Wow! Talk about a complete lack of self-awareness! The “mea no culpa” written by Google exec Jen Gennai on Medium yesterday shows a callow shallowness not seen since the days of the proverbial Valley Girl.
Either that or an utterly disingenuous denial of guilt the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Eve had to explain to Adam the valuable uses of fig leaves.
Gennai was one of the Google crew who were secretly taped by Project Veritas talking about the way they use “algorithms” to manipulate data in order to influence public policy, elections and society in general. Be afraid; be very afraid. As I wrote in the introduction to “The Media Matrix,” the real danger to society isn’t “fake news”; it is “Twitter, Facebook, smart phones, 24/ 7 cable blather, the endless Towering Babble known as the Internet.”
Here’s some of what Gennai said in her unwitting confession to Project Veritas:
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, happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again.
We’re also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?
In particular, she said Google was taking steps to prevent another “Trump situation” like the one in 2016 where Trump got elected against the wishes of our Tech Masters.
Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation, it’s like a small company cannot do that.
So after accidentally confessing that Google is manipulating data and engineering social responses to that data, Google did the only thing it could do — scrub the evidence from its video platform on YouTube.
Meanwhile, Gennai wrote her self-absolving essay on Medium in which she says she was terribly misunderstood and that what she said on videotape did not mean what she said.
Project Veritas has edited the video to make it seem that I am a powerful executive who was confirming that Google is working to alter the 2020 election. On both counts, this is absolute, unadulterated nonsense, of course. In a casual restaurant setting, I was explaining how Google’s Trust and Safety team (a team I used to work on) is working to help prevent the types of online foreign interference that happened in 2016. Google has been very public about the work that our teams have done since 2016 on this, so it’s hardly a revelation.
The video then goes on to stitch together a series of debunked conspiracy theories about our search results, and our other products. Google has repeatedly been clear that it works to be a trustworthy source of information, without regard to political viewpoint. In fact, Google has no notion of political ideology in its rankings. And everything I have seen backs this up. Our CEO has said â€We do not bias our products to favor any political agenda.†He’s somewhat more powerful and authoritative than me.
This is as good as it gets, folks. The sum total of her defense is that she didn’t really know what she was talking about, and anyways, the CEO said we don’t manipulate algorithms to hurt Republicans, so by golly, that settles it.
Umm no. It doesn’t.
Gennai doesn’t actually reject any of her previous claims or admit lying in her interview with Project Veritas — she just says we should be good little sheep and forget it ever happened.
In other words, take the Blue Pill and go back to sleep. Sorry Google, we have other plans.
My new book is “The Media Matrix: What If Everything You Know Is Fake,” which offers many examples of the press being the enemy of the truth. To support my work, please consider buying “The Media Matrix†or my “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy, which documents the downward spiral of the USA before Trump arrived on the scene. The books are available at Amazon in paperback or Kindle editions. Go here for a free sample: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/sitb/B07PDQBJM4
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