LAT: Silicon Valley searches for the Trump playbook

This Los Angeles Times article says nothing about how Big Tech tried to rig the election against Donald Trump and how his administration will seek justice. Why would a President Trump continue to allow Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc to discriminate against his point of view?

This website, for example, has been blackballed from Google’s search results since Aug. 17 even though Google’s own webmaster tools say the site is clean.

Trump supporters know that Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Journalism, the Democratic and Republican parties tried to rig this election against Trump and they want justice.

As the New York Observer reported Aug. 12, 2016:

Tech Companies Apple, Twitter, Google and Instagram Collude to Defeat Trump
There is no such thing as Pro-Trump free speech as Clinton corporate allies serve up a carefully curated view of the campaign

Apple isn’t the only corporation doing Clinton’s bidding. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said Clinton made a deal with Google and that the tech giant is “directly engaged” in her campaign. It’s been widely reported Clinton hired Eric Schmidt—chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google—to set up a tech company called The Groundwork. Assange claims this was to ensure Clinton had the “engineering talent to win the election.” He also pointed out that many members of Clinton’s staff have worked for Google, and some of her former employees now work at Google.

So it should come as no surprise that there have been multiple reports accusing Google of manipulating searches to bury negative stories about Clinton. SourceFed details how Google alters its auto-complete functions to paint Clinton in a positive light.

For example, when you type “Hillary Clinton cri” into other engines like Yahoo! or Bing, the most popular autofills are “Hillary Clinton criminal charges” but in Google it’s “Hillary Clinton crime reform.” Google denies they changed their algorithm to help Clinton, and insists the company does not favor any candidate. They also claim their algorithms don’t show predicted queries that are offensive or disparaging.

But Google has gotten into hot water on multiple occasions for connecting Trump to Adolf Hitler. In June, when users searched “when Hitler was born” it generated the expected information on Hitler but also an image of Trump. In July, searches for Trump’s book, Crippled America, returned images of Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf. Google has since fixed both—but again, why do these issues always conveniently disparage Trump and help Clinton?

Twitter is another culprit. The company has gotten a lot of slack for banning conservatives and Trump supporters such as Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos and, most recently, rapper Azealia Banks after she came out in support of Trump. Twitter has provided vague answers as to why conservative voices have been banned while they’ve allowed other users to call for the killing of cops.

Just yesterday, Buzzfeed revealed that the social media giant’s top executive personally protected the President from seeing critical messages last year. “In 2015, then-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered employees to filter out abusive and hateful replies to President Barack Obama.”

This year, Twitter isn’t just banning conservatives—the platform also changed its algorithms to promote Clinton while giving negative exposure to Trump.

The founders of some of the most popular pro-Trump Twitter handles—including @USAforTrump2016 and @WeNeedTrump—insist Twitter is censoring their content. They’ve pointed out that Twitter changes trending hashtags associated with negative tweets about Clinton (which has been reported before). On August 4, shortly after the hashtag “HillaryAccomplishment” began trending, it was taken over by anti-Clinton users, who used it to mention Benghazi or Emailgate. Eric Spracklen, @USAforTrump2016 founder, noticed the hashtag was quickly changed—pluralized to #HillarysAccomplishments.

“They take away the hashtag that has negative tweets for Clinton and replace it with something that doesn’t so the average person doesn’t see what was really trending,” Spracklen said. “This happens every day.”

Jack Murphy, founder of @WeNeedTrump, says followers complain they often aren’t able to retweet his pro-Trump tweets.

Instagram has also banned accounts that depict Clinton in a negative light. In June, a conservative comedy group called Toughen Up America was banned with no warning or explanation. Last week, the popular Australian-based graffiti artist, Lushsux, was banned from Instagram after he posted photos of a bikini-clad Clinton mural he painted.

“I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist with a tin foil hat, but the timing of the Hillary Clinton mural posting and the deletion that ensued can’t just be a coincidence,” he told the Daily Mail Australia. Lushsux has posted photos of way more graphic murals, including a topless Melania Trump and a naked Donald with his package in full sight. These images did not trigger any censorship from Instagram.

Facebook has a long history of shutting down pages and blocking conservative users while promoting progressive voices like Black Lives Matter activists. The problem became so transparent that Sen. John Thune sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking him to explain their practices.

Paul Joseph Watson writes:

According to top psychologist Robert Epstein, the power of Google’s algorithm to manipulate public opinion is so strong that it can influence up to 10 million undecided voters, ensuring a victory for Hillary Clinton.
After several years of research involving more than 10,000 people in 39 countries, Epstein concluded that Google has “the power to control elections” and that by favoring one candidate over another in some demographics up to 80 percent of undecided voters can be easily manipulated.
Google’s long standing support for Hillary Clinton runs so deep, that Google parent company Alphabet’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, met with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and asked if he could be Hillary’s “head outside advisor.”
“Many people have established that Google has a very close relationship with Hillary Clinton,” Epstein told RT, adding that, “Google seems to be favoring Hillary Clinton in its search suggestions, the suggestions it gives you when you first start to type an item.”
Back in August, we proved how Google had altered its search algorithm to prevent searches for “Clinton body count” from auto-completing, despite the term auto-completing when typed in on virtually any other search engine.
Back in June it was revealed by SourceFed that Google was indeed manipulating its search results to bury unflattering stories about Hillary.
“For example, when typing “Hillary Clinton cri,” Google’s auto-complete function brings up as its top choice “Hillary Clinton crime reform,” even though competing search engines Bing and Yahoo show the most popular search topics are “Hillary Clinton criminal charges” and “Hillary Clinton crime,” reported the Washington Times.
In August last year, Politico reported on how “Google could rig the 2016 election” by altering its search algorithms.
Epstein also noted that Facebook has the power to shift up to 600,000 voters on election day by simply sending out targeted reminders to Hillary Clinton supporters telling them to vote, while not sending out the same reminder to Trump supporters.
According to Epstein, who is a Clinton supporter himself, “Hillary Clinton is guaranteed to win this election” by approximately 6.5 million votes because polls don’t take into account Google’s algorithm to control the behavior of up to 10 million voters.
“Google’s algorithm has probably been determining the outcomes of close elections around the world for many years, probably actually controlling the winner in as many as 25 percent of the national elections of the world,” warns Epstein, adding that Google’s power was “unprecedented in human history” and constitutes a dangerous “threat to democracy” because it has no competitor and is automatically trusted more than any newspaper, magazine or television station.

Steve Sailer writes:

If you go to Google and type in American inventors you get back from Google pictures of the top American inventors of all time.

The #1 American inventor of all time is Lewis Howard Latimer, who, I just learned, worked with both Edison and Bell.

Thomas Edison is in 6th place and a well-tanned Alexander Graham Bell in 9th place, with ten black inventors rounding out the top dozen.

In the second dozen, Samuel Morse is 19th, Eli Whitney 20th, and Ben Franklin 23rd. Everybody else is black.

The Wright Brothers don’t make the top 50 American inventors, according to Google.

Thanks to John Rivers’ Twitter account for this.

In contrast, if I Google Scottish inventors, I get:

If I type in French inventors, I get:

Presumably, Google must get a lot of requests for “African American inventors” and assumes that’s what you really meant when you ask for “American inventors.” After all, what kind of sick Nazi do you have to be to be interested in your fellow Americans irrespective of race? That’s racist!

This phenomenon appears to be tied into propagandizing schoolchildren in K-12. For example, if I Google American psychologists, a subject only of interest to college and above, I get a pretty reasonable list with William James at #1:

On the other hand, American mathematicians, which is more of a K-12 school report topic than psychologists, is pretty silly:

(On the other hand, #10 David Blackwell, a Berkeley statistician, is fairly legit.)

One interesting thing is that Hispanics and Asians are completely shut out of this phenomenon.

Microsoft’s Bing is similar but slightly less absurd with Edison edging out George Washington Carver for the top spot, and Latimer coming behind Franklin and Bell, with Tesla making the top dozen.

On Bing, Bill Gates is #22, behind Steve Jobs at #19 (Woz doesn’t make the top 50). Hedy Lamarr is #28. Bing’s list is more fun than Google’s, which is mostly just depressing.

Similarly, here’s Google’s American scientists:

And here’s Bing’s American scientists:

So, Bing’s list is once again less dismal. I don’t mind a sprinkling of Diversity Tokens, but when there’s no room for Oppenheimer or Feynman on Google’s Top Fifty (#8 and #17, respectively, on Bing’s list) because of all the black obscurities, well, that’s just stupid and boring.

COMMENTS:

* George Foreman managed to make the list for his Foreman Grill, beating out the Wrights.

* I was surprised I had to scroll way down the list, directly between obscurities by the name of Henry Ford and Jonas Salk, to find the noted African-American inventor Ben Montgomery.

As Wikipedia tells it, Montgomery invented a particular kind of steam-operated propeller for boats, albeit “[t]his was not a new invention, but an improvement on similar designs invented by John Stevens in 1804 and John Ericsson in 1838.”

Of course, far more important than any potential impact of his invention on human life or commerce, is the fact that Mr. Montgomery was a slave (owned by the brother of Jefferson Davis). No doubt, the movie version of his inspirational tale will be coming soon to theaters near you.

* I’m getting an inkling of what life must have been like in the Soviet Union and presently in North Korea. This propaganda is relentless.

* That Google algorithm also lists Ted Kaczynski at #20 under American Mathematicians. AI has come very far if it can simulate a sense of humor.

* These are the sorts of topics you’d search for if you were raising a genius.

* I’m a millenial and grew up in the 90s and 2000s. We never actually studied black inventors or focused on them. I think there were blurbs about George Washington Carver and others in our social studies textbooks, but they weren’t a topic of study at all. In fact, I don’t recall studying any American inventors at all. The focus in social studies, civics, and history classes was almost entirely on politicians and political figures, most of them white except for MLK.

In high school English, we read some excerpts from Frederick Douglass and some stuff by Richard Wright, a black novelist, but most of it was the usual stuff – Poe, Melville, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc.

* Was it “Theodore Dalrymple” who said that the point of leftist propaganda was to humiliate you by demanding your obeisance to obvious lies?

* Google doesn’t really pretend not to be in the tank for Cinton and Obama. Autocomplete still won’t give you Hillary Cinton’s health problems, but is happy to suggest her health access initiative, etc. This is several weeks after breitbart and drudge made a stink about it.

With some of the highest lobbying of any company, and, I think, the most white house visits of any company, google has probably worked out some sweet deals with Obama that they would like to continue under Hillary.

After reading how New York used some of their 8,000 cameras to catch the latest bomber and their plans to put cameras in every single stop light in the city, I probably don’t even want to know.

One bright point, or not, is that that billionaire hedge fund guy supporting Trump owns the data analytics company that powered the brexit.

As an aside, I wonder when MLK’s plagiarism just goes down te memory hole for everyone, not just students who write papers on him.

* Googles autocomplete is an excellent way of finding out what the establishment doesn’t want you to know.

For ‘hillary health’, Google gives:
hillary health care
hillary health video
hillary health record

Yahoo gives:
hillary health issues
hillary health problem
hillary health rumors

Bing:
hillary health problem
hillary health problem more serious
hillary health issues

DuckDuckGo:
hillary health issues
hillary health rumors
hillary health scare

* Blacks on TV have been brilliant government technical experts since Bill Cosby on I Spy and Lt. Uhura on Star Trek a half century ago.

* We haven’t heard from America’s most promising young inventor in a long time.

He must be very hard at work. He’s so smart. His last invention only took 10 minutes. He did it the night before school.

* It’s just because “African American” is a common term for black.

Add -african (a minus sign excludes a word) and you get the kinds of results you’d expect.

* Bing gives me mostly black guys, which is kind of funny. Go to European American scientists’ and you mostly get Einstein, which is…kind of expected given popular culture. (I always wondered if he was overrated, but the very few physicists I talked to really didn’t seem to think so. One guy thought naming your bagel company Einstein was presumptuous.)

The ‘more searches like’ feature gives you gay, African, French, Greek, famous space, Chinese, Jewish, American, German, famous young, and cute.

Doing ‘white American scientists’ on google also gives you mostly black guys, though Ben Franklin puts in a few appearances. ‘European american scientists’ gives you a few white guys and one girl. They are pushing the diversity stuff hard.

* There’s a question in economics about whether industries need to be really competitive in order to create incentives for the market leader to innovate or if it’s enough for there to be potential entrants and potential competition.

Google seems a good example of how potential competition might work for a good long while, but in the long run, the monopolist or near monopolist stops putting as much thought into making its little customers happy and starts worrying mainly about making its biggest customers (the government and regulators) happy so it can stay a monopolist.

The Google for Education video they showed at my kids’ school last year was really funny, and relates to this post. “Who will make the inventions and discoveries that will change the world? Not this guy, or this guy” and then a series of Stale Pale Males in grainy black and white shots- “Maybe it will be them or them?” And then lots of vibrantly diverse kids solving scientific problems by building Legos or making Oobleck or elephant toothpaste or whatever.

About Luke Ford

I've written five books (see Amazon.com). My work has been covered in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and on 60 Minutes. I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).
This entry was posted in Apple, Donald Trump, Google. Bookmark the permalink.