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.
During an August appearance with Tucker, Dr. Epstein remarked, “So I have an article coming out very soon about ten different ways that these [...]]]>
During an August appearance with Tucker, Dr. Epstein remarked, “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.”
He also calls Google a “surveillance tool” that should be avoided.
Dr. Epstein recommends the upcoming film “The Creepy Line” in which he appears.
He appeared on the September 12 edition of Breitbart News radio, where a topic was the recently leaked video of Google headquarters bemoaning the Trump election in 2016. He noted that many companies have political leanings, but none have “the power that Google has to shift the thinking, the opinions, the values, the attitudes, the voting preferences, the purchases of more than two billion people around the world without people knowing that they are doing it — that’s the difference.”
His USA Today opinion piece is particularly timely with the fall election coming up:
]]>Not just conservatives: Google and Big Tech can shift millions of votes in any direction, By Robert Epstein, USA Today, September 13, 2018
Donald Trump is more right than he knows. My research suggests Google and Big Tech can manipulate voters in ways that threaten democracy and autonomy.
I am not a Trump supporter. I’m not even a conservative. But I love America and democracy, and I defend truth when I see it, and President Donald Trump is not only justified in expressing misgivings about Google and other tech companies — he seems to have no idea just how big a threat Google-and-the-Gang pose to both democracy and human autonomy.
In a forthcoming article in Fast Company, I have detailed 10 different methods Big Tech companies can use to shift millions of votes in the midterm elections with no one knowing they’re doing so and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace — upwards of 12 million votes, by my calculations. These powerful new means of manipulation make fake news stories and targeted ads, sources of influence that are both competitive and visible, look like kid stuff.
I’ve been a research scientist for nearly 40 years, and for more than five years now, I’ve been discovering, studying and quantifying new methods of influence that the internet has made possible. Two of these methods — the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME, pronounced “seem”) and the Search Suggestion Effect (SSE) — are among the most powerful types of influence ever discovered in the behavioral sciences.
Google search results affect elections
My randomized, controlled and peer-reviewed research on SEME shows that when one candidate is favored in search results, that can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more — up to 80 percent in some demographic groups. My new research on SSE suggests that (a) Google is manipulating opinions from the very first character people type into the Google search bar, and (b) by manipulating search suggestions (those phrases they flash at you while you’re typing your search term), Google can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into an astonishing 90/10 split.
Those boxes they often show you at the top of the results page, the so-called “featured snippets,” also shift votes and opinions, possibly boosting the impact of SEME by between 10 and 30 percent.
Is there evidence of actual favoritism in Google’s search engine? Well, the European Union certainly thinks so, having fined Google $2.7 billion last year for having biased search results. In the months leading up to the 2016 election here in the U.S., I led a team that used objective methods to preserve 13,207 online election-related searches and the 98,044 web pages to which the search results linked. These data showed that Google’s search results favored Hillary Clinton (whom I supported) in all 10 positions on the first page of search results — enough, perhaps, to have shifted two or three million votes in her direction over time.
Was this just, as Google likes to claim, an “organic” phenomenon — you know, something Google’s algorithm did all by itself based on user preferences? (What an idiotic claim. I mean, who wrote the algorithm that acts on those preferences?) Maybe — except that I found pro-Clinton favoritism in searches originating in red states, not just in blue states.
As for Google’s vacuous denials about having political preferences — defended uncritically in recent days by reporters like CNN’s Hadas Gold — let’s review: Google’s Eric Schmidt not only helped supervise Obama’s tech teams in 2008 and 2012, he also offered to supervise Hillary Clinton’s entire tech operation and bankrolled a highly secretive tech operation, The Groundwork, to assist her campaign. Clinton’s Chief Technology Officer was Stephanie Hannon, a former Google executive, and more than 95 percent of the company’s political donations have gone to Democratic candidates in recent elections.
That said, the problem is not about hurting conservatives; it’s much bigger than that. Google has also been accused of suppressing socialists and progressive groups. And whatever the company’s political preferences are today, they could change tomorrow, both in the U.S. and other countries. Democracy itself is at stake here.
Google’s ability to shift votes is unparalleled
There’s nothing wrong with a company supporting one candidate or party — Microsoft was one of Clinton’s biggest donors, after all — but no company in the history of the world has had the ability to shift votes and opinions to the extent and on the scale that Google has. When there are signs that Google is supporting one candidate or cause, we need to pay close attention to what it is showing people. (Continues)
As [...]]]>
As a result of the harassment, critics of sharia and its parent ideology political islam have gotten a lot of trouble. Not only are their lives in danger because of murderous jihadists — Dutch freedom fight Geert Wilders has required 24/7 security for years — but critics who cite chapter and verse of the koran’s commands for violence against infidels often have their sources of financial support shut down.
Arguably top on that list is author Robert Spencer who has been informing the free world about the threat of aggressive sharia for years through his many books and website JihadWatch.org.
Robert Spencer appeared with Tucker Carlson a year ago about being dropped by PayPal.
Lurking in the background and pulling strings is the fake hate spotter the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that has parlayed bogus accusations against honorable people into a multi-million-dollar empire. These days, the left is working to impoverish conservatives by cutting off normal means of making donations such as Paypal.
Robert Spencer described his struggles in a recent video that was derived from an article in PJ Media:
]]>Robert Spencer: The Left Moves Fast to Silence Me, By Robert Spencer, PJ Media, August 27, 2018
First Alex Jones was banned by nearly all the social media giants. Then Twitter banned Gavin McInnes. Then Facebook blocked Dennis Prager’s Prager University videos, although it later backtracked and apologized. Then Patreon and GoFundMe banned me, and make no mistake: you may dislike Jones, McInnes, Prager, and me, but this isn’t over. The Left is moving quickly now to silence all dissent, and there is no telling who could be next. It could be you.
Patreon started the ball rolling when they deleted the account I had started to raise funds to renovate an old TV studio, which I had hoped to use for Jihad Watch videos. Patreon gave me no explanation for banning me other than that MasterCard had demanded that they do so, and the only explanation from MasterCard was published in Breitbart News:
A Mastercard spokesperson responded to a Breitbart News request for comment with the following statement. “As part of our normal process, we share information about websites that may have illegal content with the acquirer — or merchant’s bank — that connects them to our network to accept card payments. The acquirer would then review the site for compliance with legal requirements and our standards. They would then determine what action to take. In this case, the acquirer advised us that they decided to terminate acceptance.”
What “illegal content”?
Which website — Patreon or Jihad Watch? All I had at Patreon was a video stating my hopes to rebuild the studio, and a notice about an upcoming livestream. At Jihad Watch, all we have are news articles, almost all from mainstream news sources, with commentary. To what “illegal content” is MasterCard referring?
It is not (yet) illegal in the United States to criticize Islam and to oppose jihad mass murder and the Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others. It is, however, illegal to do so under Sharia. Is MasterCard operating according to Sharia blasphemy laws now?
Shortly after that, I started a GoFundMe page to make up for the loss of Patreon. But after a few days, GoFundMe canceled my account and refunded all the donations. GoFundMe sent me this explanation:
It seems you’re using WePay [GoFundMe’s service to pay those who receive donations] for one or more of the activities prohibited by our Terms of Service …
WePay is unable to process payments related to Hate, violence, racial intolerance, terrorism, the financial exploitation of a crime, or items or activities that encourage, promote, facilitate, or instruct others regarding the same.
There was, of course, no further explanation.
It’s very clear what’s going on. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) claims that I am a “hate group leader,” and that’s that: when the SPLC says “jump,” Patreon and MasterCard say “how high?”
Indeed, the SPLC’s infallibility in such matters is taken for granted by all the social media giants as well. This is despite the SPLC’s massive admission of error in the Maajid Nawaz case, in which they paid a $3.3 million settlement to a Muslim reformer they accused of being an “anti-Muslim extremist” (which is what they call me). The SPLC’s far-Left political agenda, in lumping legitimate groups in with the likes of the KKK and neo-Nazis in order to discredit and destroy them, is also obvious.
But GoFundMe, like Patreon and MasterCard, allowed me no appeal, no discussion, no questioning of the SPLC’s fiat.
And of course, it isn’t just the SPLC. It is now taken for granted by large segments of the American population, and by innumerable people elsewhere, that to oppose jihad mass murder of innocent civilians and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others is “hate” — or as GoFundMe puts it, “Hate” with a capital “H.”
I remember how flabbergasted I was in 2003 when I was on MSNBC with Keith Olbermann and Ibrahim Hooper of Hamas-linked CAIR, and Hooper called me a “hatemonger.” I thought, “It’s ‘hate’ to oppose jihad terror? That will never fly.”
But it has. And the outcome will be that more and more people will be afraid to oppose jihad terror and Sharia oppression for fear of incurring these charges, and this discrimination and libel.
I’m going to be doing what I can to challenge GoFundMe’s uncritical acceptance of the SPLC’s smear of me, and the likely same uncritical acceptance by MasterCard/Patreon. But the SPLC has hundreds of millions of dollars and I don’t. And many who don’t realize how vulnerable they are will applaud what is happening to me because they don’t realize or believe how easily the same tactics can and will be turned on them. But they will be.
This is getting very serious. It won’t stop with me. After my adventures with Patreon and GoFundMe, MasterCard and Visa stopped processing donations for the David Horowitz Freedom Center, with which I am affiliated, although they backtracked after an outcry.
Despite this small victory, it is clear that the Left is moving quickly to silence all dissenting voices in the run-up to the 2018 elections. The freedom of speech is the foundation of a free society, and it is rapidly being destroyed in the United States. Not only are Horowitz, and me, and Jones, and Prager, and McInnes being silenced — the pressure on the credit card companies shows that the Left is now trying to make sure that we cannot make a living, and will be quite literally destroyed, personally as well as professionally.
There will be more victims. This totalitarian action needs to be stopped quickly, or it will destroy all who are not doctrinaire Leftists — and, without any doubt, the United States as a free society.