Jeff Bezos, founder and chairman of Amazon, congratulated President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday for an “extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory” after he defeated Vice President Kamala Harris.
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The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is considering recommending a federal judge to force Google to sell parts of its business in a bid to eliminate its alleged monopoly on online search, according to a court filing Tuesday.
A U.S. judge ruled in August that Google built and abused a “monopoly” by spending billions on exclusivity agreements to be the automatic search engine for browsers such as Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox. The DOJ could force Google to sell segments of its business, including its Chrome browser and Android operating system, which place Google as its default search engine, the DOJ filing showed.
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Already facing a potential breakup from a devastating antitrust court ruling, Google got more bad news Wednesday when the main congressional oversight committee announced it had opened a probe into whether the search engine misled Americans about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump last month.
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Former President Donald Trump suggested on Friday that Congress could close down Google for its alleged bias and censorship.
Republican Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall demanded in a Wednesday letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai that the company provide answers relating to its apparent “censorship” of the Trump assassination attempt from the tech giant’s “autocomplete” feature. Trump on “Mornings With Maria Bartiromo” said the company could face additional congressional scrutiny and possibly closure for how its handled political issues.
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Former President Donald Trump blasted Facebook and Google Tuesday after Facebook admitted it had censored photos of Trump’s assassination attempt, images widely seen as a major moment and rallying point for the Trump campaign.
Users on X, formerly known as Twitter, began posting online this week that Google searches for Trump’s assassination, including the photo, were not being autocompleted like other searches. They also posted screenshots saying that searches for Trump turned up news for Trump’s opponent, Vice President and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
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Google’s search engine conspicuously left out Donald Trump in autocomplete suggestions for “assassination,” “assassination attempt” and even “president donald” Sunday, drawing criticism from social media users including X owner Elon Musk that it was censoring recent history.
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For years, tech giants in California and Washington have been leading the charge to eliminate fossil fuels from the grid. Microsoft, Google, Meta and Apple, for example, are members of Climate Group RE100, an organization of major corporations who are dedicated to accelerating “change toward zero-carbon grids at scale by 2040.”
In 2018, Apple proclaimed that it was globally powered entirely by 100 percent renewable energy.
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The hearing Republicans are calling for would increase public scrutiny on Google’s AI application and potentially inherent bias.
Conservative and Republican groups nationwide are urging House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan to hold a hearing about potential problems posed by Google Gemini, with concerns specifically about whether it could influence the 2024 presidential election.
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Google’s artificial intelligence isn’t particularly bright when it comes to evaluating publishers’ compliance with its advertising policies, if the experience of a heterodox economics blog with outsized influence is any indication.
With a megaphone from Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi, both darlings of progressives in the “Occupy Wall Street” era, Naked Capitalism accused Google of making “flagrant errors” in its threats to demonetize the 18-year-old site for verboten content.
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A brand new investigation has found that Google interfered in American elections at least 41 times over the last 16 years.
Published on March 18, the Media Research Center Special Report traced election interference efforts by the world’s most popular search engine all the way back to the 2008 election of former President Barack Obama.
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An analysis by the news media watchdog group AllSides Technology finds roughly 63% of stories last year on the Google News were from “left and left-leaning news sources.”
In the new analysis released Thursday, 937 stories were reviewed from Oct. 30 to Nov. 14, 2023.
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The founder of a nonprofit aimed at protecting freedom of speech online exposed Google’s connections to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a wide ranging interview with Tucker Carlson last week.
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As the threat of fake images and videos generated by artificial intelligence (AI) could potentially play a role in the coming 2024 elections and beyond, several tech companies have pledged to use their resources to combat misinformation as a result of such technology.
According to Politico, multiple companies are planning to cooperate through a so-called “Tech Accord” dictating several key goals and methods that will be used in the fight against false AI. The companies intend to expose and debunk any “deepfake” images or videos produced by AI, through various tactics such as watermarks and automatic detection technology.
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Google lost an antitrust case against popular video game maker Epic Games on Monday, with a jury ruling that the tech giant has an illegal monopoly in its app store.
Epic, which makes Fortnite, alleged that Google stifles competition and imposes excessively costly charges on app makers using its Google Play Store. Epic also alleged that Google illegally connected its app store to its billing service, compelling developers to use both.
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A bipartisan group of senators is about to take Big Tech CEOs to task on Jan. 31, 2024, by having them publicly address their failures to protect kids online. And the CEOs need to! The harms social media poses to children are well documented and, at this point, indisputable—even by the companies themselves.
YouTube admits that it hosts harmful content for children and even calls for legislation to address the problems it helps create. YouTube’s CEO indicated as much when he published his “principled approach for children and teenagers.”
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Two months after crushing a rushed effort to impeach him, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is plotting a dual tsunami designed to politically punish those in the Legislature who tried to remove him from office while putting Google, President Joe Biden and other liberal foes into his legal crosshairs.
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A new search engine launched titled “Luxxle” prides itself on giving users more power when it comes to searching up content and more privacy.
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Republican presidential candidates’ websites are practically nonexistent in generic Google searches for the party’s 2024 bench, and not much better for the most viable primary challenger to Democratic President Biden, according to tests by a watchdog and Just the News.
For the conservative Media Research Center and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), it’s unmistakable evidence of Google’s bias for the incumbent just as primary voters are seeking more information about the candidates on the debate stage.
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State Representative Alex Kolodin (R-Scottsdale), chair of the Arizona House Ad Hoc Committee on Oversight, Accountability, and Big Tech, held the first of a series of hearings last week investigating the impact of Big Tech’s election interference.
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Google has long been accused of suppressing conservative speech, but a new study shows the internet search engine giant is playing favorites with Democrats in the 2024 presidential race.
By typing in just one query, “Presidential campaign websites,” Google returned only Democratic Party candidates — some of whom are not even running in 2024, according to Media Research Center, the media watchdog and parent of conservative news site NewsBusters, which is “committed to exposing and combating liberal media bias.”
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Google revealed new tools and safeguards to assist users in managing personal data, privacy and online safety, in an announcement on Thursday.
The updated tools will enable users to remove personal information from Google search results such as “personal phone number, home address or email,” according to a blog post by the tech giant on Thursday. Google will also give users the choice to receive alerts about new search results that include their personal contact data, simplifying the removal process.
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Louisiana federal Judge Terry A. Doughty shocked Americans with his July 4th restraining order against Biden’s digital team which was supposed to be fighting “disinformation” but was in reality just banning views online it didn’t like.
Doughty’s opinion is a jaw dropping expose of how White House staff bullied Facebook, Twitter and other platforms to remove content about election fraud, COVID concerns and other matters of public interest in blatant violation of the First Amendment. Governmental actors cannot demand that others do what they cannot under the Constitution, just as you can’t have proxies break the law for you. Yet that’s exactly what Biden officials did and that’s exactly what Judge Doughty stopped.
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Google quietly updated its privacy policy over the long July 4 holiday weekend to expand what it can do with user data, namely improve its artificial-intelligence abilities, according to tech blog Gizmodo.
The new policy replaced the word “language” with “AI” in a section referring to the “publicly available information” that Google uses to train its “models” for the benefit of users, Gizmodo says, citing the publicly recorded change log.
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A drag queen who uses the name “Peaches Christ” lashed out against ‘bigoted Christians” in a social media post after Google removed its affiliation from his previously scheduled performance during the company’s “pride” events.
As CNBC reported, Google appeared to distance itself from its original plans to sponsor drag queen Joshua Grannell’s performance at a San Francisco LGBTQ bar as part of its “pride” month events after a petition circulating among the tech giant’s employees expressed opposition to its anti-Christian theme.
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The disputed 2020 election now appears in the rearview mirror for YouTube, which is now determining what users can see relevant to the next election.
The Alphabet-owned, video-sharing site and Google sibling has censored at least two videos, and may be throttling a third, featuring Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shortly after ending a two-and-a-half-year ban on questioning the “integrity” of the last presidential election, saying it accomplished little relative to the potential harm it caused.
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Tech giant Google has reportedly distanced itself from a ‘pride month’ drag performance it had planned to sponsor in San Francisco after several hundred employees signed a petition expressing opposition to the event, arguing it discriminates against the Christian faith.
According to a report Tuesday at CNBC, a drag queen known as “Peaches Christ” was scheduled to perform at Beaux, an LGBTQ bar in San Francisco, at a “pride” event sponsored by Google.
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The Chamber of Progress, a tech industry coalition backed by companies such as Google and Meta, released statements and a study arguing against the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), stating it would primarily benefit conservative media outlets.
The California Assembly passed the CJPA on Thursday, a bill that compels companies like Google and Meta to pay publications for news links they post on their platforms, which would disproportionately enrich “disinformation giants like Fox News and the New York Post,” according to the Chamber of Progress. The coalition lists Google and Meta as corporate partners on its website and the Chamber of Progress’s founder and CEO, Adam Kovacevich, formerly headed Google’s U.S. policy strategy and external affairs team, according to its website.
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Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida fired back at Republican critics of his efforts to rein in big businesses, calling them “corporatists.”
DeSantis signed legislation May 2 that prohibited state agencies and local governments from considering Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors when issuing bonds, barred banks from considering “social credit” when making loan decisions and prohibited discrimination on the basis of political, social or religious ideology. Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and former President Donald Trump have criticized DeSantis, a potential 2024 candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, over the feud with Disney that started after DeSantis signed parental rights legislation in March 2022 over the company’s opposition.
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Over 200 former employees of federal surveillance agencies have since joined the corporate ranks of Big Tech companies in recent years, thus increasing the likelihood of systematic censorship of conservative accounts by such platforms.
According to the Daily Caller, the four social media companies Google, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok have recruited 248 former employees from the FBI, CIA, Department of Justice (DOJ), and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as proven by searches of the professional job listing and networking platform LinkedIn. The bulk of these hires were made between 2017 and 2022, with some of the former federal employees moving on to top executive positions within the social media companies.
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The Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act (RESTRICT Act), S.686, contains language that could be used to shut down any website or app with more than 1 million users that challenges the “reported result of a Federal election” — threatening websites and apps that allow free speech on their platforms including Truth Social and Rumble, not just TikTok, the supposed reason for the legislation.
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Google News heavily skewed in favor of left-leaning media outlets—both in the news articles featured on its homepage and in the search results for specific topics—in five of the days leading up to the 2022 midterm elections, according to an AllSides study Google criticized as “deeply flawed” in comments to The Daily Signal.
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Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki will be stepping down after a nine year stint as head of the company, Wojcicki announced in a blog post Thursday.
Wojcicki initially joined Google, Youtube’s parent company, nearly 25 years ago and worked on several projects for the company — including co-creating Google’s Image Search function and advertising technology — before joining Youtube in 2014 as its CEO, according to the blog post. Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan will be taking over as the new CEO of YouTube, while Wojcicki will step into an advisory role at YouTube’s parent companies, Google and Alphabet.
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Big Tech giant Google on Monday announced Bard, the company’s new artificial intelligence product, in a bid to compete with ChatGPT.
“We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, that we’re calling Bard,” reads a blog post from the company. “And today, we’re taking another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.
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The Biden Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against Google, alleging that the company has an unfair dominance over the digital ad market. As reported by the New York Post, the federal lawsuit could be filed as soon as Tuesday against Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc. The suit will target Google’s lucrative advertising business, which accounts for 80 percent of Google’s overall revenue; in 2023, Google is projected to make at least $73.8 billion from advertising alone.
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Google parent Alphabet Inc. is cutting 12,000 jobs worldwide, roughly 6% of its global workforce. The cuts, announced by CEO Sundar Pichai in a memo to Google employees, is the latest in Big Tech job cutbacks.
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Leading Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives filed new legislation that would ban federal employees from working with big tech companies to censor Americans.
The bill comes as ongoing reports show that federal law enforcement and the White House have regularly communicated with social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, pressuring the companies to remove posts and accounts for a range of issues, including questioning the COVID-19 vaccine.
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by Victor Davis Hanson The current “media” – loosely defined as the old major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, the network news channels, MSNBC and CNN, PBS and NPR, the online news aggregators like Google, Apple, and Yahoo, and the social media giants like the old Twitter and…
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Google agreed to a $391.5 million settlement with 40 states after an investigation found that the tech giant participated in questionable location-tracking practices, state attorneys general announced Monday.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong called it a “historic win for consumers.”
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There are people who talk nonstop with their dogs and cats. When I get bored, I interrogate machines. My favorite is Google Trends because it shows a lot of things that Democrats would rather you didn’t know. For example, it demonstrates that the main concern of the American people has to do with their sports team and not with sex-change operations and things like that. This leaves Democrats deeply disappointed. A contemporary Democrat is someone who firmly believes that people get out of bed, kneel in front of a picture of the ozone layer, and beat their chests while apologizing to Pachamama for climate change.
With one eye on the elections, I asked Google a few questions, paying special attention to the search trends of American users, and the answers are interesting, to say the least. In the months leading up to the 2020 election, and using George Floyd’s death as an excuse, Democratic discourse focused on stopping the racism that Republicans supposedly encouraged, pretending that this was the country’s biggest problem. But the evolution of Google queries on “racism” reveals a fun fact: no one cared about racism in the least until the Democratic Party decided to bring it into the campaign to capitalize on Floyd’s death. And the funniest thing: that concern disappeared completely the same day Joe Biden became president of the United States, which places his government’s actions in the realm of the paranormal. To put it another way: the old zombie works miracles! As I am suffering a terrible flu (this article might turn out to be posthumous), this miracle has me now seriously thinking of catching a plane, turning up at the White House, and trying to touch the hem of Joe Biden’s robe in a desperate attempt to be healed.
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The tech companies Google and IBM are backing off of previous plans to severely limit the number of White and Asian students who will be allowed to serve in their fellowships, after critical reporting of the plans resulted in backlash.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, previous reporting on the planned affirmative action policies cited several lawyers and other legal experts saying the moves would be in violation of civil rights laws and would likely face challenges if implemented. The companies had planned to implement a race-based cap on the number of White and Asian students that each university could nominate for the fellowships, in order to artificially increase the number of black and Hispanic students admitted instead.
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Trump Media and Technology Group is trying to tamp down its feud with Google over the latter’s refusal to approve its Truth Social app in its current form barely two months before midterm elections.
After TMTG CEO Devin Nunes told “Just the News Not Noise” that he didn’t know “what’s taking so long” for Google to approve the former president’s app, Google said it told TMTG Aug. 19 that the submitted app committed “several violations of standard policies,” including insufficient moderation of user-generated content.
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A fellowship hosted by Big Tech giant Google is facing heavy legal criticism due to its use of racial quotas, which critics say are unconstitutional.
Newsbusters reports that the prestigious fellowship, which offers $100,000 to students pursuing their doctorate in computer studies, requires that a certain number of students nominated for the fellowship by their university must be non-White.
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Yelp announced Tuesday it will add a “prominent consumer notice to crisis pregnancy center listings,” in order to distinguish the pro-life centers from abortion clinics.
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Google plans to purge users’ abortion-related data, including location entries showing visits to abortion clinics, as states pass new abortion restrictions following the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
The company will automatically delete entries from users’ location history for certain health-related locations including abortion clinics and fertility centers, it announced July 1. Several experts have raised concerns about the pledge, given Google’s history of secretive health data collection.
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Google is funding a Vox Media initiative to promote gender ideology and activist language in newsrooms nationwide, according to an announcement from Vox Media.
The Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge, a project that funds online journalism, is funding Vox Media’s new language guide for writers, “Language, Please,” Vox Media said in an article announcing the publication of the guide. The guide, which is meant to be used by outlets across the country, encourages journalists to avoid gendered words like “boy” and “girl” and links to “inclusivity readers” they can hire to correct their language.
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Google has offered to break apart in a bid to avoid greater punishment for antitrust violations from federal regulators, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The tech giant has raised the prospect of separating a major business operation off from Google—the auctioning and placing of online advertisements—to form a separate entity also under the umbrella of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, people close to Google reportedly told the WSJ. It was unclear if the offer would satisfy the Department of Justice (DOJ), which declined to comment on the story, according to the WSJ.
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President Joe Biden’s top adviser on environmental issues called on technology companies to censor debates on environmental issues and energy policy during a Thursday event.
“The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation,” White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy, a former EPA Administrator, said during a virtual event, according to Axios. “We need the tech companies to really jump in.”
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Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition — which can be summed up as the world’s wealthiest person buying one of the most powerful social media and news platforms — underscores one of the big problems with Big Tech.
In the absence of modernized anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws, Big Tech companies in the U.S. have amassed far too much economic and political control over society, and especially over the news and publishing industries.
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The search engine giant Google has rolled out a new feature that acts as an auto-suggestion for changing certain language to more politically correct terms.
According to the Daily Mail, users who type out certain words will be faced with several suggestions encouraging them to adopt language that is gender-neutral, or otherwise more politically correct. For example, “landlord” will yield suggestions such as “proprietor” or “property owner,” while “mankind” will lead to the suggestion of “humankind.” “Policeman” is now recommended to be “police officers,” while “housewife” is to be replaced with “stay-at-home spouse.”
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On Monday, the tech giant Google was sued by a group of black former employees who claimed that they experienced racial discrimination while working at the company.
According to ABC News, the class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of the group by far-left attorney Benjamin Crump, who is notorious for representing the families of some of the most prominent figures in the Black Lives Matter movement, including Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and George Floyd.
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