We’ve seen a lot of eye-opening things come from the release of the Twitter Files. Among the most concerning of the releases were those that pertained to the government and the FBI flagging people who were censored on social media. But the concerns don’t just pertain to platforms like Twitter. Investigative journalist Kanekoa has posted an eye-opening Twitter thread that pertains to Google.I won’t hit on all of it, but I will highlight some of the intriguing details in it.
THREAD🚨 #GoogleLeaks #TwitterFiles
In 2019, 950 pages of Google’s internal documents leaked, providing evidence of Google’s use of blacklists and machine learning algorithms to censor conservatives and populists.
These are the type of source documents @elonmusk should release. pic.twitter.com/rTracvjS9r
— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) January 30, 2023
Most people use Google and it has billions of searches a day, controlling most of the search traffic. Google also owns YouTube which has more than two billion users. Thus, it affects so much of what we are looking at in the day, and if they’re intervening in what we see, that’s a big problem.
But in 2019, software engineer Zach Voorhies leaked 950 pages of internal documents to the public and to the Justice Department which he claimed showed blacklists and machine learning algorithms that censored conservatives and populists. He then wrote a book in 2021 claiming there had been censorship and political manipulation.
Among the sites he said that documents showed had been blacklisted was RedState.
#16 Vorhies released one Google blacklist that flagged hundreds of conservative websites to be censored or pushed down in search rankings.
For example, Daily Caller, Western Journal, RedState, Gateway Pundit, Steven Crowder, Michelle Malkin, and Glenn Beck were censored. pic.twitter.com/jJh59Eq2C5
— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) January 30, 2023
He also leaked information showing “fringe rank classifiers” that would appear to rank things like CNN and MSNBC higher than Fox News.
#14 What were these classifiers?
Here’s a leaked document, “Fringe ranking/classifier.”
Google ranked ABC, CBS, and CNN as more “authoritative” than the “trashy” Fox News and Breitbart.
This is how Big Tech manually interjects political bias into search results and algorithms. pic.twitter.com/rb2EO5FkJy
— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) January 30, 2023
#13 YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki described how Google uses “machine learning” and “classifiers” to bury “trashy news” and promote “authoritative news.”
Machine learning is when algorithms are fed real-world information and learn to make decisions based on the patterns they find. pic.twitter.com/E28q5leaEO
— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) January 30, 2023
So who gets to decide what is “fake news” and what is advanced and what isn’t? Who decided that CNN was somehow more “authoritative” than Fox? And that’s the problem when you start to go down this path — it’s not a good one.
Yet Google officials testified before Congress that there wasn’t any blacklisting or bias going on.
There was also the cozy relationship that some like former Google head and Alphabet Chair Eric Schmidt had in helping the Clinton campaign. Now, he’s helping to fund jobs in the Biden administration.
Republicans got upset in 2022 with a study found that said Gmail flagged most GOP fundraising emails as spam while allowing most Democratic emails through.
#19 A study found that Google cost Republican candidates over $2 billion in donations since 2019 by flagging 77% of their fundraising emails as spam.
During the same time, Gmail marked less than 11% of Democrat fundraising emails as spam.https://t.co/lJ1TrIQxeN pic.twitter.com/4XJCg5wMvt
— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) January 30, 2023
Google denied any bias and claimed the finding was due to adjusting to customer preference.
So the question now, in the wake of the Twitter Files, is: What has been done regarding this? And will Congress be asking the questions that they need to about all these issues?
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