Tag Archives: Censorship

Google employees revolt against having a black, female conservative on advisory board

Kay Coles James is president of the Heritage Foundation, my favorite think tank
Kay Coles James is president of the Heritage Foundation, my favorite think tank

My favorite think tank in all the world is the Heritage Foundation. Almost all of my favorite policy researchers work there. The president is a conservative black lady named Kay Cole James. Any company would be thrilled to have her on an advisory board. But not Google. A bunch of their employees revolted against her.

Here’s an article from the Daily Caller about it:

Google staffers are in revolt, demanding the removal of Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James from an advisory board the company convened on artificial intelligence. A petition with more than 2,000 signatories from within the company was published on Medium on Monday, with the title “Googlers Against Transphobia and Hate.”

The petition’s signers described the appointment of Coles, a black grandmother, as a “weaponization of the language of diversity.”

The petition was promoted internally within the company by five individuals, some of whom have a history of leftist agitation.

[…]One of them, Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google’s Open Research Group, posted on a private Google listserv that, “I would disagree that their views are important to consider when those views include erasing trans people, targeting immigrants and denying climate change.”

[…]Whittaker shot down this idea, “Instead [of] recognizing the historical gravity of our position, and rising to meet the occasion, we’ve invited a vocal bigot whose hand is on the lever of U.S. policy to shape our views on where, and how, to ‘responsibly’ apply this tech.

There’s no diversity of thought at Google. Remember what happened to James Damore, when he suggested that there were differences between men and women? They ended up firing him for holding to view that most Americans agree with. He even had research papers to support his arguments, but they didn’t care… it offended people on the left, so he had to go.

I’m blogging about this today, even though it occurred last week, because Kay wrote about it in the far-left Washington Post on Monday.

She wrote:

Last week, less than two weeks after the AI advisory council was announced, Google disbanded it. The company has given in to the mentality of a rage mob. How can Google now expect conservatives to defend it against anti-business policies from the left that might threaten its very existence?

I was deeply disappointed to see such a promising idea abandoned, but the episode was about much more than just one company’s response to intolerance from the self-appointed guardians of tolerance.

It was symptomatic of where America is heading. Whether in the streets or online, angry mobs that heckle and threaten are not trying to change hearts and win minds. They’re trying to impose their will through intimidation. In too many corners of American life, there is no longer room for disagreement and civil discourse. Instead, it’s agree or be destroyed.

[…]Being attacked is not new for me. As a black, conservative, pro-life, evangelical woman, I have spent most of my life being called names and being denounced for my beliefs.

I guess Google isn’t really committed to the only kind of diversity that matters: intellectual diversity.

By the way, my Google traffic on this blog has dropped off by 90% since the 2016 election. I think Google decided to get serious after they lost that elction (and tape emerged of their senior executives literally crying about their candidate losing).

This record of bias against even moderates and libertarians is a concern to me, because we previously saw that Google feels that it is their obligation to manipulate search results (and YouTube videos) in order to benefit their allies in the Democrat party. If Google really is altering their products and services to promote Democrats, then maybe it’s time for the federal government to step in and regulate them, so that our basic human rights are not infringed by far-left fascist extremists.

Related posts

Twitter suspends account of pro-life movie “Unplanned”, deletes 99% of their followers

Facebook, Google, Youtube, Twitter purging conservative speech (Source: The Stream)
Facebook, Google, Youtube, Twitter purging conservative speech (Source: The Stream)

Wow, big social media companies like Facebook, Google, Youtube and Twitter are really ratcheting up their suppression of any accounts that challenge their allies in the Democrat Party. For example, on the weekend Twitter decided to suspend the account of the new pro-life movie “Unplanned”. And then they deleted 99,000 of their followers.

PJ Media reports:

Facebook censors criticism of Democrat Party, especially before “important elections”

Big social media companies like Google, YouTube and Twitter are very open about censoring and shadow-banning conservative voices. These companies do not support free speech or ideological diversity. They are careful to hire only those who share their secular leftism and fascism. But sometimes, one accidentally hires a non-fascist, and we get a glimpse at the internal workings of company.

Here’s Project Veritas, doing the journalism that the mainstream media won’t do:

Project Veritas has obtained and published documents and presentation materials from a former Facebook insider. This information describes how Facebook engineers plan and go about policing political speech. Screenshots from a Facebook workstation show the specific technical actions taken against political figures, as well as “[e]xisting strategies” taken to combat political speech.

[…]According to the insider, the documents revealed a routine suppression of the distribution of conservative Facebook pages. The technical action she repeatedly saw, and for which Project Veritas was provided documentation, was labeled ActionDeboostLiveDistribution. Said the insider, “I would see [this term] appear on several different conservative pages. I first noticed it with an account that I can’t remember, but I remember once I started looking at it, I also saw it on Mike Cernovich’s page, saw it on Steven Crowder’s page, as well as the Daily Caller’s page.”

Conservative commentator Steven Crowder’s page had been suppressed before in April 2016, and Crowder told Project Veritas they settled a dispute related to the issue with Facebook out of court. Asked for comment on this story, Steven Crowder’s attorney Bill Richmond said:

“Louder With Crowder is investigating the allegations of concealed stream throttling by Facebook. The accusations are deeply troubling given the previously settled dispute with Facebook uncovered by Gizmodo.com, which found the show was targeted by Facebook workers with secret audience restrictions on political grounds alongside other prominent conservative voices.”

A screenshot of an action log on Mike Cernovich’s Facebook page provided by the insider, shows the tag. The insider believes that the “deboost” code suppresses the distribution of livestream videos on Facebook. Project Veritas spoke to a current Facebook employee off the record who said that the code could limit a video’s visibility in news feeds, remove sharing features, and disable interactive notifications.

When approached for comment, author and filmmaker Mike Cernovich said the troubling issue is that Facebook could just “make stuff up” about people through these systems. “Facebook, or an individual at Facebook, has the unilateral power to create false allegations against someone he or she doesn’t like. The person accused not only can’t do anything about the allegation, they don’t even have an idea the allegation was made,” said Cernovich.

The insider says that unlike many actions that Facebook content moderators can take against pages, the “deboost” action, which appears to occur algorithmically, does not notify the page’s owner.

[…]Upon further review, the insider says she did not notice the tag on any left-wing pages.

Here’s a screencap of one the documents that was leaked:

Facebook doesn't want people to see conservative videos
Facebook doesn’t want people to see conservative videos

So, the question is, what is that “example video”, which Facebook says is “troll behavior” that must be censored? Well, it’s a video produced by a mainstream conservative journalist who works for The Blaze, a mainstream conservative news site:

The video linked in the presentation was made by Lauren Chen, a conservative commentator who now hosts a program on BlazeTV. “If you actually watch the video you can see that it clearly isn’t abusive or promoting harassment, the video was a criticism of social justice,” said Chen when asked for comment on this story. She added that “the video actually promotes equality and individualism.”

What’s the purpose of all of this censorship? Why, to suppress conservative voices before important elections, of course:

Yamamoto and de la Rubia’s presentation says that “troll accounts,” can have their internet bandwidth limited and experience forced glitches like frequent “auto-logout[s]” and the failed upload of comments. These “special features” would be triggered “leading up to important elections.”

This isn’t the first time that Facebook has been caught censoring conservatives in order to help their allies in the Democrat Party.

Remember this story about Franklin Graham?

Facebook banned Franklin Graham for "hate speech"
Facebook banned Franklin Graham for “hate speech”

The Washington Times reports:

The Rev. Franklin Graham was kicked off Facebook for defending North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” which the social-media giant’s review team decided was hate speech.

Facebook acknowledged over the weekend it had banned the prominent evangelist over transgender issues and called the 24-hour ban a mistake that it had already undone. But Mr. Graham was having none of it Sunday, calling the move “a personal attack towards me” and an example of the censorship that Silicon Valley has in store for Christians and/or conservatives.

A spokesman for Facebook told the Charlotte Observer on condition of anonymity that the review team had decided a 2016 post violated rules against “dehumanizing language” and exclusion of people based on, among other things, sexual orientation and gender self-identification. The post was deleted and Mr. Graham prevented from using the service for 24 hours.

I guess Facebook thinks that anyone who is serious about Christianity needs to be “de-boosted”, i.e. – have their free speech censored by fascists on the secular left.

And what about this article from the Daily Caller:

Facebook is censoring PragerU videos for violating its speech codes that prohibit so-called “hate speech” and shadow banning its posts, PragerU wrote on Twitter Friday.

“We’re being heavily censored on @Facebook. Our last 9 posts are reaching 0 of our 3 million followers. At least two videos were deleted last night for ‘hate speech’ including our recent video with @ConservativeMillen,” PragerU tweeted.

The official PragerU Facebook page is still up on Facebook at the time of publication. Its Facebook page reposts the same videos consistently and others can still be found on the page.

However, it appears that one specific PragerU social media administrator — the one who posted the videos that Facebook considered violated its “hate speech” policies — is unable to post on behalf of PragerU, resulting only other PragerU administrators being able to see the post. No one else can see the posts.

What kind of people work at Facebook? They are not moral people. They do not understand basic human rights. They do not respect free speech and they don’t value diversity of opinion. They are ignorant, intolerant, close-minded, bigoted fascists.