Who's Online
Guest Users: 1147

Stats
13957 Pages Viewed
1900 Unique Visits
What's New
Stories  last 2 weeks
My Account
Please Support Us With A Purchase






  • Home
  • Social Media/Big Tech (Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Apple)

Video: On Social Media Bias, Trump’s Executive Order & the China Data Threat—FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr


In this episode of American Thought Leaders 🇺🇸, we'll sit down with Brendan Carr, one of the five commissioners leading the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates radio, television, wire, and satellite communications in America. He previously served as General Counsel of the FCC, and chief legal advisor to the Commission.

We’ll discuss President Trump’s recent social media executive order, which may force social media giants like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to relax their content restrictions, especially on political speech, lest they risk losing significant liability protections.

Days ago, Twitter added a new “fact-checking” label on two of Trump’s tweets, to which he responded by accusing the company of election interference.

Trump called for new regulations under section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act to make it that social media companies that engage in “censoring” or “political conduct” will not “be able to keep their liability shield.” Section 230 largely exempts online platforms from liability for content posted by their users.

And with the deteriorating situation in Hong Kong, we’ll also discuss the current administration’s new stance towards communist China, especially as it relates to telecommunications and companies like Huawei or China Mobile.

 

 
 
 
  • Currently 0.00/5
Rating: 0.00/5 (0 votes cast)

Video: Tucker Carlson Monologue On Big Tech Censorship


"They're authoritarians. If they're willing to censor President Donald Trump they will think nothing at all of silencing you, and they don't. They gladly do it & no one pushes back."

 

 

  • Currently 0.00/5
Rating: 0.00/5 (0 votes cast)

Trump Vows to Strip ‘Radical Left’ of ‘TOTAL COMMAND’ Over Facebook, IG, Twitter & Google

‘The Administration is working to remedy this illegal situation,’ president tweets


RT.com

President Donald Trump has vowed to break the “radical left’s” apparent control of social media platforms. Earlier, the president thanked his “keyboard warriors” for their support, as they accused the tech firms of censorship.

“The Radical Left is in total command & control of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google,” Trump tweeted on Saturday. “The Administration is working to remedy this illegal situation. Stay tuned, and send names & events.”

Trump was replying directly to Michelle Malkin, a controversial right-wing pundit and opponent of Big Tech censorship. When Trump gave a shout-out to his legions of online supporters on Friday – referring to them as his “keyboard warriors” – Malkin said that right-wingers are still being “ruthlessly purged from the internet,” and asked that the president “maybe do something before it’s too late?”

Continue Reading

  • Currently 0.00/5
Rating: 0.00/5 (0 votes cast)

Video: Project Veritias - Google "Machine Learning Fairness" Whistleblower Goes Public


VIDEO: “the police began looking for me…”
  • Google Sent Threatening Letter to Google Insider Zachary Vorhies: “they knew what I had done and that letter contained several demands”
  • HUNDREDS of Internal Google Documents Leaked to Project Veritas… news blacklist, “human raters,” YouTube CEO video…
  • Google Insider Wants More Insiders to Blow Whistle: “people have been waiting for this Google Snowden moment where somebody comes out and explains what everybody already knows to be true”
  • “I felt that our entire election system was going to be compromised forever, by this company that told the American public that it was not going to do any evil”
The internal Google documents are available here.

(San Francisco) A Google insider who anonymously leaked internal documents to Project Veritas made the decision to go public in an on-the-record video interview. The insider, Zachary Vorhies, 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.

Along with the interview, Vorhies asked Project Veritas to publish more of the internal Google documents he had previously leaked. Said Vorhies:

“I gave the documents to Project Veritas, I had been collecting the documents for over a year. And the reason why I collected these documents was because I saw something dark and nefarious going on with the company and I realized that there were going to not only tamper with the elections, but use that tampering with the elections to essentially overthrow the United States.”

(Do you work in Big Tech? Project Veritas would love to hear from you.

In June of 2019, Project Veritas published internal Google documents revealing “algorithmic unfairness.” Vorhies told Project Veritas these were documents that were widely available to full-time Google employees:

“These documents were available to every single employee within the company that was full-time. And so as a fulltime employee at the company, I just searched for some keywords and these documents started to pop up. And so once I started finding one document and started finding keywords for other documents and I would enter that in and continue this cycle until I had a treasure trove and archive of documents that clearly spelled out the system, what they’re attempting to do in very clear language.”


Intimidation 

Shortly after the report including the “algorithmic unfairness” documents was published, Vorhies received a letter from Google containing several “demands.” Vorhies told Project Veritas that he complied with Google’s demands, which included a request for any internal Google documents he may have personally retained. Vorhies also said he sent those documents to the Department of Justice Antitrust Division.

(Project Veritas is hiring. If you want to become an undercover journalist, apply here!)

After having been identified by an anonymous account (which Vorhies believes belongs to a Google employee,) on social media as a “leaker,” Vorhies was approached by law enforcement at his residence in California. According to Vorhies, San Francisco police received a call from Google which prompted a “wellness check.”

Vorhies described the incident to Project Veritas:

“they got inside the gate, the police, and they started banging on my door… And so the police decided that they were going to call in additional forces. They called in the FBI, they called in the SWAT team. And they called in a bomb squad.”

“[T]his is a large way in which [Google tries to] intimidate their employees that go rogue on the company…”

Partial video of the incident was provided to Project Veritas. San Francisco police confirmed to Project Veritas that they did receive a “mental health call,” and responded to Vorhies’ address that day.

“Google Snowden moment”

Project Veritas has released hundreds of internal Google documents leaked by Vorhies. Among those documents is a file called “news black list site for google now.” The document, according to Vorhies, is a “black list,” which restricts certain websites from appearing on news feeds for an Android Google product. The list includes conservative and progressive websites, such as newsbusters.org and mediamatters.org. The document says that some sites are listed with or because of a “high user block rate.”

Another newly published document titled “Fringe ranking/classifer: Defining channel quality” lists an example ranking of various news sites, including CNN and FOX News. A document titled “Fake news & other fringe: Trashy recap” reveals that videos are rated by multiple “human raters.”

One internal Google document labelled “coffee beans” appears to show Google employees discussing diversity hiring practices. A related internal thread of communications also shows an apparent discussion about the “coffee beans” document, where one Google employee expresses concern that the document appears to “misrepresent Google’s hiring practices in a way that could raise legal questions…”

Another thread of internal Google documents shows Google employees discussing President Donald Trump’s infamous “covfefe” tweet, and a proposed plan to change the Google translation of the term.

“You’re going to be a hero”

Vorhies told Project Veritas that he hopes more insiders at Google decide to go public and discuss big tech abuses.

“My message to those that are on the fence is I released the documents. They can go in, they can see everything that Google is doing and then they can see the scale of it. Because I think that there’s a lot of engineers that have a hint that things are wrong, but they don’t understand the colossal scale that it’s at. And so for those people, I say, look at the documents, take the pulse of America, see what’s happening and come and tell the world you know what you already know to be true.”

(Big tech insiders can reach out to Project Veritas here to help expose similar newsworthy wrongdoing.)

Project Veritas requested comment from Google on this story but did not receive a response at the time of this publication.

Leaked documents

Below is an index of internal Google documents Project Veritas received from the Google insider. Each folder can be downloaded by clicking on the links in the table. Project Veritas has not re-named any of the files, but did arrange the documents into the downloadable folders below.

 

 
 
 
  • Currently 0.00/5
Rating: 0.00/5 (0 votes cast)

Video: Project Veritas: Current Sr. Google Engineer Goes Public on Camera: Tech is “Dangerous,” “Taking Sides”


Project Vertitas
 

  •  Insider: “It’s time to decide, do we run the technology, or does the technology run us?”

  •  “I really don’t buy the idea that big tech is politically neutral.”

  •  “Are we going to just let the biggest tech companies decide who wins every election from now on?”

  •  “I look at search and I look at Google News and I see what it’s doing and I see Google executives go to Congress and say that it’s not manipulated. It’s not political. And I’m just so sure that’s not true.”

  •  “I have a PhD, I have five years’ experience at Google and I just know how algorithms are. They don’t write themselves. We write them to do what we want them to do.”


 
 
 

 

(New York City) Project Veritas has published an on-the-record interview with an insider who works at Google named Greg Coppola. This video interview follows a series of insider Google reports, including internal Google documents, recently published by Project Veritas which exposed political bias, “algorithmic unfairness,” and the use of “blacklists” at YouTube.

Coppola is a senior software engineer at Google who works on artificial intelligence and the Google Assistant:

COPPOLA: I’ve been coding since I was ten [years old.] I have a PhD, I have five years’ experience at Google and I just know how algorithms are. They don’t write themselves. We write them to do what want them to do.”

(Other brave individuals who feel compelled to expose wrongdoing they witness can contact Project Veritas by sending an encrypted email to VeritasTips@protonmail.com.)

“that can be dangerous…”

The insider spoke with Project Veritas because he wants people to be aware of his concerns about technology companies’ ability to influence politics:

COPPOLA: “Well I think we’re just at a really important point in human history. I think for a while we had tech that was politically neutral. Now we have tech that really, first of all is taking sides in a political contest, which I think, you know, anytime you have big corporate power merging with political parties can be dangerous. And I think more generally we have to just decide now that we kind of are seeing tech use its power to manipulate people. It’s a time to decide, you know, do we run the technology, does the technology run us?”

Coppola believes that Google’s political motivations have compromised the integrity of the company’s Search and News products:

COPPOLA: “I think we had a long period, of ten years, let’s say, where we had search and social media that didn’t have a political bias and we kind of got used to the idea that the top search results at Google is probably the answer. And Robert Epstein who testified before Congress last week, um, looked into it and showed that, you know, the vast majority of people think that if something is higher rated on Google Search than another story, that it would be more important and more correct. And you know, we haven’t had time to absorb the fact that tech might have an agenda. I mean, it’s something that we’re only starting to talk about now.”

Asked about Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s testimony to Congress in December 2018, where Pichai said Google’s algorithms are politically unbiased, Coppola said:

COPPOLA: “First of all, I report to Sundar of course. And I have a great deal of respect for him as a manager. I work on the Google Assistant, which really doesn’t have a political bias. Google Assistant is things like, hey, Google, set an alarm for nine AM, play some music, that type of stuff… 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.”

(Internal documents from big tech companies can be sent to Project Veritas via secure email at VeritasTips@protonmail.com)

it was just a chance to work with the best computer scientists in the world”

According to Coppola, the company became more political just before the last presidential election:

COPPOLA: “I started in 2014. 2014 was an amazing time to be at Google. We didn’t talk about politics. No one talked about politics. You know, it was just a chance to work with the best computer scientists in the world, the best facilities, the best computers and free food. I think as the election started to ramp up, the angle that the Democrats and the media took was that anyone who liked Donald Trump was a racist… And that got picked up everywhere. I mean, every tech company, everybody in New York, everybody in the field of computer science basically believed that. A small number of people do work on making sure that certain new sites are promoted. And in fact, I think it would only take a couple out of an organization of 100,000, you know, to make sure that the product is a certain way…

Coppola pointed out that he believes most Google employees are not politically-driven in their work, and that the company is actually very protective of its users’ private data despite public criticism of the company:

COPPOLA: “Most people’s job [at Google] is not political and doesn’t involve politics. I mean there’s a vast number of systems and a lot of them have nothing to do with politics like processing natural language… In fact, I would say that Google actually concerns of the assistant is taking much longer to build the assistant than it would otherwise need to because there is such a respect at Google for privacy and for user data. And I hope you leave this in and I hope people realize that there is really, I would say as an insider at Google there is a lot of interest put in taking care of people’s data and conversely it means that, you know the list of reputations of mappings from new site to some number representing their credibility is probably something I can access.”

The insider expressed concern about going public, but also offered solutions for how to remedy allegations of political bias at Google:

COPPOLA: “I think the biggest problem here is just the overall lack of transparency that we have in our products today. Um, for example, if we had open source software, we would know why each answer was arrived at.”

COPPOLA: Yeah, I mean, I have a job that pays well and has other benefits like working with very intelligent coworkers and really at the forefront of computer science. The Google Assistant is probably the most advanced artificial intelligence system anywhere in the world. Then for someone like me who’s been coding since I was a kid, um, it’s hard to find a job that pushes me to the limits the way working at Google does. But I guess I just, you know, I look at search and I look at Google News and I see what it’s doing and I see Google executives go to Congress and say that it’s not manipulated. It’s not political. And I’m just so sure that’s not true. That it’s, you know, it becomes a lot less fun to work on the product. So it affects you that much. Yeah, definitely. I mean, the thing about Google is if you leave, um, you know, any other salary at any other company will be lower. Hmm. So I do think it’s a sacrifice.”

COPPOLA: “I just want to say to all the non-programmers that I really don’t buy the idea that big tech is politically neutral, and I think we need to start incorporating that into whatever strategy we use to have a democracy going forward.”

Project Veritas will continue to investigate political bias at big tech companies. Insiders at technology companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter can contact Project Veritas via encrypted email at VeritasTips@protonmail.com

  • Currently 0.00/5
Rating: 0.00/5 (0 votes cast)

Facebook Move Gives ACLU, 90 Left-Wing Groups ‘Power Over Every Post a Conservative Makes’


By Craig Bannister
 

On Sunday, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg announced the company's latest efforts to institutionalize the demands of 90 left-wing organizations into the company's operations, including disturbing efforts geared toward the 2020 elections.

Media Research Center President (MRC) Brent Bozell issued the following statement Tuesday on behalf of The Free Speech Alliance, a coalition of more than 50 conservative organizations committed to combating online bias and censorship.

"Sheryl Sandberg just announced that she is allowing the ACLU and 90 left-wing organizations to dictate nearly every aspect of Facebook’s policies. This will let the left dominate the most powerful social media platform on the face of the earth. That raises significant legal and statutory issues that should worry both left and right.

“Facebook hasn’t released the names of these groups, but the crux of their plans is clear – the influence of everything Facebook does from hiring more liberals to control of all content. That goes so far as to include advertising, partnerships and control of the product itself. Now these left-wing groups have the power over every post a conservative makes. Facebook can’t be a free marketplace of ideas with the left controlling everything and the firm’s No. 2 overseeing and embracing all they are doing.

“The company getting in bed with these liberal organizations – especially in its efforts to prepare for the 2020 elections – should be deeply alarming to the conservative movement, Congress, potentially the FEC, and indeed all Americans. This was a big mistake on Facebook's part. We hope they will rethink the decisions they have made.”

  • Currently 0.00/5
Rating: 0.00/5 (0 votes cast)

GOP Senator Introduces A Bill That Would Blow Up Business Models For Facebook, YouTube and Other Tech Giants


By Mary Catherine Wellons
cnbc.com


Key Points

  • Sen. Josh Hawley introduces legislation to remove the immunity Big Tech receives for user-posted content.
  • The bill would only affect companies with more than 30 million U.S. users, 300 million global users, or $500 million in annual revenue, but that would cover giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter.
  • However, large companies would be able to apply for immunity from the bill by having the FTC attest that their algorithms and content removal policies do not discriminate on the basis of political viewpoints, a common complaint of conservatives.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is turning up the heat on an issue that is sure to spark outrage in Silicon Valley.

Hawley, a tech critic, introduced legislation on Wednesday that would remove the immunity big technology companies receive under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. The CDA protects online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube from liability for the content users post. However, companies will be able to earn immunity from the crackdown if they submit to audits every two years to prove their algorithms and content-removal practices are “politically neutral.”

The idea of limiting Section 230 immunity has earned bipartisan support in recent years, as the companies have struggled to keep offensive and illegal content, ranging from terrorist propaganda to foreign-influenced election meddling, off their platforms.

Repealing the immunity provision could force these companies to use an editorial system where every piece of user-posted content would have to be vetted for illegal or libelous material before it’s posted, instead relying on algorithms and human checkers to scan it after it was already online and had a chance to spread to millions of people. This would fundamentally alter the business models of companies that depend on huge volumes of user-generated content, including all the big social networks.

The immunity provision of Hawley’s bill echoes concerns from other politically conservative lawmakers that these platforms are censoring right-wing voices by unfairly removing them from the platform. For instance, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, hammered Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about alleged political bias during the executive’s testimony before Senate in April 2018.

“With Section 230, tech companies get a sweetheart deal that no other industry enjoys: complete exemption from traditional publisher liability in exchange for providing a forum free of political censorship,” said Hawley. “Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, big tech has failed to hold up its end of the bargain.”

Continue Reading

  • Currently 0.00/5
Rating: 0.00/5 (0 votes cast)

43 Attorneys General Urge FTC to Take Action on Big Tech Competition, Privacy


Forty-three state attorneys general sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), urging it to take action on big tech privacy and competition.

By Sean Moran
Breitbart.com

Forty-three attorneys general (AGs) sent a letter, obtained by Breitbart News, to the FTC ahead of its Wednesday hearing on competition and consumer protection, which will include many prominent attorneys general such as Louisiana AG Jeff Landry, asking that the agency make reforms to protect consumers, consumer privacy, and competition in technology markets.

The AGs also suggested that the FTC should cooperate more with the state attorneys general on competition and technology platform issues.

The AGs said that the FTC “should require prior approval and/or prior notice for future acquisitions as part of more consent decrees in technology platform markets.”

They contended in the letter that “prior notice” or “prior approval” served as part of the FTC’s injunctive toolkit, which would give the FTC more power when delivering consent decrees.

However, the AGs said that the FTC, as well as the Department of Justice (DOJ), have not used prior notice or prior approval in any technology platform markets, such as Facebook, Google, or Amazon.

The AGs noted that Facebook, Google, and Amazon might often acquire upstart competitors to them and often are not subject to Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) antitrust reporting requirements.

The state lawyers noted that these “technology platform markets where network effects are pronounced — are particularly susceptible to acquisitions of nascent competition which may be anticompetitive but which are not subject to HSR reporting requirements.”

Continue Reading

  • Currently 0.00/5
Rating: 0.00/5 (0 votes cast)
US Debt Clock
Please Support Us With A Purchase






Please Make A One Time Donation
You can send a check
or money order to:
The KTAO Project
P.O. Box 1086
Crestone, CO 81131
or donate online:
Or Better Yet Become A Supporting Member
Important Web Sites




















Who's Online
Guest Users: 1147

Stats
13957 Pages Viewed
1900 Unique Visits
What's New
Stories  last 2 weeks
My Account
Please Support Us With A Purchase