Category Archive 'Google'
09 Jan 2021

Big Brother Cracks Down

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Gateway Pundit:

Big tech has launched an unprecedented and coordinated cyber attack on President Donald Trump and his 74,000,000 voters.

As this was happening — the GOP was dead silent.

On Friday, Twitter permanently banned hundreds, if not thousands, of Trump supporters and prominent allies — before banning the president himself. Nearly every account that helped to promote the Stop the Steal rallies or challenge the election results were banned, including Ali Alexander, Michael Coudrey, Gen. Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Lin Wood. Countless smaller accounts that supported the president were also getting suspended in a seemingly constant rate.

The same has been happening over on Facebook and Instagram.

TRENDING: BREAKING: Twitter Bans President Donald Trump — PERMANENTLY

At the same time, Parler was warned by both the Apple and Google stores that if they did not impose moderation on their free speech platform within 24 hours they would be banned entirely.

RTWT

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Patriot Daily Press:

The Trump campaign is now blocked from emailing their millions of supporters after being suspended by their email service provider.
The suspension comes shortly after President Donald Trump and his campaign were permanently banned from Twitter.

The email service, Campaign Monitor, confirmed the suspension of the account to Financial Times’ Dave Lee.

The Nationalist Review reports “the move effectively cuts off communication between his team and his core supporters. What is not clear however, is what other services have banned his team. The Trump campaign sends out a massive amount of emails—33 in January so far. But, it has been 48 hours since the campaign has reached out to its supporters via email, prompting most journalists to speculate that other providers have shut off access as well.”

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Rush Limbaugh left Twitter and deactivated his own account, protesting Trump’s suspension.

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Andrea Widburg notes:

Snapchat locked Trump’s account.
Shopify removed Trump’s organization and campaign store.
Michelle Obama called on all tech companies to ban President Trump.
Facebook deleted the Walk Away movement page, including 500,000 Walk Away testimonials.
Twitter banned General Flynn.
Twitter banned Sidney Powell.
Google’s YouTube terminated Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast while 500,000 were watching in real-time.
Twitter permanently banned President Trump’s personal account.
The Gateway Pundit says that Twitter banned hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other lesser-known sites that challenged election results.
The Trump campaign’s email service has banned the campaign from its platform.

a lot of people have said for a long time that conservatives should leave those hostile, censorious platforms. There are free speech alternatives, most notably Parler (a Twitter alternative), Me-We (a Facebook alternative), Gab (another Twitter alternative), and Rumble (a YouTube alternative). Considering that we are the product, why in the world were we giving ourselves away for free?

And finally, on Friday, Trump apparently did go to Parler. The tech giants, though, were ready. Because Parler is a bulletin board, not a publisher, it does not moderate “parleys.” Google has therefore removed Parler from the App store for “user safety.” Apple is threatening to do the same unless Parler starts acting like the other tech companies and censors speech Democrats find offensive. Amazon is also making noises about deplatforming Parler.

This is what happens when private enterprise becomes the town square. It seemed to make sense in a time when the mainstream media was manifestly biased. It never occurred to people that the tech corporations would be just as biased, only with even more power. We currently have a situation in all the President has no avenues of communication because corporations have silenced him. Joseph McCarthy was a piker compared to today’s Democrats.

30 Oct 2020

Big Tech

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22 Jul 2020

Google Censoring Conservative Sites

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Just the other day, I received a note from a commenter complaining that Never Yet Melted was not coming up on Google searches.

Well, apparently, this problem was rather more extensive.

Thomas Lifson, at America Thinker, reports:

Yesterday, what Google calls a “technical error” exposed a blacklist of multiple conservative sites, including American Thinker. After the blacklisting became obvious and generated commentary among conservative publications (and crickets among the dominant MSM propaganda organs), it appears to have been reversed.

The blacklist became blatantly obvious when a Google search for “American Thinker” revealed no items from our site, but rather articles elsewhere that mentioned us. …

This morning, the ban on material beginning www.americanthinker.com was no longer visible.

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Rod Dreher sounded the alarm yesterday.

Today I have discovered that Google’s search engine has somehow suppressed not only this blog, but a number of conservative blogs and websites. I don’t know why. Is it deliberate? Was it a hack? I’ll let you know when I find out. Whatever the answer, this reveals the incredible power Google has over access to information. Get on the wrong side of that particular Big Brother, and you can be more or less cancelled.

30 Jul 2019

Election Tampering?

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10 Jun 2019

That’s a Lot of Money

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Splinter reports that financial figures show that Google is taking home a paycheck from News almost as large as the entire journalistic community combined.

Last year Google made an astonishing $4.6 billion off the news industry, according to the New York Times. That’s a shocking amount of money, considering the declining state of journalism, and the fact that Google isn’t actually reporting or writing anything itself.

The figure was drawn from a new report by the News Media Alliance, who say the journalism industry deserves to see a cut of those massive earnings.

“They make money off this arrangement and there needs to be a better outcome for news publishers,” David Chavern, the president and CEO of the alliance, told the Times.

The report points out that the entire news industry made $5.1 billion off digital advertising last year, which is only a little more than Google made off that same content. The News Media Alliance believes its estimate of Google’s earnings was conservative, and the real number may be much higher.

“The study blatantly illustrates what we all know so clearly and so painfully,” , Philadelphia Media Network CEO Terrance C.Z. Egger told the Times. “The current dynamics in the relationships between the platforms and our industry are devastating.

RTWT

06 May 2019

Our Dystopian Present

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12 Jan 2019

Insider Admits Google Screwed Over Damore

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PJ Media’s Debra Heine passes along TiredOfLying4Google Reddit confessions.

I helped Google screw over James Damore:

I was involved in the internal decisions involving James Damore’s memo, and it’s terrible what we did to him.

First of all, we knew about the memo a month before it went viral. HR sent it up the reporting chain when he gave it as internal feedback, but we did nothing. There wasn’t anything we could do, except admit to wrongdoing and lying to our employees. We just hoped that no one else would see his document.

Unfortunately, the memo started spreading within the company. The floodgates opened and previously silent employees started talking. To quell dissent, we: told executives to write to their employees condemning the memo; manipulated our internal Memegen to bias the ratings towards anti-Damore posts (the head of Memegen is an “ally” to the diversity cause); and gave every manager talking points on what to tell their reports about the memo. In all our communications, we concentrated on how hurt employees purportedly were and diverted attention from Google’s discriminatory employment practices and political hegemony, never mind the science.

We needed to make an example of Damore. Looking for some excuse to fire him, we spied on his phone and computer. We didn’t find anything, although our spying probably made his devices unusably slow, preventing him from organizing support within the company. When we did fire him, our reputation and integrity took a hit, but at least other employees were now afraid to speak up.

Firing him without an NDA was a huge risk though. He was a top performer and knew too many compromising secrets, like Dragonfly, the secret censored search project in China. He had also reported several legally dubious practices in Search that still exist. Only God knows why he never leaked Dragonfly or the other issues, but I think it’s because he actually cared about Google.

Our response after we fired him was equally disgraceful. We were supposed to have a Town Hall TGIF to answer employees’ questions about the controversy. However, after questions started coming in that we couldn’t reasonably answer, we had to cancel it. We shifted the blame onto “alt-right trolls” and have avoided talking about it openly since then.

To control the narrative, we planted stories with journalists and flexed Google’s muscles where necessary. In exchange for insider access and preferential treatment, all we ask for is their loyalty. For online media, Google’s ads pay their paycheck and our search brings their customers, so our influence shouldn’t be underestimated.

We dealt with his NLRB case in a similar way. People are ultimately lazy, so we found a sympathetic lawyer in the NLRB and wrote the internal NLRB memo for her. No one wanted to spend the effort to oppose it, despite it being laughably weak. Then, after Damore dropped his NLRB case and filed a class action lawsuit, we had the NLRB publicly release their memo. Our PR firms sent press releases saying “the NLRB ruled the firing legal”, which was, of course, manufactured bullshit.

All of our scheming was over the phone, in deleted emails, or through an external PR firm, so we can deny all of it. Now that we’ve forced him into arbitration, we’re close to screwing him over completely.

RTWT

Pretty evil.

HT: Karen L. Myers.

17 Dec 2018

Google Is Pretty Evil

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Apparently, very close to half the people working at Google are temp workers, and the lot of the Google temp worker,Ephrat Livni tells us, is a very unequal and unhappy one, invariably terminated after two years.

The campus in Mountain View is dotted with giant statues of sweets representing the company’s Android versions—Eclair, Donut, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Marshmallow. Multicolored bikes, unlocked, line the racks outside the buildings, many of which have laundromats, gyms, photo booths, and other funny statues, plus offices with kitchens containing a dizzying array of snacks. There is free lunch (and breakfast, and minimal dinners, too).

On the surface, it all seems delightful. Certainly, I was excited when I got there on a contract as a document review attorney in 2013. But deeper engagement with the company revealed a surprising and widespread disgruntlement. At first I didn’t understand why everyone was so defensive, glum, and sullen at this otherworldly workplace. But I soon learned the reason came down to deep inequality.

Nearly half of Google workers worldwide are contractors, temps, and vendors (TVCs) and just slightly more than half are full-time employees (FTEs). An internal source, speaking anonymously to The Guardian, just revealed that of about 170,000 people who work at Google, 49.95%, are TVCs and 50.05% are FTEs. As The Guardian reported on Dec. 12, a nascent labor movement within the company led to the leak of a rather awkward document, entitled “The ABCs of TVCs,” which reveals just how seriously Google takes the employment distinctions.

The document explains, “Working with TVCs and Googlers is different. Our policies exist because TVC working arrangements can carry significant risks.” Ostensibly, TVCs are excluded from a lot of things because letting them in on the company’s inner doings threatens security. “The risks Google appears to be most concerned about include standard insider threats, like leaks of proprietary information,” The Guardian writes based on its review of the leaked document.

But in the case of the team I was on—made up of lawyers, most of whom were long-term contractors—we reviewed the most important internal documents and determined whether they were legally privileged. In other words, outsiders were deciding what mail and memos from top Google executives, engineers, and other deep insiders should be considered private in lawsuits and investigations. The irony of this bizarre access, in view of our disparate treatment, was not lost on us. And eventually, it wore workers down.

There was a two-year cap on contract extensions and a weird caste system that excluded us from meetings, certain cafeterias, the Google campus store, and much more. Most notably, contractors wore red badges that had to be visible at all times and signaled to everyone our lowly position in the system.

On days when the full-time employees were on retreats or at all-hands meetings, the office was staffed entirely by contractors. We’d nibble on snacks from the office kitchen, contemplate whether to go to the pool or gym or yoga or dance classes, and laugh amongst ourselves at this heavenly employment hell.

But it was also oddly depressing. We were at the world’s most enviable workplace, allegedly, but were repeatedly reminded that we would not be hired full-time and were not part of the club. Technically, we were employees of a legal staffing agency whose staff we’d never met. We didn’t get sick leave or vacation and earned considerably less than colleagues with the same qualifications who were doing the same work.

In time, I learned the patterns for each class of contractor hires. We came in groups on 12-week contracts that were then renewed, usually for six months, until we neared two years. As the two-year limit approached, the optimists in any given class cajoled and negotiated with managers, and the pessimists grew grumpy and frustrated about having to look for new work. Either way, the response was the same. All had to go.

RTWT

03 Oct 2018

Google Easter Eggs

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Just type “T-Rex Run” in the Google Search Box.

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Type “Text Adventure” into Google Search Box.

Right click on box and select “Inspect.”

Click on “Console” on top of screen.

You should get “Would you like to play a game? yes/no.”

13 Sep 2018

Leaked Video: Top Google Execs Mourn 2016 Election Result

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It’s a long video, but definitely worth watching as it demonstrates clearly just how deeply embedded in the Progressive community of fashion world-view the people running this major communication company really are, and how much they look down on people with different views and hate and fear any position not their own.

I thought it was pretty striking to find that three out of four of the top panjandrums of Google are foreign-born immigrants to the United States. No wonder they neither identify with nor sympathize with the perspective of native-born Americans leading ordinary lives, who did not attend elite schools, who don’t fly around on private jets, and who don’t have $70 million hiring deals like Google’s CFO.

And just wait until you see some of the alternative lifestyle types from the mass Google employee audience bringing up their Identity politics issues. Can people this weird really code? My understanding was that you had to pass some very tricky intelligence test to get hired by Google, and I find it hard to believe that some of the fruitcake specimens that spoke up could successfully compose a sentence containing the words “hare,” hunter,” and “field.”

Google was embarrassed by this Breitbart leak, and issued a Twitter statement declaring: “Nothing was said at that meeting, or any other meeting, to suggest that any political bias ever influences the way we build or operate our products.” &c.

Sure. Right. That’s why, just for instance, we get an endless stream of special animated Google headers celebrating the natal anniversaries of every Diversity Group member they can think of, but Christian holidays like Easter are overlooked completely.

30 Aug 2018

Go Get Them, Donald!

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I’m almost never a fan of the government regulating what private companies can do, short of actual crime. However, what choice would there be if, for instance, the phone company possessing a de facto monopoly decided to block calls made by Republicans?

We have already extensive public accommodation law precedents, and the giant left-coast social media and search engines are currently getting away with unconscionable bias toward certain customers.

Zero Hedge agrees with Trump that these companies are treading on dangerous ground.

On Tuesday morning, President Trump lashed out at Google, with his remarks later broadening to include Twitter and Facebook, accusing it of “rigging” search results by presenting only results “from National Left-Wing Media” and accused “Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good.”

Those companies “better be careful because you can’t do that to people,” Trump said later in the Oval Office. “I think that Google, and Twitter and Facebook, they are really treading on very, very troubled territory and they have to be careful. It is not fair to large portions of the population.”

Google immediately responded, condemning Trump’s charge, and claiming that “Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology.”

And yet, as so often happens, in Trump’s crude delivery, the politically incorrect truth was once again found.

According to a memo posted on Facebook’s internal message board titled “We Have a Problem With Political Diversity”, and which was published by the New York Times, senior Facebook engineer Brian Amerige confirmed Trump’s allegation writing that “we are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views” and shockingly admitted that “we claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology. We throw labels that end in *obe and *ist at each other, attacking each other’s character rather than their ideas.”

The scathing indictment of Facebook’s liberal “mono-culture” continues:

    We do this so consistently that employees are afraid to say anything when they disagree with what’s around them politically.​ HR has told me that this is not a rare concern, and I’ve personally gotten over a hundred messages to that effect. Your colleagues are afraid because they know that they — not their ideas — will be attacked. They know that all the talk of “openness to different perspectives” does not apply to causes of “social justice,” immigration, “diversity”, and “equality.” On this issues, you can either keep quiet or sacrifice your reputation and career.

“These are not fears without cause” Amerige writes, and continues the stunning disclosure of the company’s biased culture, “Because we tear down posters welcoming Trump supporters. We regularly propose removing Thiel from our board because he supported Trump. We’re quick to suggest firing people who turn out to be misunderstood, and even quicker to conclude our colleagues are bigots. We have made “All Lives Matter” a fireable offense. We put Palmer Luckey through a witch hunt because he paid for anti-Hillary ads. We write each other ad-hoc feedback in the PSC tool for having “offensive” ideas. We ask HR to investigate those who dare to criticize Islam’s human rights record for creating a “non inclusive environment.” And they called me a transphobe when I called out our corporate art for being politically radical.

RTWT

13 Mar 2018

Spilling the Beans on Working for Big Tech Companies

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Google employees eat lubch in Kendall Square Cafeteria, Cambridge, Massachusetts

A long-time Google manager, at Marginal Revolution, describes life at Google, and critiques other major tech companies.

I joined Google [earlier]…as an Engineering Director. This was, as I understand it, soon after an event where Larry either suggested or tried to fire all of the managers, believing they didn’t do much that was productive. (I’d say it was apocryphal but it did get written up in a Doc that had a bunch of Google lore, so it got enough oversight that it was probably at least somewhat accurate.)

At that time people were hammering on the doors trying to get in and some reasonably large subset, carefully vetted with stringent “smart tests” were being let in. The official mantra was, “hire the smartest people and they’ll figure out the right thing to do.” People were generally allowed to sign up for any project that interested them (there was a database where engineers could literally add your name to a project that interested you) and there was quite a bit of encouragement for people to relocate to remote offices. Someone (not Eric, I think it probably was Sergey) proposed opening offices anyplace there were smart people so that we could vacuum them up. Almost anything would be considered as a new project unless it was considered to be “not ambitious enough.” The food was fabulous. Recruiters, reportedly, told people they could work on “anything they wanted to.” There were microkitchens stocked with fabulous treats every 500′ and the toilets were fancy Japanese…uh…auto cleaning and drying types.

And… infrastructure projects and unglamorous projects went wanting for people to work on them. They had a half day meeting to review file system projects because…it turns out that many, many top computer scientists evidently dream of writing their own file systems. The level of entitlement displayed around things like which treats were provided at the microkitchens was…intense. (Later, there was a tragicomic story of when they changed bus schedules so that people couldn’t exploit the kitchens by getting meals for themselves [and family…seen that with my own eyes!] “to go” and take them home with them on the Google Bus — someone actually complained in a company meeting that the new schedules…meant they couldn’t get their meals to go. And they changed the bus schedule back, even though their intent was to reduce the abuse of the free food.)

Now, most of all that came from two sources not exclusively related to the question at hand:

Google (largely Larry I think) was fearless about trying new things. There was a general notion that we were so smart we could figure out a new, better way to do anything. That was really awesome. I’d say, overall, that it mostly didn’t pan out…but it did once in a while and it may well be that just thinking that way made working there so much fun, that it did make an atmosphere where, overall, great things happened.

Google was awash in money and happy to spray it all over its employees. Also awesome, but not something you can generalize for all businesses. Amazon, of course, took a very different tack. (It’s pretty painful to hear the stories in The Everything Store or similar books about the relatively Spartan conditions Amazon maintained. I was the site lead for the Google [xxxx] office for a while and we hired a fair number of Amazon refugees. They were really happy to be in Google, generally…not necessarily to either of our benefit.)

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