| Stats |
ALERT AMERICA: A researcher who has spent more than half a decade monitoring Google’s influence said he believes the tech giant will “actively interfere” in the 2020 elections/
(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.”
“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.”
“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
Dr. Robert Epstein told Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Tuesday that Google can manipulate votes by using tools that they have at their disposal exclusively, and that no one can counteract them. Epstein warned the senator of big tech election meddling during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on "Google and Censorship through Search Engines" on Tuesday.
Facebook board member Peter Thiel on the need for the FBI and CIA to investigate Google for Treason on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
This week’s Fireside Chat is all about Google/YouTube’s censorship. Why does a differing opinion automatically mean it is offensive and controversial? There are over 100 PragerU videos that YouTube has placed on its restricted list, and we have never been given a reason why.
The report includes undercover footage featuring a top Google executive, Jen Gennai, discussing how Google might prevent an electoral outcome like 2016 from happening again.
By Mary Catherine Wellons
cnbc.com
Key Points
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.”
A Republican Google software engineer has written an open letter describing a culture of left-wing “outrage mobs” that make use of the company’s anonymous bias reporting channels to shut down dissent.
The , published Tuesday morning on Medium, was written by software engineer Mike Wacker, who was reported himself multiple times via the company’s anonymous reporting tools.
“If left unchecked,” Wacker wrote, “these outrage mobs will hunt down any conservative, any Christian, and any independent free thinker at Google who does not bow down to their agenda.”
In one case, Wacker describes a fellow Republican employee who was reported for saying nice things about the University of Toronto academic Jordan Peterson. He was given a note in writing that said, “One Googler raised a concern that you that you appeared to be promoting and defending Jordan Peterson’s comments about transgender pronouns, and this made them feel unsafe at work.” (RELATED: Documents Detailing Google’s ‘News Blacklist’ Show Manual Manipulation Of Special Search Results)
Wacker himself was twice reported via the company’s anonymous reporting channels.
“You wrote in the activists-us@ group: ‘The definition of ‘Google’s values’ that matters is the one used by Google’s activists, who could only be described as ‘nonpartisan’ in the same sense that the Women’s March could be described as inclusive towards pro-life Jewish women,'” reads a note he received in January. “Other members of the group responded that your statement was percieved [sic] as hateful/incendiary/inflammatory. [redacted].”
ZeroHedge.com
New research reveals that Google built biases into its search results that influenced the 2018 midterm elections - possibly costing Republicans three congressional districts.
First things first - the study was conducted by Dr. Robert Epstein - a San Diego-based Harvard Ph.D. who founded the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies. He's also a Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), a UCSD visiting scholar, and served as editor-in-chief of Psychology Today.
He also supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 (just like Google!).
Down to the findings:
Epstein and AIBRT analyzed Google searches linked to three highly competitive southern California congressional races in which Democrats won, and found that Google's "clear democrat bias" may have flipped the seats away from Republican candidates. According to the study, at least 35,455 undecided voters within the three California districts may have been persuaded to vote Democrat due to the biased Google search results.
Epstein says that in the days leading up to the 2018 midterms, he was able to preserve “more than 47,000 election-related searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, along with the nearly 400,000 web pages to which the search results linked.”
Analysis of this data showed a clear pro-Democrat bias in election-related Google search results as compared to competing search engines. Users performing Google searches related to the three congressional races the study focused on were significantly more likely to see pro-Democrat stories and links at the top of their results.
As Epstein’s previous studies have shown, this can have a huge impact on the decisions of undecided voters, who often assume that their search results are unbiased. Epstein has called this the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME). -Breitbart
 |
You can send a check or money order to: The KTAO Project P.O. Box 1086 Crestone, CO 81131 or donate online:  |
| Stats |