The Pentagon Highlands Forum’s co-optation of tech giants like Google to pursue mass surveillance, has played a key role in secret efforts to manipulate the media as part of an information war against the American government, the American people, and the rest of the world: to justify endless war, and ceaseless military expansionism. Colluded Against the American People Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has made efforts to influence the American political discourse (not to mention presidential election outcome), which extends far beyond the company’s penchant for subtly disadvantaging independent and conservative thinkers on platforms like YouTube. By financially supporting left-leaning policy shops, Google’s parent company has helped raise a liberal army intent on hashing out policy minutiae to help bend US policy to their benefactors’ advantage. Barry Lynn, formerly a top researcher at New America, learned that lesson the hard way after publishing a paper praising European Union antitrust regulators for fining Google nearly $3 billion for purportedly rigging its search algorithm to favor its own services over its rivals. Google spent more than $9.5 million on lobbying during the first half of 2017, more than almost any other company. It has helped organize conferences at which key regulators overseeing investigations into the company were presented with pro-Google arguments, sometimes without disclosure of Google’s role in funding NA, according to the NYT. The company has also donated to more than 170 groups from across the political spectrum, according to voluntary disclosures on its website. Seeking to Censor Information Google's 160-page handbook tells us all exactly how they plan to spoon feed us only “their” news. The lengthy handbook is a heavy read for the average person, but the book does lay out an Orwellian machination. Pay close attention to the “instructional” on page 108 where Google dictates who does and does not meet rating criteria. The section under Fails to Meet (FailsM) is a steamrolling of the free press, and suggested hiding certain kinds of sites: “Pages that directly contradict well established historical facts (e.g., unsubstantiated conspiracy theories), unless the query clearly indicates the user is seeking an alternative viewpoint.”Google has obscured its real intentions with the idea that their algorithms are “filtering” or “learning” results to help your life be better. Once again Google supposes to do “what is good for the public” by destroying some sources and propping up others. Using terms like “search quality rating guidelines” and “page quality rating guidelines” at Google provide justification for controlling what you see and read on the web. Censorship and monopolization of internet information and business. Also contained within the handbook is a section describing how Google will rank the best of the best news sites entitled “A High Level of Expertise/Authoritativeness/Trustworthiness (EAT)”. The acronym alone should clue you that Google search users are about to be fed the "truth". “High Quality Pages” for the Google oligarchs means that either the page owner pays Google through the mouth, or that the site in question serves Google’s masters well – period. At the top of this matrix of sources are newspapers (High News 1) like The Washington Post and New York Times, followed by the articles within those pages (High News 2). On down the list of authority pages are government sites like the US State Department and White House. So, Google has factored out the importance of truth or even the importance of the news story itself, in favor of “who” wrote the story and the “reality” Google wants you to accept. Search Results Shape People's Opinions Researchers have observed that Internet search rankings have a significant impact on consumer attitudes, preferences, and behaviors, mainly because users trust and choose higher-ranked results more than lower-ranked results, even though users generally have no idea how results get ranked. This phenomena, dubbed the "search engine manipulation effect" (SEME), is presumably why North American companies now spend more than 20 billion US dollars annually on efforts to place results at the top of rankings. Studies using eye-tracking technology have shown that people generally scan search engine results in the order in which the results appear and then fixate on the results that rank highest, even when lower-ranked results are more relevant to their search. Higher-ranked links also draw more clicks, and consequently people spend more time on Web pages associated with higher-ranked search results. A recent analysis of ∼300 million clicks on one search engine found that 91.5% of those clicks were on the first page of search results, with 32.5% on the first result and 17.6% on the second. The study also reported that the bottom item on the first page of results drew 140% more clicks than the first item on the second page. Given the apparent power of search rankings, researchers sought out to determine whether search results could be manipulated to alter the preferences of undecided voters in democratic elections, since it is already well established that biased media sources such as newspapers, political polls, and television sway voters. Using a double-blind, randomized controlled experimental method, the results of these experiments demonstrate that:
Search engine companies are currently unregulated and these results could be viewed as a cause for concern, suggesting that such companies could affect — and perhaps are already affecting — the outcomes of close elections worldwide. Such manipulations are difficult to detect, and most people are relatively powerless when trying to resist sources of influence they cannot see. Of greater concern in the present context, when people are unaware they are being manipulated, they tend to believe they have adopted their new thinking voluntarily. Thus, unregulated election-related search rankings could pose a significant threat to the democratic system of government. SolutionsStart making the transition away from companies like Google and Facebook now. Begin using alternative search engines, such as: References Butler, P. (2017). We Told You So: Google Is NSA | New Eastern Outlook. [online] Journal-neo.org. Available at: https://journal-neo.org/2017/09/04/we-told-you-so-google-is-nsa/ [Accessed 10 Sep. 2017].
Epstein, R. and Robertson, R. (2015). The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(33), pp.E4512-E4521. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1419828112 Google. (2017). General Guidelines. [online] Available at: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//insidesearch/howsearchworks/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf [Accessed 10 Sep. 2017]. Ahmed, N. (2017). How the CIA made Google – INSURGE intelligence – Medium. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e [Accessed 10 Sep. 2017].
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