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Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Google: Committed to the Suppression of Vaping...?

I found an interesting link (http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/08/08/google-committed-suppression-free-speech/): Google is Committed to the Suppression of Free Speech.

The article describes how Google curtails access to non-major-media web sites: “Between April and June, Google completed a major revision of its search engine that sharply curtails public access to Internet web sites that operate independently of the corporate and state-controlled media. Since the implementation of the changes, many left wing, anti-war and progressive web sites have experienced a sharp fall in traffic generated by Google searches. The World Socialist Web Site has seen, within just one month, a 70 percent drop in traffic from Google.” (quoted from https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/07/31/goog-j31.html)


In it Google says: "Today, in a world where tens of thousands of pages are coming online every minute of every day, there are new ways that people try to game the system. The most high profile of these issues is the phenomenon of “fake news,” where content on the web has contributed to the spread of blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information."

See, here Google explains how it knows best: "However, it’s become very apparent that a small set of queries in our daily traffic (around 0.25 percent), have been returning offensive or clearly misleading content, which is not what people are looking for."

("Offensive" based on what, I wonder...? Perhaps we should ask their recently fired engineer James Damore...)

Then Google says: "Developing changes to Search involves a process of experimentation. As part of that process, we have evaluators—real people who assess the quality of Google’s search results—give us feedback on our experiments."

I wonder A) who these people are and B) what their personal biases might be...?

Now let's place this in the context of vaping.

We all know the ANTZ position on vaping so to me it's very likely that the "unhealthy" notion of vaping is being adjusted by Google to ensure that the right message about smoking is not curtailed, i.e., vaping is smoking is bad.

(We all know how Facebook feels on this matter as well…)

Of course, based on what we know about Google and search from the above, it would be highly unlikely that anyone would necessarily know or prove what Google might be doing in this regard though clearly there is a significant amount of evidence, e.g., what the main stream media says about vaping, to make one wonder.

Google is a monopoly very clearly, though its name is not yet generic (see http://fortune.com/2017/05/17/google-generic/).  As the "search monopoly" one would hope the search results would be neutral, i.e., not biased.  But this is not the case.

My suspicion is that, very likely, vaping is a target with respect to "misleading content."

After all, smoking is evil and Google says "do no evil..."

And, at least according to some, Google is more like a "cult" than anything else (see James Damore's comments here: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/11/fired-google-engineer-damore-says-company-is-like-a-cult.html).




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