Story At-A-Glance
- Google whistleblower Zach Vorhies has released 950 pages of Google documents that paint a comprehensive picture of how Google is manipulating public opinion and the political landscape
- Changes at Google first became noticeable in 2016, after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Vorhies later discovered evidence suggesting Google was playing a role in the effort to remove President Trump from office
- Machine Learning Fairness is a Google project that replaces “unfair” search results — even when the “unfairness” is accurately reflecting worldly reality — with more “fair and balanced” search results, thereby artificially altering what people perceive as “reality”
- Google tools such as autofill search recommendations can be used to sway public opinion on political (and other topics), which can have significant political consequences
- Research shows biased search rankings can shift voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more, and that people will be completely unaware of having been manipulated
In an interview, Google whistleblower Zach Vorhies, who worked as a senior software engineer at Google and YouTube for over eight years, shares his inside knowledge of this global monopoly, revealing why Google is not a reliable source of information anymore.
Google’s monopoly over search is matched by a continued reassurance that it is an unbiased search platform. Google is actively suppressing and censoring information, proving it is anything but unbiased.
The point of sharing this information is that Google is manipulating search results to reflect its views, and to influence our social behavior while denying this is happening.
The Wall Street Journal just published a thorough investigation covering these same points.
Below is a summary of the main points from this article posted on Mercola.com – Click here to read the full article.
What Happened to ‘Don’t Be Evil’?
Like NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden before him, Vorhies is a courageous patriot who is trying to do the right thing by warning everyone about how Google is now manipulating and censoring the global storehouse of internet-based information.
“Everything started out with Google really great,” Vorhies says. “They had this mission statement of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful. They also had this idea of ‘Don’t be evil.’ It was built right into their initial public offering (IPO) statements.
I thought at the time, ‘This is great. This is exactly the kind of company that the world needs. We need to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible. We need to let the algorithms decide what goes to the top and let the users decide what’s most useful for them and then make sure that other people are able to find that information.’
Google stayed true to those principles all the way up until 2016, until Donald Trump won the election. For some reason, they decided they were going to throw all these mission statements away and go after the president of the United States, censor the internet and distort the news so that people’s searches could be redirected towards antipresidential sentiment.
This eventually morphed into not just censorship of the president, but censorship of information related to health… I realized [that] if this was allowed to continue, then this agenda of Big Pharma would be able to become… ‘the truth’…
Once I found out that Google was censoring a lot of information, I started looking at the information it was censoring with a new degree of ‘They wouldn’t be censoring it unless it was true,’ sort of thing.
It’s a strange heuristic to use to figure out what’s true in the world, but you’ve just got to figure out what they’re censoring. You kind of understand that they’re censoring it because it’s not Big Tech-friendly. It’s not friendly to the established players.”
Some ‘Fake News’ Isn’t so Fake After All
Shortly after Trump won the presidential election, you started hearing more and more about the scourge of “fake news.” Google, like Facebook and others, decided they had to protect users from fake news. The problem is, who determines what’s fake and what’s not?
Using Google’s internal search engine, Vorhies set out to determine what Google’s definition of fake news was. He found several examples in a presentation. However, in it were actual, verifiably real news events. “I went, ‘Wait a minute. Is this about fake news or is this about controlling the narrative for like political purposes?'” Vorhies says.
How Machine Learning Fairness Twists Perception of Reality
Just what is ML Fairness and how does it work? Vorhies explains:
“Let’s say that this circle right here represents the entire spectrum of all possible artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. ML Fairness is a small part of that type of AI. It’s a relatively new type of AI. What machine learning does is it simulates brain neurons and how they fire.
If you have this collection of millions of simulated neurons… you can start to create very complex behavior that’s able to solve problems, like chess or the game Go … It can classify hate speech. That’s the part that’s interesting to me — how this thing could be used to classify information across the internet.
ML Fairness is a type of AI that takes information on the internet, classifies it and then ranks it. And then the Google engine will figure out whether the information is fair or not. And if it is ‘fair,’ it goes to the top. If it’s not fair, then it gets pushed to the bottom. That’s what ML Fairness is in a nutshell.”
What this manipulation ultimately ends up doing is presenting a twisted and false view of the world. What you’re seeing in your search results is what the AI algorithm decided is most fair — not what’s actually happening in the real world.
Did Google Conspire to Commit Treason?
Vorhies saw these changes starting to take place in early 2017. Next, Google announced it was going to start assigning an “authoritativeness score” to all news content. “I was able to see this ranking on internal documents,” Vorhies says. High rankings were given to outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.
“These outlets, in my opinion, have been producing propaganda,” Vorhies says. “They led to us into war with Iraq with the weapons of mass destruction hoax. They’ve lied to us [about] Vietnam. They have a history of supporting every war and military encouragement around the world that has [led to] the destruction of millions of lives.”
In June 2017, chief executive officer of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, announced that this was how they were going to filter news content across the YouTube platforms. As Vorhies expected, this led to a clamp down on anything that goes against the mainstream narrative.
YouTube Censorship Has Had Lethal Consequences
In 2018, the real-world ramifications of censorship hit home when an Iranian YouTube creator who had recently been demonetized marched into YouTube headquarters and opened fire on employees and then shot herself.
Google Attempts to Destroy Vorhies by ‘Lawfare’
Vorhies resigned from Google June 28, 2019, and was immediately put under investigation, as the company had logs showing the many documents he’d been searching for and reading through. Vorhies tells the story of what happened next:
They decided they were going to attempt to financially destroy me by engaging in lawfare, which is warfare via the legal system. Within a few weeks of me disclosing ML Fairness to Project Veritas, they sent me threatening letters, demanding access to all my data outside of work…
How Autofill Can Shift Political Opinion
Vorhies goes on to explain and describe how Google tools such as autofill search recommendations can be used to sway public opinion on political (and other topics), which can have significant political consequences.
Autofill is what happens when you start typing a search query into a search engine and algorithms kick in to offer suggestions to complete your search. We’ve been led to believe that whatever the autofill recommendations are is what most people are in fact searching for — Google has stated that the suggestions given are generated by a collection of user data — but that’s not true, at least not anymore.
The Search Engine Manipulation Effect
Epstein developed a “black box test” (a method of software testing) to measure just how influential a tool like autofill can be. Remarkably, his test demonstrated that “Google’s ‘autocomplete’ search suggestions can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split” — all without anyone being aware of the manipulation.
As pointed out by Vorhies, “We’ve got to watch out for Google, because … they’re going to try to rig the 2020 elections.” Based on Epstein’s results, Google certainly appears to have the power to do so. The only way to prevent it may be an information campaign that exposes this hidden agenda, thereby helping to suppress this search engine manipulation effect.
Do a Google Detox
How can you prevent getting sucked into the false-reality vortex that is Google? Vorhies offers a number of suggestions for how to minimize Google’s influence over your life:
- Stop using Google search. Options include DuckDuckGo and Startpage
- Stop using Gmail. ProtonMail, which provides end-to-end encryption and less spam, is an excellent option
- Switch from an android phone (powered by Google) to an iPhone. While not perfect, iPhone is slightly better of the two
There are alternatives for most if not all Google products, and by using these other companies, we can help them grow so that Google becomes less and less relevant.
“Use iPhone, use DuckDuckGo and use Protonmail. Those three things will get most of Google out of your life,” Vorhies says. “I’ve been a lot happier because of that. I know [Google is] able to read everything that I write when I’m on Gmail or I’m using one of their services. I’ve had people who want to interview me on YouTube, and then their YouTube pages get destroyed.”
Also, stop using Google docs (Digital Trends has published an article suggesting a number of alternatives) and if you’re a high school student, do not convert the Google accounts you created as a student into personal accounts.
Both the Chrome and Firefox browsers have also been compromised by Google, so consider switching if you’re on either of those. Brave is my personal favorite, but the Opera browser is another alternative. Vorhies is also a fan of Brave.
“The guy who created this browser, Brave … added features to eliminate all the ads. Now my MacBook runs like new. I’ve got a 2012 MacBook. I thought I had to upgrade it in order to make it run fast.
[Using] Brave instead, my computer operates five times faster when it [has] a lot of browser tabs open. It’s phenomenal. Not only do I get to Google detox, but I get a better experience by not using Google. It’s a no-brainer. People should just use it. And all of the plug-ins I use, like LastPass, which contains all of my passwords, they all install.”
Support Vorhies’ ‘Disclosure Tour’
As Vorhies mentioned earlier, his primary focus right now is to raise awareness about Google and to create a cultural force for change. You can help by sharing this article and video, and by following Vorhies on Twitter. His handle is PerpetualManiac (Twitter.com/PerpetualManiac).
“If you click the follow button, you’ll be part of a collection of patriots who are looking to ensure the survival of the republic, to ensure sovereignty and to bring Google to account for the censorship they’re doing. People are helping me raise awareness by retweeting the things I’m saying. Because honestly, I’m fighting giants,” Vorhies says.
“If [Google is] going to take me down, then I’m just going to go down fighting. I’m going to leverage everything they do to further the great awakening that’s happening right now in the United States and across the world.
It’s up to us to ensure that the freedoms we enjoy are handed down to our children… our grandchildren and our collective future.”
Read the full article on Mercola.com – Click here to read the full article.