The Daily Caller reported that not only former Google engineer James Damore but also other conservatives working for Google, endure a climate of censorship and discrimination against them.
Google managers openly discuss blacklists “meant to encourage and coordinate the sabotage of promotions, performance reviews, and employment opportunities for those with conservative viewpoints” Damore’s lawsuit against the company has revealed.
Google’s new “fact-checkers” are exclusively devoted to censoring conservative media outlets. As The National Sentinel reported, Google gives users details on the sidebar as well as a section titled “Reviewed Claims” in which only conservative sites are listed.
Left-wing outlets and blogs are not given the same “fact-check” treatment. When searching their names, a “Topics they write about” section appears, but strangely there is no “Reviewed Claims” section included.
In searching The Washington Post for example, not only was the “Reviewed Claims” section absent, but there was even a section labeled “Awards” added. The New York Times an CNN have received a similar treatment from Google.
But the Post, the Times and CNN have all published demonstrably, provably false fake news stories involving conservatives, President Donald J. Trump, his administration or his campaign. Yet there are no “Reviewed Claims” listed.
ABC News recently suspended one of its reporters, Brian Ross, for filing a fake news story about former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, but it, too, has no “reviewed” news stories.
“It’s not just Google, either,” The Daily Caller noted. “Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – owned by Google – have all exhibited the same pattern of discrimination and censorship against conservatives.”
An undercover media sting has revealed that Twitter is also targeting conservatives and independent media for censorship via “shadow bans”.
James O’Keefe, who runs Project Veritas, caught certain Twitter engineers admitting to developing algorithms that use “machine learning”, keywords and other techniques ban users who are Trump supporters and Republican voters.
Newstarget quoted Abhinov Vadrevu, a former Twitter software engineer, who said: “One strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned because they keep posting and no one sees their content,” he said. “So they just think that no one is engaging with their content when in reality, no one is seeing it.”
Olinda Hassan, a policy manager for Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, explained Twitter was developing a way of “down-ranking shitty people”.
“Yeah. That’s something we’re working on,” said Hassan. It’s something we’re working on. We’re trying to get the shitty people to not show up. It’s a product we’re working right now.”
But who are the shitty people? Former Twitter Engineer Conrado Miranda explained that the platform was already censoring pro-Trump or conservative content. “That’s a thing,” Miranda explained.
