Tag Archives: google
Google Says They Will Demonetize Websites Which Report “Ukraine is Attacking its Own Citizens”
Jim Hoft
April 2, 2022
Google censored President Trump for years pushing hit pieces on the 45th President to the top of their search results. Google frequently censored top conservative websites like The Gateway Pundit and news broke that Google-YouTube censored and removed over a million videos on Covid-19.
Last August, Google demonetized The Gateway Pundit from their ad network. The Gateway Pundit is one of the top 200 websites in America today, according to Alexa ranking.
“Our goal is to help enable a free and open internet by giving publishers the ability to monetize their content. We do this by maintaining a clean and safe ad network that is part of a healthy digital advertising and publisher ecosystem,” said Google in their email to The Gateway Pundit.
Now, the far-left company warned more publishers that they will demonetize any websites that “imply victims are responsible for their own tragedy or similar instances of victim-blaming, such as claims that Ukraine is committing genocide or deliberately attacking its own citizens.”
Google also indicated that it may also demonetize for other reasons including talking about Nazi aspects of Azov Battalion.
One article titled “Winning ‘hearts’ and PR war, but Ukraine has a “Nazi” problem that NATO and USA do not talk about” published in OpIndia was demonetized.
“The article doesn’t blame the people of Ukraine or justify the war in Ukraine in any way, but it just talks about some of the uncomfortable aspects of the conflict that many other people have also been pointing out i.e. presence of neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine’s establishment. Azov Battalion is one such element.
The war in Ukraine has also brought out how the big tech and social media companies could align themselves in international conflict and act as supernational entities.”
‘Rife with Conflicts of Interest:’ Google Faces European Antitrust Complaint over Digital Advertising
LUCAS NOLAN
11 Feb 2022
Tech giant Google is facing another antitrust complaint filed in the EU related to the company’s digital advertising business. The European Publishers Council compares Google’s stranglehold on the digital advertising business and its built-in conflicts of interest as both ads buyer and seller to “Goldman or Citibank owning the New York Stock Exchange.”
The Daily Mail reports that the European Publishers Council (EPC) has filed an antitrust complaint against Google in the EU accusing the company of engaging in “unlawful tactics” to monopolize online advertising.
The EPC, a group of chairmen and CEOs of Europe’s largest media groups, has revealed plans to file a complaint with the European Commission about Google’s digital advertising practices. The group alleges that Google’s advertising platform is “rife with conflicts of interests” as the company is acting as both buyer and seller in the same transaction while operating the actual auction platform.
The EPC alleges that this constitutes a monopoly that is harming publishers and consumers in Europe. The EPC compared Google’s advertising platform to “Goldman or Citibank owning the New York Stock Exchange.”
The group claims that figures show that one of Google’s advertising auction programs reduced publisher revenue by 40 percent and that are worries that further changes to cookie technology could result in revenues being reduced by as much as 70 percent.
The EPC’s complaint is just the latest in a long line of antitrust lawsuits filed against Google. The French competition authority fined Googled €220 million in June for favoring its own services. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority also launched an investigation into Google over the introduction of its new Privacy Sandbox advertising plan.
The CMA recently announced that Google agreed to a set of commitments that will give the CMA oversight of the introduction of the Privacy Sandbox.
Read more at the Daily Mail here.
Censorship By Algorithm Does Far More Damage Than Conventional Censorship
Caitlin Johnstone
January 29th, 2022
Journalist Jonathan Cook has a new blog post out on his experience with being throttled into invisibility by Silicon Valley algorithmic suppression that will ring all too familiar for any online content creators who’ve been sufficiently critical of official Western narratives over the last few years.
“My blog posts once attracted tens of thousands of shares,” Cook writes. “Then, as the algorithms tightened, it became thousands. Now, as they throttle me further, shares can often be counted in the hundreds. ‘Going viral’ is a distant memory.
“I won’t be banned,” he adds. “I will fade incrementally, like a small star in the night sky — one among millions — gradually eclipsed as its neighboring suns grow ever bigger and brighter. I will disappear from view so slowly you won’t even notice.”
Cook says this began after the 2016 US election, which was when a major narrative push began for Silicon Valley corporations to eliminate “fake news” from their platforms and soon saw tech executives brought before the US Senate and told that they must “quell information rebellions” and come up with a mission statement expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord” online.
Arguably the most significant political moment in the United States since 9/11 and its immediate aftermath was when Democrats and their allied institutions concluded that Donald Trump’s election was a failure not of establishment politics but of establishment narrative control. From that point onwards, any online media creator who consistently disputes the narratives promoted by the same news outlets who’ve lied to us about every war has seen their view counts and new follows slashed.
By mid-2017 independent media outlets were already reporting across ideological lines that algorithm changes from important sources of viewership like Google had suddenly begun hiding their content from people who were searching for the subjects they reported on.
“In case anyone wants to know how Facebook suppression works — I have 330,000 followers there but they’ve stopped showing my posts to many people,” Redacted Tonight host Lee Camp tweeted in January 2018. “I used to gain 6,000 followers a week. I now gain 500 and FB unsubscribes people without their knowledge — so my total number never increases.”
I saw my own shares and view counts rapidly diminish in 2017 as well, and saw my new Facebook page follows suddenly slow to a virtual standstill. It wasn’t until I started using mailing lists and giving indie media outlets blanket permission to republish all my content that I was able to grow my audience at all.
And Silicon Valley did eventually admit that it was in fact actively censoring voices who fall outside the mainstream consensus. In order to disprove the false right-wing narrative that Google only censors rightist voices, the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet admitted in 2020 to algorithmically throttling World Socialist Website. Last year the CEO of Google-owned YouTube acknowledged that the platform uses algorithms to elevate “authoritative sources” while suppressing “borderline content” not considered authoritative, which apparently even includes just marginally establishment-critical left-of-center voices like Kyle Kulinski. Facebook spokeswoman Lauren Svensson said in 2018 that if the platform’s fact-checkers (including the state-funded establishment narrative management firm Atlantic Council) rule that a Facebook user has been posting false news, moderators will “dramatically reduce the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook.”
People make a big deal any time a controversial famous person gets removed from a major social media platform, and rightly so; we cannot allow such brazen acts of censorship to become normalized. The goal is to normalize internet censorship on every front, and the powerful will push for that normalization to be expanded at every opportunity. Whether you dislike the controversial figure being deplatformed on a given day is entirely irrelevant; it’s not about them, it’s about expanding and normalizing internet censorship protocols on monopolistic government-tied speech platforms.
But far, far more consequential than overt censorship of individuals is censorship by algorithm. No individual being silenced does as much real-world damage to free expression and free thought as the way ideas and information which aren’t authorized by the powerful are being actively hidden from public view, while material which serves the interests of the powerful is the first thing they see in their search results. It ensures that public consciousness remains chained to the establishment narrative matrix.
It doesn’t matter that you have free speech if nobody ever hears you speak. Even in the most overtly totalitarian regimes on earth you can say whatever you want alone in a soundproof room.
That’s the biggest loophole the so-called free democracies of the Western world have found in their quest to regulate online speech. By allowing these monopolistic megacorporations to become the sources everyone goes to for information (and even actively helping them along that path as in for example Google’s research grants from the CIA and NSA), it’s possible to tweak algorithms in such a way that dissident information exists online, but nobody ever sees it.
You’ve probably noticed this if you’ve tried to search YouTube for videos which don’t align with the official narratives of Western governments and media lately. That search function used to work like magic; like it was reading your mind. Now it’s almost impossible to find the information you’re looking for unless you’re trying to find out what the US State Department wants you to think. It’s the same with Google searches and Facebook, and because those giant platforms dictate what information gets seen by the general public, that wild information bias toward establishment narratives bleeds into other common areas of interaction like Twitter as well.
The idea is to let most people freely share dissident ideas and information about empire, war, capitalism, authoritarianism and propaganda, but to make it increasingly difficult for them to get their content seen and heard by people, and to make their going viral altogether impossible. To avoid the loud controversies and uncomfortable public scrutiny brought on by acts of overt censorship as much as possible while silently sweeping unauthorized speech behind the curtain. To make noncompliant voices “disappear from view so slowly you won’t even notice,” as Cook put it.
The status quo is not working. Our ecosystem is dying, we appear to be rapidly approaching a high risk of direct military confrontation between nuclear-armed nations, and our world is rife with injustice, inequality, oppression and exploitation. None of this is going to change until the public begins awakening to the problems with the current status quo so we can begin organizing a mass-scale push toward healthier systems. And that’s never going to happen as long as information is locked down in the way that it is.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. And as more and more people get their information about what’s happening in the world from online sources, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation has already become one of the most consequential forms of narrative control.
Facebook, Google, and Snapchat Are Bypassing Apple’s APP Tracking Transparency and Still Collecting Data on Users
Downloading “free” apps onto devices more often than not allows app providers to collect personal data on users. Of course, companies that manufacture and sell devices tend to collect personal data on users too (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Having access to this data allows companies and providers to analyze users’ habits and preferences so they can market additional products and services to them. They can also sell users’ data to 3rd parties. This practice is sometimes referred to as “Surveillance Capitalism.”
As more customers are becoming aware of this, more want to be able to “opt-out” of privacy-invasive data collection. Companies aren’t necessarily making this easy though. Recently Verizon was exposed for automatically enrolling its customers into a new program that scans users’ browser histories. Facebook, Google, and Snapchat are now also being exposed for continuing to collect data on without users’ knowledge or consent.
From Apple Insider:
Snap, Facebook using loopholes to bypass App Tracking Transparency
AppleInsider is supported by its audience and may earn commission as an Amazon Associate and affiliate partner on qualifying purchases. These affiliate partnerships do not influence our editorial content.
A new report is bringing to light additional details on how platforms like Facebook and Snap are working around Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature to collect data.
Following a recent report that Snap and Facebook were skirting App Tracking Transparency (ATT) using a loophole in the feature’s guidelines, The Information on Friday detailed the quiet workarounds that the social media platforms were using.
More specifically, the companies are using a loophole in ATT guidelines to continue collecting aggregated user data. This is because the guidelines bar tracking users and linking “user or device data” between different apps I services, but they don’t specifically define “linking.”
As a result, even though nearly 80% of iOS have opted out of cross-platform tracking, app developers are taking advantage of the “wiggle room” to share data that could be leveraged to identify users later. Snap, for example, is using a workaround that it has dubbed “Advanced Conversions” to receive detailed data from advertising companies about the activities of individual iOS users.
The Information claims that the data allows Snap to gauge ad efficiency, even if a user has asked an app not to send that data to Snap. Although this data — which includes whether a user saw an ad and what they did on an app afterward — is encrypted, Snap can reportedly analyze the results and deliver ad efficiency information to advertisers.
Despite the fact that this is technically tracking users, Snap doesn’t believe that it’s violating App Tracking Transparency.
According to The Information, both Facebook and Google are using similar methods to glean data on iOS users. Facebook didn’t respond to a request for comment from the outlet, while Google said it uses iOS user data in a way that it believes is compliant with Apple’s guidelines.
Apple has previously warned developers and advertisers from attempting to bypass ATT, stating that companies must comply with the feature’s guidelines or risk expulsion from the App Store.
In a statement, Apple said that its ATT feature has “received strong support from privacy advocates and regulators.” It added that “a user’s data belongs to them and they should get to decide whether to share their data and with whom.”
Facebook, Google, and Snapchat Are Bypassing Apple’s APP Tracking Transparency and Still Collecting Data on Users
Chrome Users Beware: Manifest V3 is Deceitful and Threatening
Daly Barnett
December 10th, 2021
EDITORS NOTE: If you are still using chrome, don’t.
Manifest V3, Google Chrome’s soon-to-be definitive basket of changes to the world of web browser extensions, has been framed by its authors as “a step in the direction of privacy, security, and performance.” But we think these changes are a raw deal for users. We’ve said that since Manifest V3 was announced, and continue to say so as its implementation is now imminent. Like FLoC and Privacy Sandbox before it, Manifest V3 is another example of the inherent conflict of interest that comes from Google controlling both the dominant web browser and one of the largest internet advertising networks.
Manifest V3, or Mv3 for short, is outright harmful to privacy efforts. It will restrict the capabilities of web extensions—especially those that are designed to monitor, modify, and compute alongside the conversation your browser has with the websites you visit. Under the new specifications, extensions like these– like some privacy-protective tracker blockers– will have greatly reduced capabilities. Google’s efforts to limit that access is concerning, especially considering that Google has trackers installed on 75% of the top one million websites.
It’s also doubtful Mv3 will do much for security. Firefox maintains the largest extension market that’s not based on Chrome, and the company has said it will adopt Mv3 in the interest of cross-browser compatibility. Yet, at the 2020 AdBlocker Dev Summit, Firefox’s Add-On Operations Manager said about the extensions security review process: “For malicious add-ons, we feel that for Firefox it has been at a manageable level….since the add-ons are mostly interested in grabbing bad data, they can still do that with the current webRequest API that is not blocking.” In plain English, this means that when a malicious extension sneaks through the security review process, it is usually interested in simply observing the conversation between your browser and whatever websites you visit. The malicious activity happens elsewhere after the data has already been read. A more thorough review process could improve security, but Chrome hasn’t said they’ll do that. Instead, their solution is to restrict capabilities for all extensions.
As for Chrome’s other justification for Mv3– performance– a 2020 study by researchers at Princeton and the University of Chicago revealed that privacy extensions, the very ones that will be hindered by Mv3, actually improve browser performance.
The development specifications of web browser extensions may seem in the weeds, but the broader implications should matter to all internet citizens: it’s another step towards Google defining how we get to live online. Considering that Google has been the world’s largest advertising company for years now, these new limitations are paternalistic and downright creepy.
But don’t just take our words for it. Here are some thoughts from technologists, privacy advocates, and extension developers who share our concern over Manifest V3:
“A web browser is supposed to act on behalf of the user and respect the user’s interests. Unfortunately, Chrome now has a track record as a Google agent, not a user agent. It is the only major web browser that lacks meaningful privacy protections by default, shoves users toward linking activity with a Google Account, and implements invasive new advertising capabilities. Google’s latest changes will break Chrome privacy extensions, despite academic research demonstrating that no change is necessary. These user-hostile decisions are all directly attributable to Google’s surveillance business model and enabled by its dominance of the desktop browser market.”
- Jonathan Mayer, Princeton University
“Manifest V3 positions Chrome as the all-powerful arbiter of what software lives and what dies, shattering the ideal of a diverse array of extensions serving the legitimate preferences and values of equally diverse users. In 2017, when Google banned AdNauseam from the Chrome store, it summarily cut off tens of thousands of users from data they had accumulated, and deprived them of a free and open-source extension to counter online profiling and manipulation. In hindsight, AdNauseam was the canary in the coal mine, as Mv3 is now poised to cut off users from a range of invaluable privacy tools (including ad blockers) that thousands if not millions rely on. A browser that plays favorites to advance its owners’ interests effectively chokes out innovative, independent developers, while shrinking the options for individuals to shape their online experiences.”
- Helen Nissenbaum and Daniel Howe (creators of AdNauseam and TrackMeNot)
“Manifest V3 is a detrimental step back for internet privacy.”
- Ghostery company blog
“Nearly all browser extensions as you know them today will be affected in some way: the more lucky ones will ‘only’ experience problems, some will get crippled, and some will literally cease to exist.”
- Andrey Meshkov, AdGuard company blog
200+ Local Newspapers Sue Google and Facebook
More than 200 newspapers across the U.S. have reportedly joined antitrust lawsuits against Google and Facebook over the past year. The lawsuits claim that Facebook and Google have monopolized the digital ads market, taking revenue that should have gone to local news outlets.
Axios reports that newspapers across the United States have been joining antitrust lawsuits against Google and Facebook for the past year, claiming that the tech giants monopolized the online digital ads market and took revenue that would otherwise have gone to local news.
Freshly printed copies of the San Francisco Chronicle move on an overhead conveyor belt November 8, 2009 in Fremont, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
The situation began as an effort by small-town local newspapers to take a stand against the tech giants, but has since turned into a national movement with over 200 newspapers across dozens of states joining the cause.
Doug Reynolds, the managing partner of HD Media, a holding company that owns multiple newspapers across West Virginia including the Charleston Gazette-Mail, stated: “The intellectual framework for this developed over the last 3-4 years.”
Reynolds filed the first newspaper lawsuit in January in West Virginia. He worked with a coalition of lawyers to file the first lawsuit; the coalition has since agreed to represent newspapers all over the country that are interested in filing similar lawsuits.
The lawyers include antitrust litigation experts and those with a personal interest in newspapers, such as Farrell and Fuller, Fitzsimmons Law Firm, Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP and Herman Jones LLP. The law firms are working on contingency, meaning that they will only get paid if the newspapers win settlements or verdicts against the Masters of the Universe.
The coalition of lawyers has been retained by over 30 newspaper ownership groups on the behalf of more than 200 publications. Antitrust complaints have been filed by 17 different ownership groups on behalf of around 150 newspapers.
News Media Alliance General Counsel Danielle Coffey said in a statement: “We fully support this litigation.” Clayton Fitzsimmons, one of the lawyers involved in the coalition, stated that the goal of the litigation is “to recover past damages to newspapers” caused by Big Tech firms.
The other aim is to “establish a new system going forward in which newspapers aren’t just competitive again, but can thrive.”
Read more at Axios here.
Congress Turns Up Heat on Big Tech CEOs
IVAN PENTCHOUKOV
July 29, 2020
The men heading four of the largest tech companies in the world faced hours of questioning from lawmakers on Capitol Hill on July 29 as part of an investigation into whether their companies have grown too powerful.
The chief executive officers from Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook defended their company practices, although the format of the hearing allowed little time for substantive discussion on a range of complex issues.
The hearing capped a yearlong congressional investigation into big tech’s alleged anti-competitive tactics and stifling of innovation, among other issues. Lawmakers sought to determine whether decades-old antitrust laws should be revised to address the realities of the digital age, which the four companies dominate.
“When the American people confronted monopolists in the past—be it the railroads and oil tycoons or AT&T and Microsoft—we took action to ensure no private corporation controls our economy or our democracy,” Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) said in his opening statement. “We face similar challenges today.”
The congressional investigation is one of several inquiries into the tech firms’ practices. The Trump administration, federal regulators, and the Justice Department are looking into the four companies’ businesses. In September last year, the attorneys general in 50 states and territories opened an antitrust probe of Google’s advertising business. Apple is facing scrutiny in the European Union over its App Store practices.
The scrutiny intensified on July 29 after President Donald Trump said he would take matters in his own hands if Congress fails to deliver a legislative solution.
“If Congress doesn’t bring fairness to Big Tech, which they should have done years ago, I will do it myself with Executive Orders. In Washington, it has been ALL TALK and NO ACTION for years, and the people of our Country are sick and tired of it!” the president wrote on Twitter.
The July 29 hearing marked the first congressional appearance of Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon and the world’s richest man. In opening remarks, he underlined his humble roots as the son of a single mother in high school.
Some of Amazon’s third-party vendors have accused the online retail giant of using internal data to copy-cat successful products. Critics also argue that the company has virtually cornered the online market in several product categories, especially books.
Bezos countered the concerns by pointing out that the company faces intense competition, including from companies that have adopted its successful third-party marketplace platform. There are now 1.7 million small and medium-sized businesses selling on Amazon’s marketplace around the world, he said.
Bezos devoted a substantial portion of his speech to the collateral benefits of Amazon’s growth and wealth, including profits for the shareholders, large-scale innovation, and charitable works.
“More than 80% of Amazon shares are owned by outsiders, and over the last 26 years—starting from zero—we’ve created more than $1 trillion of wealth for those outside shareholders. Who are those shareowners? They are pension funds: fire, police, and school teacher pension funds,” Bezos said in written testimony.
In its bipartisan investigation, the Judiciary subcommittee collected testimony from mid-level executives of the four firms, competitors, and legal experts, and pored over more than a million internal documents from the companies.
Cicilline has called the four companies monopolies, although he says breaking them up should be a last resort. He also said that in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, “these giants stand to profit” and become even more powerful as millions shift more of their work and commerce online.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, is faced with questions that range beyond the topic of market competition. His platform’s role as a place to share views and ideas has become the target of conservatives, who say they are singled out for censorship. Recently released undercover videos by investigative journalism outfit Project Veritas show Facebook moderators saying they delete everything conservative and pro-Trump.
“Big Tech is out to get conservatives,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
In the meantime, the company is under pressure from liberals to delete so-called “hate speech” and information on controversial topics.
“We believe in values—democracy, competition, inclusion, and free expression—that the American economy was built on,” Zuckerberg said in written testimony.
“Ultimately, I believe companies shouldn’t be making so many judgments about important issues like harmful content, privacy, and election integrity on their own,” he added. “That’s why I’ve called for a more active role for governments and regulators, and updated rules for the internet.”
Zuckerberg has said Facebook aims to allow as much free expression as possible unless it causes imminent risk of specific harm or damage.
European regulators have concluded that Google manipulated its search engine to gain an unfair advantage over other online shopping sites in the e-commerce market, and fined Google, whose parent is Alphabet Inc., a record $2.7 billion. Google has disputed the findings and is appealing.
“Google operates in highly competitive and dynamic global markets, in which prices are free or falling, and products are constantly improving,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in his written testimony. “Competition in ads—from Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Comcast, and others—has helped lower online advertising costs by 40% over the last 10 years, with these savings passed down to consumers through lower prices.”
Apple, whose iPhone is the third-largest seller in the world, faces EU investigations over the fees charged by its App Store. Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) said lawmakers have learned over the course of the investigation that Apple doesn’t share its criteria for approval for the app store and that the rules are “arbitrarily interpreted and enforced.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company treats every developer the same.
“We have open and transparent rules,” Cook said. “Those rules apply evenly to everyone.”
Apple’s App Store opened with 500 apps and has grown to 1.7 million today, according to Cook. The App Store business supports more than 1.9 million American jobs, he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.Follow Ivan on Twitter: @ivanpentchoukov
Google Whistleblower Confirms They Use Algorithms To CENSOR: “Algorithms Don’t Write Themselves”
By Mac Slavo,
July 25th, 2019
Activist Post
EDITOR’S UPDATE: Project Veritas has learned that Greg Coppola has been placed on administrative leave by Google.
Senior Google software engineer, Greg Coppola, has dismissed the idea that Big Tech is “politically neutral” and called out his company as “very biased,” joining Project Veritas’ growing stable of whistleblowers. Coppola said that Google has “merged” with the Democrat party.
“I’m very concerned to see Big Tech and Big Media merge basically with a political party, with the Democratic party,” Greg Coppola, a Googler since 2014 who works on the AI Google Assistant, toldProject Veritas. The real question Coppola posed is “Are we going to continue to think for ourselves or are we going to just let the biggest tech companies decide who wins every election from now on?” And according to a report by RT, Coppola says that he knows Google is attempting to manipulate public thought.
With decades of programming experience under his belt (he’s been coding since age 10, he said) Coppola wanted to inform the masses of his growing certainty about Google’s political slant.Algorithms “don’t write themselves – we write them to do what we want them to do,” he pointed out, explaining that even AI machine learning is “just a tool that we control.” Coppola chose Google News as an example to prove his point. Google News is a news aggregator that draws from “just a handful of sites, and all those sites are vitriolically against President Trump, which I really consider to be interference in the American election.”
Coppola says that Google began its censorship campaign and election meddling for the 2016 Presidential elections. The engineer explained that “the angle that the Democrats and the media took was that anyone who liked Donald Trump was a racist, even a Nazi, and that got picked up everywhere” – even Google. And even then, “most people’s jobs are not political and don’t involve politics.” But it only takes a few bad apples to spoil democracy for everyone.
I think it’s, you know, ridiculous to say that there’s no bias. I think everyone who supports anything other than the Democrats, anyone who’s pro-Trump or in any way deviates from what CNN and the New York Times are pushing, notices how bad it is. – Greg Coppola
The one real difference between the American press and the Soviet state newspaper Pravda was that the Russian people knew they were being lied to. To expose the lies our media tell us today, controversial journalist James O’Keefe created Project Veritas, an independent news organization whose reporters go where traditional journalists dare not. Their investigative work–equal parts James Bond, Mike Wallace, and Saul Alinsky―has had a consistent and powerful impact on its targets.
In American Pravda, the reader is invited to go undercover with these intrepid journalists as they infiltrate political campaigns, unmask dishonest officials and expose voter fraud. A rollicking adventure story on one level, the book also serves as a treatise on modern media, arguing that establishment journalists have a vested interest in keeping the powerful comfortable and the people misinformed. –American Pravda: My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News
GOOGLE: “ORGANIC IS A LIE, SUPPLEMENTS ARE DANGEROUS, CHIROPRACTIC IS FAKE,” AND OTHER THOUGHTS THEY WANT YOU TO THINK
Sayer Ji, GreenMedinfo
Waking Times, July 3rd, 2019
On June 3rd, 2019, it was discovered that Google had scrubbed their search results clean of natural health sites, resulting in some losing as much as 99% of their traffic. Soon after, it was discovered that Google also manipulates users with their autocomplete function into thinking that natural approaches to health are fraudulent and even harmful. This is Part 2 of our ongoing series exposing these practices. Part 1 can be found here.
Google manipulates your search results in a very specific way. For instance, if you start your search out with “supplements are,” Google will autocomplete your search field with the following suggestions:
“SUPPLEMENTS ARE BAD, USELESS, NOT REGULATED, DANGEORUS, SCAMS”
Most Google users believe that its suggestions reflect the volume of searches others are doing on the topic — a reasonable assumption, given Google says their algorithm is “Based on several factors, like how often others have searched for a term.” In fact, Google goes out of their way to say they are not making subjective suggestions, but objective predictions based on real searches:
“Predictions, not suggestions
You’ll notice we call these autocomplete “predictions” rather than “suggestions,” and there’s a good reason for that. Autocomplete is designed to help people complete a search they were intending to do, not to suggest new types of searches to be performed. These are our best predictions of the query you were likely to continue entering.
How do we determine these predictions? We look at the real searches that happen on Google and show common and trending ones relevant to the characters that are entered and also related to your location and previous searches.” [italics and bold added] Source: Google
But Google Trends data show the “supplements are” autocomplete results above to be inaccurate, if not blatantly falsified. In fact, keyword search volume trend lines show that since 2004, searches for the phrase “supplements are bad” relative to “supplements are good” (in red) are far lower, and the gap continues to increase, with about 5x more people searching for them in a positive rather than negative light. This is the very definition of the Orwellian inversion: where Good becomes Bad, and War becomes Peace.
Amazing, a third Google product from its extremely profitable Google Ads division called Keyword Planner, shows an even more accurate quantification of how many searches have actually been performed in the United States in the past month with the phrase: “supplements are bad.” The result? Only 100-1,000 searches, which is between only .2739 and 2.7 people a day.
That’s right, in the entire population of the United States (327,321,076 as of March, 26, 2018), at most 2.7 people type the phrase “supplements are bad” into the Google search engine. But if any of those 327 million people type “supplements are…” into the Google search engine, all 327 million users will have their search completed for them with the suggestion that they are “bad” and search for information on how bad they are.
In order to demonstrate that this result is not a fluke, let’s look at the search “taking vitamins…” and see what Google suggests in their autocomplete.
Example #1: “TAKING VITAMINS IS BAD”
And what does the Google Trend data show? A null result: “Hmm, your search doesn’t have enough data to show here.”
This should not be surprising considering that the vast majority use search engines to field queries and not affirmative statements reflecting foregone conclusions. But that’s how thoroughly a very specific anti-nutritional industry political agenda is embedded within Google’s algorithm.
When we drop this phrase into Google’s keyword planner, what do we get? An astounding 0-10 people search this term every month in the U.S. In other words, no one.
We discussed the potential corrupting influence of pharmaceutical companies, with whom Google partners and receives investment, on their results in our previous article: INVESTIGATION: Google Manipulates Search Suggestions To Promote Pharma, Discredit Natural Health.
Alternative browsers like Duckduckgo, on the other hand, won’t suggest anything because it does not have an autocomplete function as google does, which google states: “is designed to help people complete a search they were intending to do, not to suggest new types of searches to be performed.
Our investigation has uncovered a number of examples like this where Google is placing autocomplete suggestions into the search user’s mind that are not only the opposite of what most people search for, but sometimes do not search for at all — indicating that Google’s ostensibly objective feature is literally a propaganda device programming users to think thoughts they would never otherwise consider.
This has profound implications, as we will explore later, as the so-called Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) identified by researchers in 2013, is one of the most powerfully influential forces on human behavior ever discovered — so powerful, in fact, that it may have determined the outcome of one quarter of the world’s elections in recent years.
But first, let’s look at further examples of Google’s dystopian search results, such as:
Example #2: “GMOS ARE GOOD”
Google trends data for “gmos are good” v. “gmos are bad”: gmos are bad wins.
Example #3: “ORGANIC IS A LIE”
Google trends data for “organic is a lie”: null finding.
Example #4: “HOMEOPATHY IS FAKE..”
Google trends data for “homeopathy is fake”: null finding.
Example #4: “HOLISTIC MEDICINE IS FAKE..”
Google trends data for “holistic medicine is fake”: null finding.
Example #5: “CHIROPRACTIC IS FAKE..”
Google trends data for “chiropractic is fake” versus “chiropractic is real”: real wins.
Example #6: “NATUROPATHY IS FAKE..”
Google trends data for “naturopathy is fake”: null finding.
What’s really going on here?
One might argue that the examples shown above are benign, and may even reflect a twisted sense of humor. After all, wasn’t Google’s original tongue-in-cheek motto “Don’t be evil”? And how seriously do we take a company whose name, after all, is as silly as Google? It turns out, however, that the sort of manipulations revealed here actually have extremely powerful effects on human thinking and behavior — far beyond what most can even imagine.
The true extent to which Google’s search algorithm affects human society today was first revealed by research psychologist Robert Epstein, and his associate Ronald E. Robertson, who discovered the search engine manipulation effect (SEME) in 2013— the largest human behavioral effect ever identified. In fact, their randomized, clinical trial based research revealed that Google’s “instant” search tool, which “autocompletes” a users sentences, may be so extraordinarily powerful as to have determined the outcomes of a quarter of the world’s elections in recent years.
Stanford Seminar – The Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) and Its Unparalleled Power by Robert Epstein.
Their 2015 paper titled, “The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is well worth reading. If found that within certain voter sub-populations, such as undecided Republications, the SEME was so powerful that it determined up to 80% of the votes.
Weaponized: How The Search Suggestion Effect (SSE) Gave Google Orwellian Power
When someone searches Google — an act so common that it was added as a legitimate transitive verb to the Oxford English Dictionary and the 11th edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary 2006 — they are often at their most uncertain and vulnerable moment, which is why they have a question and deferring to google for an answer. In fact, every second there are 63,000 Google searches performed around the world, which translates into 228 million searches per hour, and 2 trillion searches per year. The majority of these searches will present an autocomplete suggestion, effectively completing the users thoughts for them.
Most searchers assume the results Google will present are somehow objective, and credible sources of data, because of the perceived power and/or omniscience of their algorithms. This is why Google’s “autocomplete” feature is so powerful. And why, if it is not an accurate prediction of what the thinking is looking for, but the opposite, it can profoundly influence a person’s thinking and subsequent favor. It is fundamentally the trust one puts in Google that it does not have its own agenda, which gives it its immense power and draw.
This is why, a recent undercover investigation by Project Veritas is so concerning. James O’ Keefe interviewed a top Google executive who admitted that Google adjusted their algorithms to manipulate elections. You can watch the video below:
Where do we go from here?
The research on Google’s manipulation of search results has just begun, and there are other topics to be explored. For instance, we addressed Google’s attempt to discredit vaccine safety and health freedom advocates by further amplifying the dehumanizing effects of the socially engineered slur “anti-vaxxer” as follows:
Yet Google Trends shows that this is not a search that the public makes, globally, nor in the United States.
Clearly, Google can not be trusted. Three of their core products — Google search, Google trends, Google Ads’ keyword planner — boldly reveal how their search results do not accurately reflect their search volume. How can they get away with this, you might ask? It turns out that they are indemnified against lawsuit for manipulating content on their platform due to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Until this act is repealed they will continue to operate with impunity, essentially above the law. But in a promising new development, on June 19th, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo) introduced legislation, Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act, which “removes the immunity big tech companies receive under Section 230 unless they submit to an external audit that proves by clear and convincing evidence that their algorithms and content-removal practices are politically neutral. Sen. Hawley’s legislation does not apply to small and medium-sized tech companies.” We hope it continues to receive bi-partisan support and succeeds in correcting the loophole which has lead to Google’s immense misuse of power.
In the meantime, we encourage our readers to search for other topics relevant to natural health and health freedom and to submit to us their findings so we can continue to update our articles on the topic. Or, hashtag your results:
The Underground Newswire 
