by Danielle Ryan

Former Google employee Zachary Vorhies told Project Veritas that he spent a year collecting documents that prove Google uses a politically biased "fringe ranking" system and maintains a “blacklist” of undesirable websites. 

Surprise, surprise! Our Silicon Valley overlords have “deboosted and deranked” websites that fall foul of its own agenda.

Coverage of Vorhies’ leaks has been minimal, with the exception of right wing websites, many of which found themselves banished to the “blacklist.” Liberal media has mostly ignored the leaks. This is primarily because Project Veritas is led by arch-conservative James O’Keefe and they are naturally loathe to cover any information he brings to light, regardless of how legitimate it might be.

The group has uncovered some enlightening information in the past; most embarrassingly, it caught a CNN reporter admitting that the Russiagate story, which consumed American media for the better part of three years, was "mostly bullsh*t" but that it had been "incredible" for ratings. 

The Daily Beast did cover the leaks — but with the sole purpose of questioning Vorhies’ credibility. The guy, it appears, is a pusher of the QAnon conspiracy theory, who has dabbled in Pizzagate and has written some anti-semitic tweets. Even O’Keefe acknowledged this, tweeting on Wednesday that “not every source is a perfect angel.” 

If his information is accurate, Vorhies’ personal interests shouldn’t be relevant. Then again, when it was revealed that the DNC rigged the 2016 primary against Bernie Sanders, the only thing CNN and friends wanted to talk about was Russia.

The media may have spent three years bloviating about powerful foreign entities influencing their elections, but Google — perhaps the most powerful corporation on earth in terms of its ability to influence human thought — gets a free pass. Seems legit.

Vorhies’ leaks add to the growing cache of evidence that Google is not playing it straight when it claims that political bias does not affect its search results. A Google employee has been caught admitting the company is trying to “prevent the next Trump situation.” The tech giant has encouraged its employees to join “resistance” protests — and removed content critical of it from YouTube (which it owns).

Algorithms "don't write themselves" another concerned Google employee said last month, “we write them to do what we want them to do” — and what it wants them to do is clear as day.

There is a mythology that says Google, Facebook and Twitter are concerned only with censoring conservative views. O’Keefe even bemoans Google’s “scary, progressive social agenda.” There is some truth to that as far as social issues like abortion are concerned, but that’s where Google’s “progressive agenda”ends.

This idea stems partly from the fact that Google consistently ranks “left-leaning” sites like the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC and CNN higher in terms of credibility than right-leanings websites. Some important context is needed here, though. The right-wing Breitbart considers CNN to be “far-left” — a classification the actual “far-left” would find hilarious, to say the very least. 

We’ve known for years that Google actively de-ranks socialist websites and genuinely subversive left-leaning content — a category CNN and crew (which are as down-the-line centrist as it gets) do not come close to falling into.

Google is not a slave to “the left” —  it’s simply a slave to the status quo and neoliberalism. So, don’t expect corporate media to start worrying about that any time soon. 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/466593-google-censorship-political-bias/

Strangely, don't mention it on the roof tops, this website YD is reasonably high up in the ranks at Google — by using some key words — though hopelessly placed on Bing and often ignored at Ecosia. Yahoo and other search engines are lost like north shore plumbers looking for a job on a surfboard. Mind you the 3,243,459 entries found by Google in a search are as useless as a cactus-armchair.

That Google does not place YD last could be worrying, thinking that we are progressive and neoliberal. We may appear libertine (devoid of most moral principles, of responsibility, or sexual restraints) to some and progressive reactionaries (to overturn a present condition of decadence and recover an idealized past) to others, but far from this. We encourage people to live their lives more scientifically, more joyful with the relative universe without destroying the planet — and be alert to the hypocritical hubris of politicians, cannon merchants and priests (or Imams).

Thus democracy can survive better, away from the clutches of vultures...

After coming under fire recently for its alleged role in protests in China, Twitter has taken steps to combat what it called a “significant state-backed information operation focused on the situation in Hong Kong,”according to the company’s Monday blog post. In all, the firm said 936 accounts were permanently suspended “for a range of violations” of its policies.

“Based on our intensive investigations, we have reliable evidence to support that this is a coordinated state-backed operation,” the blog post said of the deleted accounts. “Specifically, we identified large clusters of accounts behaving in a coordinated manner to amplify messages related to the Hong Kong protests.”

Using the “sow discord” language directly out of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, the company’s blog post reads much like a rehash of the 2016 presidential election, in which so-called “Russian bots” supposedly played an outsized role.

Twitter is certainly no stranger to purges, especially those of the politically motivated variety; in recent months, in fact, the company apparently can’t keep its hands off the banhammer.

April saw British European Parliament candidates Carl Benjamin and Tommy Robinson exiled from the platform, while Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was given the boot in June – for no stated reason. The Russian Embassy in Syria briefly fell victim in July, but was soon reinstated, however weeks later three Iranian news agencies would suffer the same fate. Earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and a reporter from the right-of-center Daily Caller were censored on Twitter for reporting the contents of death threats against the senator.

While accounts are removed from Twitter on a daily basis for a variety of reasons, the platform’s major purges are apparently related to political considerations, and the great hunt for ‘Chinese bots’ seems to fall into that category. However, it also amounts to meddling into internal affairs of a major world power.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/466848-twitter-purge-chinese-bots/

MEANWHILE:

The two leaders met ahead of the G7 summit, which Russia will not be part of, to talk about issues both bilateral and international. Amid the mostly-amicable exchange, the French president scaled the moral high ground to admonish Putin for his treatment of protesters at home.

“We called this summer for freedom of protest, freedom of speech, freedom of opinion and the freedom to run in elections, which should be fully respected in Russia like for any member of the Council of Europe,”Macron said at a joint press briefing at his summer residence on the French Mediterranean coast ahead of 3.5-hour-long talks with Putin.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/466840-macron-putin-protests-yellow-vests/

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The yellow vests movement or yellow jackets movement(French: Mouvement des gilets jaunes, pronounced [muvmɑ̃ de ʒilɛ ʒon]) is a populist,[63] grassroots[64] revolutionary[65]political movement for economic justice[66] that began in France in October 2018. After an online petition posted in May had attracted nearly a million signatures, mass demonstrations began on 17 November.[67] The movement is motivated by rising fuel prices, a high cost of living; it claims that a disproportionate burden of the government's tax reforms were falling on the working and middle classes,[68][69][70] especially in rural and peri-urbanareas.[32][71] The protesters have called for lower fuel taxes, a reintroduction of the solidarity tax on wealth, a minimum-wage increase, the implementation of Citizens' initiative referendums,[40] as well as the resignations of President Emmanuel Macron and the Second Philippe government.[citation needed]

The movement spans the political spectrum. According to one poll, few of those protesting had voted for Macron in the 2017 French presidential election, and many had either not voted, or had voted for far-right or far-left candidates.[72] Rising fuel prices initially sparked the demonstrations. Yellow high-visibility vests, which French law required all drivers to have in their vehicles and to wear during emergencies, were chosen as "a unifying thread and call to arms" because of their convenience, visibility, ubiquity, and association with working-class industries.[73]

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_movement

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35934

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-49411647/russian-couple-filmed-at-protest-may-lose-children

Read all the other articles on offer, including Why I don't like Vladimir Putin... and Violonist fined 6 Pounds for Protesting... This array coming from the land that has made the life of Julian Assange more hellish than the devil could think of...

The speaker of New Zealand's parliament has cradled a lawmaker's baby while he presided over a debate in the House of Representatives.

Trevor Mallard tweeted a photo of himself feeding MP Tāmati Coffey's baby boy in the speaker's seat. 

Mr Coffey, Labour MP for Waiariki, announced the birth of his son, Tūtānekai Smith-Coffey, in July.

The baby was born via a surrogate mother and is the biological son of Mr Coffey's partner, Tim Smith.

In a tweet about the baby's birth, Mr Coffey said he and his partner were "overwhelmed at the miracle of life" and the surrogate mother - a friend of Mr Smith - was "doing awesome". 

• 'I thought parental leave would be easy'
• Ardern and Bhutto: Two different pregnancies in power

On Wednesday, Mr Coffey attended a parliamentary debate with his baby for the first time after returning from paternity leave.

During the session, father-of-three Mr Mallard took on the role of babysitter as well as speaker.

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49421455

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Here is the full Trump quote from Tuesday, in which he rejected Democrat Bernie Sanders’ idea that Israel should stop accepting American aid, after its reluctance to let in congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who have publicly endorsed the BDS campaign.

“The concept of even talking about this – even three years ago – of cutting off aid to Israel because of two people that hate Israel and hate Jewish people – I can't believe we're even having this conversation,” Trump said.

“Where has the Democratic Party gone? Where have they gone where they're defending these two people over the State of Israel? I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat – it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” 

There is no ambiguity to this quote. Trump says that it is bizarre that Democrats prioritize Omar and Tlaib over maintaining Washington’s historic good relations with Israel. And that those Jews who support the Democratic Party are being “disloyal” to either fellow Jews or the state of Israel. 

Trump is not using the dual allegiance trope deployed since ancient times, in which Jews living in foreign countries are accused of putting their ethnicity and religion above their citizenship. On the contrary, he is urging American Jews to show MORE of a dual allegiance, to remember their roots and back their historic kin, living in Israel.

The media has either pretended that the two above sentiments are the same, or that the “great disloyalty” mentioned by Trump related to the United States itself or to him personally, which makes no sense within the context.

To perpetuate the confusion it has leveraged Jewish voices to deliver the judgment. Though notably, the ostensibly neutral ones actually stopped short of calling the US president an anti-Semite. The American Jewish Committee called the comments “divisive” and the Anti-Defamation League merely urged him to “stop using Jews as a political football.”

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/466980-trump-antisemitism-jews-netanyahu/

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Either way, Israel is a full-blown terrorist state from its inception onwards... This made me realise that I'm way older than this state plonked in Palestine. Brother.

“The news is dominated by Hong Kong, and yet 29 miles from England is France and this extraordinary rebellion of the ‘yellow jackets’ that has produced an equally extraordinary violence from the state and has been virtually ignored,” Pilger told RT’s Going Underground program.

The explanation of course is that the US and its allies are in a state of virtual war against China, the goal of which is to “maintain supremacy in all areas of human affairs,” he said.

They see a challenge in China. Undoubtedly it’s an economic challenge, but it’s not a military challenge. This 19th century view of the world that permeates Washington and has returned to this country, the United Kingdom, has now created a war situation with China.

The Yellow West movement, which got its name after the high-visibility jackets worn by the demonstrators, kicked off in November over a proposed hike in fuel taxes, which was later dropped. Facing a harsh response, demonstrations continued over a wider discontent with Macron’s pro-business agenda, decline in living standards and growing inequality.

In Hong Kong large-scale protests erupted in late March over a proposed law that would have allowed criminal suspects to be handed over to the mainland. Although the law has since been suspended, the protests have only gained momentum, spiraling into fierce clashes with police. 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/466968-pilger-going-underground-interview/

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