Zach Vorhies was a Google/Youtube senior software engineer turned whistleblower. In this interview with Lee Camp, he tells the story of how Google got into the censorship business.
After Trump's election, management decided to steer traffic away from right-wing racist and xenophobic commentators in favor of traditional news sources like CNN and the NYTimes. Soon they expanded from there to downgrade search results for anyone whose narrative differed from the mainstream. For example, the DNC and their allies in the press were weaving the story of a Russian connection to the Trump election campaign. Independent journalists were saying there's no there there, but Google's algorithms sided with the Mainstream.
Vorhies tells how Google shut down links to Tulsi Gabbard's campaign page just on the evening when she was on air in the second Democratic debate, and millions of viewers were learning about her for the first time.
Another story Vorhies tells is about enemis of Jordan Peterson who bought up dozens of web site names that differed by one character from Peterson's home page. Then they started sending spam from all of them. It didn't take long for Google's spam filters to pick up this activity, and shut down all the fake sites. But the algorithm that did this job wasn't smart enough to distinguish the real site, so they threw out the baby with the bathwater, and Peterson's site also was censored.
More from Lee Camp and Zach Vorhies. (Fast Forward to 14:20 for the interview.)
Google's search ranking is supposed to be based on a purely numeric count of how many people in the past were looking for each item on the results list. In fact, it was this algorithm that launched Google's business 20 years ago, and enabled them quickly to leapfrog into the #1 position in the (then) crowded search engine market. But now they have abandoned this formula, and they point people toward their ideological favorites. They continue to dominate the search engine market by inertia alons. Vorhies recommends Startpage and DuckDuckGo.
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