As Google celebrates its 20th birthday, it is perhaps a perfect time to examine just what the West’s most prominent internet company has become. It began with the admirable motto of “Do No Evil,” yet increasingly, it is being seen as destructive, restrictive, meddling, and downright nasty.
What was once merely a search engine providing a free service to people just finding their way along the new internet highways has become a controlling monopoly that not only seeks to impact innocent voters across the world, but is even now engaged in creating a strangle-hold search engine for a repressive Chinese regime that seeks to silence dissidents’ free speech in the Middle Kingdom.
Total Control
Google is currently designing a search engine system for the Chinese government named Project Dragonfly. During the recent hearing by the Senate Committee on Science, Commerce, and Transport, Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) questioned Google Chief Privacy Officer Keith Enright on China’s notorious history of censorship and the company’s role in developing tools to help them.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Enright initially attempted to deny that such a project existed, using evasive language such as “nowhere near” having such a product. After being nailed down, the Google shill admitted that the project exists, they are currently working on it, and that he has none of the actual details.
Using Dragonfly, the ruling Chinese Communist Party will be able to throttle data from areas or people they consider “outside” the scope of acceptability. They would also have control over their citizens’ access to information from around the world.
Is this in line with Do No Evil?
A History of Deceit
President Trump recently ignited an internet storm when he suggested that search engine platforms, specifically Google, are “controlling what we can & cannot see.” Those who invariably dismiss Trump’s comments as lies and hyperbole without considering where he is coming from were quick to label his tweet as paranoia and delusion. But is he right?
Google provides search results based on algorithms; we take this to mean that the process is entirely automated and therefore free of bias – but this is only half the answer. These algorithms are created, and they are created by people who work for Google, and they have bias of their own.
If it seems that when you type a political search string into the browser you invariably receive left-leaning content in response, it’s because those that programmed the system provide greater weight to sites they personally consider higher quality.
PJ Media carried out tests based on news search strings for Donald Trump and found that 96% of the returned results (first 10 pages) were generally negative and from left-leaning news sources.
And YouTube?
Let’s not forget that the online video giant YouTube is also owned by Google. How many conservative feeds have been shut down, demonetized, depromoted, and hidden from subscribers compared with left-leaning content producers? This is bias.
And, of course, when a user searches for videos through Google, YouTube is the main platform for hosting these, therefore the video content you will see is filtered – despite what the company claims.
Slaying the Giant
On this auspicious celebration of Google’s 20th birthday, it is time for the customer to realize that they themselves are the product. The user is being sold, weighed, and measured in so many ways. And what is worse, the user is being swayed, controlled, and ultimately led blindly to an information set that is biased and often politically correct nonsense.
Yet this is a young company – like a boy on the verge of manhood – imagine what it will be in just a few short years.
