‘Soft child-porn’ or honest political debate? Take a guess which one YouTube failed to censor

By Robert Bridge

Despite employing a small army of ‘anti-extremist’ flaggers, YouTube somehow overlooked an entire prison block of pedophiles on its platform. Is the video-sharing site wasting too many resources censoring political content?

Last week, a regular guy named Matt Watson, working at his home computer, shook the wired world to its very foundations by providing convincing evidence that YouTube supports – either wittingly or unwittingly – a pedophile ring that openly preys on the most vulnerable members of society, children.

As Watson demonstrated, not only are these bottom feeders free to comment on videos that feature minors, but they also provide time stamps, presumably for the benefit of the wider pedophile community, indicating exactly when the children can be seen in their most compromising positions. They also actively promote links to porn sites that cater for these twisted minds.

The discovery prompted some of the most popular corporate brands, including Disney and Nestle, to bolt for the emergency exits after it was discovered their ads were running alongside the work of sexually depraved deviants. Needless to say, not the best business model.

Aside from the lewd comments accompanying the videos, which is not overly surprising considering the planet’s high creep factor, one of the most disturbing revelations is how ‘user friendly’ YouTube has become for pedophiles. Watson showed how Google-owned YouTube, through no more than a couple mouse clicks, navigates users to a frolicking playground where the sidebar is loaded with nothing but children-themed videos, a virtual pedophile paradise. But it gets more disturbing.

Once a user has entered this “wormhole,” as Watson calls it, there are no alternative video options available for escaping from it. A user will not even find ‘awareness’ videos, for example, that discuss the threat of child predators. In other words, once the user makes it to YouTube’s children video section it is game over, so to speak, unless he or she physically activates a new search.

The reason that this scandal makes no sense is that YouTube has known about its pedophile problem for years. Back in 2017, advertisers were fleeing the platform for the very same reason they are today – their ads were being featured next to scantily clad girls, as well as the predictable depraved comments. Today, algorithm technology is so advanced that Google Maps, for example, is able to blur out the faces of every single person’s image that is captured by its Google Street View. Yet somehow YouTube appears to be technologically handicapped when it comes to finding ways to combat online pedophiles. Why is that?

One possible explanation is that Google and YouTube, as well as the majority of other IT companies, have become overly attentive to politics at the expense of everything else – and more so ever since Donald Trump ‘stole’ the White House from the Democratic darling Hillary Clinton.

First, it is important to state the obvious: Silicon Valley is to Liberals what Yankee Stadium is to the New York Yankees. In other words, the holy of the holies. To quote Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, Silicon Valley, the home to hundreds of IT companies, is an “extremely left-leaning place.” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, meanwhile, admitted that his company is so liberal that conservative employees “don’t feel safe to express their opinions” in the workplace.

Given this blatant liberal predilection within the industry, who do you think Google and YouTube teamed up with to police its content from ‘extremist’ (i.e. conservative) content? Certainly not far-right groups.

In 2017, YouTube doubled the size of its so-called ‘Trusted Flaggers’ program, which now partners with over 100 organizations, the full member list of the program remains confidential. Among the few members that have been made public, however, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), No Hate Speech and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), they could best be described as ‘extremist’ in their liberal ideology. Meanwhile, as the Wall Street Journal reported, “less than 10 of the slots are filled by government agencies.”

Ironically, given the nature of this discussion, several of those agencies deal with “child-safety” issues.

Conservatives argue that the glaring lack of transparency with regard to the secretive ‘Trusted Flaggers’ program, combined with the IT industry’s well-known liberal affections, explains why so many right-wing and alternative news sites are being either demonetized, downgraded, or outright banned. And since we are talking about private businesses, these organizations have no legal obligation to uphold the Constitution’s First Amendment that guarantees ‘freedom of speech.’ They just casually shrug their shoulders and blame everything on the almighty algorithms. Yet, as even the most technologically handicapped person knows, algorithms were not magically conjured up out of thin air. Human beings, not robots (at least not yet), work tediously to develop them.

As just one example of the Orwellian atmosphere now pervading Planet Google, Jordan Peterson, a professor with a reputation for opposing political correctness, had one of his YouTube videos blocked in over two dozen countries last year. YouTube duly informed him that it had “received a legal complaint” about the video and decided to block it. Just like that!

Meanwhile, Google can take draconian measures to downgrade RT and Sputnik, for example, over totally unfounded charges related to ‘Russiagate’ hysteria, yet they seem incapable of micromanaging the comments section in kiddie videos.

What this is intended to show is that YouTube does not hesitate to take deliberate steps to intervene in issues that matter most to them, which overwhelmingly seem to be of a political nature. Yet, when the welfare of children is at stake, the mini-surveillance state that the platform has built always goes missing in action, as it has now for many years.

How is it possible that one young man, working alone and without pay, is able to weed out a viper’s den of pedophiles from YouTube’s dungeon? Yet YouTube, with its army of ‘flaggers’ and moderators and government agencies, has failed to filter these miscreants for several years?

The sad reality is that the world of IT is totally consumed with politics, and politics is totally consumed with the world of IT, to the point where society’s most vulnerable are left at risk.

Unfortunately, parents must assume a great deal of vigilance against pedophiles when their children use the video sharing platform because YouTube has obviously dropped the ball on the issue and simply cannot be trusted. Like the rest of the IT kingdom, their heart is in politics, and that is it.

@Robert_Bridge

February 26, 2019 0

KNOWLES: ISIS Widows Want ‘Therapy’ After Marrying Terrorists

By Michael J. Knowles

Former American citizens turned ISIS brides want to return to the United States after being captured by Western forces in the Middle East. Michael Knowles explains why this is a bad idea on Thursday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show.” Transcript and video below.

You had this influx of women, these radicalized Islamic women in the United States, in Great Britain, throughout continental Europe who during the rise of the Islamic state actually left to go fight … on behalf of the Islamic State. So now because President Trump promised we would crush ISIS militarily, and we have, now these women don’t have a state. ISIS barely exists anymore, if it exists at all. Now they want to come back and say, “Whoopsie-daisy, let’s pretend that nothing happened.”

Here is a woman named Hoda Muthana, she left at the age of 19, left Alabama, the good ol’ USA, moved to Syria and married an Australian jihadi who died within three months. Then she married another jihadi, had a child with him, That’s now 18 months old. That guy got killed as well — good job, Western forces — and now she wants to come back to Alabama. Here she is:

Muthara: When I was 17 I had an account on Twitter and we were all just normal Muslims speaking together, and we were just learning off of each other, feeding off of each other. We heard the Caliphate was announced and then we interpreted ourselves that it was obligatory upon us to go…[when she went to Syria] we didn’t see much about, what we did see when we did see it, we would see dead bodies in public.

“You know we’d see dead bodies.” But they knew that they were gonna see dead bodies because they were on these Twitter threads and in these internet groups that we’re talking about this, that’s why they left. Who wants to stay in boring, peaceful, free Alabama, when you can move to Syria and help Islamic militants slaughter innocents? Which is what this woman did. By the way, it’s not like she was eight or nine years old here, was captured and brought over there. She was 19 years old when she left the United States, she helped to spread ISIS propaganda on Twitter. She tweeted out “Americans wake up, go on drive-bys and spill all of their blood.”

We have a hard time in the West believing that people can think this way because we live in a basically decadent, secular, liberal society, so we have no conception of anyone truly believing that people should go on drive-bys and spill all of the blood, as this woman said, on Twitter. So we have this vulnerability, we don’t have a natural defense against these people who are vicious, vile terrorists who want to burn down everything that we have, want to spill our blood in the street — her words, not mine — what we want to do is just let them come back and that’s the compassionate thing, that’s the nice thing to do — that’s the imprudent thing to do. What does this woman think her punishment should be for leaving the United States and going to fight for ISIS?

Muthara: Maybe therapy lessons, it may be a process that will insure us that we’ll never do this again. Jail time, I don’t know if that has an effect on people.

Yeah, jail time, let’s not even consider that. How about just some nice therapy, maybe a good day at the spa, kind of let me get some of my troubles out of here, just relax a little bit, de-stress, maybe that would help. Wow, to be able to look an interviewer straight in the face and say, “Yes, I called for the spilling of American blood in the name of the Islamic state, I’d left and renounced my country, I joined a major international terrorist group and helped people slaughter innocents throughout the Middle East. I think I probably just need a little touch of therapy.” She does need some therapy, she also needs some prison.

February 22, 2019 0

THE INDEPENDENT MEDIA JUST SAVED AMERICA FROM A BLOODY RACE WAR (THAT THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA WAS TRYING TO START)

America was just saved by the same independent media that the tech giants are trying to wipe out

Natural News – FEBRUARY 21, 2019

In reviewing the Jussie Smollett fiasco, it’s important to note that Smollett staged his hate crime hoax in a location where he believed it would be caught and recorded on a surveillance camera. The purpose of this was to have video footage that the media would play up nationwide, fomenting an outbreak of racially-charged violence that would ultimately lead to a full-blown race war across America (which the media, of course, would blame on Trump).

This is the goal of the left-wing media, which now functions as a cabal of enemy combatants in a civil war they started. And I have no doubt that Barack Obama and his “community organizers” are behind the whole thing. Smollett is well known to be a cohort of Obama, and this is exactly the kind of thing Obama continues to direct from his “bunker” command center near the White House. (See photo, below, of Smollett and the Obamas together.)

The independent media blow the hoax wide open (and the Chicago police did a damn fine job, too)

Yet the hoax was revealed thanks to the efforts of the independent media and old school police work by the Chicago PD, not the “mainstream” media news cartels (which pushed endless lies and propaganda to prop up the hoax for as long as possible).

It was indy media that asked the first questions about the flimsy story that Smollett pushed on the world. Too many things didn’t add up, and while the left-wing media swallowed the hoax without asking a single critical question, the independent media pointed out the many holes in Smollett’s story, such as the fact that he refused to hand over his full phone records to the police… or his claim that he was attacked by two men but somehow managed to hold on to his Subway sandwich the entire time, even walking home with it. Other facts highlighted by the independent media also blew holes in the Smollett story, such as the observation that Smollett was spotted on camera walking home with the fake noose still around his neck. Why would a victim of an attempted lynching continue to wear the noose? And why would he wait 40 minutes to call the police? Why didn’t he desperately shout to the doorman of his apartment to call the police, explaining he had just been attacked?

Get more news like this without being censored: Get the Natural News app for your mobile devices. Enjoy uncensored news, lab test results, videos, podcasts and more. Bypass all the unfair censorship by Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Get your daily news and videos directly from the source! Download here.

None of it added up. But the left-wing media didn’t care. The fake hate crime hoax fit their narrative of America as a racist nation filled with homophobic Trump supporters, and the delicious ingredients in that recipe made such an enticing narrative that the media couldn’t resist. So they risked a race war breaking out across America to try to once again demonize Trump supporters and “keep the hate alive” (which is a key job of the left-wing media these days).

America was just saved by the same independent media that the tech giants are trying to wipe out

All this underscores the importance of speech diversity in a free society. Dissenting voices are sometimes the most important voices of all, since they question the official narrative of lies and deception. This is exactly why systematic censorship of the independent media by the dishonest, fascist tech giants is so dangerous to Democracy.

In this case, it was the dissenting voices — the independent media — that exposed the hoax and very likely stopped the outbreak of racial violence from taking place. In other words, while the mainstream media was actively pushing for a race war in America, the independent media threw water on the embers before it become a firestorm. In response, numerous “journalists” in the media are publicly admitting they are disappointed and saddened that the hate crime wasn’t real. They actually wish for hate crime violence in America, and they don’t even try to hide their dark desires anymore.

Yes, we’ve actually reached the point of insanity in America where “mainstream” media journalists actively wish for hate crimes and race wars. And they are willing to lie and deceive the public to try to make that happen.

If anyone should be censored and de-platformed today it’s CNN, the NYT and the Washington Post. Those are the organizations spreading dangerous lies in a deliberate effort to spark a nationwide race war. They are complicit in the plot to destroy America, and they are acting with extreme malice in trying to carry out their intended agendas to see America rip itself apart.

So why do the tech giants selectively censor the independent media while granting the lying left-wing media near-total control over the public narrative? Because the tech giants want to destroy America, too. They’re all in on it. It’s a plot to bring down this nation, blame white people, depose Trump, silence all dissent and sweep in an authoritarian regime run by deranged, fraudulent Leftists.

Brighteon.com/6002684589001

https://www.brighteon.com/embed/6002684589001

February 21, 2019 0

‘Go Get Them Nick’ — Donald Trump Cheers on Covington Student Suing Washington Post

By Charlie Spiering

**President Donald Trump on Wednesday supported Covington High School student Nick Sandmann and his lawyers for suing the Washington Post.**

“Go get them, Nick,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Fake News!”

Trump quoted the lawsuit which said the Post “ignored basic journalistic standards because it wanted to advance its well-known and easily documented biased agenda against President Donald J. Trump.”

The lawsuit is seeking $250 million in damages, accusing the Post of targeting and bullying Sandmann and his peers for wearing a Trump campaign Make America Great Again hats during a school trip for the March for Life.

The lawsuit claims that the Washington Post ignored the truth of the event between Sandmann and Native American activist Nathan Phillips on three different occasions.

On January 19, 20 and 21,the Post ignored the truth and falsely accused Nicholasof, among other things, “accost[ing]” Phillips by “suddenly swarm[ing]” him in a “threaten[ing]” and “physically intimidat[ing]” manner as Phillips “and other activists were wrapping up the march and preparing to leave,” “block[ing]” Phillips path, refusing to allow Phillips “to retreat,” “taunting the dispersing indigenous crowd,” chanting “build that wall,” “Trump2020,” or “go back to Africa,” and otherwise engaging in racist and improper conduct which ended only “when Phillips and other activists walked away.

The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.

February 20, 2019 0

Writer Temporarily Suspended By Twitter for Questioning if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Put Her Boyfriend on Payroll

by Cassandra Fairbanks February 15, 2019

Writer Luke Thompson was temporarily suspended by Twitter for calling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez out on giving her boyfriend a job in her Congressional office.

Thompson had discovered that Ocasio-Cortez’s boyfriend, Riley Roberts, is now listed as staff in the House directory and tweeted “while you were having a nice Valentine’s Day, @AOC decided to put her boyfriend on staff – drawing a salary on the taxpayer’s dime. Nice to see her adapting to the swamp so quickly.”

Twitter claimed that a screenshot of his House directory listing violated the rules against posting private information.

Ocasio-Cortez responded to Thompson’s claim by saying that he only has an account so that he can access her schedule.

“Actually this cal designation is a permission so he can have access to my Google Cal. Congressional spouses get Gcal access all the time. Next time check your facts before you tweet nonsense,” Ocasio-Cortez responded — though her claim was quickly debunked by the writer.

Thompson responded by noting that he is listed in the directory as “staff” — not as a boyfriend or spouse. He additionally noted that the House doesn’t use Google.

Unclear at what title or pay grade he was hired as he isn't in Legistorm yet. But it's a bad look. pic.twitter.com/yUbRPik4Vt

— Luke Thompson (@ltthompso) February 15, 2019

Thompson also posted a link to Roberts’ LinkedIn profile — causing the boyfriend to quickly delete his entire profile.

Thompson’s account was reinstated shortly after the suspension. Ocasio-Cortez has not responded to his fact-check.

February 15, 2019 0

YouTube ADMITS They Manipulate Your Suggested Videos

James Allsup

Premiered 3 hours ago

January 30, 2019 0

Kenton County Prosecutor: We’ve Already Issued Subpoenas and Search Warrants against Online Abusers of Covington School Children (VIDEO)

By Jim Hoft

Rob Sanders, the Kenton County, Kentucky prosecutor told Laura Ingrahamthe investigations against the terroristic threats against the Covington High School children is ALREADY UNDER WAY!

On Tuesday Sanders said multiple investigations were already underway.

Sanders said he has had investigators inside of his office all day.

Rob Sanders: When it comes to the offenses that rise to the felony level we can extradite. Now it’s not as easy as arresting a Twitter handle we can’t just reach out and arrest someone, half the time they’re using a fake name, fake profile picture, that sort of thing. We have to go through the process of issuing subpoenas, search warrants… It’s already underway. I’ve had detectives in and out of my office all day today.

Via The Ingraham Angle:

January 24, 2019 0

VERIFIED LEFTIST CALLS FOR MAGA KIDS TO BE ‘FIRED ON’, SCHOOL BURNED DOWN

“I want you to fire on any of these red hat bitches when you see them. On sight.”

Paul Joseph Watson | Infowars.com – JANUARY 21, 2019

A verified leftist on Twitter responded to the media’s fake news demonization campaign against the Covington Catholic High School students by calling for them to be ‘fired on’ and for their school to be burned down.

After the teens, some of whom were wearing MAGA hats, became embroiled in a brief confrontation with a Native American activist, the media launched a smear campaign claiming that they had harassed Nathan Phillips.

However, full video footage of the incident showed that the teens themselves were being harassed and abused by a militant black identity group and that Phillips had tried to provoke the confrontation by walking into the crowd of boys, who had begun singing high school chants to drown out the homophobic and violent abuse they were receiving.

Despite them doing absolutely nothing wrong, the Covington kids were subjected to a sustained 48 hour barrage of violent abuse, threats and doxxing on Twitter, with the Silicon Valley giant doing little to stem the tide of hatred.

Musician and verified leftist ‘Uncle Shoes’ was accused of inciting murder against the students after he tweeted, “If you are a true fan of Shoes I want you to fire on any of these red hat bitches when you see them. On sight.”

If you are a true fan of Shoes I want you to fire on any of these red hat bitches when you see them. On sight.

— Uncle Shoes (@HouseShoes) January 21, 2019

“Lock the kids in the school and burn that bitch to the ground,” he added.

“Burn the fucking school down,” he re-iterated.

He later ludicrously tried to claim that ‘fired on’ didn’t mean to shoot but to punch.

Someone reported the threats to Twitter, who responded by saying the tweets did not violate their guidelines.

Other celebrities, activists and verified leftists used their platforms to sick outrage mobs on the children.

Hollywood producer Jack Morrissey expressed his desire to see the kids “go screaming, hates first, into the woodchipper.”

Writer Kevin Allred brazenly asserted that all white people were terrorists (he is white).

Porn star Stormy Daniels all but called for the kids to be electrocuted.

Comedian Kathy Griffin was accused of orchestrating a doxxing campaign of the kids after demanding to know their identities.

CNN contributor Reza Aslan tweeted that the main student seen during the confrontation had a “punchable face”.

Musician Wheeler Walker called on his fans to “punch him in the nuts and send me the video of it.”

It appears that Twitter has failed to take any action against any of these threats, with no news of any of the individuals in question being suspended by the social media giant.

January 21, 2019 0

REVEALED: Google’s Fascist WAR on the Populist Right

ByJordan James, Editor-in-Chief

GOOGLE is using its unfair and unwavering online dominance to crackdown on political ideas, free speech and the populist right and now the world has PROOF the search giant actively alters ‘organic’ search results to favour left-wingers.

The web giant is working to silence the right by de-ranking outlets, figures and content in Google search results and is demonetizing right-wing news websites, the channels of popular right-wing figures in an authoritarian online war.

Google owns many chunks of the web including YouTube, in the past few days, a number of prominent right-wing figures have had their incomes wiped out thanks to ‘demonetisation’ tactics.

Tommy Robinson and Count Dankula are the latest figures to see their entire YouTube channels demonetized.

The American company has also targeted this website too, in December Google demonetized our revenue streams and suspended our display advertising meaning we have lost 70% of our monthly income.

A Google spokesman even refused to tell Breitbart the specific policy that Politicalite violated, or why service had not been restored following our voluntary takedown of the article.

The company has banned news outlets from search results including Politicalite fora brief period in 2018 and more recentlyGateway Pundit.

Google’s CEO has even LIED to U.S. Congress about the practices, yesterday Breitbart revealed that Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the United States Congress last month that his company does not “manually intervene” on any particular search result.

“Yet an internal discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News reveals Google regularly intervenes in search results on its YouTube video platform,” claimed Breitbart.

Breitbart Tech’s Allum Bokhari added that Google internal regularly adds search results, including negative results about prominent left-wing figures, to a blacklist on its platform YouTube.

January 18, 2019 0

‘THE SMOKING GUN’: Google Manipulated YouTube Search Results for Hot Topics …Leaked Convo: ’Tons of White- and Blacklists That Humans Manually Curate’… …Pro-Life Videos Demoted — After Left-Wing Journo Complaint!

By Allum Bokhari

In sworn testimony, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Congress last month that his company does not “manually intervene” on any particular search result. Yet an internal discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News reveals 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 term “abortion” was added to a “blacklist” file for “controversial YouTube queries,” which contains a list of search terms that the company considers sensitive. According to the leak, these include some of these search terms related to: abortion, abortions, the Irish abortion referendum, Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and anti-gun activist David Hogg.

The existence of the blacklist was revealed in an internal Google discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News by a source inside the company who wishes to remain anonymous. A partial list of blacklisted terms was also leaked to Breitbart by another Google source.

In the leaked discussion thread, a Google site reliability engineer hinted at the existence of more search blacklists, according to the source.

“We have tons of white- and blacklists that humans manually curate,” said the employee. “Hopefully this isn’t surprising or particularly controversial.”

Others were more concerned about the presence of the blacklist. According to the source, the software engineer who started the discussion called the manipulation of search results related to abortion a “smoking gun.”

The software engineer noted that the change had occurred following an inquiry from a left-wing Slate journalist about the prominence of pro-life videos on YouTube, and that pro-life videos were replaced with pro-abortion videos in the top ten results for the search terms following Google’s manual intervention.

“The Slate writer said she had complained last Friday and then saw different search results before YouTube responded to her on Monday,” wrote the employee. “And lo and behold, the [changelog] was submitted on Friday, December 14 at 3:17 PM.”

The manually downranked items included several videos from Dr. Antony Levatino, a former abortion doctor who is now a pro-life activist. Another video in the top ten featured a woman’s personal story of being pressured to have an abortion, while another featured pro-life conservative Ben Shapiro. The Slate journalist who complained to Google reportedthat these videos previously featured in the top ten, describing them in her story as “dangerous misinformation.”

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.

The manual adjustment of search results by a Google-owned platform contradicts a key claim made under oath by Google CEO Sundar Pichai in his congressional testimony earlier this month: that his company does not “manually intervene on any search result.”

A Google employee in the discussion thread drew attention to Pichai’s claim, noting that it “seems like we are pretty eager to cater our search results to the social and political agenda of left-wing journalists.”

One of the posts in the discussion also noted that the blacklist had previously been edited to include the search term “Maxine Waters” after a single Google employee complained the top YouTube search result for Maxine Waters was “very low quality.”

Google’s alleged intervention on behalf of a Democratic congresswoman would be further evidence of the tech giant using its resources to prop up the left. Breitbart News previously reported on leaked emails revealing the company targeted pro-Democrat demographics in its get-out-the-vote efforts in 2016.

According to the source, a software engineer in the thread also noted that “a bunch of terms related to the abortion referendum in Ireland” had been added to the blacklist – another change with potentially dramatic consequences on the national policies of a western democracy.

youtube_controversial_query_blacklist

At least one post in the discussion thread revealed the existence of a file called “youtube_controversial_query_blacklist,” which contains a list of YouTube search terms that Google manually curates. In addition to the terms “abortion,” “abortions,” “Maxine Waters,” and search terms related to the Irish abortion referendum, a Google software engineer noted that the blacklist includes search terms related to terrorist attacks. (the posts specifically mentions that the “Strasbourg terrorist attack” as being on the list).

“If you look at the other entries recently added to the youtube_controversial_query_blacklist(e.g., entries related to the Strasbourg terrorist attack), the addition of abortion seems…out-of-place,” wrote the software engineer, according to the source.

After learning of the existence of the blacklist, Breitbart News obtained a partial screenshot of the full blacklist file from a source within Google. It reveals that the blacklist includes search terms related to both mass shootings and the progressive anti-second amendment activist David Hogg.

This suggests Google has followed the lead of Democrat politicians, who have repeatedly pushed tech companies to censor content related to the Parkland school shooting and the Parkland anti-gun activists. It’s part of a popular new line of thought in the political-media establishment, which views the public as too stupid to question conspiracy theories for themselves.

Here is the partial blacklist leaked to Breitbart:

2117 plane crash Russian

2118 plane crash

2119 an-148

2120 florida shooting conspiracy

2121 florida shooting crisis actors

2122 florida conspiracy

2123 florida false flag shooting

2124 florida false flag

2125 fake florida school shooting

2126 david hogg hoax

2127 david hogg fake

2128 david hogg crisis actor

2129 david hogg forgets lines

2130 david hogg forgets his lines

2131 david hogg cant remember his lines

2132 david hogg actor

2133 david hogg cant remember

2134 david hogg conspiracy

2135 david hogg exposed

2136 david hogg lines

2137 david hogg rehearsing

2120 florida shooting conspiracy

The full internal filepath of the blacklist, according to another source, is:

//depot/google3/googledata/superroot/youtube/youtube_controversial_query_blacklist

Contradictions

Responding to a request for comment, a YouTube spokeswoman said the company wants to promote “authoritative” sources in its search results, but maintained that YouTube is a “platform for free speech” that “allow[s]” both pro-life and pro-abortion content.

YouTube’s full comment:

YouTube is a platform for free speech where anyone can choose to post videos, as long as they follow our Community Guidelines, which prohibit things like inciting violence and pornography. We apply these policies impartially and we allow both pro-life and pro-choice opinions. Over the last year we’ve described how we are working to better surface news sources across our site for news-related searches and topical information. We’ve improved our search and discovery algorithms, built new features that clearly label and prominently surface news sources on our homepage and search pages, and introduced information panels to help give users more authoritative sources where they can fact check information for themselves.

In the case of the “abortion” search results, YouTube’s intervention to insert “authoritative” content resulted in the downranking of pro-life videos and the elevation of pro-abortion ones.

A Google spokesperson took a tougher line than its YouTube subsidiary, stating that “Google has never manipulated or modified the search results or content in any of its products to promote a particular political ideology.”

However, in the leaked discussion thread, a member of Google’s “trust & safety” team, Daniel Aaronson, admitted that the company maintains “huge teams” that work to adjust search results for subjects that are “prone to hyperbolic content, misleading information, and offensive content” – all subjective terms that are frequently used to suppress right-leaning sources.

He also admitted that the interventions weren’t confined to YouTube – they included search results delivered via Google Assistant, Google Home, and in rare cases Google ’s organic search results.

In the thread, Aaronson attempted to explain how search blacklisting worked. He claimed that highly specific searches would generate non-blacklisted results, even controversial ones. But the inclusion of highly specific terms in the YouTube blacklist, like “David Hogg cant remember his lines” – the name of an actual viral video – seems to contradict this.

Aaronson’s full post is copied below:

I work in Trust and Safety and while I have no particular input as to exactly what’s happening for YT I can try to explain why you’d have this kind of list and why people are finding lists like these on Code Search.

When dealing with abuse/controversial content on various mediums you have several levers to deal with problems. Two prominent levers are “Proactive” and “Reactive”:

Proactive: Usually refers to some type of algorithm/scalable solution to a general problem

E.g.: We don’t allow straight up porn on YouTube so we create a classifier that detects porn and automatically remove or flag for review the videos the porn classifier is most certain of

Reactive: Usually refers to a manual fix to something that has been brought to our attention that our proactive solutions don’t/didn’t work on and something that is clearly in the realm of bad enough to warrant a quick targeted solution (determined by pages and pages of policies worked on over many years and many teams to be fair and cover necessary scope)

E,g.: A website that used to be a good blog had it’s domain expire and was purchased/repurposed to spam Search results with autogenerated pages full of gibberish text, scraped images, and links to boost traffic to other spammy sites. It is manually actioned for violating policy

These Organic Search policies and the consequences to violating them are public

Manually reacting to things is not very scalable, and is not an ideal solution to most problems, so the proactive lever is really the one we all like to lean on. Ideally, our classifiers/algorithm are good at providing useful and rich results to our users while ignoring things at are not useful or not relevant. But we all know, this isn’t exactly the case all the time (especially on YouTube).

From a user perspective, there are subjects that are prone to hyperbolic content, misleading information, and offensive content. Now, these words are highly subjective and no one denies that. But we can all agree generally, lines exist in many cultures about what is clearly okay vs. what is not okay. E.g. a video of a puppy playing with a toy is probably okay in almost every culture or context, even if it’s not relevant to the query. But a video of someone committing suicide and begging others to follow in his/her footsteps is probably on the other side of the line for many folks.

While my second example is technically relevant to the generic query of “suicide”, that doesn’t mean that this is a very useful or good video to promote on the top of results for that query. So imagine a classifier that says, for any queries on a particular text file, let’s pull videos using signals that we historically understand to be strong indicators of quality (I won’t go into specifics here, but those signals do exist). We’re not manually curating these results, we’re just saying “hey, be extra careful with results for this query because many times really bad stuff can appear and lead to a bad experience for most users”. Ideally the proactive lever did this for us, but in extreme cases where we need to act quickly on something that is so obviously not okay, the reactive/manual approach is sometimes necessary. And also keep in mind, that this is different for every product. The bar for changing classifiers or manual actions on span in organic search is extremely high. However, the bar for things we let our Google Assistant say out loud might be a lot lower. If I search for “Jews run the banks” – I’ll likely find anti-semitic stuff in organic search. As a Jew, I might find some of these results offensive, but they are there for people to research and view, and I understand that this is not a reflection of Google feels about this issue. But if I ask Google assistant “Why do Jews run the banks” we wouldn’t be similarly accepting if it repeated and promoted conspiracy theories that likely pop up in organic search in her smoothing voice.

Whether we agree or not, user perception of our responses, results, and answers of different products and mediums can change. And I think many people are used to the fact that organic search is a place where content should be accessible no matter how offensive it might be, however, the expectation is very different on a Google Home, a Knowledge Panel, or even YouTube.

These lines are very difficult and can be very blurry, we are all well aware of this. So we’ve got huge teams that stay cognizant of these facts when we’re crafting policies considering classifier changes, or reacting with manual actions – these decisions are not made in a vacuum, but admittedly are also not made in a highly public forum like TGIF or IndustryInfo (as you can imagine, decisions/agreement would be hard to get in such a wide list – image if all your CL’s were reviewed by every engineer across Google all the time). I hope that answers some questions and gives a better layer of transparency without going into details about our “Pepsi formula”.

Best,

Daniel

The fact that Google manually curates politically contentious search results fits in with a wider pattern of political activity on the part of the tech giant.

In 2018, Breitbart News exclusively published a leaked video from the company that showed senior management in dismay at Trump’s election victory, and pledging to use the company’s power to make his populist movement a “hiccup” in history.

Breitbart also leaked “The Good Censor,” an internal research document from Google that admits the tech giant is engaged in the censorship of its own products, partly in response to political events.

Another leak revealed that employees within the company, including Google’s current director of Trust and Safety, tried to kick Breitbart News off Google’s market-dominating online ad platforms.

Yet another showed Google engaged in targeted turnout operations aimed to boost voter participation in pro-Democrat demographics in “key states” ahead of the 2016 election. The effort was dubbed a “silent donation” by a top Google employee.

Evidence for Google’s partisan activities is now overwhelming. President Trump has previously warned Google, as well as other Silicon Valley giants

January 16, 2019 0