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Google Ditches ‘Fact-Check’ To Give Alternative Media A Break. But Their Secret Speech Police Unit Is Still Intact

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Google Insider Reveals Secret ‘Speech Police’ Unit

 

An anonymous Google insider has revealed that a secret ‘speech police’ unit operates within the company, tasked with censoring controversial opinions online. 

Google Has An Actual Secret Speech Police – More than 100 nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and government agencies around the world help police YouTube…All of them have confidentiality agreements barring Google, YouTube’s parent company, from revealing their participation to the public

It’s not just terrorist videos that Google is censoring. Jordan B. Peterson, a professor known for opposing political correctness, had one of his videos blocked in 28 countries earlier this month. A note sent to Peterson’s account said YouTube had “received a legal complaint” about the video and decided to block it.

The overwhelming majority of the content policing on Google and YouTube is carried out by algorithms. The algorithms make for an easy rebuttal against charges of political bias: it’s not us, it’s the algorithm. But algorithms are designed by people. As noted above, Google’s anonymous outside partners work closely with the internal experts designing the algorithms. This close collaboration has upsides, Google’s representatives say, pointing to advances in combatting terrorist propaganda on the platform. But it also provides little transparency, forcing users to take Google’s word that they’re being treated fairly.

Over 100 nongovernment organizations and government agencies are employed by Google to help quietly remove ‘extremist content’ – including content that goes against the mainstream narrative.

Dailycaller.com reports: All of them have confidentiality agreements barring Google, YouTube’s parent company, from revealing their participation to the public, a Google representative told The Daily Caller on Thursday.

A handful of groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and No Hate Speech, a European organization focused on combatting intolerance, have chosen to go public with their participation in the program, but the vast majority have stayed hidden behind the confidentiality agreements. Most groups in the program don’t want to be publicly associated with it, according to the Google spokesperson, who spoke only on background.

YouTube’s “Trusted Flaggers” program goes back to 2012, but the program has exploded in size in recent years amid a Google push to increase regulation of the content on its platforms, which followed pressure from advertisers. Fifty of the 113 program members joined in 2017 as YouTube stepped up its content policing, YouTube public policy director Juniper Downs told a Senate committee on Wednesday.

The third-party groups work closely with YouTube’s employees to crack down on extremist content in two ways, Downs said and a Google spokesperson confirmed. First, they are equipped with digital tools allowing them to mass flag content for review by YouTube personnel. Second, the partner groups act as guides to YouTube’s content monitors and engineers who design the algorithms policing YouTube but may lack the expertise needed to tackle a given subject.

It’s not just terrorist videos that Google is censoring. Jordan B. Peterson, a professor known for opposing political correctness, had one of his videos blocked in 28 countries earlier this month. A note sent to Peterson’s account said YouTube had “received a legal complaint” about the video and decided to block it.

Peterson used his large social media following to push back, calling out YouTube on Twitter, where he has more than 300,000 followers. YouTube reversed Peterson’s block after another popular YouTuber, Ethan Klein, demanded an explanation on Twitter, where he has more than 1 million followers. Although the original notice said that YouTube was responding to a legal complaint, on Twitter the company gave the impression that the block was erroneous.

The overwhelming majority of the content policing on Google and YouTube is carried out by algorithms. The algorithms make for an easy rebuttal against charges of political bias: it’s not us, it’s the algorithm. But algorithms are designed by people. As noted above, Google’s anonymous outside partners work closely with the internal experts designing the algorithms. This close collaboration has upsides, Google’s representatives say, pointing to advances in combatting terrorist propaganda on the platform. But it also provides little transparency, forcing users to take Google’s word that they’re being treated fairly.

YouTube’s partnership with outside organizations to combat extremist content is just one part of the company’s efforts to prioritize certain kinds of content over others. YouTube also suppresses certain content through its “restricted” mode, which screens out videos not suitable for children or containing “potentially mature” content, as well as by demonetizing certain videos and channels, cutting off the financial stream to their operators.

Prager University, a conservative nonprofit that makes educational videos, sued Google in October for both putting their content in restricted mode and demonetizing it. Prager faces an uphill battle in court (as a private company, Google isn’t bound by the First Amendment) but the lawsuit has forced Google to take public positions on its censorship.

The Google representative who spoke with TheDC said that it is the algorithms that are responsible for placing videos in restricted mode. But in court documents reviewed by TheDC, Google’s lawyers argued otherwise. “Decisions about which videos fall into that category are often complicated and may involve difficult, subjective judgment calls,” they argued in documents filed on Dec. 29.

In her testimony before the Senate committee on Wednesday, Downs described some of the steps Google has taken to suppress “offensive” or “inflammatory” content that falls short of actual violent extremism.

“Some borderline videos, such as those containing inflammatory religious or supremacist content without a direct call to violence or a primary purpose of inciting hatred, may not cross these lines for removal. But we understand that these videos may be offensive to many and have developed a new treatment for them,” she said.

“Identified borderline content will remain on YouTube behind an interstitial, won’t be recommended, won’t be monetized, and won’t have key features including comments, suggested videos, and likes. Initial uses have been positive and have shown a substantial reduction in watch time of those videos,” she added.

YouTube’s demonetization push, which is affecting some of the most popular non-leftist political channels, is meant to accommodate advertisers who seek to avoid controversial content, the Google spokesperson said.

Dave Rubin, a popular YouTube host, has seen his videos repeatedly demonetized. Rubin posted a video, “Socialism isn’t cool,” on Wednesday. The video was up a little over 24 hours before YouTube demonetized it on Thursday.

The video was later remonetized, a Google representative told TheDC. But users can’t recoup the advertising dollars they lost while their videos were erroneously demonetized.

“I suspect that there is some political bent to it but I don’t think it’s necessarily a grand conspiracy against conservatives or anyone who’s not a leftist. Part of the problem is their lack of transparency has created a situation where none of use really know what’s going on,” Rubin told TheDC. “Does it seem that it is more so affecting non-leftist channels? Yeah, it does.”

Google Ditches ‘Fact-Check’ Feature Targeting Alternative Media

Google has announced it is discontinuing its dubious ‘fact-checking’ feature because it proved to be completely biased against alternative media. 

According to a Google spokeswoman, the company has no plans to reintroduce the fact-checking program, which unfairly targeted alternative media websites and conservative outlets.

Dailycaller.com reports: “We launched the reviewed claims feature at the end of last year as an experiment with the aim of helping people quickly learn more about news publications,” a spokeswoman for Google told TheDCNF, while also adding that TheDCNF was the catalyst for the recent move. “We said previously that we encountered challenges in our systems that maps fact checks to publishers, and on further examination it’s clear that we are unable to deliver the quality we’d like for users.”

There were two main problems with the fact-check widget, which appeared on the sidebar of Google’s search results for very few sites and publications.

First, the legitimate outlets chosen were virtually all ones with conservatives audiences. The Daily Caller, for example, was given such treatment, while sites like Vox, Slate, The Huffington Post, Mother Jones and several others clearly on the left side of the political spectrum were not.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, many of the fact-checks were wrong. One of the purported reviewed claims was for an article that straightforwardly reported that yet another member of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team was a donor for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama.

Google attributed the fact-check to The Washington Post, something it’s vice president of communications took issue with.

“We went back and double-checked the story and the information submitted to Google, and The Daily Caller was not mentioned at all, even in links,” Kristine Coratti, of WaPo, told TheDCNF. “We clearly labeled the source, so I cannot speak to how The Daily Caller ended up being erroneously listed as the source of the fact-checked quote in this case.”

After days of back-and-forth with representatives at Google, TheDCNF was told it was probably due to the algorithms, something the company doesn’t talk about as a matter of internal policy.

Google removed that single purported fact-check at the time of TheDCNF’s initial inquiries, but there were several others that were also false, if not all of them.

For instance, a “claim” attributed to The Daily Caller by Google’s feature and its third-party fact-checking partner Snopes was “a transgender woman raped a young girl in a women’s bathroom because bills were passed…”

A quick read of the news piece shows that there was no mention of a bill or any form of legislation. The story was merely a straightforward reporting of a disturbing incident originally reported on by a local outlet.

The whole program has been suspended for the foreseeable future as of Friday. Google engineers are reportedly heading back to the drawing boards to see how they can vastly improve a fact-check system, while it remains to be seen if the company will abandon the project altogether.

“As we continue to work on addressing this problem and assess how best to serve our users,” the Google spokeswoman continued, “we are putting the experiment on hold.”

 

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