Former Google Engineer: Disappearance of Conservative Sites Might Have Exposed Blacklist
“It appears to have revealed the existence of another blacklist that disproportionately targets conservatives. The glitch is that sites on this blacklist disappeared from Google search results, but the existence of the list is very much by design.”
On Tuesday morning, numerous conservative outlets, including Legal Insurrection, disappeared from Google search results.
During that time, the outlets appeared on searches on Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo.
The glitch hit Bongino Report, Breitbart, Drudge, Human Events, and Newsbusters. Chuck Ross at The Daily Caller noticed Google blocked his website. The Federalist mentioned the list included Washington Free Beacon, The Blaze, Townhall, and The Daily Wire.
It also hit Occupy Democrats, the only left-leaning website that disappeared.
Google released statements:
In a jargon-filled statement, Google said it was looking into the issue, but failed to offer any explanation. “We are aware of an issue with the site: command that may fail to show some or any indexed pages from a website,” the company said in a post published on Twitter Tuesday afternoon. “We are investigating this and any potentially related issues.”
In response to an inquiry from Mediaite, a spokesman for Google added, “This issue affected a number of sites representing a range of different content and viewpoints. This issue was a technical error unrelated to the content or ideology of the sites affected.”
Mike Wacker, a former Google engineer, told Mediaite: “It appears to have revealed the existence of another blacklist that disproportionately targets conservatives. The glitch is that sites on this blacklist disappeared from Google search results, but the existence of the list is very much by design. And that raises a major question: Why was this blacklist created in the first place, and what else is it used for?”
Wacker mentioned the list “may have been manually curated.” However, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Congress in 2018 that “the company did not ‘manually intervene on any search result.'”
But Wacker suggested it could come from an algorithm, which “could have been created by a human.” If not, then “an AI that found something about the affected websites so offensive — such as the way users share their content, or the keywords used by those sites — that it blocked them.” He said:
“One possibility is that sites on this blacklist are being penalized, and the glitch was that the penalty was accidentally set so high that these sites were effectively removed from Google search,” Wacker said. “I’ve found that a lot of people tend to conflate algorithms with AI since they’re both automated, but AI isn’t as objective and mechanical as algorithms are.”
Dr. Robert Epstein agreed with Wacker:
Dr. Robert Epstein, a researcher who has argued Google has the power to sway up to 10 percent of American voters in the 2020 election, concurred with Wacker. “It’s likely that a person or algorithm at Google added ‘breitbart.com’ and other URLs to one or more of the company’s blacklists,” Epstein said. “Then, perhaps after some pushback, someone pulled those URLs off the blacklists.”
Google has faced scrutiny over search results. A former employee gave Project Veritas documents “that suggested the website was seeking to rank websites according to ‘quality.'” The employees placed Fox News below CNN and MSNBC.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
At some point, I have to wonder, isn’t Google in violation of our Civil Rights by these practices and therefore subject to heavy fines like any other corporation would be in denying service to someone on the basis of their race, creed, or religion?
I can say with certainty that blacklists around employment are wildly popular in Silicon Valley. Because I’m on one. That industry is vile.
@Krink126; As a social worker, I can assure you that employment / promotion blacklist aren’t secluded to just technology. Best to keep your mouth closed if you work in public schools, juvenile court or mental health.
I disagree about keeping your mouth closed.
Be loud, proud and hated by entities that would hate you.
For years I fought on the Father’s Rights Front and one of our closest allies was a family law attorney who was HATED by the divorce industry.
It’s a hard path. Tread it carefully. But NEVER SURRENDER.
That’s why the can use political leaning. It’s not a protected class. If this gave a downvote. I wasn’t meant to.
I downvoted this post as an experiment, not because I didn’t like it. Up until now, it was my experience that an accidental downvote could be “cancelled” by clicking the downvote button again, as that is how the “like” button works on many websites. But not here, as when I tried it I got an “Already Voted” message instead of a changed vote.
I don’t FB, so I don’t know how their system works, but I think this is the only site I commonly visit that doesn’t allow you to “change” a recent upvote/downvote by clicking it again.
I’m curious; does that match other users’ experience in this area?
The message is actually “Already Rated”, not “Already Voted”. Sorry.
And worse, if you accidentally give something a downvote, you can’t even compensate with an upvote.
What civil rights are they denying? There is no right to appear in search results. Even if they were doing it by race or some other clearly protected classification, e.g. removing black-run web sites from search results, there would be no civil rights violation because this is not a service they are offering those sites.
They’re the de-facto standard. “Google” is a commonly used verb. Kids learn it at an early age for decades now and means “to search, look up.” Like Kleenex is to tissues. Stop being such a know-it-all putz. If you want to be the ultimate arbiter of what is right then remember you are a human, and as such flawed. No one owns the truth. Putz.
Yup. You figured Milhouse would show up to try to defend Google.
It’s a mystery without any clues!
I’m sick of liberal organizations like Google sports teams and others looking at the US treasury as their own personal piggy banks.
STOP THE CORPORATE WELFARE.
Steering, certainly, and cancellation, maybe. The Alphabet umbrella corporation is a known transcivil corporation.
Yeah a glitch. maybe. or maybe google is trying to intimidate conservative sites into compliance. Now they know they’re on the list and may proactively edit themselves to avoid punishment.
Or they may sue communist Chinese owned Google into the ground.
Remember it takes as little as 10% or less stock ownership and having a board member or two, or as we already know many of the top execs, in favor of that major stock owner to effectively run the entire company.
However, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Congress in 2018 that “the company did not ‘manually intervene on any search result.’”
Well, that’s a lie. Try to use google shopping to buy a gun.
It’s not a lie, since it’s technically true. Blacklists aren’t manual interventions, they’re algorithmic ones.
And those algorithms have to be intentionally inserted into the search engine.
It’s a lie by semantics.
In a Process is the Punishment move conservatives in the House should subpoena social media executives for committee testimony in a session that never end.
Good Article Here:
BTW, when I brought this up the other day, I keep getting responses that should be using DuckDuckGo. I usually don’t use google but was bringing this to everyone attention. As you can see Google has 91 % of market share. This “can” impact 10% of votes like they claim.
You can’t bury our head on this one. With media and Google actions, they are declaring all out war against what little conservative chance we have. This is serious and we can’t expect the government to help us on this one.
As of June 2020, Google had 91.75% of market share of search engines, with Bing at 2.75%, Yahoo at 1.7%, Baidu at 1.02%, Yandex at 0.92%, and DuckDuckGo at 0.49%.
https://thenationalpulse.com/news/google-axes-conservative-media/
Those numbers don’t make any sense. There’s no “market” for search engines because nobody pays to use a search engine.
There’s a huge market for the data they mine from a search engine. Why do you think google stock was one of the tops in the exchange, even before they expanded into all of these other areas?
Those are ad dollar percents?
That’s a lie of omission. Any search blacklist, even if manually curated, is applied programmatically not manually. So yes, that statement is technically true, but what it is intended to imply, “therefore no blacklist exists”, is not true.
Well….if you own a business, make sure you are a registered Democrat and then vote Republican. I know of a person that has done this for years insisting that it gives him cover when Dems start nosing around.
You can also muck up some primaries while you are at it!
I’m so old, I remember when Google built share vs, a gaggle of established search engines thru *better query results.*
The search engine that became “Google” was called “backrub” for it’s backlink-based scheme ranking search results. The idea was to provide “most relevant” to the user; this is before their customers became advertisers, and their search users the product.
Now, their product seems to be comfort, buzz n propaganda for the ruling oligarchy; the other parts of it.
Now, better results are provided by DuckDuckGo. Google provides me with trash results most of the time, but DuckDuckGo is pretty decent.
It’s not just websites. Over the past couple of years I’ve noted a continued trend to block access to all content that doesn’t conform to prevailing winds. They are suppressing all kinds of information, not just political.
Let’s face facts, Google is a leftist force of evil. It needs to be broken up.
In addition to inventing the Web, I bet Al Gore invented algorithms. This could explain some things.