Published on Apr 12, 2019
YouTube Hides PragerU Video of Candace Owens’ Testimony in ‘Restricted Mode’
By Alana Mastrangelo
PragerU announced on Wednesday that YouTube has placed another of its videos in “restricted mode,” meaning that not everyone who visits the video-sharing website will be able to watch it. The restricted video is of Candace Owens’ powerful testimony before the House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday.
YouTube has placed yet another PragerU video in “restricted mode,” according to the organization.
This time, the restricted video is of Candace Owens’ testimony before the House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, which had created several viral moments, one of which has also recently become the most watched C-SPAN video of a House hearing on Twitter.
When YouTube puts a video in “restricted mode,” it means that the video is censored from all users that have enabled the website’s restricted mode feature, which typically include libraries, schools, public institutions, or in any setting where viewers may belong to a younger demographic.
The restricted mode feature is used in order to block videos that have been deemed inappropriate, such as pornography or violence.
“RESTRICTED: @Youtube has placed our video of @RealCandaceO’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in restricted mode,” tweeted PragerU on Wednesday, “Why is Youtube trying to prevent people from hearing Candace’s words?”
“@YouTube clearly has a political bias against conservatives,” continued PragerU in a second tweet, “It just placed our video of @RealCandaceO in restricted mode.”
This is not the first of PragerU’s videos to have ended up on YouTube’s restriction list. According to the organization’s founder, Dennis Prager, 80 of their 400 videos are on a restricted list, meaning that the videos are “lumped with pornography and violence, so that kids in libraries and schools can’t see them,” said Prager.
“If you are not on the left, you are to be shut down,” said Prager to Breitbart News in an interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily last February, “We have never, ever had anything like this in American history.”
“We are in a dark age because of the left’s control of Silicon Valley, academia, and media,” added Prager, “It’s a dark age that we are living in right now, and it is entirely left-wing induced.”
Research: Google Search Bias Flipped Seats for Democrats in Midterms
By Allum Bokhari
New research from psychologist and search engine expert Dr. Robert Epstein shows that biased Google searches had a measurable impact on the 2018 midterm elections, pushing tens of thousands of votes towards the Democrat candidates in three key congressional races, and potentially millions more in races across the country.
The study, from Epstein and a team at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), analyzed Google searches related to three highly competitive congressional races in Southern California. In all three races, the Democrat won — and Epstein’s research suggests that Google search bias may have tipped them over the edge.
The research follows a previous study conducted in 2016 which showed that biased Google results pushed votes to Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. Democrats and Google executives have disputed these findings.
Epstein says that in the days leading up to the 2018 midterms, he was able to preserve “more than 47,000 election-related searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, along with the nearly 400,000 web pages to which the search results linked.”
Analysis of this data showed a clear pro-Democrat bias in election-related Google search results as compared to competing search engines. Users performing Google searches related to the three congressional races the study focused on were significantly more likely to see pro-Democrat stories and links at the top of their results.
As Epstein’s previous studies have shown, this can have a huge impact on the decisions of undecided voters, who often assume that their search results are unbiased. Epstein has called this the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME).
According to Epstein’s study, at least 35,455 undecided voters in the three districts may have been persuaded to vote for a Democrat candidate because of slanted Google search results. Considering that each vote gained by a Democrat is potentially a vote lost by a Republican, this means more than 70,910 votes may have been lost by Republicans in the three districts due to Google bias. In one of these districts, CA 45, the Democrat margin of victory was just over 12,000 votes.
The total Democrat win margin across all three districts was 71,337, meaning that bias Google searches could account for the vast majority of Democrat votes. Extrapolated to elections around the country, Epstein says that bias Google results could have influenced 4.6 million undecided voters to support Democrat candidates.
Moreover, Epstein’s findings are based on modest assumptions, such as the assumption that voters conduct one election-related search per week. According to Epstein, marketing research shows that people typically conduct 4-5 searches per day, not one per week. In other words, the true impact of biased search results could be much higher.
Epstein’s study may also understate the level of liberal bias in Google search results, due to its use of a 2017 study from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center to rank sources by their bias. The study assigns conservative sources like Breitbart News a far higher bias rating than ostensibly centrist but in fact highly liberal sources like the New York Times. The study also gives online encyclopedia Wikipedia a non-liberal bias rating, despite the fact that its most controversial pages are typically hijacked by its cabal of left-wing editors to push partisan liberal narratives.
As the Los Angeles Times notes, Epstein is not a Republican and publicly supported Hillary Clinton in 2016. Nevertheless, Democrats and liberals continue to ignore or doubt his findings. House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) has repeatedly called claims of big tech bias a “conspiracy theory,” as have other congressional Democrats. And left-wing academics interviewed by the Los Angeles Times also heaped doubt on Epstein’s work.
Dr. Robert Epstein is featured in the 2018 documentary The Creepy Line, which was produced by Breitbart News editor-at-large Peter Schweizer and explores the bias amongst the Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley.
Breitbart News continues to expose left-wing bias at Google. Recent reports reveal that company managers have told employees that the tech giant must stop “fake news” because “that’s how Trump won,” that Google-owned YouTube adjusted its algorithms to push pro-life content off its top search results, and that the company’s own internal researchers describe the company’s changes in policy since 2016 as a “shift towards censorship.”
Trump to ‘look into’ Facebook censorship after site gags his social media chief
President Donald Trump has promised to look into accusations of anti-conservative bias on Facebook, after the social media giant apparently blocked his social media chief Dan Scavino from commenting.
Scavino complained on Monday that Facebook had abruptly blocked him from replying to his followers, with the company claiming his comments had been reported as spam.
“AMAZING. WHY ARE YOU STOPPING ME from replying to comments,” he wrote. “People have the right to know. Why are you silencing me???”
“I will be looking into this!” Trump tweeted in response. The president has often accused Silicon Valley tech companies of discriminating against conservative users, and did so again on Tuesday. “Facebook, Google and Twitter, not to mention the Corrupt Media, are sooo on the side of the Radical Left Democrats,” he tweeted. “But fear not, we will win anyway, just like we did before!”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly dismissed accusations of liberal bias directed at the company. Grilled by Republican lawmakers on the topic last year, Zuckerberg claimed that their examples of censorship were once-off mistakes, but did admit that most of his employees probably lean left politically.
These accusations have come from within the company too. An anonymous whistleblower told conservative watchdog Project Veritas last month that Facebook actively developed and uses “deboosting” tools to suppress and delete right-wing content. Last year, a Facebook employee called the company a liberal “monoculture that’s intolerant of different views,”and savaged Facebook’s workforce for being “quick to attack – often in mobs – anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.”
The employee’s rant, posted on an internal message board, attracted the support of more than 100 other workers, who formed a group called ‘FB’ers for Political Diversity.’
TWITTER NOW ENFORCING SHARIA LAW ON AMERICANS?
Michelle Malkin warned of legal repercussions by Twitter over four-year-old tweet of Muhammad cartoons
FEBRUARY 28, 2019
Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin received a notice from Twitter’s legal team Wednesday, warning that she may wish to seek legal counsel over a four-year-old tweet the social media site says “is in violation of Pakistani law.”
“Here’s the notice Twitter’s legal dept sent me last week, warning me to get legal counsel because anti-blasphemy Muslim zealots complained that my Mohammed Cartoons tweet violates Pakistan’s laws,” Malkin wrote.
In defiance of Pakistani law and in support of free speech, see the forbidden images below.
This is only the latest example of blatant hypocrisy from Twitter as conservatives are disproportionately targeted while pornography, death threats and other clear violations of the site’s terms of service are ignored.
Malkin isn’t the only one being targeted as multiple Twitter users have recently been contacted by Twitter’s legal team regarding posts about Islam.
In an interview with Big League Politics, Malkin explained, “Over the past few months, several other prominent critics of Islamic extremism have received similar warning letters from Twitter’s legal department, including Saudi-Canadian activist Ensaf Haidar, the wife of imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi; Imam Mohammad Tawhidi, an Iranian-born Muslim scholar and reform advocate from Australia; Jamie Glazov, a Russian-born Canadian columnist who just released a new book called “Jihadist Psychopath”; and Pamela Geller, an anti-jihad blogger and activist.”
In November of 2018, conservative activist Laura Loomer was banned from Twitter for criticizing Muslim Democrat Ilhan Omar’s support of female genital mutilation.
Malkin could be the next conservative to be permanently kicked off the platform as she is refusing to cower to the site’s intimidation tactics.
She writes, “As a US citizen subject to AMERICA’S laws—NOT Pakistan’s or Mohammed’s—I’ll now retweet my Mo cartoons & columns to 2.1 million followers every day & stand with free speech & free thought.”
Share this article to show big tech that Americans won’t be bullied into submission and that the First Amendment is still alive.
‘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?
READ MORE: YouTube says it ‘accidentally’ shut down conservative channels
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.
SAN FRANCISCO’S DRUG ADDICTS NOW OUTNUMBER HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS
Leftist utopia turning sour
FEBRUARY 7, 2019
San Francisco’s drug addicts now outnumber high school students as it was revealed that the city handed out a record 5.8 million free syringes last year – about 500,000 more than in 2017.
Despite spending an extra $1.8 million dollars last year in an effort to retrieve used needles, the government handed out about 2 million more syringes than it got back.
San Francisco’s junkie population – many of whom live on the streets and use sidewalks as outdoor toilets – now stands at 24,500, an increase of 2,000 drug users since 2012 and 8,500 more people than the city’s 16,000 high school students.
Despite new Mayor London Breed’s promise to clean up the city, 9,659 calls complaining about needles littering the streets were received in 2018, an increase of a third on 2017.
The number of complaints about feces on the streets has also tripled since 2011.
The disconnect between San Francisco’s tech elite and the homeless junkies who camp on its streets was emphasized in a tweet by Erik Finn showing starving, jobless homeless people huddled outside a “robotic coffeebar”.
Investor Bill Blain also expressed horror at what he witnessed during a recent trip to San Francisco, writing, “The squalor we saw in The City was frightful.”
“San Francisco has always been one of my favourite US cities, but the degree of homelessness, mental illness and drug abuse we saw on this trip was truly shocking,” writes Blaine, adding that his liberal friends shrugged it off as always having been that way, ignorant of the fact that it is clearly getting worse.
“I found it quite shocking the number of folk sleeping rough on the sidewalks, the smell of weed and drug impedimenta everywhere, the filth, mental illness and degradation on view just a few meters from the financial centre driving Silicon Valley,” said Blaine.
“It’s a city where the destitute seem to have become invisible to the Uber hailing elites. We found ourselves hopping on one of the beautiful F-Route Trolley Buses to find nearly every seat occupied by someone lugging around their worldly possessions around in a plastic bag. It was desperately sad,” he lamented.
As the video below documents, San Francisco is perhaps the prime example of what leftist nihilism mixed with virtue signalling eventually does to a city.
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Microsoft Partners With Neocon-Backed ‘Fact Checker’ Seeking To ‘Wage War On Independent Media’
by Chris Menahan
Microsoft has partnered with a shoddy Neocon-backed “fact checker” called NewsGuard which rates websites’ “credibility” in-browser and NewsGuard’s CEO says their goal is to have their software on all smartphones and computers by default.
From MintPressNews:
How a NeoCon-Backed “Fact Checker” Plans to Wage War on Independent Media
As Newsguard’s project advances, it will soon become almost impossible to avoid this neocon-approved news site’s ranking systems on any technological device sold in the United States.
by Whitney Webb
January 09th, 2019Soon after the social media “purge” of independent media sites and pages this past October, a top neoconservative insider — Jamie Fly — was caught stating that the mass deletion of anti-establishment and anti-war pages on Facebook and Twitter was “just the beginning” of a concerted effort by the U.S. government and powerful corporations to silence online dissent within the United States and beyond.
While a few, relatively uneventful months in the online news sphere have come and gone since Fly made this ominous warning, it appears that the neoconservatives and other standard bearers of the military-industrial complex and the U.S. oligarchy are now poised to let loose their latest digital offensive against independent media outlets that seek to expose wrongdoing in both the private and public sectors.
As MintPress News Editor-in-Chief Mnar Muhawesh recently wrote, MintPress was informed that it was under review by an organization called Newsguard Technologies, which described itself to MintPress as simply a “news rating agency” and asked Muhawesh to comment on a series of allegations, several of which were blatantly untrue. However, further examination of this organization reveals that it is funded by and deeply connected to the U.S. government, neo-conservatives, and powerful monied interests, all of whom have been working overtime since the 2016 election to silence dissent to American forever-wars and corporate-led oligarchy.
More troubling still, Newsguard — by virtue of its deep connections to government and Silicon Valley — is lobbying to have its rankings of news sites installed by default on computers in U.S. public libraries, schools, and universities as well as on all smartphones and computers sold in the United States.
In other words, as Newsguard’s project advances, it will soon become almost impossible to avoid this neocon-approved news site’s ranking systems on any technological device sold in the United States. Worse still, if its efforts to quash dissenting voices in the U.S. are successful, Newsguard promises that its next move will be to take its system global.
Red light, green light . . .
Newsguard has received considerable attention in the mainstream media of late, having been the subject of a slew of articles in the Washington Post, the Hill, the Boston Globe, Politico, Bloomberg, Wired, and many others just over the past few months. Those articles portray Newsguard as using “old-school journalism” to fight “fake news” through its reliance on nine criteria allegedly intended to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to online news.
Newsguard separates sites it deems worthy and sites it considers unreliable by using a color-coded rating — green, yellow, or red — and more detailed “nutrition labels” regarding a site’s credibility or lack thereof. Rankings are created by Newsguard’s team of “trained analysts.” The color-coding system may remind some readers of the color-coded terror threat-level warning system that was created after 9/11, making it worth noting that Tom Ridge, the former secretary of Homeland Security who oversaw the implementation of that system under George W. Bush, is on Newsguard’s advisory board.
As Newsguard releases a new rating of a site, that rating automatically spreads to all computers that have installed its news ranking browser plug-in. That plug-in is currently available for free for the most commonly used internet browsers. NewsGuard directly markets the browser plug-in to libraries, schools and internet users in general.
According to its website, Newsguard has rated more than 2,000 news and information sites. However, it plans to take its ranking efforts much farther by eventually reviewing “the 7,500 most-read news and information websites in the U.S.—about 98 percent of news and information people read and share online” in the United States in English.
[…]
According to local media, Newsguard “now works with library systems representing public libraries across the country, and is also partnering with middle schools, high schools, universities, and educational organizations to support their news literacy efforts,” suggesting that these Newsguard services targeting libraries and schools are soon to become a compulsory component of the American library and education system, despite Newsguard’s glaring conflicts of interest with massive multinational corporations and powerful government power-brokers.
Notably, Newsguard has a powerful partner that has allowed it to start finding its way into public library and school computers throughout the country. As part of its new “Defending Democracy” initiative, Microsoft announced last August that it would be partnering with Newsguard to actively market the company’s ranking app and other services to libraries and schools throughout the country. Microsoft’s press release regarding the partnership states that Newsguard “will empower voters by providing them with high-quality information about the integrity and transparency of online news sites.”
Since then, Microsoft has now added the Newsguard app as a built-in feature of Microsoft Edge, its browser for iOS and Android mobile devices, and is unlikely to stop there. Indeed, as a recent report in favor of Microsoft’s partnership with Newsguard noted, “we could hope that this new partnership will allow Microsoft to add NewsGuard to Edge on Windows 10 [operating system for computers] as well.”
Newsguard, for its part, seems confident that its app will soon be added by default to all mobile devices. On its website, the organization notes that “NewsGuard will be available on mobile devices when the digital platforms such as social media sites and search engines or mobile operating systems add our ratings and Nutrition Labels directly.” This shows that Newsguard isn’t expecting its rating systems to be offered as a downloadable application for mobile devices but something that social media sites like Facebook, search engines like Google, and mobile device operating systems that are dominated by Apple and Google will “directly” integrate into nearly every smartphone and tablet sold in the United States.
A Boston Globe article on Newsguard from this past October makes this plan even more clear. The Globe wrote at the time:
Microsoft has already agreed to make NewsGuard a built-in feature in future products, and [Newsguard co-CEO] Brill said he’s in talks with other online titans. The goal is to have NewsGuard running by default on our computers and phones whenever we scan the Web for news.”
This eventuality is made all the more likely given the fact that, in addition to Microsoft, Newsguard is also closely connected to Google, as Google has been a partner of the Publicis Groupe since 2014, when the two massive companies joined Condé Nast to create a new marketing service called La Maison that is “focused on producing engaging content for marketers in the luxury space.” Given Google’s power in the digital sphere as the dominant search engine, the creator of the Android mobile operating system, and the owner of YouTube, its partnership with Publicis means that Newsguard’s rating system will soon see itself being promoted by yet another of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies.Furthermore, there is an effort underway to integrate Newsguard into social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Indeed, as Newsguard was launched, co-CEO Brill stated that he planned to sell the company’s ratings of news sites to Facebook and Twitter. Last March, Brill told CNN that “We’re asking them [Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google] to pay a fraction of what they pay their P.R. people and their lobbyists to talk about the problem.”
[…]
Notably, Newsguard has a powerful partner that has allowed it to start finding its way into public library and school computers throughout the country. As part of its new “Defending Democracy” initiative, Microsoft announced last August that it would be partnering with Newsguard to actively market the company’s ranking app and other services to libraries and schools throughout the country. Microsoft’s press release regarding the partnership states that Newsguard “will empower voters by providing them with high-quality information about the integrity and transparency of online news sites.”
Since then, Microsoft has now added the Newsguard app as a built-in feature of Microsoft Edge, its browser for iOS and Android mobile devices, and is unlikely to stop there. Indeed, as a recent report in favor of Microsoft’s partnership with Newsguard noted, “we could hope that this new partnership will allow Microsoft to add NewsGuard to Edge on Windows 10 [operating system for computers] as well.”
Newsguard, for its part, seems confident that its app will soon be added by default to all mobile devices. On its website, the organization notes that “NewsGuard will be available on mobile devices when the digital platforms such as social media sites and search engines or mobile operating systems add our ratings and Nutrition Labels directly.” This shows that Newsguard isn’t expecting its rating systems to be offered as a downloadable application for mobile devices but something that social media sites like Facebook, search engines like Google, and mobile device operating systems that are dominated by Apple and Google will “directly” integrate into nearly every smartphone and tablet sold in the United States.
A Boston Globe article on Newsguard from this past October makes this plan even more clear. The Globe wrote at the time:
Microsoft has already agreed to make NewsGuard a built-in feature in future products, and [Newsguard co-CEO] Brill said he’s in talks with other online titans. The goal is to have NewsGuard running by default on our computers and phones whenever we scan the Web for news.”
This eventuality is made all the more likely given the fact that, in addition to Microsoft, Newsguard is also closely connected to Google, as Google has been a partner of the Publicis Groupe since 2014, when the two massive companies joined Conde Nast to create a new marketing service called La Maison that is “focused on producing engaging content for marketers in the luxury space.” Given Google’s power in the digital sphere as the dominant search engine, the creator of the Android mobile operating system, and the owner of YouTube, its partnership with Publicis means that Newsguard’s rating system will soon see itself being promoted by yet another of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies.Furthermore, there is an effort underway to integrate Newsguard into social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Indeed, as Newsguard was launched, co-CEO Brill stated that he planned to sell the company’s ratings of news sites to Facebook and Twitter. Last March, Brill told CNN that “We’re asking them [Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google] to pay a fraction of what they pay their P.R. people and their lobbyists to talk about the problem.”
[…]
Financial censorship
Another Newsguard service shows that this organization is also seeking to harm independent media financially by targeting online revenue. Through a service called “Brandguard,” which it describes as a “brand safety tool aimed at helping advertisers keep their brands off of unreliable news and information sites while giving them the assurance they need to support thousands of Green-rated [i.e., Newsguard-approved] news and information sites, big and small.”
At the time the service was announced last November, Newsguard co-CEO Brill stated that the company was “in discussions with the ad tech firms, leading agencies, and major advertisers” eager to adopt a blacklist of news sites deemed “unreliable” by Newsguard. This is unsurprising given the leading role of the Publicis Groupe, one of the world’s largest advertising and PR firms, has in funding Newsguard. As a consequence, it seems likely that many, if not all, of Publicis’ client companies will choose to adopt this blacklist to help crush many of the news sites that are unafraid to hold them accountable.
It is also important to note here that Google’s connection to Publicis and thus Newsguard could spell trouble for independent news pages that rely on Google Adsense for some or all of their ad-based revenue. Google Adsense has long been targeting sites like MintPress by demonetizing articles for information or photographs it deemed controversial, including demonetizing one article for including a photo showing U.S. soldiers involved in torturing Iraqi detainees at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.
Since then, Google — a U.S. military contractor — has repeatedly tried to shutter ad access to MintPress articles that involve reporting that is critical of U.S. empire and military expansion. One article that has been repeatedly flagged by Google details how many African-Americans have questioned whether the Women’s March has aided or harmed the advancement of African-Americans in the United States. Google has repeatedly claimed that the article, which was written by African-American author and former Washington Post bureau chief Jon Jeter, contains “dangerous content.”
Given Google’s already established practice of targeting factual reporting it deemed controversial through Adsense, Brandguard will likely offer the tech giant just the excuse it needs to cut off sites like MintPress, and other pages equally critical of empire, altogether.
Read their full report.
This has been a dream of the establishment for over a decade.
One of these NewsGuard “journalists” contacted yours truly with a review of Information Liberation that was so shoddy I didn’t even bother to respond as almost everything he said was wrong and his reading comprehension was terrible.
I figured it’s a waste of time to respond as I would be doing the reporter’s job for him by correcting him and I would only be improving his shoddy work.
It’s blatantly obvious their goal is not to create an honest assessment of any of our websites but instead to compile whatever slander they can throw together to suit their pre-ordained narrative.
JihadWatch’s Robert Spencer has also written an excellent article exposing NewsGuard titled, “Steven Brill’s NewsGuard and the ‘fact-checking’ scam.”
Just look at the guys behind this:
Would you trust those men to walk your dog?
The reason no one ever bothered implementing any scheme like this is because it’s so obviously a fraud and an affront to people’s intelligence that it is more likely to have the opposite effect — negative rated sites are going to be viewed as more credible as evidenced by the fact they’re being slandered by these establishment hacks.
Google sued over cover-up & payoffs in executive sexual misconduct
Board members of Alphabet, the parent company of tech giant Google, are being sued by shareholders over multi-million payouts to top executives investigated for sexual harassment at the Silicon Valley behemoth.
The lawsuit, filed on Thursday in California, claims that the board failed in its duty to shareholders by approving big severance payouts to executives who left the company, while keeping details of their alleged sexual misconduct under wraps.
Among the defendants named in the lawsuit by shareholder James Martin are Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as former CEO Eric Schmidt, who were all on the board’s audit and compensation committees that approved the payouts.
Last October, Google revealed to its employees that it had dismissed 48 people for sexual harassment over the past two years, without payouts. Martin’s lawsuit, however, focuses on millions paid to two executives – Andy Rubin and Amit Singhal – who were both accused of sexual misconduct.
Rubin left Alphabet in 2014 with a four-year $90 million payout. He was the creator of the Android mobile operating system and ran the company’s mobile division. The reasons for his departure were a mystery until a New York Times report in October accused him of sexual misconduct with a female staff member, which the paper said was covered up by Google.
ALSO ON RT.COMGoogle CEO sends out sex harassment damage control memoAnother executive, Amit Singhal, left Alphabet in 2016 in a similar fashion, also amid sexual harassment claims, the lawsuit says.
The Times report caused widespread anger among Alphabet staff, with thousands of employees staging walkouts at Google offices around the world. Commenting on Martin’s lawsuit, some of the staff involved in organizing the October walkout released a statement Thursday, slamming the Google board for not having the employees’ “best interests at heart.”
“Google’s culture of racism, discrimination, and sexual harassment is not the result of a few individual bad actors — it’s built into how the system works, and won’t be fixed without structural change,” they wrote.
Any damages Martin is seeking will be directed back to Google, as his objective is to reform Alphabet’s corporate governance, his attorney Louise Renne told Bloomberg.
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