It is becoming more and more evident that tech giants including Google, Facebook, and Twitter are using their own political blacklists to CENSOR and DIMINISH traffic to prominent conservative platforms and their supporters. Following a Google “glitch” hiding several conservative platforms on Tuesday, an ex-engineer at Google reveals the tech giant may have a ‘secret blacklist’ of conservative news outlets.

“It appears to have revealed the existence of another blacklist that disproportionately targets conservatives,” Mike Wacker theorized in a message to Mediaite. “The glitch is that sites on this blacklist disappeared from Google search results, but the existence of the list is very much by design. And that raises a major question: Why was this blacklist created in the first place, and what else is it used for?”

The so-called “glitch” was evident on Tuesday morning and early afternoon before it was resolved. However, it was long enough for users to note that they were unable to access websites including Breitbart, The National Pulse, The Drudge Report, Newsbusters, The Bongino Report, and Human Events. Large liberal media outlets — including The New York Times and Washington Post — did not appear to be harmed.

In April 2019, Project Veritas released leaked documents from a Google insider that revealed The Gateway Pundit, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Newsbusters, American Thinker, MRCTV, American Lookout, Twitchy, Daily Caller, Natural News, The Rebel Media, LifeNews, BizPac Review, YoungCons and many others were being targeted, censored, blacklisted and silenced by Google.

Dr. Robert Epstein, a researcher who has claimed Google has the power to sway up to 10 percent of American voters in the 2020 election, concurred with Wacker. “It’s likely that a person or algorithm at Google added ‘breitbart.com’ and other URLs to one or more of the company’s blacklists,” Epstein said. “Then, perhaps after some pushback, someone pulled those URLs off the blacklists.”

Any manual manipulation would contradict the testimony of Google CEO Sundar Pichai delivered to Congress in December 2018, when he told a House committee the company did not “manually intervene on any search result.”

In a tech jargon-filled statement, Google said it was looking into the issue, but failed to offer any explanation. “We are aware of an issue with the site: command that may fail to show some or any indexed pages from a website,” the company said in a post published on Twitter Tuesday afternoon. “We are investigating this and any potentially related issues.”

This isn’t the first time Google has come under great scrutiny. Google has faced issues related to censorship in the past. One incident leading to Pichai’s 2018 insistence that Google did not manually manipulate search results involved pictures of President Donald Trump appearing at the top of search results for the word “idiot.”

Tuesday’s so-called “glitch” threatens to enhance the scrutiny in the lead-up to the 2020 election.

 

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