For more than a year, conservative commentators, publishers, and political leaders have complained that the Left-wing social media giants including Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube have been censoring and/or downgrading search results for their content.
For just as long, the CEOs of the social media giants have stated — often under oath — that no, their platforms do not censor or downgrade conservative content, even though some studies have shown that, for some reason, user engagement of Right-leaning content has fallen off, in some cases dramatically.
Now, however, Breitbart News has discovered evidence refuting those denials, at least at Google-owned YouTube.
Last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told a House panel that the platform does not “manually intervene” when it comes to any particular search result. However, “an internal discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News reveals that Google regularly intervenes in search results on its YouTube video platform — including a recent intervention that pushed pro-life videos out of the top ten search results for ‘abortion,’” the news site reported.
“Abortion” was one of the terms that Google engineers added to a “blacklist” file for “controversial YouTube queries,” where a list of search terms the company considers sensitive are housed.
In addition to the term abortion, additional terms such as “abortions,” “the Irish abortion referendum,” “Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters,” and anti-gun activist “David Hogg” were included, according to anonymously leaked information cited by Breitbart News.
‘Let’s make sure we reverse things in four years’
In addition, a second partial list of terms the social media platform has blacklisted was leaked to the news site by another Google source. In that leaked discussion thread, a site reliability engineer for Google indicated there may be additional blacklists, according to the source.
“We have tons of white- and blacklists that humans manually curate,” said employee noted. “Hopefully this isn’t surprising or particularly controversial.”
Breitbart noted that other employees seemed more concerned that Google was keeping blacklists. One source said the software engineer who started the discussion thread described the existence of the blacklist containing the abortion term a “smoking gun.” (Related: The big social media companies are being used as a weapon to advance the agenda of the new world order.)
Separately, The Daily Caller reported in November, a few weeks after the midterms which saw Democrats retake control of the House, that Google employees held internal discussions over whether to bury conservative media search results as a result of POTUS Donald Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, which most did not expect.
“How many times did you see...items from opinion blogs (Breitbart, Daily Caller) elevated next to legitimate news organizations? That’s something that can and should be fixed,” Google engineer Scott Byer wrote in a Nov. 9, 2016, post that was leaked to TheDC, incorrectly describing that site and Breitbart as something other than legitimate news sources.
“I think we have a responsibility to expose the quality and truthfulness of sources – because not doing so hides real information under loud noises,” he continued. “Let’s make sure that we reverse things in four years – demographics will be on our side.”
As for the latest leak to Breitbart, the software engineer who called the blacklists a smoking gun also observed that the addition of the term abortion took place after a far-Left journalist from Slate complained to Google about the prominence of pro-life videos being returned in search results on YouTube. Soon after April Glaser’s complaint, the top 10 search results for abortion returned pro-abortion videos.
“The Slate writer said she had complained last Friday and then saw different search results before YouTube responded to her on Monday,” the Google leaker wrote to Breitbart. “And lo and behold, the [changelog] was submitted on Friday, December 14 at 3:17 PM.”
‘Starting to see a pattern’
Video content that was manually downgraded included a number from Dr. Antony Levatino, a former abortion doctor who became a pro-life activist (and someone, you would think, who has an expert’s viewpoint of the procedure and its after-effects on women). Another featured pro-life conservative Ben Shapiro, while still another featured one woman’s personal story of being pressured into having the procedure.
Glaser, in her complaint to Google, called those videos “dangerous misinformation.”
Breitbart noted further:
Since the Slate journalist’s inquiry and Google’s subsequent intervention, the top search results now feature pro-abortion content from left-wing sources like BuzzFeed, Vice, CNN, and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. In her report, the Slate journalist acknowledged that the search results changed shortly after she contacted Google.
In December, Republican lawmakers called for an investigation into Google following prior revelations that the platform was downgrading conservative content.
“So what do we have here? Looks like a monopoly scheming to use its market power to silence news [and] viewpoints it doesn’t like. Starting to see a pattern here,” then-U.S. Sen.-elect Josh Hawley of Missouri wrote on Twitter. “Google execs need to explain what is going on under oath.”
https://twitter.com/HawleyMO/status/1068518444386127872
One did. And, based on leaks to Breitbart, he wasn’t being honest.
The question for ruling Democrats in the House is, are you prepared to take action against Google CEO Pichai?
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