Hours After Trump Jr. Exposes Google's 2020 Election Plan, YouTube Deletes Video... But Now We've Got It
On Sunday, Project Veritas released its latest video, this time on Google.
In it, a company whistleblower said that the business would algorithmically demote certain information if it deemed it “unfair” — regardless of its truthfulness — and released a series of alleged internal documents, including an email that referred to Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson as “nazis.”
The exposé also featured an undercover video with the head of Google’s Responsible Innovation team saying that the company was working at “preventing the next Trump situation,” though she disputed the context in which it was uttered. She also said that Google had “gotten accusations … around fairness … that we’re unfair to conservatives because we’re choosing what we find as credible news sources and those sources don’t necessarily overlap with conservative sources.”
“We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn’t just us, it was — the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like, everybody got screwed over, so we’re rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again,” the Google employee said. “We’re also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?”
Also on Sunday, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted about the video along with the YouTube link to it.
This is really scary if you don’t think there’s bias coming from the social media masters watch this.
If we don’t act now it will only get worse.
Insider Blows Whistle & Exec Reveals Google Plan to Prevent “Trump situation” in 2020 on Hidden Cam https://t.co/7ZXGzg2jVl
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) June 24, 2019
“This is really scary if you don’t think there’s bias coming from the social media masters watch this,” Trump Jr. said. “If we don’t act now it will only get worse.”
Hours later, the YouTube link was no longer there. It was taken down by the video platform — a platform that Google owns.
?DEVELOPING: We have received two YouTube privacy complaints for undercover interviews in today’s video (https://t.co/seGC0VcRzz) which exposed a Google exec saying prevent next Trump situation,” another engineer confirming “ML Fairness.” Now is time to download video and SHARE. pic.twitter.com/MKO4dkBy27
— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) June 24, 2019
Yes, the company that once touted “Don’t be evil” as a sort of unofficial motto was restricting information about itself on its own platforms.
As you can probably guess, there were plenty of people who commented on Trump’s post that weren’t surprised that the video had been taken down.
— Guardian_Elite (@Guardian_Elite) June 25, 2019
Break @Google @facebook @amazon @reddit @Pinterest
— Lungman (@lungman111) June 25, 2019
They already got rid of it. How convenient for them to get rid of their own wrong doings. It’s Big Brother Google.
— Ryan McKnight (@driverrwm_ryan) June 25, 2019
And then there were some who sounded a note of optimism.
We beat big tech in 2016.
We’ll beat them in 2020.Because they are too arrogant to realize, ultimately they cannot control the most important thing—
OUR VOTE!
— CC (@ChatByCC) June 24, 2019
If you want to see the video, by the by, here you go:
Whether you believe that the video was absolutely contextual or whether it shows a deeper culture of censorship within Google is eclipsed by the fact that, well, Google censored it.
If this were just limited to Project Veritas’ YouTube channel, the move probably wouldn’t have made that much of a ripple. That being said, this video seems to have struck a chord with many, including the president’s son. The dead link to the video on the tweet speaks precisely to how serious this is.
And that’s what Trump Jr. was trying to elucidate: This should be a call to action. If this video is inaccurate, the onus is upon the tech giant to prove it. It’s worth noting that the alleged email that called that list of conservatives “nazis” supposedly came from a transparency and ethics group within the company. It’s time Google was transparent about its ethics.
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