By B.N. Frank
Big Tech continues to be criticized for excessive public
surveillance (see
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6), neglecting to reduce and recycle
toxic Electronic Waste (E-Waste), endangering humanity with the
misuse of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and of course,
censorship.
A 2-part segment about increasing internet censorship was
featured on this week’s episode of
“Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Become an Activist Post Patron for just $1 per month at Patreon.
Big Tech Censorship: Part 1
By FULL MEASURE STAFF Sunday, January 10th 2021
This past week saw a turbulent beginning of the end of
the unprecedented term of President Trump. A rally in Washington
supporting the president and calls to overturn the election turned
violent. Protesters stormed both chambers of Congress and one was
shot before being driven from Capitol Hill. Members of Congress
returned to certify Joe Biden as president-elect. Meantime,
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube took aggressive, new steps to clamp
down hard on President Trump’s social media accounts. Among other
objections, Twitter said President Trump violated policies in his
video urging protesters to be peaceful and go home, because he
reiterated claims about election fraud. Some welcome Big Tech’s
crackdown; others say it’s a radical violation of free speech. It
highlights a long-simmering battle over the control of information
online. That’s the focus of our special
investigation.
Sharyl Can you give sort of the short version of how you
discovered or came to believe something wrong was going on?
Zachary Vorhies: Yeah. I was working at YouTube in 2016 and
everything was really great. But then something happened. And what
happened was Donald Trump won the election.
2016 news clip, news anchor: We can now project the winner of
the presidential race, Donald Trump wins the presidency.
Vorhies: And after he won the election, the company just took a
hard left and decided that they were going to abandon their liberal
principles and start going towards an authoritarian sort of
management of their products and services.
Zachary Vorhies was as an insider for more than eight years, a
senior software engineer at Google and Google’s YouTube.
Sharyl: Can you describe how that manifested itself, this change
in direction you describe?
Vorhies: It happened the first week after Donald Trump won the
election. Google had an all hands meeting, which they usually do
every week, called TGIF. The CFO broke down into tears recounting
how she was communicating with the New York office about how they
were going to lose this election. The founder Sergey Brin said that
he was personally offended at the election of Donald Trump. And
Sundar Pichai, the CEO, said that one of the most successful things
that they had done in the election was applying machine learning in
order to hide fake news.
Donald Trump’s candidacy didn’t only ignite a new trend of
heavy handed manipulation and censorship at Google. Ten days after
Trump was elected, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced efforts
unheard of before. Facebook would begin judging and rating news
organizations in terms of trustworthiness and attaching warning
labels to content. It also changed how “trending topics” work,
no longer reflecting the number of people discussing something.
The liberal propaganda group Media Matters, founded by Hillary
Clinton supporter David Brock, took credit for convincing Facebook
to take the drastic new steps.
Within days of the inauguration in January 2017 the whole
strategy was outlined in in a confidential memo to donors by Media
Matters and some of its affiliates, American Bridge, CREW, Citizens
for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and ShareBlue.
The memo stated that Media Matters was a “partner” of
Facebook and other Big Tech players to crack down on online
information Media Matters didn’t like. “Facebook needed our
help in fully understanding the problem and identifying concrete
solutionsWe’ve been engaging with Facebook leadership behind the
scenes to share our expertise” with the goal of getting Facebook
to “adjust its model” Media Matters also said it lobbied Google
to “cut off access to revenue” of “40 of the worst fake news
sites” —as identified by Media Matters, of course.
This leaked internal video shows the CEO of Google’s YouTube,
Susan Wojcicki, discussing their new approach.
Susan Wokcicki (2017 video): We’re pushing down the fake news
and demoting it, and we are increasing authoritative news and
promoting it. Content that isn’t that we don’t think that is
authoritative news it’s just kind of encouraging people to look
at is not true. We work with Google news on that to define what
reputable sources are.
Sharyl: And when you say ‘They bragged about effectively
cracking down on fake news, that sounds like a good thing?
Vorhies: Yeah, you would think. But when I looked at the design
documents, I started to notice something very interesting, which
was a lot of the fake news that they were using as examples of
things that they should censor were things involving Hillary
Clinton. And I was sort of apolitical, but I started to think to
myself, is this really fake news? Why is Google defining this as
fake news in order to justify censorship of it? So once I realized
that there was this fake news regimen that they were using and it
seemed like it was political, I started looking for what that
censorship execution could be. And I found it and the project was
called Machine Learning Fairness.
Sharyl: What does Machine Learning Fairness describe?
Vorhies: Machine learning is a type of A.I. You’ve got A.I.
that plays chess and checkers
Sharyl: Artificial intelligence?
Vorhies: Yeah.
Vorhies leaked a confidential Google document describing what he
calls Artificial Intelligence censorship designed to rerank the
entire internet by making “machine-learning intentionally
human-centered” to “intervene for fairness.”
Sharyl: Do you think there’s evidence that the instructions
that Google basically gave its program or machine on how to flag
fake news was skewed unfairly, and in favor of liberal interests
over conservative interests?
Vorhies: I mean, I wouldn’t even call them liberal because
they’re kind of authoritarian, totalitarian right now. And yeah,
the evidence of that is whenever you go to news.google.com or you
type in a Google search, it’s always being directed towards
anti-Trump sentiment. And the reason why this is because they’re
training these classifiers with people that are highly biased.
At the same time, Vorhies says Google was working on social
reconstruction to correct what it calls “algorithmic
unfairness.”
Sharyl: What is algorithmic unfairness?
Vorhies: Algorithmic unfairness is any sort of algorithm that
reinforces existing stereotypes. So a really good question that was
answered at Google is: Could objective reality be algorithmically
unfair? And Google’s answer to that was actually yes. And the
example that they give was let’s say you’re doing a search for
CEOs. And let’s say Google returns a bunch of images and most of
those images are images of men. Now, even if that reflects
objective reality, this can still be considered algorithmically
unfair and justify product intervention in order to fix.
Sharyl: And that was happening at Google?
Vorhies: That was happening at Google. And you could tell this
because you can go into Google search and you can say, “men
can”, and then let Google auto complete. And what it was doing is
it was saying “men can have babies,” “men can have
periods,” “men can get pregnant.” And then you try to do the
same thing but for women, and Google returned results like “women
can get drafted,” “women can do anything.” So it’s this
inversion of the stereotypes that they were trying to enforce. And
it wasn’t just them being equal. They were actually trying to
reverse the gender roles. And this is what they think is an
algorithmically fair engine.
Meantime, Vorhies says people within Google began organizing
anti-Trump activism through an email list: “Resist at Google dot
com.” and suggested chants like: “What do we want? JUSTICE!
When do we want it? NOW!”
In June 2019, the next presidential campaign was gearing up.
After more than eight years at Google, Vorhies says he decided to
resign and blow the whistle.
Vorhies: I realized that I couldn’t remain silent anymore and
that I had to go and seek out and disclose this to the public
because it appeared that Google was attempting a coup on the
president.
Sharyl (on camera): After a break, our investigation continues
into how the Big Tech shaping of information accelerated and
impacted the 2020 election.
See Part 2
HERE Also See Spiro’s August 6th interview at Activist Post
with Zach Vorhies:
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Software Engineer Exposes Big Tech Censorship Strategies Which
Include Use of AI and “Blacklistsâ€