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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.
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“The announcement came minutes after Trump met with a top North Korean official in the Oval Office for over an hour,” according to Politico. “The North Korean official was reported to be carrying a letter for Trump from his country’s leader, the latest of several missives the two heads of state have exchanged.”
Trump continues make progress in securing peace on the Korean Peninsula, despite the fact that the alleged experts in the mainstream press said that he would have us nuked by this point in his presidency.
“President Donald J. Trump met with Kim Yong Chol for an hour and half, to discuss denuclearization and a second summit, which will take place near the end of Februarym [sic]” the White House reportedly said. “The President looks forward to meeting with Chairman Kim at a place to be announced at a later date.”
Trending: ‘Impeach Rashida Tlaib’ Petition Closes In on 250K Signatures, Highlights False-Residency Accusation
According to the report, Vietnam and Thailand have been mentioned as possible locations.
During the last North Korean summit, which took place in Singapore in spring of 2018, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un verbally committed to full denuclearization. The country has not launched a nuclear test missile since the meeting. North Korea also returned the remains of several U.S. Serviceman killed in the Korean war.
A cross-party decision for legislative changes (to be made before elections due in April) has been reached in an attempt to stomp out grooming and sexual abuse.
Finland’s Justice Ministry is set to change rape laws to ensure that sex without consent is always a crime, in line with previous demands from a citizens’ initiative, reports national broadcaster Yle.
The changes, largely influenced by neighboring Sweden, are expected to tighten legislation concerning sex with minors and give more consideration to victims in helpless situations. In the future, sex with a child will always be considered rape, which is not the case nowadays.
Former editor-in-chief of Breitbart News London has warned for years about the Islamic invasion into Europe and has now been proven right.
At present, intercourse with someone below the age of consent is classified as aggravated child abuse. This led to massive outrage when Finnish prosecutors last year failed to charge a man convicted of sexually abusing a 10-year-old with rape.
Previously, a citizens’ initiative on consent law gained 57,000 signatures, but was initially met with a cool reception from Justice Minister Antti Häkkänen and was given the cold shoulder by parliament.
However, following last week’s series of arrests over child sex abuse featuring migrant suspects, Häkkänen changed his tune, which campaigners see as their victory. By his own admission, Häkkänen was shocked by the recent reports of rape and sexual abuse. Nevertheless, he stressed that the changes should be made after more careful consideration.
A similar consent law has been implemented in several countries, including Germany and Sweden. In Sweden, it has led to more convictions of rape, with more severe punishments handed out, according to Swedish Radio.
Additionally, the changes will affect police rules on data gathering to allow them to better track individuals suspected of grooming online. Furthermore, the government is to look at whether aggravated sex crimes constitute sufficient reason to rescind Finnish citizenship.
However, another, more radical petition demanding the deportation of foreign sex offenders is still gathering signatures in light of the recent grooming gang scandal. At the time of writing, it has amassed close to 104,000 signatures, almost double as the consent petition.
This initiative is backed by the right-wing Blue Reform party, who want the Finnish government to interpret international agreement more freely than before. The party’s requirement is to be able to deport refugees convicted of sexual offenses, regardless of whether their home country is considered safe or not.
This would require a constitutional change, an unlikely measure. Still, a number of Finnish politicians, including Interior Minister Kai Mykkänen, call for harsher penalties for foreigners convicted of sex crimes.
Meanwhile, the number of reports of sexual offenses against children increased markedly last year, reaching 1,400 and topping 2017’s figure by 18 percent, Yle reported.
About a quarter of all reported sexual offenses were carried out by people with a foreign background, police inspector Pekka Heikkinen informed, which signals clear over-representation.
By Allum Bokhari
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.
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
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
By Emma R. – 16 January 2019
The French yellow vest (‘gilet jaunes’) movement is entering its ninth edition Saturday 12 januari. And instead of cooling down things seem to be heating up and spreading.
While the gilets jaunes are calling for a massive bankrun, in an effort to damage or even collapse the French- and eventually the EU banking system, the government dispatches 80 thousand police and army personnel to try and contain the protests.
French Interior Minister Castaner today even heightened the tension by saying that protesters will be held accountable for acts committed by fellow gilets jaunes during Saturday’s protests.
Earlier this week there where some tensions between the Italian and French government. Italy’s support for the yellow vest movement was not appreciated by the French.
by Dan Lyman
In Skåne County, three detonations over the span of four hours kept the ‘bomb squad’ very busy as a blast at an apartment building in Landskrona was followed by two more in nearby Malmö – one at a grocery store and another at an industrial garage.
Pictures taken at the grocery site show extensive damage to storefront.
“It turns out the Swedish bomb squad needs more resources,” said journalist Peter Sweden. “Tonight there was another explosion in the city of Malmö, a grocery store was bombed. But the Swedish bomb squad was already occupied dealing with a bombing at an apartment in a different city.”
In Värnamo, an exchange of gunfire between vehicles led to the arrest of five suspects under suspicion of attempted murder.
“Several people who were in a car on Malmövägen had been shot at from another car,” Fria Tider reports. “During the subsequent operation, the police managed to stop three cars at different locations in the Värnamo area, which could be put in connection with the shooting.”
In Töreboda, police are investigating arson after a fire broke out at an asylum residence.
Some 40 residents were evacuated from the building and taken to a nearby parish home, according to a police report.
In Falun, a 15-year-old boy was kidnapped by a man with a baseball bat who demanded a ransom from the boy’s parents under threat of physical harm.
“The search led police to an address where they suspected the boy was,” Expressenreports. “After work by the police negotiator, a man in his 30s was arrested by prosecutors.”
“The perpetrator is said to have demanded money not to hit the boy with a baseball bat.”
Infowars Europe is regularly documenting noteworthy events in Sweden as they unfold. You can read some of our recent reports here, here, and here.
By Jack Montgomery
The handsome English county suffered a number of gruesome attacks between January and May 2018, according to Cambridgeshire Live, citing statistics uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act.
“We take acid attacks very seriously because they can often have a devastating effect on victims, particularly if they are young or otherwise vulnerable,” said a spokesman for Cambridgeshire Police — although they also claimed it was “important to note” that such attacks are “still very rare”.
This is certainly true if the numbers are compared to multicultural urban centres such as London, under Mayor Sadiq Khan, where such attacks now occur with frightening regularity — and police have even been issued with equipment designed for war zones to treat victims more efficiently.
However, the Cambridgeshire figures show nine people were victimised in the county between January and May 2018, compared to a total of 30 between 2012 and 2017 — suggesting a long-term increase in attacks.
Across the country, an average of 15 acid attacks a week are carried out, with three-quarters taking place in London.
A slim majority of acid attacks in Cambridgeshire between 2012 and 2017 were inflicted on women, which on the surface would appear to be in line with the conventional view of victims as women from non-European “honour” cultures being punished for perceived social transgressions.
The United Kingdom goes against the grain in this respect, however, with victims predominantly male and perpetrators skewing disproportionately but not exclusively non-white, and South Asians not particularly overrepresented.
Instead, acid appears to be a weapon of choice for armed robbers, home invaders, and gang members of all backgrounds in Britain’s high diversity, low social cohesion cities, being used to intimidate or disable with little concern for the serious, long-term injuries they can inflict.
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Apparently, her young son alerted her to this fact though Tlaib ran essentially unopposed.
“Mama, look, you won. Bullies don’t win,” her woke child apparently said in reference to President Donald J. Trump.
According to Tlaib, her response was “Baby, they don’t. Because we’re gonna go in there, we’re gonna impeach the motherfucker.”
Trending: EVIDENCE: Brennan and Clapper Hacked FISA Court Judge Reggie Walton; Comey Covered It Up
Tlaib has two boys with her ex-husband. The youngest, Yousif, is seven and was well-documented on Tlaib’s campaign trail, during which the media fawned over the single mother as Superwoman. Her oldest boy is only slightly older than Yousif. It is unclear which son Tlaib was talking to in her expletive-filled rant, but neither son has reached the age where a sane parent would consider cursing in front of him.
The “woke child” charade is getting old.
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