"In collaboration with: movements.org" - in Assange's article[1] about his meeting with Eric Schmidt he mentions:
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Gen Next also backs an NGO, launched by Cohen toward the end of his State Department tenure, for bringing internet-based global “pro-democracy activists” into the US foreign relations patronage network. The group originated as the “Alliance of Youth Movements” with an inaugural summit in New York City in 2008 funded by the State Department and encrusted with the logos of corporate sponsors.
[...]
In 2011, the Alliance of Youth Movements rebranded as “Movements.org.” In 2012 Movements.org became a division of “Advancing Human Rights,” a new NGO set up by Robert L. Bernstein after he resigned from Human Rights Watch (which he had originally founded) because he felt it should not cover Israeli and US human rights abuses. Advancing Human Rights aims to right Human Rights Watch’s wrong by focusing exclusively on “dictatorships.” Cohen stated that the merger of his Movements.org outfit with Advancing Human Rights was “irresistible,” pointing to the latter’s “phenomenal network of cyberactivists in the Middle East and North Africa.” He then joined the Advancing Human Rights board, which also includes Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in occupied Afghanistan. In its present guise, Movements.org continues to receive funding from Gen Next, as well as from Google, MSNBC, and PR giant Edelman, which represents General Electric, Boeing, and Shell, among others.
---
Fascinating stuff - a glimpse into the murky world of international politics for someone like me who generally has no idea.
Google, The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and Edelman all strongly courted Obama staffers in 2012 during and after the election. There are many close ties between these companies and the current administration. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if movements.org was simply another funnel for these organizations to continue to splash money and favors in their direction.
How depressing would it be to know your job and existence is basically a bribe, with no expectation to make a meaningful contribution to the world? I'm picturing some enterprising recent college graduate thinking they're going there to change the world and getting laughed out of the room after laying out a plan to make them more effective. I need a shower just thinking about it.
So your idea is that companies give money to employee Y of X, as a bribe to X (who likes the company better because they game X money), and that's bad because Y is somehow unable to use money effectively, but X is able to use money effectively?
Made me thinks of the last season of House of Cards. Really a good one, really neat and engaged in some aspect like Reign by Terror, Manufacturing consent using search engine, relation with Russia...
One of other HN article is about Facebook data used for social studies. If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.
You can't even assume that a company competing for your dollars will treat your better (Verizon's tracking header junk on mobile, even with that market being far more competitive than landline).
This particular incident? No. It's the fact that they're doing this kind of thing at all is the problem. People have been worrying for years about the filter bubble that Google put you in; could you imagine if they tried to skew the US election? This document provides some evidence that they've certainly been thinking along those lines.
The email is lacking context, but it appears that they gather data from open sources, not from some sinister surveillance program. And they use this data in open partnership with Al Jazeera. And the company itself is not the main "Google" that is tied to search an ads, but was launched, at inception, as "global technology think-tank".
So I see no relationship between what's discussed in these emails and hypothetical scenarios you're describing.
In fact, Cohen had moved to Google from the US State Department in 2010. He had been a fast-talking “Generation Y” ideas man at State under two US administrations, a courtier from the world of policy think tanks and institutes, poached in his early twenties. He became a senior advisor for Secretaries of State Rice and Clinton. At State, on the Policy Planning Staff, Cohen was soon christened “Condi’s party-starter,” channeling buzzwords from Silicon Valley into US policy circles and producing delightful rhetorical concoctions such as “Public Diplomacy 2.0.” On his Council on Foreign Relations adjunct staff page he listed his expertise as “terrorism; radicalization; impact of connection technologies on 21st century statecraft; Iran.”
---
Good or evil is quite subjective, but there is a pretty clear connection to at least one presidential candidate.
That article is a seriously interesting (and long) read, assuming that it's all true of course - it is not interesting enough for me to start digging for proofs! ;)
>Jared Cohen is the President of Jigsaw and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.[3] Previously, he served as a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff and as a advisor to Condoleezza Rice and later Hillary Clinton
It looks like high tech in US is in relationship with politicians who promote war, warrant-less NSA spying and built torture programs
http://www.drop-dropbox.com/
The skewing of opinion can be done by biasing the results of a web search. As discussed on HN before, a search engine has a strong influence over the decision making of its users: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11255633
>provides some evidence that they've certainly been thinking along those lines.
They've been acting along those lines, you mean. That's even scarier.
We are in an election year in the USA... and if not the USA, there's always some other election in some other country. If not an election, then an insurrection... Google has no business meddling in the affairs of states.
I would. Encouraging a 5-year destructive war is evil. And they were encouraging sectarian islamists authoritarians to go to war against inclusive secular authoritarians.
Syria was never a great place. But when the American led coalition really put its attempts at starting a revolution into high gear in 2009, starting training dissidents directly in 2011, then arming them in 2012, it really turned into a hellhole.
Now with 500,000+ dead, millions displaced, why is no one being held accountable? Shouldn't Google face consequences for what had to be an association and coordination with the US coalition?
I mean if this isn't what utter and complete failure looks like, I don't know what is.
[EDIT] Downvotes for this? The only way this could be downvoted is if people think the dates are wrong. Which they might be, and we probably won't know for a long time for sure. But the wikileaks US embassy cable docs sure paint this timeline as correct. And giving money to dissident groups, followed by helping them coordinate, then after hostilities broke out, arming them, hardly takes a stretch of the imagination.
A multinational corporation has decided to map defections in a civil war in order to encourage people to defect from the government. An evil government, sure-- but it's a company weighing in on one side of a war. It isn't within their mandate.
Manipulation here means that manipulation elsewhere is possible.
well, even that would be OK of it was the company/owner desire. the crux here is that it was a government project, paid by your money, without your representation, and that it completely backfired.
I believe that this kind of behaviour will be the reason why the Internet as we know it and are used to it will end some day.
We will have many island solutions with firewalls around them just to prevent foreign powers from interfering in internal political processes.
For example I certainly do not like what Erdogan is doing in Turkey (cutting off Facebook and Twitter), but is he wrong when he is accusing foreign powers from trying to incite demonstrations or manipulate public opinion? I'm pretty sure he is not.
Same goes for China, Russia and all the other countries that are implementing or already have finished implementing their own great firewall.
There is no reason in the world why any country should ever accept this. (I doubt the US would ever accept China doing this to them)
But there are also serious internal problems. For one Google could influence the US presidential elections by skewing search results and making certain candidates look bad and others good.
I'm sure almost 100% of Google employees would never support such a thing, but when Google does this regarding Syria you can't really be sure that they wouldn't do this internally too.
I don't think restricting the flow of information because you don't trust people to interpret it correctly is morally okay. People have been influenced by other people since the dawn of language. Deciding by whom they can be influenced shouldn't be the state's concern.
Why the downvotes? Are people really advocating for state censorship and propagandization? Perhaps the state has already achieved it's goals if this is so.
This kind of thing isn't new though. The Internet is just the latest means of communication with the public. Public opinion has, and still is, manipulated for good and bad via mass media, grassroots campaigning, bribery, agent provocateurs, etc., etc. Replace "internet" with "telephone" or "printing press" and your post would read the same. Governments always want to control their "internal political processes" and to achieve that they tend to block out anything that interferes, whether it be foreign governments or internal factions that run counter to their interests.
"I'm sure almost 100% of Google employees would never support such a thing..."
Even to stop Trump? I'm betting quite a few employees, especially at the top, wouldn't mind tweaking things to stop what they see as a very real threat.
"Billionaires, tech CEOs and top members of the Republican establishment flew to a private island resort off the coast of Georgia this weekend for the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum, according to sources familiar with the secretive gathering.
The main topic at the closed-to-the-press confab? How to stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Larry Page, Napster creator and Facebook investor Sean Parker, and Tesla Motors and SpaceX honcho Elon Musk all attended. So did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), political guru Karl Rove, House Speaker Paul Ryan, GOP Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.), Cory Gardner (Colo.), Tim Scott (S.C.), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Ben Sasse (Neb.), who recently made news by saying he “cannot support Donald Trump.”
The fact that establishment figures from both sides see him as "a very real threat" seems like a very good sign. For all the talk of democracy, it's pretty funny (funny ironic) listening to all the talk of subverting the election process. Can't entrust such a thing with the plebes after all...
Trump's pretty bad IMO, but worst case scenario he'd only be the president. There's really good checks against the president's power. The unfortunate (glaring) exception being that we've somehow lost track of the bit about Congress being the only one who can execute a declaration of war.
A lot of those "checks" are just things that Presidents historically don't do, not that they're prohibited from doing so by the Constitution. Even then, it's not clear that Trump really gives a shit about the Constitution. Like all contemporary Presidents he would decide what he wants to do first and then have his lawyers provide some veneer of constitutionality to it, but in Trump's case the bar for such would probably be really, really low.
He's already mentioned going after news outlets that criticize him. What else can the President do? Can he instruct the military/NSA to spy on every sitting Congressman and Senator, and blackmail them? That's not explicitly unconstitutional, and these days "explicitly unconstitutional" seems to be the only thing that matters (i.e. unless the Constitution actually says you can't do a thing, then you can do that thing). What are the President's actual powers during a time of war, especially if the theater is in America itself? Can he mobilize the military in response to a domestic terrorist attack, and if so what sort of plenary power does he have domestically?
And the more important question, really, is not "what does the Constitution say" but rather "what are the American people ready for"? If Trump does become President, the answer would seem to be "quite a lot of really scary shit".
I think they'll do it, but not because they see Trump as a threat. They'll do it to prevent "hate speech". Websites that criticize Trump will be signal-boosted, and those that criticize Sanders or Clinton will be suppressed for using "hate speech" and for being "conspiracy nuts", even if their tone is identical to that of Trump's critics.
For the record, I don't care which of these contestants wins. I don't even care about media biases, because I think it's only natural. But I am disappointed when tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, that are not content creators, but are supposed to be just pipelines for content, exhibit clear biases.
For this particular issue, some people suggest a more benign explanation for the bias[1], and they might be right. But I still suspect some manual tweaking to boost some sites, and suppress others.
I don't know about Russia but it certainly seems that China is establishing some social networks that are wholly distinct from other western ones. In that way they're "island solutions" but less malicious sounding.
>For one Google could influence the US presidential elections by skewing search results and making certain candidates look bad and others good.
It'd be very hard to prove, but yes. This could be extremely granularly controlled, too-- apply a few filters to weed out those who are likely to be able to detect subversion, then drill down to the demographic in the geographical area that needs to be energized to vote for a certain candidate.
> is he wrong when he is accusing foreign powers from trying to incite demonstrations or manipulate public opinion? I'm pretty sure he is not.
Please substantiate. Turkey is a NATO member which, other than the recent kerfuffle with downing a Russia fighter jet, has decent relations with most of its neighbours, and no real Great Enemies. Turkey has always had a press-repressive (!!) orientation because they've wanted to keep internal Islamist forces at bay. Amusing, Erdogan has flipped the script and now it's his Islamist government which is cracking down on other voices, although the take-over of the Zaman news organization is really about internal fighting with an influential cleric. But either way, in the end, Turkey has always had authoritarian governments succeeded by military coups and more authoritarian rule.
Turkey's membership of NATO was only achieved through explicit naming in an addendum to the Articles, the only country so included, and was never a popular addition. They remain the only country for which expulsion has a clear process, though unlikely.
> has decent relations with most of its neighbours
Except with Greece, both of whom have shot down more of each others aircraft than non-NATO aircraft, and Armenia with whom they have a lingering border skirmish and Syria and Kurdistan-Iraq...
That would be regrettable, but it only partially addresses the threat that the Internet, or rather networking in general, poses to oppressive regimes around the world (which is to say, the vast majority of governments around the world). A balkanization of the Internet would reduce that threat considerably, and especially with regard to outside influences of course, but would not come close to eliminating it.
The threat I'm talking about is just people talking to each other, and coordinating their actions. The only way to totally stop that is to basically ban computing devices at all, or at least ban their networking Battlestar Galactica style, and at that point you're condemning yourself to a 70s-ish economy in the best case, which means you're not going to compete with other nations in trade nor in military strength. Kind of defeats the purpose of having an oppressive regime in the first place, which is mainly about controlling and enslaving your people while playing at "realpolitik" pissing contests on the international stage.
I look at the Internet as basically a return to the status quo, after a century where national governments could monopolize the mass media and thus monopolize speech. Those days are over, and not even a balkanization of the Internet will bring them back. Oppressive regimes increasingly will have to choose between going full DPRK, or trying their hand on a more even playing field (compared to 50 years ago). So far they have unanimously chosen the latter, and there is every reason to think they will continue to do so.
Lots of people here are talking about skewing search results, but it doesn't seem like we have any evidence Google did that. All the email says they did was create a tool to visualize data, and give it to the press.
The article linked talks about a few other things Google did, but the closest they get to manipulating search results is putting “Live! Secretary Kerry answers questions on Syria. Today via Hangout at 2pm ET.” on the homepage below the search box. A politically neutral statement advertising a unique source of (biased) information, and their own product. This is the moral equivalent of reddit advertising an AMA with Obama, or Elon Musk as far as I can see.
Edit: Maybe it is thread based selection bias, but I have been consistently stating this and more developed versions of this threat model and consistently get downed.
If anyone sees this and votes on my above comment (either direction) I would be curious to get thoughts on Google, search engines, or general winner take all/consolidation dynamics in tech
This was a very different branch of Google than Search. The email was from Jared Cohen, who I had to look up to verify that he even worked at Google (apparently, he left the State Department in 2010 to become a director at Google Ideas). I never saw so much as an email or presentation while I was at Google; my understanding is that he operated in a siloed part of Google (now Alphabet) whose mission specifically was to spread democracy across the world:
"Google Ideas" is a rather creepy name for a company whose mission is international propaganda. I guess it's good thhey changed it to Jigsaw to reduce tarnish to the Google brand.
Funny that Alphabet sold Boston Dynamics because people think robots are scary, but doesn't mind keeping the international intrigue division.
From the original article:
"The last forty years has seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy."
This is how powerful governments shape the world:
1. Create ideas (lies)
2. Get the press to constantly write those ideas
3. Change the truth
Once the truth is shaped you can now do what you want. In fact you now have to do required things to keep your country safe.
Examples: Millions of people unnecessarily dying in Iraq and Syria.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadhttp://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/syriadefections...
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Gen Next also backs an NGO, launched by Cohen toward the end of his State Department tenure, for bringing internet-based global “pro-democracy activists” into the US foreign relations patronage network. The group originated as the “Alliance of Youth Movements” with an inaugural summit in New York City in 2008 funded by the State Department and encrusted with the logos of corporate sponsors.
[...]
In 2011, the Alliance of Youth Movements rebranded as “Movements.org.” In 2012 Movements.org became a division of “Advancing Human Rights,” a new NGO set up by Robert L. Bernstein after he resigned from Human Rights Watch (which he had originally founded) because he felt it should not cover Israeli and US human rights abuses. Advancing Human Rights aims to right Human Rights Watch’s wrong by focusing exclusively on “dictatorships.” Cohen stated that the merger of his Movements.org outfit with Advancing Human Rights was “irresistible,” pointing to the latter’s “phenomenal network of cyberactivists in the Middle East and North Africa.” He then joined the Advancing Human Rights board, which also includes Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in occupied Afghanistan. In its present guise, Movements.org continues to receive funding from Gen Next, as well as from Google, MSNBC, and PR giant Edelman, which represents General Electric, Boeing, and Shell, among others.
---
Fascinating stuff - a glimpse into the murky world of international politics for someone like me who generally has no idea.
[1] https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
How depressing would it be to know your job and existence is basically a bribe, with no expectation to make a meaningful contribution to the world? I'm picturing some enterprising recent college graduate thinking they're going there to change the world and getting laughed out of the room after laying out a plan to make them more effective. I need a shower just thinking about it.
One of other HN article is about Facebook data used for social studies. If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.
I hear this all the time but it's message is a bit off. I'll quote this page http://powazek.com/posts/3229
1) Assumption: This is new or unique to the internet
2) Assumption: You’re either the product or the customer
3) My Favorite - Assumption: Companies you pay treat you better (Comcast Anyone?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jigsaw_(company)
The email is lacking context, but it appears that they gather data from open sources, not from some sinister surveillance program. And they use this data in open partnership with Al Jazeera. And the company itself is not the main "Google" that is tied to search an ads, but was launched, at inception, as "global technology think-tank".
So I see no relationship between what's discussed in these emails and hypothetical scenarios you're describing.
---
In fact, Cohen had moved to Google from the US State Department in 2010. He had been a fast-talking “Generation Y” ideas man at State under two US administrations, a courtier from the world of policy think tanks and institutes, poached in his early twenties. He became a senior advisor for Secretaries of State Rice and Clinton. At State, on the Policy Planning Staff, Cohen was soon christened “Condi’s party-starter,” channeling buzzwords from Silicon Valley into US policy circles and producing delightful rhetorical concoctions such as “Public Diplomacy 2.0.” On his Council on Foreign Relations adjunct staff page he listed his expertise as “terrorism; radicalization; impact of connection technologies on 21st century statecraft; Iran.”
---
Good or evil is quite subjective, but there is a pretty clear connection to at least one presidential candidate.
That article is a seriously interesting (and long) read, assuming that it's all true of course - it is not interesting enough for me to start digging for proofs! ;)
[1] https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
It looks like high tech in US is in relationship with politicians who promote war, warrant-less NSA spying and built torture programs http://www.drop-dropbox.com/
Eric Schmidt has founded The Groundwork, to ensure that Clinton has the engineering talent needed to win the election.
http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working...
They are even hiring here. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=loomin-arty
Because the Donald really wants to change the flow of trade and how large corporations build and hire.
From Oprah show, 25 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEPs17_AkTI
They've been acting along those lines, you mean. That's even scarier.
We are in an election year in the USA... and if not the USA, there's always some other election in some other country. If not an election, then an insurrection... Google has no business meddling in the affairs of states.
And at least they should do it publicly.
Now with 500,000+ dead, millions displaced, why is no one being held accountable? Shouldn't Google face consequences for what had to be an association and coordination with the US coalition?
I mean if this isn't what utter and complete failure looks like, I don't know what is.
[EDIT] Downvotes for this? The only way this could be downvoted is if people think the dates are wrong. Which they might be, and we probably won't know for a long time for sure. But the wikileaks US embassy cable docs sure paint this timeline as correct. And giving money to dissident groups, followed by helping them coordinate, then after hostilities broke out, arming them, hardly takes a stretch of the imagination.
Manipulation here means that manipulation elsewhere is possible.
We will have many island solutions with firewalls around them just to prevent foreign powers from interfering in internal political processes.
For example I certainly do not like what Erdogan is doing in Turkey (cutting off Facebook and Twitter), but is he wrong when he is accusing foreign powers from trying to incite demonstrations or manipulate public opinion? I'm pretty sure he is not.
Same goes for China, Russia and all the other countries that are implementing or already have finished implementing their own great firewall.
There is no reason in the world why any country should ever accept this. (I doubt the US would ever accept China doing this to them)
But there are also serious internal problems. For one Google could influence the US presidential elections by skewing search results and making certain candidates look bad and others good.
I'm sure almost 100% of Google employees would never support such a thing, but when Google does this regarding Syria you can't really be sure that they wouldn't do this internally too.
Even to stop Trump? I'm betting quite a few employees, especially at the top, wouldn't mind tweaking things to stop what they see as a very real threat.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/aei-world-forum-donald-t...
"Billionaires, tech CEOs and top members of the Republican establishment flew to a private island resort off the coast of Georgia this weekend for the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum, according to sources familiar with the secretive gathering.
The main topic at the closed-to-the-press confab? How to stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Larry Page, Napster creator and Facebook investor Sean Parker, and Tesla Motors and SpaceX honcho Elon Musk all attended. So did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), political guru Karl Rove, House Speaker Paul Ryan, GOP Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.), Cory Gardner (Colo.), Tim Scott (S.C.), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Ben Sasse (Neb.), who recently made news by saying he “cannot support Donald Trump.”
He's already mentioned going after news outlets that criticize him. What else can the President do? Can he instruct the military/NSA to spy on every sitting Congressman and Senator, and blackmail them? That's not explicitly unconstitutional, and these days "explicitly unconstitutional" seems to be the only thing that matters (i.e. unless the Constitution actually says you can't do a thing, then you can do that thing). What are the President's actual powers during a time of war, especially if the theater is in America itself? Can he mobilize the military in response to a domestic terrorist attack, and if so what sort of plenary power does he have domestically?
And the more important question, really, is not "what does the Constitution say" but rather "what are the American people ready for"? If Trump does become President, the answer would seem to be "quite a lot of really scary shit".
For the record, I don't care which of these contestants wins. I don't even care about media biases, because I think it's only natural. But I am disappointed when tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, that are not content creators, but are supposed to be just pipelines for content, exhibit clear biases.
For this particular issue, some people suggest a more benign explanation for the bias[1], and they might be right. But I still suspect some manual tweaking to boost some sites, and suppress others.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/1...
I wonder if it will be less pernicious than this.
> Same goes for China, Russia ... great firewall.
I don't know about Russia but it certainly seems that China is establishing some social networks that are wholly distinct from other western ones. In that way they're "island solutions" but less malicious sounding.
It'd be very hard to prove, but yes. This could be extremely granularly controlled, too-- apply a few filters to weed out those who are likely to be able to detect subversion, then drill down to the demographic in the geographical area that needs to be energized to vote for a certain candidate.
Please substantiate. Turkey is a NATO member which, other than the recent kerfuffle with downing a Russia fighter jet, has decent relations with most of its neighbours, and no real Great Enemies. Turkey has always had a press-repressive (!!) orientation because they've wanted to keep internal Islamist forces at bay. Amusing, Erdogan has flipped the script and now it's his Islamist government which is cracking down on other voices, although the take-over of the Zaman news organization is really about internal fighting with an influential cleric. But either way, in the end, Turkey has always had authoritarian governments succeeded by military coups and more authoritarian rule.
Turkey's membership of NATO was only achieved through explicit naming in an addendum to the Articles, the only country so included, and was never a popular addition. They remain the only country for which expulsion has a clear process, though unlikely.
> has decent relations with most of its neighbours
Except with Greece, both of whom have shot down more of each others aircraft than non-NATO aircraft, and Armenia with whom they have a lingering border skirmish and Syria and Kurdistan-Iraq...
Turkey is basically surrounded by enemies, there's almost no one they are on good terms with.
The threat I'm talking about is just people talking to each other, and coordinating their actions. The only way to totally stop that is to basically ban computing devices at all, or at least ban their networking Battlestar Galactica style, and at that point you're condemning yourself to a 70s-ish economy in the best case, which means you're not going to compete with other nations in trade nor in military strength. Kind of defeats the purpose of having an oppressive regime in the first place, which is mainly about controlling and enslaving your people while playing at "realpolitik" pissing contests on the international stage.
I look at the Internet as basically a return to the status quo, after a century where national governments could monopolize the mass media and thus monopolize speech. Those days are over, and not even a balkanization of the Internet will bring them back. Oppressive regimes increasingly will have to choose between going full DPRK, or trying their hand on a more even playing field (compared to 50 years ago). So far they have unanimously chosen the latter, and there is every reason to think they will continue to do so.
The article linked talks about a few other things Google did, but the closest they get to manipulating search results is putting “Live! Secretary Kerry answers questions on Syria. Today via Hangout at 2pm ET.” on the homepage below the search box. A politically neutral statement advertising a unique source of (biased) information, and their own product. This is the moral equivalent of reddit advertising an AMA with Obama, or Elon Musk as far as I can see.
- people see different results.
- countries see different results
- all search engines use page rank and model results of google
Without a whistleblower, or someone literally searching millions of things with a battery of diagnostics (which google would notice) it would be hard.
Either way, it doesn't matter. Google (cobsolidation) is one of the bigger risks we face now.
If anyone sees this and votes on my above comment (either direction) I would be curious to get thoughts on Google, search engines, or general winner take all/consolidation dynamics in tech
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jigsaw_(company)
Funny that Alphabet sold Boston Dynamics because people think robots are scary, but doesn't mind keeping the international intrigue division.
This is how powerful governments shape the world: 1. Create ideas (lies) 2. Get the press to constantly write those ideas 3. Change the truth
Once the truth is shaped you can now do what you want. In fact you now have to do required things to keep your country safe.
Examples: Millions of people unnecessarily dying in Iraq and Syria.