This is an update to my previous Google is Evil blog post (found here www.tinyurl.com/Searching-Internet-Google-Evil). It’s a letter I just wrote to the membership of May First[1] which hosts my website and which solicits input from its membership to decide its forthcoming priorities.
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A New Priority for May First in 2018:
Providing an Answer to Alfredo’s Question in his 11/1/17 email to the membership:
His Question:
“What does our movement do to create an alternative to the corporate-controlled Internet?”
Answer:
– Educate its members and all others about corporate Google’s political control of humanity’s access to all information through its Internet search engine, and join others already working towards creating an alternative, distributed, neutral search engine for humanity’s access to all information through the Internet. In short, ASSIST WITH THE CREATION OF AN ALTERNATIVE TO CORPORATE CONTROLLED INTERNET SEARCH
Some Quick Facts May Firsters Need About Google which I’ll address in this document here with examples and references:
Corporate Google has a monopoly on search – and alternative search engine websites use Google’s search engine results – so simply using other internet search engines is NOT a solution to the problem addressed here & all other search engines are following Google’s lead. First, Google DEGRADED its search engine so that even when you use quotation marks to find specific content you knew was out there, Google ignores them and no longer offers up what it previously did – instead it offers up what it thinks you really want, or what it wants you to want, not what your search query tells Google you want. If you can’t find it on Google, does it exist? (For background, see my article
www.tinyurl.com/Searching-Internet-Google-Evil )
Now, Google has moved on to blatantly altering its secret search algorithms to hide left political content on the net. EXAMPLES:
“Beginning in April of this year, Google began manipulating search results to channel users away from socialist, left-wing, and anti-war publications, and directing them instead towards mainstream publications that directly express the views of the government and the corporate and media establishment (i.e., the New York Times, Washington Post, etc.)”
Copied from: An open letter to Google: Stop the censorship of the Internet! Stop the political blacklisting of the World Socialist Web Site! – World Socialist Web Site – http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/25/pers-a25.html (emphasis supplied).
See also this from Salon:
“Liberal and progressive sites appear to be among the victims of a policy Google announced on April 25, designed to boost “reliable sources” of information, after Google and other technology companies were criticized for allowing low-quality and even fraudulent websites to proliferate during the 2016 presidential campaign.
In a blog post, Ben Gomes, Google’s vice president of engineering, admitted that the company had been providing searchers with “offensive or clearly misleading content” in a small percentage of results. To combat this, Gomes wrote that Google had “adjusted [its] signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content.”
Gomes did not specify just what “adjusting signals” meant in regards to political content. Google and its employees have historically refused to release details about how results are filtered and prioritized . . .
“Not only are people being essentially blocked from accessing leftist viewpoints, they are not even being told they exist,” he said. “We would think that the WSWS would be an authority on socialism, but apparently that’s not what Google thinks.”
When asked how Bing, Google’s less-popular search rival, has handled the socialist publication, Damon said he had noted similar declines in referral traffic. “They’re just copying what Google did,” he said.”
Copied from: “Fake news” or free speech: Is Google cracking down on left media? – Salon.com – https://www.salon.com/2017/10/18/fake-news-or-free-speech-is-google-cracking-down-on-left-media/
Out of Google’s own mouth: (through Eric Schmidt, who from 2001 to 2011 served as the CEO of Google and who since then is the Executive Chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet):
“We’re very good at detecting what’s the most relevant and what’s the least relevant. It should be possible for computers to detect malicious, misleading and incorrect information and essentially have you not see it. We’re not arguing for censorship, we’re arguing just take it off the page, put it somewhere else…make it harder to find,” Schmidt said, adding: “I think we’re going to be ok.” (emphasis supplied)
Source: Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt on Google advertising and extremist content
Address : https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/23/google-chairman-eric-schmidt-advertising-and-extremist-content.html
And this from the New York Times:
“In April, Google announced an initiative called Project Owl to provide “algorithmic updates to surface more authoritative content” and stamp out fake news stories from its search results.
To some, that was an uncomfortable step toward Google becoming an arbiter of what is and is not a trustworthy news source.. . .
Most people have little understanding of how Google’s search engine ranks different sites, what it chooses to include or exclude, and how it picks the top results among hundreds of billions of pages. And Google tightly guards the mathematical equations behind it all — the rest of the world has to take their word that it is done in an unbiased manner.
Copied from: As Google Fights Fake News, Voices on the Margins Raise Alarm – The New York Times – https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-bias-claims.html?_r=0
Google however is NOT unbiased. It does have a political agenda OPPOSITE to those on the left.
For just one example, Google sees it as its mission to prevent the radicalization of a surplus population, again in Google’s own words (through Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas):
“With more than 50 percent of the world’s population under the age of thirty
and the vast majority of those characterized as “at risk” either socially,
economically, or both, an oversupply exists of young people susceptible to
recruitment by the extremist religious or ideological group closest to them
in identity or proximity. Google Ideas and the Council on Foreign Relations aim to initiate a global conversation on how best to prevent young people from becoming radicalized and how to de-radicalize others.”
Quotes found at:
and:
Google Ideas and Council on Foreign Relations Team-up on Counter-radicalization
For more on Google’s evil politics, with other examples, see my backgrounder:
www.tinyurl.com/Searching-Internet-Google-Evil
Creating an honest and unbiased alternative to Google Search must be a TOP PRIORITY of any left technological organization and May First needs to join and assist those already working on this. I’m not a techie myself, so I implore the techies in May First to work on saving the internet from this ongoing menace I’m addressing -and for its membership to vote to make this May First’s top priority. Here’s an article about techies already working on this:
“FREE SOFTWARE ACTIVISTS HAVE RELEASED A PEER-TO-PEER SEARCH ENGINE TO TAKE ON GOOGLE, YAHOO, BING AND OTHERS.
“The free, distributed search engine, YaCy, takes a new approach to search. Rather than using a central server, its search results come from a network of independent “peers,” users who have downloaded the YaCy software. The aim is that no single entity gets to decide what gets listed, or in which order results appear.
“Most of what we do on the Internet involves search. It’s the vital link between us and the information we’re looking for. For such an essential function, we cannot rely on a few large companies and compromise our privacy in the process,” said Michael Christen, YaCy’s project leader.
The project is supported by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), which is concerned that dominant search engines have too much control and power over what information Internet users can find online. “That company will also know what you’re currently interested in. The search terms used tell others a lot about what you’re up to. Targeted advertising is only the most benign use of this data,” explained Karsten Gerloff, FSFE president.
“We are moving away from the idea that services need to be centrally controlled. Instead, we are realizing how important it is to be independent, and to create infrastructure that doesn’t have a single point of failure,” added Gerloff.
The YaCy network currently has around 600 ‘peers’, but project organizers expect this to grow along the lines of other free software projects that aim to replace centrally-run services. For example, identi.ca (status.net) offers a free software alternative to Twitter; diaspora (joindiaspora.com) and many others provide a free, distributed alternative to Facebook.
As is often the case in the early stages of a new technology, results are better on some topics than on others — mainly computer-related issues.
The YaCy peers create individual search indexes and rankings, so that results better match what users are looking for over time. Each instance of the software contains a peer-to-peer network protocol to exchange search indexes with other YaCy search engines.
Everyone can try out the search engine at http://search.yacy.net/. Users can become part of YaCy’s network by installing the software on their own computers. YaCy is free software, so anyone can use, study, share and improve it. It is currently available for GNU/Linux, Windows and MacOS. The project is also looking for developers and other contributors.”
Source: Free Software Activists to Take on Google with New Free Search Engine | CIO
Address : https://www.cio.com/article/2401940/internet/free-software-activists-to-take-on-google-with-new-free-search-engine.html
(emphasis supplied).
On December 2nd, PLEASE VOTE TO MAKE ASSISTING WITH THE CREATION OF AN ALTERNATIVE TO CORPORATE CONTROLLED INTERNET SEARCH MAY FIRST’S TOP PRIORITY FOR 2018.
Thank you for your time and consideration!
Angie
Angie.joy@verizon.net (I’m having problems now with this email address: Angie@WhatNewsShouldBe.org)
- [1] “May First/People Link engages in building movements by advancing the strategic use and collective control of technology for local struggles, global transformation, and emancipation without borders. Flowing from that mission, our organization redefines the concept of “Internet Service Provider” in a collective and collaborative way. Like any democratic membership organization, we gather together each year to evaluate the past year’s experiences, plan the coming year’s work…” https://mayfirst.org/en/ ↩