You can help CodeWalrus stay online by donating here. | New CodeWalrus | Old (dark mode) | Old (light) | Discord server
0
b/Other publicado por u/gameblabla June 26, 2019, 01:12:36 AM
Project Veritas has released a video on Google and how they seemed to actively change search results.
According to the Insider and one google executive, they did so as to influence the 2020 elections because they were dismayed by the 2016 election results.

The video was originally published on Youtube before Google quickly took notice of it and removed it on privacy complaint grounds.
A few days later, it was also removed from Vimeo... this time on hate speech grounds.
Video is still on bitchute :
https://www.bitchute.com/video/re9Xp6cdkro/

I'll try to summarize what's important but basically on certain search like men can, it will only suggests things like men can cook, get pregnant, have periods.


Sometimes, it will even not suggesting anything for some search results, like Hillary's Clinton lost emails for example.



According to them (the executive & the insider), Google is doing so as to change the narrative and possibly influence the 2020 elections.
The insider proves this by using Google trends and comparing the results with another search result like Donald trump's emails.



Both are now getting low search results yet even then suggestions work for donald trump emails but doesn't for Hillary clinton's emails. (as seen above)
Amazingly enough, Hillary's email controversy is in fact suggested in Google Trends as i noticed myself, just not on Google search.



I've also noticed inconsistencies for search terms myself, even in Google France, as you can see below.
Search for "couple", which also means the same thing in french, gets you this.



However, search for "white couple", or in french "couple blanc", and this happens :



You get a bunch of mixed race or black couples.
You also get similar search results from Duckduckgo and Qwant so it looks like they are taking in full or part of Google's search results.
This does not happen if you search for arabic or black couple, as Google accurately returns back results for those.


What is Project Veritas ?

Project Veritas is a non profit founded by James O'Keefe exposing secrets and doing leaks through undercover work.
The last few weeks, they also covered how Pinterest would put Christian & liveaction and put them in the c blacklist.
The whistleblower got fired from Pinterest for revealing this.
Project Veritas was criticized before in the past for the failed Washington Post sting, where a woman allegedly fed them with false information.

Reception from Google executive and others

The Google executive responded to Project Veritas video by saying that she was just casually talking to a bystander in a cafe and she was being tricked by him.
She also said on the claims that it is ridiculous to suggest that Google would seek to influence the elections and that she was not as important as they thought.

She deleted her twitter and instagram account following the video. (it was all done very quick : I suspect Google must have ordered her to do so)
Oddly enough, she liked a comment on her medium page saying that she was a liar.

Another oddity is that no Republicans, except for two (Cruz and another one), publicly denounced this.



Project veritas reddit account also got banned after they attempted to post a video link.
So far though, most outlets seem to remain silent on the matter.

My opinion on this ?

I'll admit that i strongly dislike the likes of Ben Shapiro among others.
However, i fail to see what Google are going to achieve with this and they hurt a lot of people when they made it pretty much impossible to get monetized on Youtube.
(it's impossible to swear, whereas it was possible to do so before)

I still use Amazon, ebay and watch some other youtube channels like the Quartering among others like the 8-bit guy but i use google search less and less because each time
i'm being set back by inaccurate search results. Even duckduckgo is guilty of this but at least they don't spy on me or sell my personal info.

It's very suspicious they would go out and delete the video as quickly as they did. (they also did the same thing for Pinterest's story, even though both companies are unrelated)
In the video, they showed snippets of internal documents on how they proceed. It would be nice if we could get full copies of these like what happened with Pinterest.

Pretty much the only website where you can talk about it is on Twitter and i guess Discord.
Last Edit: June 29, 2019, 03:51:42 PM by gameblabla
Inicia sesión o crea una cuenta para dejar un comentario
u/Dream of Omnimaga June 29, 2019, 02:31:33 PM
Seems like the video was deleted on Vimeo too.
u/gameblabla June 29, 2019, 03:48:47 PM
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on June 29, 2019, 02:31:33 PMSeems like the video was deleted on Vimeo too.
Yup, a few days after it was posted, Vimeo deleted it for "incitement of hate speech"... which is laughable considering it was talking about Google possible meddling in 2020 elections, that's it.

The video is still on bitchute : https://www.bitchute.com/video/re9Xp6cdkro/

There were a few more reactions since the video got released, including Donald Trump himself.
Quote from: undefinedTRUMP: You saw what happened yesterday with Google. Google was totally biased, like you know they talk about Russia, because they have some bloggers. And by the way some of those bloggers were going both ways they were for Clinton and for Trump.

MARIA: Well somebody at Google said they what happened in 2016 to happen in 2020. They don't want it to happen again.

TRUMP: Let me tell you, they're trying to rig the election. That's what we should be looking at, not the phony witch hunt. This is the greatest political disgrace in history......

TRUMP: They should be sued. What's happening with the bias, and now you see it with that executive yesterday from Google the hatred for Republicans. It's not even like let's lean democrat. The hatred. And actually I heard that all during my election. They were swamping us with negative stuff.

Here's what happened next related to the incident :

QuoteJune 25 : Leaked emails claims that Google flagged Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and PragerU as "dog whistle nazis" and recommending to disable some features.

June 26 : Project Veritas claims that Google intervened in the Irish abortion debate by censoring key words.
They have posted a few screenshots of said blacklist including the URLs.
https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/26/blacklisted-leaked-youtube-doc-appears-to-show-election-interference/

I think the 8th amendment would have been repealed anyway regardless of Google's meddling but still...
It's also unknown how said blacklist was put in practice, if it was applied.
I recall saying Google defending it (when breibart released such allegations in 2018) by claiming they were cracking down on bots taking advantage of the debate.

June 26 : Vimeo deletes Project Veritas's video on incitement to hate grounds. (Which i can confirm is a lot of bulls)

June 27 : Youtube responded to deleting Project Veritas video by claiming they got a privacy complaint over it.
Project veritas responded by saying that Gennai was a public figure for Google and spoke at a number of conferences, thus it did not hold weight.

June 27 : Senator Ted cruz posted the interview with the Google executive on his channel. Not deleted so far.

Today : Project Veritas sent cease & desist letters to a bunch of journos including bloomberg, vox, the Verge among others demanding they retract their claim that they were selectively editing words from Gennai. All of them complied.


That being said, considering the laws he himself had passed, i can't help but feel like they were reaping what they sow.
Mississippi had passed a law in 2016 that would allow business to discriminate on religious grounds, Donald trump himself made sure to sign into law the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers which led to the mass censorship of adult creators on Patreon & others (and certainly didn't help prostitutes) among others...

With that said though, it still doesn't excuse Google's actions, on top of their other accusations they are facing in congress :
This includes abusing the smartphone market by shutting out 3rd party stores and some apps like adblockers off the Google play store, compelling manufacturers to pay the 5$ per device fee for adding Google services, their overreach of personal data and so on...)

I doubt it helped the community as they were more interested in censoring key words than to oppose the laws.
Indeed, Google did not hesitate to look into the files of a prostitute in her Google drive folder...
Youtube is quick to demonetize videos that simply swear (which is the reason why AVGN videos are now being sponsored, among other things) or report on catastrophic events.

The result of this is that it leads Young americans to be less trusting of LGBT people because of incidents like these are being blamed on them, when in reality
it's Google strong-arming creators and others...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/glaad-accelerating-acceptance-index_n_5d08cf3ae4b0ea7c4a4f9538

Anyway, i'm pissed at Google and i wanted to let my steam off. I'm sorry but this needed to be talked about.
u/Caleb Hansberry July 01, 2019, 04:45:18 PM
Wow, very interesting. I'll have to rethink using Google services. They're so incredibly convenient, though.
u/gameblabla September 17, 2019, 05:28:02 PM
Just though i would update on this.

Google is now advising their employees to avoid political subjects. Some of them were not too kind to this.
http://www.businessinsider.fr/us/google-community-guidelines-no-politics-2019-8
Though i think it's hypocritical for some of those people ("conservatives" in particular) to agree with such thing especially when they are doing the exact same thing over on twitter and elsewhere.

Another thing that happened was said insider revealed a blacklist :
https://torrentfreak.com/google-blocked-torrentfreak-from-appearing-in-search-feature-190815/

Now, he said that they mostly blocked "conservatives" from Google Now stories (including Alex Jones) but they also blocked 2 gay websites, torrentfreak, numerous torrent websites and more.
I can't help however but feel like Project Veritas greatly exaggerated the importance of said leaks.
What they did leak was important but nowhere near the scale they suggested it would affect things.

It did however explain why you would get pictures of black people when you specifcally search for pictures of white people.
The cruel irony is that Qwant, which had fiercely denied copying Google's search results, also has the same results when searching for white couple.

Kind of sad that no one took the defence of torrentfreak and other innocent websites for being blocked from Google now stories...
u/Dream of Omnimaga September 18, 2019, 06:10:41 PM
I remember in 2009 when any attempt at discussing 9/11 or certain religious/politic matters in Youtube comment, the comment would mysteriously fail to post, just like when you tried posting a web link.
u/nulledprodigy October 22, 2019, 11:04:20 PM
Literally everything major seems to rely on Google/Amazon/MS infrastructure somewhere along the line so it's hardly surprising that this can happen and no one is forced to do or say anything properly on the matter.

A lot of the censorship seems to be down to older people pushing their political agenda onto the younger crowd manipulatively (which is possibly why everyone seems so money-obsessed online these days compared to several years ago).
Start a Discussion

b/Other

Any discussion that doesn't fit in other categories go here. Also, don't forget to introduce yourself. :)

232
Topics
Explore Board
Website statistics


MyCalcs | Ticalc.org | Cemetech | Omnimaga | TI-Basic Developer | MaxCoderz | TI-Story | Casiocalc.org | Casiopeia | The Museum of HP Calculators | HPCalc.org | CnCalc.org | Music 2000 Community | TI Education | Casio Education | HP Calcs | NumWorks | SwissMicros | Sharp Calculators
Powered by EzPortal