Not to Trust Big Tech By Brian Simpson
The short of the long, is not to trust Big Tech, and it is absolutely amazing that people did not see this coming sooner. After all, this is a cultural war, not a Sunday school picnic, and the aim of the game is the polish our kind off, not give us belly rubs:
“Google – which was exposed trying to help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election, and who were beside themselves after she lost – discussed whether to bury conservative media outlets in the company’s search function after Donald Trump became president, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation‘s Peter Hasson. Internal communications obtained by the Caller reveal that The Daily Caller and Breitbart were specifically singled out for potential censorship. Communications obtained by The DCNF show that internal Google discussions went beyond expressing remorse over Clinton’s loss to actually discussing ways Google could prevent Trump from winning again.
“This was an election of false equivalencies, and Google, sadly, had a hand in it,” Google engineer Scott Byer wrote in a Nov. 9, 2016, post reviewed by TheDCNF. Byer falsely labeled The Daily Caller and Breitbart as “opinion blogs” and urged his coworkers to reduce their visibility in search results. “How many times did you see the Election now card with items from opinion blogs (Breitbart, Daily Caller) elevated next to legitimate news organizations? That’s something that can and should be fixed,” Byer wrote. “I think we have a responsibility to expose the quality and truthfulness of sources – because not doing so hides real information under loud noises,” he continued.
“Beyond that, let’s concentrate on teaching critical thinking. A little bit of that would go a long way. Let’s make sure that we reverse things in four years – demographics will be on our side.” –DCNF. Not all Google employees agreed with the notion of censoring conservative outlets; engineer Uri Dekel – a self-described Clinton supporter, argued that manipulating search results was the wrong approach. “Thinking that Breitbart, Drudge, etc. are not ‘legitimate news sources’ is contrary to the beliefs of a major portion of our user base is partially what got us to this mess. MSNBC is not more legit than Drudge just because Rachel Maddow may be more educated / less deplorable / closer to our views, than, say Sean Hannity,” Dekel wrote Byer in a reply, adding “I follow a lot of right wing folks on social networks you could tell something was brewing. We laughed off Drudge’s Instant Polls and all that stuff, but in the end, people go to those sources because they believe that the media doesn’t do its job. I’m a Hillary supporter and let’s admit it, the media avoided dealing with the hard questions and issues, which didn’t pay off. By ranking ‘legitimacy’ you’ll just introduce more conspiracy theories”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/01/tech-companies-facebook-google-hiding-plain-sight/
None of this would be a problem if the average punter was capable of thinking, but 100 IQ points is just not enough in the tank to deal with the grand global conspiracy.
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