Prof. Robert Epstein has warned against Google’s use of its Search function to influence voters [...]]]>
Prof. Robert Epstein has warned against Google’s use of its Search function to influence voters to embrace the liberal side.
Last July, the Senate held a hearing titled Google and Censorship through Search Engines where Dennis Prager testified that Youtube (owned by Google) had restricted access to 56 of PragerU’s 320 five-minute videos that explain history and politics to young people because schools have become so deficient.
Silicon Valley investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has accused Google of improperly working with Red China, including “the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military.”
On Wednesday, Tucker Carlson interviewed Floyd Brown, co-author of the new book Big Tech Tyrants.
Brown says he is “terrified” at the unbridled power of Big Tech — as well he should be.
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: So you’d think that we’d have a free press in this country — we’re guaranteed it in the Bill of Rights, but it’s not exactly free anymore. Big tech controls it and the tech companies are doing everything they can to shape the narrative, the storyline around impeachment.
For example, Facebook and YouTube, which control a much larger percentage of digital media than anyone realizes are now censoring, flat out censoring any material that mentions the name of the man believed to be the whistleblower. They’re not letting you know who this guy is.
Floyd Brown is co-author of “Big Tech Tyrants.” And he joins us tonight. So Floyd, it seems to me that we’ve moved to a stage a year out from a Presidential election, where the tech monopolies, which really control all of digital journalism in this country, are deciding what facts we’re allowed to know. Why should we not be terrified?
AUTHOR FLOYD BROWN: We should be terrified, and I am terrified. The truth is, is that over half of all news consumed by Americans is consumed on these social media platforms.
And when they can censor the way they’re censoring right now –both Facebook and Google around the name of this whistleblower — it’s chilling. It’s absolutely chilling.
They have such dominant power. In fact, you know, I know that Fox News isn’t saying the name of the whistleblower, but the name of the whistleblower was accidentally said by somebody on your network, and then that was posted on YouTube, which was immediately censored by Google.
So what you have — I’m the publisher of the Western Journal — we have decided to publish the name of the whistleblower, and we’ve done four stories on the whistleblower, and we have 43 million followers on Facebook. I don’t think ten of them have seen those particular stories.
CARLSON: So I mean, look, there’s a legitimate debate here. Let me just say that no one in Fox has told me what to do or not on that issue despite a lot of reporting to the contrary, I haven’t named the guy because I haven’t confirmed it. I can’t find anybody who will confirm it. But as soon as we do, we will I mean, that’s, you know — that’s journalism, and you may disagree.
But the point is this guy, whether he is the whistleblower or not, is at the center of a really important news story, and the average person ought to be able to make up his or her mind on that, but we’re not allowed to, because the tech monopolists won’t allow us. So why is Congress standing back and not saving us from this? Seriously.
BROWN: Yes, well, it’s amazing to me that a lot of the publications that you know, publish things like the Pentagon Papers, and have, you know, published almost all of what WikiLeaks released, and time and time again, they have been more than willing to publicize things that are the deepest secrets of the U.S. government.
But here this one particular secret, they’re so good at keeping the name of this whistleblower out of the media and you know, there’s been major changes in tech since Donald Trump was elected. And those major changes are all around keeping Donald Trump’s — really his ideas and his message — from reaching people.
CARLSON: Yes, I noticed that.
BROWN: I mean, when you look at Twitter, Twitter suppresses Donald Trump’s own tweets. And, you know, Facebook has limited the amount of people —
CARLSON: So this is much greater interference. I mean, this is an interference on a scale that Putin for all of his determination to hack our democracy never even approached or could have imagined. Purportedly American companies are putting a thumb on the scale of democracy and nobody is saying anything about it, why?
BROWN: They should be and Congress should be investigating them.
These companies have all grown incredibly large. You know, in my book, “Big Tech Tyrants,” I talk about the amount of data that has been collected on individuals. Americans don’t have any idea of the volume of information from medical records to you know, what they Google, to what they’re looking at, every single page of the internet that they visit is recorded somewhere.
And, yet people should be rebelling against that. And frankly, it’s a very dangerous situation.
CARLSON: Well, it is.
BROWN: When you see this kind of censorship, this is worse than what you would imagine from Putin and the Soviets.
Or the Russians.
CARLSON: These people are not your friends.
BROWN: No.
CARLSON: Meanwhile, I think Republicans control the Senate. I think it’s not just Josh Hawley, he is not the only U.S. Senator, where are the rest of them? It would be interesting to know.
BROWN: Well, as you know, as I. . .
CARLSON: I am sorry, but my lecturing is as put us over the edge, this this topic is worth being mad about. Thank you for your book. Thank you for coming on tonight. I appreciate it. I wish we had more time.
The Times used the word “indoctrinate” to describe PragerU more than once, although it’s obvious the paper regards its own publication as a [...]]]>
The Times used the word “indoctrinate” to describe PragerU more than once, although it’s obvious the paper regards its own publication as a fair representation of the news despite its decided liberal orientation and open-borders philosophy.
As an influential provider of conservative-leaning ideas, Dennis Prager has come under a lot of criticism from the left, particularly Silicon Valley.
On July 16, Prager appeared before a Senate hearing titled Google and Censorship through Search Engines to defend his work — see my report including video and transcript, Dennis Prager Responds to Google Censorship against PragerU.
To critics who call his videos biased, he remarked during his testimony:
DENNIS PRAGER: PragerU releases a five-minute video every week. Our presenters include three former prime-ministers, four Pulitzer-Prize winners, liberals, conservatives, gays, blacks, Latinos, atheists, believers, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and professors and scientists from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and a dozen other universities.
Do you think the secretary-general of NATO, or the former prime-ministers of Norway, Canada, and Spain, or the late Charles Krauthammer, or Philip Hamburger, distinguished professor of law at Columbia Law School, would make a video for an extreme or hate-filled site? The idea is not only preposterous; it is a smear.
PragerU presents a variety of historical subjects, from the current failure of Europe to confront hostile Islam to the importance of the Protestant Reformation in creating modern freedoms. Most are essays presented by experts, from well known persons to professors you never heard of. All are interesting, and their Monday morning appearance is a good start for the week.
How a Los Angeles-based conservative became one of the internet’s biggest sensations, Los Angeles Times, August 23, 2019
WASHINGTON — Earlier this summer, as Donald Trump assembled online activists at the White House to thank them for their role in getting him to the Oval Office and – Trump predicted – keeping him there, one guest didn’t rush to claim credit.
Los Angeles-based Prager University, a registered charity, is legally prohibited from politicking. It isn’t truly a university and doesn’t have a campus. But the digital empire created by Dennis Prager, a 71-year-old conservative radio host and erstwhile Never Trumper, is having more success rallying young people to Trump’s side than many campaign committees aligned with the president.
The concise videos PragerU launches onto the internet every week to indoctrinate and motivate conservatives have been watched more than 2 billion times, according to the group’s own count. Independent analysis done for The Times by Tubular Labs, a video measurement company, largely backs up that claim. PragerU consistently spends more on Facebook advertising than major political campaigns and national advocacy groups. It ranks among the top 10 biggest political spenders on the platform.
Its videos are becoming a staple on college campuses, where Prager is dead set on overturning liberal orthodoxy. PragerU boasts that thousands of college and high school teachers screen its videos in their classrooms.
All that has caused considerable consternation on the left.
“It is a sophisticated campaign to indoctrinate young people,” said Tara McGowan, chief executive of Acronym, a nonprofit that advises progressives on digital campaigning. “The amount of money they are putting behind it is alarming and significant. They seem to have created a savvy way to push an ideology onto an audience and get a tax break in the process.” (Continues)
The article goes into great detail about funding, including the identities of major contributors. If you are interested in Prager’s philosophy of education, the Times article provides almost nothing. For that, the best introduction is probably his Senate testimony:
]]>One person testifying was Dennis Prager, whose website PragerU has suffered many instances of censorship by Google with no explanation.
PragerU takes on liberal shibboleths, such as the “Nation of Immigrants” myth, which may [...]]]>
One person testifying was Dennis Prager, whose website PragerU has suffered many instances of censorship by Google with no explanation.
PragerU takes on liberal shibboleths, such as the “Nation of Immigrants” myth, which may anger the far left. (Actually, we are a nation of citizens.)
The educational five-minute videos are aimed at a young audience to fill in the historical gaps left by the liberal education establishment, but the restrictions placed on some items are nonsensical: Mr. Prager learned from the first witness, a spokesman from Google, that the video about the Ten Commandments was put under restriction because it mentioned murder — negatively, of course, but those algorithms are strict!
Seriously, you would think that a major web publisher like PragerU would get responsible human attention.
]]>DENNIS PRAGER: I will take just a moment because my opening comment is under five minutes just to respond on the issue of the Ten Commandments video that was a placed on the restricted list by Google; the representative from Google mentioned that a reason that it would be on the restricted list was that it contains mentions of murder, so I was thinking, I have a solution that will I think appeal to Google. I will re-release it as that the Nine Commandments. That should solve the problem of including murder in my discussion of the Ten Commandments.
And as regards the swastika, yes, there is a swastika; it is again in the commandment of do not murder wherein I show that murder — there are people who believe murder is all right even today, and I use the swastika and the hammer and sickle as two examples. I would think we would want young people to associate the swastika with evil; that was why I had a swastika.
It is an honor to be invited to speak in the United States Senate, but I wish I were not so honored. Because the subject of this hearing — Google and YouTube’s (and for that matter Twitter and Facebook’s) suppression of internet content on ideological grounds — threatens the future of America more than any external enemy.
In fact, never in American history has there been as strong a threat to freedom of speech as there is today.
Before addressing this, however, I think it important that you know a bit about me and the organization I co-founded, Prager University, PragerU as it often referred to.
I was born in Brooklyn NY. My late father, Max Prager, was a CPA and an Orthodox Jew who volunteered to serve in the US Navy at the start of World War II. My father’s senior class thesis at the City College of New York was on antisemitism in America. Yet, despite his keen awareness of the subject, he believed that Jews living in America were the luckiest Jews to have ever lived.
He was right. Having taught Jewish history at Brooklyn College, written a book on antisemitism, and fought Jew-hatred my whole life, I thank God for living in America.
It breaks my heart that a vast number of young Americans have not only not been taught how lucky they are to be Americans but have been taught either how unlucky they are or how ashamed they should be.
It breaks my heart for them because contempt for one’s country leaves a terrible hole in one’s soul and because ungrateful people always become unhappy and angry people.
And it breaks my heart for America, because no good country can survive when its people have contempt for it. I have been communicating this appreciation of America for 35 years as a radio talk show host, the last 20 in national syndication with the Salem Radio Network, an organization that is a blessing in American life. One reason I started PragerU was to communicate America’s moral purpose and moral achievements, both to young Americans and to young people around the world. With a billion views a year, and with more than half of the viewers under age of 35, PragerU has achieved some success.
My philosophy of life is easily summarized: God wants us to be good. Period. God without goodness is fanaticism, and goodness without God will not long endure. Everything I and PragerU do emanates from belief in the importance of being a good person. That some label us extreme or “haters” only reflects on the character and the broken moral compass of those making such accusations. They are the haters and extremists.
PragerU releases a five-minute video every week. Our presenters include three former prime-ministers, four Pulitzer-Prize winners, liberals, conservatives, gays, blacks, Latinos, atheists, believers, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and professors and scientists from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and a dozen other universities.
Do you think the secretary-general of NATO, or the former prime-ministers of Norway, Canada, and Spain, or the late Charles Krauthammer, or Philip Hamburger, distinguished professor of law at Columbia Law School, would make a video for an extreme or hate-filled site? The idea is not only preposterous; it is a smear.
Yet, Google, which owns YouTube has restricted access to 56 of our 320 five-minute videos and to other videos we produce. “Restricted” means that families that have a filter to avoid pornography and violence cannot see that video. It also means that no school or library can show that video.
Google has even restricted access to a video on the Ten Commandments, as we have seen. Yes, the Ten Commandments.
We have repeatedly asked Google why our videos are restricted. No explanation is ever given. But, of course, we know why. Because they come from a conservative perspective.
Liberals and conservatives differ on many issues. But they have always agreed that free speech must be preserved. While the left has never supported free speech, liberals always have. I therefore appeal to liberals to join us in fighting on behalf of America’s crowning glory – free speech. Otherwise, I promise you, one day you will say, “first they came after conservatives, and I said nothing, and then they came after me. And there was no one left to speak up for me.”
Thank you.
For more details on the issues, see the candidate’s website Yang2020.
Consider what technology experts have already predicted for our near future. Oxford researchers forecast in 2013 that nearly half of American jobs were vulnerable to machine or software replacement within 20 years. Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi believes that in 30 years humans will become largely obsolete, and world joblessness will reach 50 percent. The Gartner tech advising company believes that one-third of jobs will be done by machines by 2025. The consultancy firm PwC published a report last year that forecast robots could take 38 percent of US jobs by 2030. In November 2017, the McKinsey Global Institute reported that automation “could displace up to 800 million workers — 30 percent of the global workforce — by 2030.” Forrester Research estimates that robots and artificial intelligence could eliminate nearly 25 million jobs in the United States over the next decade, but it should create nearly 15 million positions, resulting in a loss of 10 million US jobs. Kai-Fu Lee, the venture capitalist and author of AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, forecast on CBS’ Sixty Minutes about automation and artificial intelligence: “in 15 years, that’s going to displace about 40 percent of the jobs in the world.” A February 2018 paper from Bain & Company, Labor 2030, predicted, “By the end of the 2020s, automation may eliminate 20% to 25% of current jobs.”
Why isn’t Washington paying attention to tech experts’ warnings? There’s not a whole lot to be done in the face of such fundamental social change, but certainly America won’t need more immigrant workers, as President Trump has recently suggested in a major reversal of a top campaign promise. That flip-flop is doubly bad because:
Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete
Audio version:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Big tech knows a lot about you, in some cases more than you know about yourself. They certainly know where you go and what you eat. May even know what you think. The only thing it can’t control is what your thoughts are, but they are working on that, too.
In a 2018 phone recording obtained exclusively by this show, Adam Kovacevich — he is Google’s head of U.S. Public Policy — explains to Google employees why the company was a sponsor for CPAC that year. Google sponsored CPAC, he says, because it wouldn’t let them push the party toward a more open borders agenda. Listen:
GOOGLE EXECUTIVE ADAM KOVACEVICH: The Republican Party and the conservatives in general, is also going through a lot of internal debates about what should be the sort of position of the Party and I think that’s one that we should be involved in because we, I think, want probably, the majority of Googlers wants to steer conservatives and Republicans more towards a message of liberty and freedom and away from the more sort of nationalistic incendiary nativist comments and things like that.
CARLSON: Now, as noted, Google has more power than any company has ever had. It has the power of its massive data reserves technology, of course, it has financial power. It has one highest market capped companies in history. It also increasingly has political power though they don’t typically admit it in public.
Kovacevich did admit it. He said that companies like Google are playing quote, “a leadership role” in American politics. He bragged that the company got a support of mass immigration on to a CPAC panel and that person argued in support of Google’s agenda. It shows a lot about big tech’s attitude toward the country. They are in control — elections, parties, democracy, just a hindrance to their control.
So we told you a lot on this show about the potential dangers of big tech. Some of those dangers are imminent, and they are technological, and the main one is robotics and artificial intelligence.
Remarkably, the person, the political figure who is making the most sense on this subject, who has thought about it most deeply is a Democrat who is running for President. He is Andrew Yang. He is an entrepreneur and as we said, he is a Democratic presidential candidate. He says that artificial intelligence and expanded automation could potentially cause violence in this country and that we need to do something about it right now. Andrew Yang joins us tonight.
Andrew, thanks very much for coming on, and I meant that with sincerity. I haven’t heard anybody in our political conversation describe the threat as clearly and compellingly as you have. Why should would he be worried about automation?
CANDIDATE ANDREW YANG: Well, if you look at the backdrop, we automated away four million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, and those communities have never recovered. Where if you look at the numbers, half of the workers left the workforce and never worked again, and then half of that group filed for disability.
Now what happened to the manufacturing workers is now going to happen to the truck drivers, retail workers, call centers and fast-food workers and on and on through the economy as we evolve and technology marginalizes the labor of more and more Americans.
CARLSON: What will be the effects of that? That’s a massive displacement of people. What will happen once that happens?
YANG: Well, as you said, I think it’s going to be disastrous, where if you look at truck drivers alone, being a trucker is the most common job in 29 states. There are 3.5 million truck drivers in this country, and my friends in Silicon Valley are working on trucks that can drive themselves because that’s where the money is, where we can save tens, even hundreds of billions of dollars by trying to automate that job.
But I was just with truck drivers in Iowa last week and imagining that community recovering from their income going from let’s call it $50,000 a year to much, much less than that catastrophically, it’s going to be a disaster for many, many American communities.
CARLSON: You are one of the only people I have met honest about the effects of the de-industrialization. I remember in Washington, the idea was, they will all become computer programmers, and so everything is fine, but that didn’t happen.
My question is do we have to sit passively back and let this happen to the country?
YANG: Well, that’s why I’m running for President, Tucker. I think it would be insane to just sit back and watch this automation wave overtake our communities and our economy. So we are not ostriches. We can get our heads up out of the sand, and say, “Look, we get it. Artificial intelligence is real. Self-driving cars and trucks are being tested on the highways right now and we need to evolve.”
We need to actually start pushing the way we think of economic progress to include how our families are doing, how our children are doing, and things that would actually matter to the American people because GDP is going to lead us off a cliff.
You know, robot trucks — great for GDP, terrible for many, many American communities. So we need to get with the program and figure out how to actually make this economy work for people.
CARLSON: I sit with my jaw open. I agree with you so strongly. Let me ask you finally, why isn’t this a central question in the campaign of everybody running for President on any side, and why instead are they talking about issues that are really are kind of frivolous? Why aren’t they talking about this?
YANG: It’s a good question, Tucker. I mean, one of the reasons I’m running for President is to push this in the center of the mainstream agenda where every candidate should be talking about what we are going to do about the fact that we’re automating away the most common jobs in the economy right now.
As we are sitting here together, the labor force participation rate in the United States is 63.2%. The same level as Ecuador and Costa Rica, and if anyone thinks that’s where America ought to be, I mean, that number is even going to be further challenged when all of this technology comes online. So we have to make America embrace this challenge of the 21st Century and then try and address it together as a people.
CARLSON: Last question. Shouldn’t people who cite unemployment statistics be penalized for saying something so stupid?
YANG: Yes, we have a series of bad numbers and I refer to GDP as one. Certainly, a headline unemployment rate is completely misleading and one of my mandates as President is I’m going to update the numbers that actually make sense to the American people.
CARLSON: Yes, yes. So we can know what’s going on, otherwise we can’t make wise decisions.
YANG; Yes, right now again and you know this, our life expectancy has declined for the last three years, first time in 100 years because of a surge in suicides and drug overdoses. How can you say an economy is healthy when our people are dying? It makes no sense at all.
CARLSON: I literally — I don’t even know what you think on the other issues and I just support what you said so much. I appreciate your coming on.
YANG; Thank you, Tucker. It’s great to be here.
As Dr. Epstein noted about the search engine [...]]]>
As Dr. Epstein noted about the search engine Google from his research, “It’s frightening to me that this company with very strong political leanings has the power to shift millions of votes and shift opinions on a massive scale without people knowing that they are doing it and without being accountable to the public.”
But while the search shenanigans continue, as Epstein reports, “Google has been extremely good at keeping its secrets for almost 20 years, but in the last few months that has changed, and there have been quite a number of leaks, and we have seen a number of internal discussions there.”
So the Google company’s Stalinesque group-think may be breaking down somewhat under criticism from the public.
In addition, there may be some hope for action against Big Tech’s extreme influence on opinion from abroad. Epstein noted: “The Europeans see these companies as American, and they have been much tougher on them. I think we are going to see some pretty drastic actions taken against these companies by the E.U. in the next few years, and that could change their ability to operate worldwide.”
]]>In a September 20 segment, Carlson examined the Google response to President Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” (a temporary measure which was [...]]]>
In a September 20 segment, Carlson examined the Google response to President Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” (a temporary measure which was quite popular among GOP voters according to a Rasmussen poll). But Google employees thought that shutting the door even a little on Western Civilization’s historic enemy was just mean.
Remember that under the Obama administration, Muslim immigrants got priority, so it’s only fair for President Trump to chill in response (Chart: Obama Admin. On Pace to Issue One Million Green Cards to Migrants from Majority-Muslim Countries, Breitbart.com, June 17, 2016).
Much of this criticism is based on the work of psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein (@DrREpstein), who has penetrated Big Tech’s propensity to manipulate in favor of liberal causes and politicians. One of the worst secret influencers is what Google search turns up. See Tucker’s interview with Dr. Epstein here: Big Tech Threatens to Secretly Undermine American Elections.
Back to Thursday’s report:
Spare audio:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Tonight, we have a development in our ongoing exclusive investigation into the behavior of Google. There are new emails first obtained by this show.
Now Google, as you know, is the most powerful company in the history of the world. Virtually all human information flows through its software. And for that reason, Google shapes much of how the world understands reality.
At the heart of Google’s business is its search engine which has a virtual monopoly on search in this country and others. Google search succeeds because it is blindingly efficient but also because it is perceived as honest. When you search for a term on Google, the most popular results come to the top. The process is straightforward and democratic: that’s what most people think. That’s how it’s perceived, and that’s why the world trusts Google.
But what if Google was lying to you? What if the results that you got were secretly weighted to get you to vote a certain way, to believe a certain thing? That would affect a lot of people and a lot of votes.
In fact, it would be impossible to have a real democracy under circumstances like that. A small number of incredibly rich people would be in charge of everything including your perceptions.
Well that is a major concern for all of us because Google is a very political company. We recently showed you email evidence of the Google effort to collude with a left-wing group in support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Now tonight, we have internal documents that show that Google employees discussed corrupting the company’s search engine to push propaganda on hundreds of millions of unsuspecting users.
Here’s what happened. Shortly after taking office, President Trump issued his now-famous travel ban. Almost immediately after that, Google employees began plotting ways to undermine the President’s Executive Order. On January 29th, a Google Product Marketing Manager named Mackenzie Thomas sent an email to a group of fellow employees. “There is a large brainstorm going on throughout the marketing org” she wrote, brainstorming about how to respond to Trump’s order.
Among Thomas’ ideas was “To actively counter algorithmically biased results for search terms such as Islam, Iran, Mexico, Latino and so forth.” In other words, Google employees wanted to alter the search results to make them more positive in certain cases for political reasons. Thomas also suggested promoting links for making donations to organizations fighting the travel ban.
This, of course, would be completely dishonest and unethical behavior. But Thomas’ colleagues at Google seemed to approve of it strongly. Product Manager Rami Banna, for example, replied this way. “We’re absolutely in, Mackenzie, anything you need. We’ll put together a list of orgs with Meryl and HL team.”
Another employee named Stacey Chen added that group she thought Google should promote included the ACLU, the Immigration Defense Project, the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee and the National Immigration Law Center. All of those groups were at the time agitating against the President’s immigration ban.
Even at least one person on the chain seemed to realize how dangerous and out of the ordinary this conversation was. A Google employee called Clement Wolf commented that he was “very much in favor of Google stepping up” but was wondering “How partisan we want to be on this? To the extent of my knowledge, we’d be breaching precedent if we only gave highlights access to organizations that support a certain view.”
We contacted Google about these remarkable emails and the reply to us is here in full.
“These emails were just a brainstorm of ideas, none of which were ever implemented. Google has never manipulated its search results or modified any of its products to promote a particular political ideology – not in the current campaign season, not during the 2016 election, and not in the aftermath of President Trump’s Executive Order on immigration. Our processes and policies would not have allowed for any manipulation of search results to promote political ideologies.”
Left unanswered by Google was why anyone would believe that statement for a second. Nor did Google say anything about the employees on that email chain. Presumably, they still work at Google which is remarkable. If you ran a bank and caught your tellers brainstorming about how to rob the vault, would they still work for you? Remember that Google fired an engineer called James Damore last summer almost instantly.
The CEO flew back from family vacation to fire him. Why? Because Damore was caught expressing mildly conservatives ideas in a private memo. Here, Google employees are plotting to subvert our entire public conversation secretly. But that’s fine with Google. It shouldn’t be fine with any of us or with the U.S. Congress. Google executives are scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill next week. The scheduled topic is privacy. But it would be nice if at least one elected representative asked about this because it’s much scarier than anything Russia ever attempted.
Peter Schweizer wrote “Clinton Cash.” He now has a fantastic new documentary called “The Creepy Line” about big tech and he joins us tonight. Are you surprised by this?
PETER SCHWEIZER: Not really. It’s just further confirmation that Google has been cooking the books as it relates to search.
And you’re absolutely right. I mean this would be like a company having a brainstorming session on how we’re going to fiddle with the books in accounting. Then you’re going to step back and say “No, we were just having a brainstorming session.”
It speaks to the culture of the company. And the culture of the company is they are prepared to put their thumb on the scale and shift the debate in favor of the direction that they want to go.
CARLSON: But this is so corrupt that it’s — I was stunned by it, and I was worried that these emails were not authentic because it’s such a big . . . so search is the core of Google’s business. It’s many different things, Google, but basically, it’s a search engine. It was built on the back of one. And the promise has always been that they’re not lying to you. But they are.
SCHWEIZER: That’s right. And this is really the third strike as far as I’m concerned. The first strike, of course, is the commercial search. When travel websites and people like Yelp were complaining that they were, you know, tilting the algorithm, you know, against them to others, Google said “Absolutely not. We would never do that.”
We now know the Federal Trade Commission, the EU, and others have looked at this and said Google was fiddling with the algorithm. The second strike as far as I’m concerned was the work done by Dr. Robert Epstein which shows clearly in 2016 that search was tilted to favor Hillary Clinton. This is strike three. It shows that the culture of the company is such that they’re very happy having a free and open conversation about manipulating the algorithm on a highly political subject.
CARLSON: But I don’t understand. I mean so people go to jail for violating our campaign finance laws because they put an extra ad on some cable channel nobody watches. This is the most powerful company in the world.
How can we have a democracy in a country where Google can just get whoever it wants elected by lying to us through the search function?
SCHWEIZER: It’s a great example, Tucker, of regulations and campaign finance laws not keeping up at all with where we are in technology. Nobody could see when we pass laws about in-kind contributions to campaigns from companies that something like this would happen.
But this is the ultimate, the ultimate campaign contribution. This is not like, you know, Exxon giving gasoline to a political campaign. This is a company secretly tipping the scales in favor of candidates or causes or beliefs that they have. It’s done in secret. We don’t know how extensive it’s happening. And 80 to 90 percent of search in the world is basically done through Google, so they have complete dominance in this area.
CARLSON: And the Congress does nothing. And I can think of at least one Republican senator who I believe has been bought off by Google. I don’t think he’s alone. At some point it might be worth naming who those people are. Peter, great to see you.
SCHWEIZER: Thanks, Tucker.
Dr. Epstein (@DrREpstein) discussed the issue on the Tucker Carlson show on Friday, but it was not quite as alarming as his earlier appearance in March where he revealed the frightening extent of Big Tech’s secret powers of persuasion:
DR. ROBERT EPSTEIN: Tucker, I’ve been studying this very carefully now for more than five years with multiple randomized controlled experiments around the world for national elections, and I can tell you that we should be paranoid because what Google and Facebook can do is really mind-boggling.
If, for example, if Mark Zuckerberg on Election Day last year, if he had chosen to press the Enter key in early morning and just sent out a message to Hillary Clinton supporters, only saying go out and vote, a go-out-and-vote reminder, that would have sent her an additional 450,000 voters that day with no one knowing that this had occurred — and that’s just Facebook.
What Google can do is really off the scale: our experiments show that Google can can take a 50/50 split among undecided voters and change it into a 90/10 split with no one knowing that they have been manipulated and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to follow.
Spare audio:
Now back to Friday: as Tucker pointed out, the Democrats are still harping over their overwrought conspiracy theories about Russian meddling in the 2016 election, while a more genuine threat resides in Big Tech’s ability to meddle in secret.
Plus, it’s alarming how some citizens can have their voting decisions swayed by rather small influences piped in from the internet.
TUCKER CARLSON: How about the threat of Facebook itself or other tech giants? Representatives from about a dozen tech companies including Facebook and Twitter held a secret meeting today ostensibly to discuss how to resist the manipulations of these platforms, but could it be that these companies themselves are manipulative? Could they and not the Russians be imperiling our democracy?
Nobody has studied this more carefully than Robert Epstein; he’s the senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research, and he joins us tonight. Dr. Epstein, thanks very much for joining us. I just want to say at the outset I have no idea what your politics are; I don’t think you’re a conservative; I don’t think it matters. You care about democracy. Tell us, should we be concerned potentially about the manipulation of our democracy by the tech companies?
DR. ROBERT EPSTEIN: Tucker, it’s great to be back. I am NOT a conservative, and we should be extremely concerned because I can tell you the bottom line here is content no longer matters: all that matters is the filtering and ordering of content and that is completely in the hands of Google and Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter.
CARLSON: So what would happen — I know that you’ve gamed this out to some large extent — how would a company potentially like Facebook or Google manipulate public opinion to achieve a desired result in an election?
EPSTEIN: Well I think they’re doing this all the time actually, because we’re well aware of the fact that they suppress material, sometimes they announce it, sometimes they don’t. We are aware of the fact that Google puts some items higher in search results than other items; well, if search results favor one candidate that shifts votes. I think we’re well aware of the fact that news feeds on Facebook sometimes seem to favor one political point of view over another, and that shifts votes. So I have an article coming out very soon about ten different ways that these big tech companies can shift millions of votes in November, in fact I calculate this November they’ll be able to shift upwards of 12 million votes just in the midterm elections.
CARLSON: If they have the power to do that and they have a demonstrated political preference and a demonstrated willingness to exercise that preference by suppressing information they disagree with, as we both have seen, then why shouldn’t we be terrified that they’re going to subvert our democracy completely?
EPSTEIN: Well I think democracy has been subverted actually because at the moment you see there are no specific rules or regulations that are stopping these companies from exercising the power that they have; so that’s a problem. Another problem is that we have no monitoring systems in place; at the moment I’m working with academics and with business people to build monitoring systems, but until those systems are fully in place, you can’t even really track what it is they’re doing, what it is they’re showing people. So we’ve got some big problems here at the moment. I think the problems can be solved at some point but at the moment I think democracy is in trouble.
CARLSON: So Republicans don’t want to do anything because they’re free market absolutists under the narcotic sway of libertarian religion, and Democrats don’t to do anything because they know that helps them. But without Congress acting would anybody trust our electoral system as honest and on the up and up?
EPSTEIN: I wouldn’t trust it at the moment because in the research I do, you know I found number one, that it’s very easy to shift a lot of votes without people knowing that they’re being influenced, so that’s a problem, and the other problem is that you can do this without leaving a paper trail. So at the moment, I think we’re really in deep trouble, and I think you hit the nail on the head — the Republicans aren’t doing anything about it, and the Democrats aren’t doing anything about it; each for their own reasons.
CARLSON: It’s terrifying. Thank you, Dr. Epstein, for calling attention to this.
Breitbart News has also been reporting on Epstein’s work examining Big Tech’s surreptitious influence and censorship, e.g. Exclusive — Robert Epstein: Who Gave Private Big Tech Companies the Power to Decide What We Can See? which includes a 36-minute audio interview.
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