by CHQ Staff
Our friend James O’Keefe and his team at Project Veritas have produced another bombshell Silicon Valley expose, this time with the help of Google whistleblower Zachary Vorhies.
The documents Mr. Vorhies released included a document with a Google Now blacklist and Google block list, and hundreds of other pages of material from internal Google memos, emails, and guidelines. This allegedly impacted the app and not all Google searches.
That blocklist included NewsBusters, Twitchy, Conservative Tribune, Front Page Mag, RedState, Christian Post, Daily Caller, MRCTV, and Catholic News Agency, among other sites that might support President Donald Trump or his policies.
Google Now was part of Google Search built for Androids and iOS. According to Lifehacker, Google Now put cards, which looked like a smaller version of the discontinued Knowledge Panel, in browsers “to display cards it thinks may be relevant to you at the moment.” While the branding for Google Now has been discontinued, the structure is still a part of the Android Google search according to an analysis of the documents by Corinne Weaver of NewsBusters.
These blocked sites, according to Google, “had a high user block rate.” In addition, Google Now had a blacklist that blocked certain sites completely, regardless of who blocked them or not. These included torrent sites and eBay. Vorhies told Veritas that this was a “blacklist,” which listed certain sites because of the “high user block rate.”
However, if a high number of users blocked CNN, would Google add this mainstream liberal site to the block list?
From our review of the list the evidence is that CNN would not be blocked.
Ms. Weaver reports the list of sites with a high block rate included other places, such as the sites belonging to noted right or right-leaning voices such as Glenn Beck, LTC Allen B. West, USA, (also a senior fellow at MRC), Steven Crowder, the Duggar Family blog, Megyn Kelly, Rush Limbaugh, and Michelle Malkin.
In other words, sites that might offend the progressive sensibilities of millennial snowflakes, but are well within the mainstream of American culture, and might support Trump or his policies in the upcoming election.
As Ms. Weaver reported, Google has created blacklists and blocklists before, for its sister site YouTube. The whistleblower Vorhies released a statement in June showing the manual changes YouTube staff were making to YouTube’s search algorithm to hide pro-life results. A list of blacklisted terms were released to Breitbart as well. These terms included the Irish abortion referendum.
Mr. Vorhies told Project Veritas:
I gave the documents to Project Veritas, I had been collecting the documents for over a year. And the reason why I collected these documents was because I saw something dark and nefarious going on with the company and I realized that they were going to not only tamper with the elections, but use that tampering with the elections to essentially overthrow the United States.
Further, Vorhies told Project Veritas these were documents that were widely available to full-time Google employees:
These documents were available to every single employee within the company that was full-time. And so as a fulltime employee at the company, I just searched for some keywords and these documents started to pop up. And so once I started finding one document and started finding keywords for other documents and I would enter that in and continue this cycle until I had a treasure trove and archive of documents that clearly spelled out the system, what they’re attempting to do in very clear language.
Another thread of internal Google documents shows Google employees discussing President Donald Trump’s infamous “covfefe” tweet, and a proposed plan to change the Google translation of the term.
Vorhies told Project Veritas that he hopes more insiders at Google decide to go public and discuss big tech abuses.
“My message to those that are on the fence is I released the documents,” said Mr. Vorhies. “They can go in, they can see everything that Google is doing and then they can see the scale of it. Because I think that there’s a lot of engineers that have a hint that things are wrong, but they don’t understand the colossal scale that it’s at. And so for those people, I say, look at the documents, take the pulse of America, see what’s happening and come and tell the world you know what you already know to be true.”
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Photo “Project Vertias-Google Whistle Blower Interview” by Project Veritas.
