Republicans will never win another election unless they can figure out how to stop tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter from censoring conservatives and an anti-mainstream (liberal) media narrative from their platforms.

In August, a conservative Google whistleblower came forward with bombshell revelations about how Google manipulates their algorithms and how they have a “blacklist” of websites they keep users from seeing in their search results. Our website, 100percentfedup.com, appeared alongside many other conservative news websites that played a critical role in exposing the disinformation campaign against then-candidate Trump.

In December 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the House Judiciary Committee that the search engine was not biased against conservatives. Pichai explained what algorithms are, and said Google’s algorithm was not offensive to conservatives because its artificial intelligence does not operate in that manner. He told lawmakers, “things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it” are what drives the search results. Pichai said even if his programmers were anti-Republican, the process is so intricate that the artificial intelligence could not be manipulated and it was too complicated to train the algorithm to fit their bias.

Was Pichai telling the truth?

In July, we reported on the testimony by former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, Dr. Robert Epstein, in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. During his bombshell remarks, Dr. Epstein revealed how liberal tech giants like Google and Facebook have manipulated, and will likely continue to manipulate votes for Democrats. He also warned that in 2020, the invisible manipulation by companies like Google will be like nothing we’ve ever seen.

Today, the Wall Street Journal released another bombshell report about Google.

In their report, the WSJ exposes Google and how easy it is to manipulate its users and to destroy businesses that, in today’s day and age, rely on Google’s massive search engine to bring customers to their businesses.

According to the Wall Street Journal report, Google is interfering with algorithms and altering your search results to give you the result they want you to see.

Every minute, an estimated 3.8 million queries are typed into Google, prompting its algorithms to spit out results for hotel rates or breast-cancer treatments or the latest news about President Trump.

They are arguably the most powerful lines of computer code in the global economy, controlling how much of the world accesses information found on the internet, and the starting point for billions of dollars of commerce.

Twenty years ago, Google founders began building a goliath on the premise that its search algorithms could do a better job combing the web for useful information than humans. Google executives have said repeatedly—in private meetings with outside groups and in congressional testimony—that the algorithms are objective and essentially autonomous, unsullied by human biases or business considerations.

The company states in a Google blog, “We do not use human curation to collect or arrange the results on a page.” It says it can’t divulge details about how the algorithms work because the company is involved in a long-running and high-stakes battle with those who want to profit by gaming the system.

But that message often clashes with what happens behind the scenes. Over time, Google has increasingly re-engineered and interfered with search results to a far greater degree than the company and its executives have acknowledged, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

Those actions often come in response to pressure from businesses, outside interest groups and governments around the world. They have increased sharply since the 2016 election and the rise of online misinformation, the Journal found.

Google’s evolving approach marks a shift from its founding philosophy of “organizing the world’s information,” to one that is far more active in deciding how that information should appear.

More than 100 interviews and the Journal’s own testing of Google’s search results reveal:

• Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favor big businesses over smaller ones, and in at least one case made changes on behalf of a major advertiser, eBay Inc., contrary to its public position that it never takes that type of action. The company also boosts some major websites, such as Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.

• Google engineers regularly make behind-the-scenes adjustments to other information the company is increasingly layering on top of its basic search results. These features include auto-complete suggestions, boxes called “knowledge panels” and “featured snippets,” and news results, which aren’t subject to the same company policies limiting what engineers can remove or change.

• Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results. These moves are separate from those that block sites as required by U.S. or foreign law, such as those featuring child abuse or with copyright infringement, and from changes designed to demote spam sites, which attempt to game the system to appear higher in results.

• In auto-complete, the feature that predicts search terms as the user types a query, Google’s engineers have created algorithms and blacklists to weed out more-incendiary suggestions for controversial subjects, such as abortion or immigration, in effect filtering out inflammatory results on high-profile topics.

• Google employees and executives, including co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have disagreed on how much to intervene on search results and to what extent. Employees can push for revisions in specific search results, including on topics such as vaccinations and autism.

• To evaluate its search results, Google employs thousands of low-paid contractors whose purpose the company says is to assess the quality of the algorithms’ rankings. Even so, contractors said Google gave feedback to these workers to convey what it considered to be the correct ranking of results, and they revised their assessments accordingly, according to contractors interviewed by the Journal. The contractors’ collective evaluations are then used to adjust algorithms.

THE JOURNAL’S FINDINGS undercut one of Google’s core defenses against global regulators worried about how it wields its immense power—that the company doesn’t exert editorial control over what it shows users. Regulators’ areas of concern include anti-competitive practices, political bias, and online misinformation.

Far from being autonomous computer programs oblivious to outside pressure, Google’s algorithms are subject to regular tinkering from executives and engineers who are trying to deliver relevant search results, while also pleasing a wide variety of powerful interests and driving its parent company’s more than $30 billion in annual profit. Google is now the most highly trafficked website in the world, surpassing 90% of the market share for all search engines. The market capitalization of its parent, Alphabet Inc., is more than $900 billion.

Google made more than 3,200 changes to its algorithms in 2018, up from more than 2,400 in 2017 and from about 500 in 2010, according to Google and a person familiar with the matter. Google said 15% of queries today are for words, or combinations of words, that the company has never seen before, putting more demands on engineers to make sure the algorithms deliver useful results.

Here’s a screenshot of what a Google search vs. a Duck Duck Go search looks like when a user searches for the same keywords. It’s clear that Google is much kinder to Joe Biden than search engine competitor, Duck Duck Go.

The WSJ compared Duckduckgo and Google autocomplete results in Joe Biden, and found that ‘creepy’ was suggested every time by the former but never by Google.

A Google spokeswoman disputed the Journal’s conclusions, saying, “We do today what we have done all along, provide relevant results from the most reliable sources available.”

But that’s not what Jen Gennai, head of responsible innovation at Google had to say when she was caught in an undercover video by Project Veritas admitting that Google shouldn’t be broken up, because smaller companies wouldn’t be able “to stop the next Trump situation” from happening.

Watch:

In July 2019, Fred Coppola, who has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and five years of experience working at Google, explained to Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe how Google is manipulating its search algorithms in Google Search and Google News to favor the Democratic Party. He used to report directly to Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, but after his interview with O’Keefe, Coppola was placed on administrative leave.

Coppola claims that Google’s bias is undeniable, “I’m very concerned to see big tech and big media to merge essentially with a party—with the Democrat Party.” Coppola told Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe. “I don’t have a smoking gun. I’ve been coding since I was 10, I have a Ph.D. I have five years with Google, and I just know how algorithms are. They don’t write themselves; we write them to do what we want them to do. And…you can use machine learning, but you can get the results of machine learning to get them to come out the way they want them to. It’s just a tool that we control. You know, I look at Search, I look at Google News, and I see Google exec’s go to Congress and say it’s not manipulated, it’s not political, and I’m just so sure that’s not true.”

“Are we going to continue to have elections that mean anything? Are we going to continue to think for ourselves, or are we going to allow the tech companies to decide who wins the elections from now on?” Coppola asks.

Coppolla also appeared on Fox New’s Tucker Carlson show where he explained how Google manipulates its search engine feed:

One month later, another Google insider spoke directly to James O’Keefe, but he took it a step further—he delivered a laptop with 950 pages of documents from Google to the DOJ, which he claims will prove they manipulate their algorithms.

The Google insider, Zachary Vorhies, who anonymously leaked internal documents to Project Veritas made the decision to go public in an on-the-record video interview. The whistleblower decided to go public after receiving a letter from Google, and after he says Google allegedly called the police to perform a “wellness check” on him.

In his original interview with James O’Keefe of Project Veritas, the Google whistleblower kept his face hidden, over the fear of retribution.

Curiously, the American public hasn’t heard a word about the Google documents that were delivered to the DOJ.

 

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