europe and America and see a dwindling middle class with a declining population. There’s no money in that, not long-term anyway. Maybe the problem could be fixed with pro-natal policies like Hungary’s, but why bother? It’s far easier to simply go overseas, to a country that does have a booming population and rising middle class.
That’s the same reason, by the way, that global elites are so vociferously opposed to President Donald Trump and his agenda. Trade restrictions on China, to protect American jobs? An outrage! The elites can’t make money off American jobs, you see. They’re just so much more expensive than Chinese jobs!
Ask yourself, why is big tech so determined to work with China, despite the political pitfalls? Did Google, which once boasted the hipster motto “don’t be evil,” really think they’d suffer no blowback for developing a censored search engine designed to appease Chinese state censors? Or that working with the Chinese military but not the American one would somehow escape notice? Of course not — but for all its professed “values,” there’s no way a profit-seeking multinational like Google can resist the temptation of a 1.4 billion-person market.
As for the impact on the environment, the elites don’t really care, no matter how many times they jet to various climate change summits around the globe. It’s not that they don’t believe in a looming environmental catastrophe, they just believe they can escape it. “Doomsday capitalism” is how the left-wing magazine CounterPunch describes the trend of billionaires investing in post-apocalypse getaways.
There’s a lot of misinformation out there about how conservatives see the climate. While they’re skeptical of man-made climate change, natural climate change is a different matter. And even if they don’t think climate change is a problem, that doesn’t mean that the massive amounts of pollution generated by the likes of China is Okay. Preserving the natural environment means preserving our heritage — a conservative goal.
But plastic straw bans, meat bans, and one-child policies won’t solve the problem. They simply cause unnecessary pain to ordinary people. Meanwhile, the Chinese dirty coal furnaces keep on burning.
Are you a corporate or Big Tech insider who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
Billionaire investor, Facebook board member, and Trump supporter Peter Thiel recently called on the FBI and CIA to investigate Google for the “seemingly treasonous” act of aiding the Chinese military.
Axios reports that Peter Thiel, the billionaire Silicon Valley investor, Facebook board member, and longtime supporter of President Donald Trump, called on the FBI and CIA to investigate Google for allegedly aiding the Chinese military during his speech at the recent National Conservatism Conference. During the speech, Thiel noted “three questions that should be asked” by the federal government of tech giant Google.
Number one, how many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for AI?
Number two, does Google’s senior management consider itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated by Chinese intelligence?
Number three, is it because they consider themselves to be so thoroughly infiltrated that they have engaged in the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military… because they are making the sort of bad, short-term rationalistic [decision] that if the technology doesn’t go out the front door, it gets stolen out the backdoor anyway?
Thiel added that these questions “need to be asked by the FBI, by the CIA, and I’m not sure quite how to put this, I would like them to be asked in a not excessively gentle manner.”Thiel has been a long time supporter of Artificial Intelligence, joining Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman in pledging to commit a total of $1 billion to the non-profit group OpenAI in 2015.
Google has come under fire previously for its relationship with China, particularly the development of a censored Chinese search engine codenamed Project Dragonfly. During a speech before the Hudson Institute in 2018, Vice President Mike Pence criticized what he believes is China’s theft of U.S. technology, urging Google to take action on the issue. Pence said during the speech that other business leaders are hesitant to enter the Chinese market “if it means turning over their intellectual property or abetting Beijing’s oppression.”
Pence called on Google to listen to these other leaders and that “more must follow suit.” He also called on Google to end the development of its censored Chinese search engine project known as Dragonfly: “For example, Google should immediately end development of the ‘Dragonfly’ app that will strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers,”said Pence.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Chinese policy expert Dr. Michael Pillsbury noted that eight years ago, Google co-founder Sergey Brin received praise for refusing to do business with the Chinese government, a decision which now appears to have been completely reversed. “Fast forward eight years and Google has reversed itself, but done so secretly.”
Recently, e-commerce giant Amazon faced pressure from employees to cut ties with Peter Thiel’s Palantir, a data mining firm that is employed by ICE in its efforts to carry out deportations. Amazon employees are now circulating a letter from June 2018 in which they called for executives to ban Palantir from Amazon Web Services; Palantir’s software utilizes Amazon’s cloud computing unit.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolanor email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
While the media tried to weave a sleazy fake-news Trump connection to Epstein they totally play down the Bill Clinton/Epstein meetings and plane rides over the years.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, the great El Rushbo, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
Social media giants appear to have their thumbs on the scale of Right vs Left freedom of speech in hopes of tilting the balance in the Democrats favor this 2020 election.
Which Democrat Presidential Hopeful Has The Wildest Campaign Promise So Far?
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, the great El Rushbo, and has had his toons tweeted by President Trump.
No one recalls Shepard Smith of Fox News shedding a single tear over illegal immigrants dying during the Obama Administration, but a different story with Trump in office.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been seen all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, the great El Rushbo, and most recently President Trump.
Have these guys never heard of the Streisand Effect? Yeah, blacklist the whistleblower video — surely THAT will prove your innocence!
Project Veritas strikes again! This time, it’s a GOOGLE insider telling us what’s going on behind the curtain. And they’ve even got a bigwig spilling the beans in her own words. But don’t worry — they can silence YouTube, but they can’t stop a private platform they have no control over.
And it’s just a ‘coincidence’ that Google Executives suddenly shut down their social media accounts, right?
NEW: Google executive Jen Gennai @gennai_jen, who said Congress “can pressure us but we’re not changing,” has deleted her Twitter account. Her Instagram is private, too; it wasn’t before. Google engineer @GauravGite3 has deleted his Facebook. pic.twitter.com/24Qx78rpaZ
Where are CNN and their great ‘defenders of free speech’? Can Jim Acosta not tear himself away from the tens of fans he is ‘thronged’ by to rush to the defense of the First Amendment?
Oh, this story is about friends and political allies of the Democrats? Never mind. They’re not interested.
YouTube has axed the video — but you can see all 25 minutes of it here:
BREAKING: YOUTUBE/GOOGLE HAS REMOVED OUR GOOGLE INVESTIGATION as it was approaching 50K likes and a million views. IMPORTANT: Please download it on @bitchute and repost it. https://t.co/chDsGF0QCk
But with all their bleating about how our elections are endangered by a few Russian Facebook posts, and a Macedonian Meme farmer (or whatever the hell it was) pumping out bogus content, you’d think a multi-billion conglomerate that is literally the gatekeeper for most of our online interactions deliberately picking winners and losers, with a stated intent of preventing a repeat of the ‘Trump Situation’ of 2016.
Project Veritas has released a new report on Google which includes undercover video of a Senior Google Executive, leaked documents, and testimony from a Google insider. The report appears to show Google’s plans to affect the outcome of the 2020 elections and “prevent” the next “Trump situation.”
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.”
Said Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe:
“This is the third tech insider who has bravely stepped forward to expose the secrets of Silicon Valley. These new documents, supported by undercover video, raise questions of Google’s neutrality and the role they see themselves fulfilling in the 2020 elections.”
Source: American Spectator
Do they think themselves above the law?
Apparently so…
So with all those investigations into interference by Russians in the 2016 election — will there be a congressional investigation into Google? In fact, Google executive Gennai already has an answer on what happens when Congress requests Google execs to show up for a hearing:
“We got called in front of Congress multiple times, so we’ve not shown up because we know that they’re just going to attack us. We’re not going to change our, we’re not going to change our mind. There’s no use sitting there being attacked over something we know we’re not going to change. They can pressure us but we’re not changing. But we also have to be aware of what they’re doing and what they’re accusing us of.”
Source: American Spectator
We’ve long advocated that Tech Giants who play favorites should pay the price of accountability that every other Publisher with editorial control plays: that they become subject to the same laws and potential legal action that print and television media are constrained by.
What’s more, there is a pretty strong case for some illegal ‘in kind donations’that Google has been providing one party to the exclusion of others.
Could it get worse? Of course it could.
Leaked doc shows member of Google “transparency & ethics” group calling conservative commentators Dennis Prager, Jordan Peterson & Ben Shapiro “Nazis”.
Calls for algorithmically censoring them on YouTube.
Not a good look calling Jews ‘Nazis’, there Google.
Not that any of this should really surprise us. They’ve been pretty open about their desire to force their own brand of politics down America’s collective throat, regardless of what individual voters in different parts of the country may personally want.
So… what is there to be done if you’re getting that ‘torch and pitchfork’ urge when you read about a Conglomerate deciding that the democratic process isn’t a reliable way of getting the result THEY know is best for us?
Well, after contacting your elected officials and demanding some action, there’s an event coming up addressing exactly that topic:
YouTube unveils their new paid subscription service at the YouTube Space LA in Playa Del Rey, Los Angeles, California, United States October 21, 2015. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
YouTube is getting help from the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center in its effort to identify extremist content.
YouTube’s “Trusted Flaggers” police the platform for so-called hate speech to terror-related content.
The SPLC has labeled pedestrian conservative groups as hate groups in the past.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is assisting YouTube in policing content on their platform, The Daily Caller has learned. The left-wing nonprofit — which has more recently come under fire for labeling legitimate conservative organizations as “hate groups” — is one of the more than 100 nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and government agencies in YouTube’s “Trusted Flaggers” program, a source with knowledge of the arrangement told TheDC.
The SPLC and other program members help police YouTube for extremist content, ranging from so-called hate speech to terrorist recruiting videos. All of the groups in the program have confidentiality agreements, a spokesperson for Google, YouTube’s parent company, previously told TheDC. A handful of YouTube’s “Trusted Flaggers,” including the Anti-Defamation League and No Hate Speech — a European organization focused on combatting intolerance — have gone public with their participation in the program. The vast majority of the groups in the program have remained hidden behind their confidentiality agreements.
The SPLC’s close involvement in policing content on YouTube is likely to cause consternation among conservatives who worry that they may not be treated fairly. The left-wing group has consistently labeled pedestrian conservative organizations as “hate groups” and has been directly tied to violence against conservatives in the past.Floyd Lee Corkins, who opened fire at the Family Research Center in 2012, said he chose the FRC for his act of violence because the SPLC listed them as a “hate group.”
It’s unclear when the SPLC joined YouTube’s “Trusted Flaggers”program. The program goes back to 2012 but exploded in size in recent years amid a Google push to increase regulation of the content on its platforms, which followed pressure from advertisers. Fifty of the 113 program members joined in 2017 as YouTube stepped up its content policing, YouTube public policy director Juniper Downs told a Senate committee in January.
Downs said the third-party groups work closely with YouTube’s employees to crack down on extremist content in two ways, both of which a Google spokesperson previously confirmed to TheDC.
First, the flaggers are equipped with digital tools allowing them to mass flag content for review by YouTube personnel. Second, the partner groups act as guides to YouTube’s content monitors and engineers designing the algorithms policing the video platform but may lack the expertise needed to tackle a given subject.
“We work with over 100 organizations as part of our Trusted Flagger program and we value the expertise these organizations bring to flagging content for review. All trusted flaggers attend a YouTube training to learn about our policies and enforcement processes. Videos flagged by trusted flaggers are reviewed by YouTube content moderators according to YouTube’s Community Guidelines. Content flagged by trusted flaggers is not automatically removed or subject to any differential policies than content flagged from other users,” said a YouTube spokesperson, who would not specifically comment on the SPLC’s participation in the program.
The SPLC did not return multiple voicemails and emails seeking comment.
The overwhelming majority of the content policing on Google and YouTube is carried out by algorithms. The algorithms make for an easy rebuttal against charges of political bias: it’s not us, it’s the algorithm. But actual people with actual biases write, test and monitor the algorithms.
As noted above, Google’s anonymous outside partners (such as the SPLC) work closely with the internal experts designing the algorithms.This close collaboration has upsides, Google’s representatives have said, such as in combatting terrorist propaganda on the platform.
But it also provides little transparency, forcing users to take Google’s word that they’re being treated fairly.
The SPLC has faced criticism for its cavalier definitions of “hate group” and “extremist.” The organization stoked controversy in 2015 by labeling Dr. Ben Carson, now the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), an anti-gay “extremist.” After a backlash, the SPLC reversed its ruling and apologized to Carson.
The organization faced a similarly intense backlash in 2016 for labeling Maajid Nawaz, a respected counter-extremism activist, an “anti-Muslim extremist.”
The Washington Examiner’s Emily Jashinsky noted last year that “the SPLC’s claim to objectivity is nothing less than fraudulent, a reality that informed observers of its practices from both the Left and Right accept.”
“The routine of debunking their supposedly objective classifications occurs like clockwork each time a major outlet makes the mistake of turning to them when reporting on the many conservative thinkers and nonprofits the group absurdly designates as hateful.”
The SPLC has faced tough criticisms not just from conservatives but from the mainstream press as well.
“At a time when the line between ‘hate group’ and mainstream politics is getting thinner and the need for productive civil discourse is growing more serious, fanning liberal fears, while a great opportunity for the SPLC, might be a problem for the nation,” Politico Magazine’s Ben Schreckinger wrote last year.
Bloomberg columnist Megan McArdle similarly noted last year that the SPLC commonly lumps in principled conservatives alongside actual racists and extremists and warned of the possibility that tech companies could rely on the SPLC’s misleading definitions.
“Given the increasing tendency of powerful tech companies to flex their muscle against hate groups,” she wrote, “we may see more and more institutions unwittingly turned into critics or censors, not just of Nazi propaganda, but also of fairly mainstream ideas.”
Google, the most powerful search engine in the world, is now displaying fact checks for conservative publications in its results. No prominent liberal site receives the same treatment. And not only is Google’s fact-checking highly partisan — perhaps reflecting the sentiments of its leaders — it is also blatantly wrong, asserting sites made “claims” they demonstrably never made.
When searching for a media outlet that leans right, like The Daily Caller (TheDC), Google gives users details on the sidebar, including what topics the site typically writes about, as well as a section titled “Reviewed Claims.”
Vox, and other left-wing outlets and blogs like Gizmodo, are not given the same fact-check treatment. When searching their names, a “Topics they write about”section appears, but there are no “Reviewed Claims.”
In fact, a review of mainstream outlets, as well as other outlets associated with liberal and conservative audiences, shows that only conservative sites feature the highly misleading, subjective analysis. Several conservative-leaning outlets like TheDC are “vetted,” while equally partisan sites like Vox, ThinkProgress, Slate, The Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Salon, Vice and Mother Jones are spared.
Occupy Democrats is apparently the only popular content provider from that end of the political spectrum with a fact-checking section.
Big name publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times are even given a column showcasing all of the awards they have earned over the years.
The Robert Mueller fact check (pictured above) is a case in point for Google’s new feature.
Ostensibly trying to sum up the crux of the post, the third-party “fact-checking”organization says the “claim” in a DC article that special Counsel Robert Mueller is hiring people that “are all Hillary Clinton supporters” is misleading, if not false.
The problem is that TheDC’s article makes no such claim. Their cited language doesn’t even appear in the article. Worse yet, there was no language trying to make it seem that the investigation into the Trump administration and Russia is entirely comprised of Clinton donors. The story simply contained the news: Mueller hired a Hillary Clinton donor to aid the investigation into President Donald Trump.
Still, the Washington Post gave the claim, which came from Trump himself, its official “Three Pinocchios” rating. The method applies to several other checks. Claims concocted or adulterated by someone outside the TheDC are attributed to TheDC, in what appears to be a feature that only applies to conservative sites.
Examples of such misattribution and misrepresentation are aplenty.
For instance, using Snopes.com, an organization withhighlydubious fact-checking capabilities, Google’s platform shows an article by TheDC to have a so-called “mixture” of truth.
The “claim” made, according to Snopes.com and Google, is “a transgender woman raped a young girl in a women’s bathroom because bills were passed…” A quick read of the news piece shows that there was no mention of a bill or any form of legislation. The story was merely a straightforward reporting of a disturbing incident originally reported on by a local outlet.
And like Snopes, another one of Google’s fact-checking partners, Climate Feedback, is not usually regarded as objective.
Snopes and Google also decided to “fact-check” an obviously tongue-in-cheek article in which a writer for TheDC pokes fun at a professor saying the solar eclipse in 2017 was naturally racist.
Even Vox pointed out the absurdity of the educator’s literary tirade on Mother Nature’s purported racial prejudice, and the damage it might have done to real arguments of apparent racism. While Snopes got some flak for its choice, no one seems to have noticed the absurdity of the world’s go-to search engine providing fact-checks to purposefully irreverent content, rather than hard news stories.
Google is increasingly similar to Big Brother’s Oceania in 1984 | Jeremie Lederman/ledermanstudio.com
Google is “coming after critics in academia and journalism,”according to the Washington Post, who added that the company “is forming into a government of itself.”
“Google has established a pattern of lobbying and threatening to acquire power. It has reached a dangerous point common to many monarchs: The moment where it no longer wants to allow dissent,” claimed Zephyr Teachout, an academic, activist, and former Democratic political candidate in an article for the Washington Post.
Referencing the news this week that members of the Open Markets team she was part of at the Google-funded New America Foundation think tank had been kicked out after they praised the European Union’s decision to fine Google for violating anti-trust regulations, Teachout highlighted the irony of Google’s former slogan “Don’t be evil,” adding, “It appears that Google may have lost sight of what being evil means, in the way that most monarchs do: Once you reach a pinnacle of power, you start to believe that any threats to your authority are themselves villainous and that you are entitled to shut down dissent.”
“Google is forming into a government of itself, and it seems incapable of even seeing its own overreach. We, as citizens, must respond in two ways,”proclaimed Teachout. “First, support the brave researchers and journalists who stand up to overreaching power; and second, support traditional antimonopoly laws that will allow us to have great, innovative companies — but not allow them to govern us.”
Teachout also wrote an article for the Intercept this week, where she explained, “In 2010, while I was pushing to break up big banks because they had become too powerful, I started to realize that the problem in America wasn’t just big banks, it was corporate monopolies.”
In the article, Teachout also announced she will be “the board chair of a new organization, comprised of the same team [kicked out of New America], doing the same work.”
“We will be launching in the fall, and I am helping to create a new digital campaign, Citizens Against Monopoly, to help channel the tremendous public concern that we know exists around monopoly power,”she concluded. “Google’s actions make it more important than ever that we stand up to fight monopolies. At the end of the day, this is about freedom.”
The CEOs of Apple, Google and Amazon offered praise for Donald Trump after a meeting with the president at the White House on Monday, Breitbart reported. According to The Hill, the meeting was a brainstorming session for Jared Kushner’s Office of American Innovation, which seeks in part to modernize the federal government through technology.
The session was attended by a number of tech industry CEOs — including Google’s Eric Schmidt, Apple’s Tim Cook and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — as well as roughly two dozen business experts. In the aftermath of the meeting, the three CEOs came out with praise for the president.
“I’m absolutely convinced that during your administration there is going to be a huge explosion of new opportunities because of the platforms that are getting built in our industry,”Google’s Schmidt told the president.
Schmidt said that “huge” growth due to entrepreneurship, immigration and skilled workers was “going to happen soon during your leadership.” Schmidt was far from the only one predicting growth. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos praised the administration’s emphasis on information technology for improving government and saving taxpayers money, saying that Trump’s presidency could be the “innovation administration.”
“I think you guys are already headed that way,” Bezos said. However, he said there needed to be more emphasis on artificial intelligence.
“I think it would be impossible to overstate this, is that the United States needs to — in every way at every level — be working on machine learning and artificial intelligence,”he said. “That can be used in every part of government to improve the services that government provides to citizens.”
Apple’s Tim Cook also offered support for the administration’s efforts to streamline government.
“The U.S. should have the most modern government in the world, and today it doesn’t,”Cook said. He advocated a citizen-centric focus for how the federal government works.
“The government should be focused on its citizens, and the services of the government should be measured on how pleased the citizens are with receiving its services,”Cook said.
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He added that learning how to code for computers should be “a requirement” in America’s public schools: “We have a huge deficit in the skills that we need today, vs. the skills that are there,”he said.
It’s worth pointing out that none of these individuals are on the Trump train. According to Newsweek, Bezos and Cook both openly opposed the president’s travel ban and Google filed an amicus brief in the case. Google also opposed President Trump’s reversal on the Obama administration’s guidance on transgender bathroom policy for public schools.
An administration official said that Monday’s meeting was just the start of the administration’s technology initiative.
“This is just the beginning of a multiyear process,”the official said.
“The problems we are looking at in the Office of American Innovation are not quick fixes,”they added. “These are things that are going to require years to really make significant progress on. Our systems are in some cases 10 to 20 years out of date, so we’re not going to fix that in one day. But we have to start now. And this day we believe will be a significant one in terms of generating ideas and potential solutions to some of the problems.”
Needless to say, the left wasn’t happy about the meeting. A liberal group called Tech Solidarity urged employees to force CEOs to boycott the meeting.
“This meeting doesn’t have to happen. Tech employees have the power to stop it,”the group said in a statement. “We’ve learned in the last six months that there is no clean way to do business with the Trump Administration. The President does not respect boundaries or institutions. You are either for him, or against him. That decision doesn’t belong to our CEOs; it belongs to us as an industry.”
Despite the fact that Google — a multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products — has announced it will serve as the official livestream provider during this year’s Republican convention, liberal groups and civil rights advocates have called on the technology giant to sever any connection to the event, which will be held July 18-21 in Cleveland, Ohio.
According to an article by Tony Romm, senior technology reporter for the Politico website, the company’s “mere presence at the GOP convention is sure to spark new opposition from liberal groups and civil rights advocates” due to Republican front-runner “Donald Trump’s incendiary rhetoric.”
“Google has confirmed it will play a formal role at the 2016 Republican convention — despite pressure from critics who want the tech giant to withdraw”in protest of Trump’s controversial remarks about women, immigrants and minorities,” Romm noted.
A company representative told Politico on Thursday that it will be “offering election trends, convention videos, virtual reality tools and other data to attendees and viewers,”he indicated. Google “provided similar services at the Democratic and Republican conventions in 2012,” the reporter stated, “and for both parties’ presidential debates earlier this year.”
Of course, “Google hasn’t taken a position on any of the candidates,”but Romm noted that liberal organizations “have already been pushing the company — and others, like Microsoft and Xerox — to pull out in opposition to Trump.”
The tech company’s acknowledgment “came the same day that a collection of activists — ColorOfChange, Free Press Action Fund and others — mounted a small protest outside the search giant’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.” Romm was being generous by calling the protest “small” since only about a dozen people turned out to deliver a petition with 500,000 signaatures calling on the company to withdraw from the event.
In addition, “the protesters sent a plane over the Google campus with a banner that read ‘#dumptrump’ and ran ads on Facebook with a similar message,”the reporter noted.
“We want Google to pull all of their support for a Trump-led Republican national convention,”said Mary Alice Crim, field director for the Free Press Action Fund. “We’re asking for that to be immediate, and we do hope after today’s petition delivery, [the company] will talk with us.”
On its website, the group claims: “We fight to save the free and open Internet, curb runaway media consolidation, protect press freedom and ensure diverse voices are represented in our media.”
Meanwhile, ColorOfChange states on its website that its goal is “changing the color of democracy”and to “strengthen Black America’s political voice.”
However, Romm stated:
Google declined to say if it has donated any funds or technology to the GOP convention along with taking the role of official livestream provider.
In 2012, the company made at least $350,000 in donations to the Republican convention that nominated Mitt Romney, according to Federal Election Commission records.
“Google executive Eric Schmidt, then the company’s CEO, provided similar support to the Democrats that year,” the reporter noted.
“Trump’s ascendancy in this year’s Republican campaign has put many potential corporate sponsors in a bind,”he added.
Romm then stated: “Large companies, including Google, have typically established a presence at the political conventions for marketing and influence building purposes, and they tend to support both parties’ events in the interest of parity.”
“Fearing a backlash, however, some companies are re-evaluating their plans,”the reporter continued. “Coca-Cola — which had been targeted by ColorOfChange and others — has already said it will donate far less to the GOP convention this year than it had in 2012.”
Trump’s “history of inflammatory statements threatens tech companies in particular, given the industry’s progressive home base in Silicon Valley and its efforts to promote diversity in its workforce,”he noted.
“In the past, tech giants have buckled to some liberal pressure campaigns,”Romm stated. “Google, for example, quit the American Legislative Exchange Council in 2014 after intense criticism from progressive groups.”
The groups took their action because “ALEC is a conservative organization that had drafted model legislation designed to undermine climate regulation, and activists slammed Google for backing what they called ‘climate change deniers.'”
As NewsBusters previously reported, this isn’t the first time Trump has taken heat for his remarks about women. On NBC’s Today program Thursday morning, Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie asked: “Do you even care” that 70 percent of women have a negative view of him?
“Of course I care,”Trump replied. “Nobody respects women more than I do.”
It would be interesting if conservatives demanded that Google refuse to cover the July 25-28 Democratic Party convention in Philadelphia because one of the candidates is a socialist. How long would it take for the screams of “intolerance” and “bigotry” to finally die down?
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American Family Association
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not also downright libelous. 
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What Did You Say? 
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on July 30, 2020