YouTube "Tweaks" Its Search Algos After Las Vegas Conspiracy Theories Go Viral

In Silicon Valley"s ongoing crusade to make sure that you only consume mainstream media propaganda, you know because $100,000 worth of Facebook ads crushed Hillary"s campaign and changed the course of human history forever, YouTube has joined the likes of Facebook and Twitter in saying that it will promote more "authoritative sources in search results" going forward.  All of which, once again, begs the question of who gets to determine who is an "authoritative source?"

As the Wall Street Journal points out today, YouTube searches for "Las Vegas Shooting" earlier this week included a video from "End Times News Report" with the title "Proof Las Vegas Shooting Was a FALSE FLAG Attack - Shooter on 4th Floor."  The video, created by Jake Morphonios who posts YouTube videos in his spare time, quickly went viral and amassed over 1.1 million views in just 27 hours...but all that changed when YouTube decided to censor Morphonios" content and replace it with mainstream media videos...you know for your protection.

For example, the fifth result when searching “Las Vegas shooting” on YouTube late Tuesday yielded a video titled “Proof Las Vegas Shooting Was a FALSE FLAG attack—Shooter on 4th Floor.” The video said there were multiple shooters in Sunday’s mass shooting, a claim dismissed by law enforcement. Posted by a channel called the End Times News Report, it amassed more than 1.1 million views in about 27 hours.

The high search ranking of the End Times News Report video claiming there was a second shooter in Las Vegas helped it gain 371,000 views over four hours late Tuesday. On Wednesday, YouTube removed the video.

Jake Morphonios, who runs the End Times News Report along with a damaged-inventory-liquidation business in Kernersville, N.C., said the video eventually reached 2.5 million views. “It was a hot topic, of course, and was going to get some views anyway, but it really did get caught in [YouTube’s] algorithm and went viral from there,” he said. “Clearly it got into featured videos or something.” The 43-year-old said he has posted about 800 videos and typically gets about 5,000 views each.

He said he aims to offer viewers information on news events that mainstream news sources won’t. “It’s my opinion, it’s my analysis, and everyone’s got an opinion, and I can understand that maybe they don’t want me to be considered the equivalent of The Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or something like that,” he said. “But still, I’m not presenting myself as mainstream media. I’m just a guy with a computer offering an opinion. And to be punished for that is, well, it’s draconian.”

Not surprisingly, YouTube said the the "tweaks" made to their search engines were designed to promote more "authoritative sources," especially when searches are related to "major news events."

In response to criticism on social media of some search results this week, a person familiar with YouTube said the company is accelerating the rollout of planned changes to its search engine. On Wednesday night, the video service began promoting more authoritative sources in search results, especially pertaining to major news events, the person said. YouTube doesn’t disclose how it determines which sources are authoritative.

But while YouTube refused to offer any insights into how they plan to decipher "authoritative sources" from "non-authoritative sources", running the same search for "Las Vegas shooting" today, after YouTube"s "tweaks", provides some clues on their methodology...

Conclusion, YouTube"s "tweaks" have turned it into nothing more than a mainstream media echo chamber.

Guerrilla Street Art Appears In Support Of Fired Google Engineer James Damore

Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

In response to Google firing engineer James Damore (who just got on Twitter as @Fired4Truth) for his politically incorrect #GoogleMemo, a series of guerrilla street art installations have cropped up in Venice and Santa Monica, CA in protest of the Silicon Valley search bohemoth.

Spotted outside Google"s Venice Beach offices. pic.twitter.com/0SL2idZv0C

— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) August 11, 2017

Conservative pundit and founder of the Proud Boys “pro-Western fraternal organization” says the individual responsible for the street art is a member of his organization.

For the record, this street artist is a #ProudBoy. For all the allegations of racist violence, this is what we actually do. @unsavoryagents https://t.co/3Pdj1vB0FN

— Gavin McInnes (@Gavin_McInnes) August 11, 2017

March on Google

In response to being fired, James Damore conservatives Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovich have organized “March on Google” set for Saturday, August 19th anywhere google has offices.

“We are going to raise awareness about Google’s one-sided bias and campaign against dissenting opinions and voices,” Posobiec said, adding “Google’s firing of James Damore is the flashpoint here. An engineer fired for simply expressing an opinion that ran counter to Google’s politically-charged atmosphere of an “Ideological Echo Chamber” (Also the title of Damore’s memo).

Hundreds of people have reportedly signed up for the marches since Wednesday’s announcement.

ANNOUNCING:

Nationwide Marches on Google Offices

Big Google is Watchinghttps://t.co/NgMWiwl2Lz

— Jack Posobiec ???????? (@JackPosobiec) August 9, 2017

UPDATE! 4 More #MarchOnGoogle Cities Announced!

Los Angeles
Seattle
Pittsburgh
Atlanta!https://t.co/fkTqB8bvxY pic.twitter.com/2oOhpW3szU

— Jack Posobiec ???????? (@JackPosobiec) August 11, 2017

How do you make the world a better place while battling the Diversity Industrial Complex? @fired4truth

photo by @peterdukephoto pic.twitter.com/BKySxGiYIT

— Mike Cernovich ???????? (@Cernovich) August 10, 2017

Support for Damore

In addition to a huge swell of internal agreement with the controversial memo among Google employees, there has been an outpouring of conservatives offering everything from kind words to jobs in support of Damore from the likes of Wikileaks and Twitter alternative Gab.ai.

1/ Censorship is for losers. @WikiLeaks is offering a job to fired Google engineer James Damore. https://t.co/tmrflE72p3

— Julian Assange ???? (@JulianAssange) August 8, 2017

We want to hire the Google employee who wrote this beautiful work of art. pic.twitter.com/oOIFwDTyzP

— Gab (@getongab) August 5, 2017

Gab CEO Andrew Torba elaborated on his job offer in an interview with Breitbart Tech.

“Gab supports the free and open expression of all ideas. What this document and the reaction to it prove is that Silicon Valley exists in a bubble world where Wrong Think is not permitted,” Torba claimed. “They preach tolerance and yet are intolerant of any conservatives ideas. They praise diversity and yet shun conservatives out of their workplace. They applaud the bravery of folks who speak out when it aligns with their own far-left agenda, but scorn a conservative who dares to stand up for what they believe in.” via Breitbart

Shockingly, the NYT and Chicago Tribune have both published articles coming out against Damore"s firing - with the NYT op-ed suggesting Google CEO Sunday Pichai resign!

Conservatism is truly the new counterculture…

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James Damore: "This Is Why I Was Fired By Google"

Fired Google engineer Jame Damore has penned an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal explaining how his good-faith effort to discuss differences between men and women in tech couldn’t be tolerated in the company’s "ideological echo chamber," adding that self-segregation with similar-minded people has grown in recent decades as we spend more time in digital worlds "personalized to fit our views."

I was fired by Google this past Monday for a document that I wrote and circulated internally raising questions about cultural taboos and how they cloud our thinking about gender diversity at the company and in the wider tech sector. I suggested that at least some of the male-female disparity in tech could be attributed to biological differences (and, yes, I said that bias against women was a factor too). Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai declared that portions of my statement violated the company’s code of conduct and “cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”

My 10-page document set out what I considered a reasoned, well-researched, good-faith argument, but as I wrote, the viewpoint I was putting forward is generally suppressed at Google because of the company’s “ideological echo chamber.” My firing neatly confirms that point.

How did Google, the company that hires the smartest people in the world, become so ideologically driven and intolerant of scientific debate and reasoned argument?

We all have moral preferences and beliefs about how the world is and should be. Having these views challenged can be painful, so we tend to avoid people with differing values and to associate with those who share our values. This self-segregation has become much more potent in recent decades. We are more mobile and can sort ourselves into different communities; we wait longer to find and choose just the right mate; and we spend much of our time in a digital world personalized to fit our views.

Google is a particularly intense echo chamber because it is in the middle of Silicon Valley and is so life-encompassing as a place to work. With free food, internal meme boards and weekly companywide meetings, Google becomes a huge part of its employees’ lives. Some even live on campus. For many, including myself, working at Google is a major part of their identity, almost like a cult with its own leaders and saints, all believed to righteously uphold the sacred motto of “Don’t be evil.”

Echo chambers maintain themselves by creating a shared spirit and keeping discussion confined within certain limits. As Noam Chomsky once observed, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

But echo chambers also have to guard against dissent and opposition. Whether it’s in our homes, online or in our workplaces, a consensus is maintained by shaming people into conformity or excommunicating them if they persist in violating taboos. Public shaming serves not only to display the virtue of those doing the shaming but also warns others that the same punishment awaits them if they don’t conform.

In my document, I committed heresy against the Google creed by stating that not all disparities between men and women that we see in the world are the result of discriminatory treatment.

When I first circulated the document about a month ago to our diversity groups and individuals at Google, there was no outcry or charge of misogyny. I engaged in reasoned discussion with some of my peers on these issues, but mostly I was ignored.

Everything changed when the document went viral within the company and the wider tech world. Those most zealously committed to the diversity creed—that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and all people are inherently the same—could not let this public offense go unpunished. They sent angry emails to Google’s human-resources department and everyone up my management chain, demanding censorship, retaliation and atonement.

Upper management tried to placate this surge of outrage by shaming me and misrepresenting my document, but they couldn’t really do otherwise: The mob would have set upon anyone who openly agreed with me or even tolerated my views. When the whole episode finally became a giant media controversy, thanks to external leaks, Google had to solve the problem caused by my supposedly sexist, anti-diversity manifesto, and the whole company came under heated and sometimes threatening scrutiny.

It saddens me to leave Google and to see the company silence open and honest discussion. If Google continues to ignore the very real issues raised by its diversity policies and corporate culture, it will be walking blind into the future—unable to meet the needs of its remarkable employees and sure to disappoint its billions of users.

Leaked Internal Messages Reveal Co-Worker Support For Fired Google Engineer's Controversial Memo

James Damore, now a former Google employee, caused outrage when he circulated a manifesto on Friday, complaining about Google’s “ideological echo chamber” alleging women have lower tolerance for stress and that conservatives are more conscientious. The chess master, who studied at Harvard, Princeton and MIT and worked at Google"s Mountain View HQ, was fired on Monday after the search giant’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said portions of Damore’s 10-page memo “violate our code of conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes” despite saying in the same memo that Google employees shouldn"t be afraid of speaking their minds.

But, according to screenshots obtained by Wired, internal discussions that followed Damore"s memo and its fallout show Google employees both embracing and advancing its views. Damore himself indicated in the following message that his former coworkers had reached out privately to express "their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues." Others chimed in publicly as well.

As an example, the following Google employee blasted the inability of some people to understand and/or acknowlege "how distribution differences aren’t stereotypes and can’t be applied to individuals...it’s basic statistical logic." 

I put almost agree on go/pc-considered-harmful-poll. I thought it needed way more citations. Also, I would have left off anything about “marxism”. You could have made the same points about diversity/psychological safety without them. Adding them in just made the doc seem political. Although, I don’t think either would have changed the reaction.

My biggest concern is the number of people who don’t understand how distribution differences aren’t stereotypes and can’t be applied to individuals. It’s basic statistical logic. Regardless of wether [sic] or not there are differences and if they are biological or cultural, this is just a blatant logical fallacy.

For example, men’s average height is higher than women’s average height. You would never just assume a woman can’t be taller than 5’9”, but you would expect more men to be above 5’9”.

Of course, intellectual honesty isn"t the point of the "progressive" movement, is it?  The talking heads of the Left are all too eager to put on their science hats when discussing climate change but are less eager to entertain scientific facts when they"re deemed "inconvenient."

Meanwhile, the following Googler tied the whole Damore controversy back to the 2016 Presidential election.

For example, there is broad consensus in all American companies that everyone should be treated the same regardless of race and gender and that sexual harassment or other mistreatment of employees should not be tolerated. But I do not think there is consensus on the following things, which are treated as obvious and noncontroversial at Google.

1. Different recruitment/hiring process for employees on color of their skin


2. Open stereotyping of employees by race and gender on internal sites without public outcry that makes such instances rare over time


3. Weekly public (though thankfully anonymous) shaming of employees for misdeeds as slight as anachronistic use of “guys” for a mixed gender group


4. Frequent references to documents that stigmatize open disagreement with a a rage [sic] of positions


5. Call for employees to give each other hugs at an all hands meeting because the wrong candidate won a presidential election in the country, following by a mass mailing on how to help your kids deal with grief due to the same occurrence

We could go on, or start a centithread on any of these subjects. I understand that these things feel normal and necessary to many holding strong progressive values, especially coming from colleges which are largely run along these norms today. Many feel that the country suffered a huge setback in 2016 and sick to use [sic] other venues, including workspaces with largely sympathetic employee base, to advance their values forward. Google as shining light in the sea of darkness right?

But then, what do you propose to do about Googlers who are well within general norms of the country, and many other businesses like IBM, Oracle or whatever - but who do not agree with progressive consensus which is currently in effect in our internal discourse? This consensus, while pretty strong, is also often overstated. During the election season, progressives have been very active at Google, including (sadly I think) draconian responses to anyone who disagreed with their core ideas. Now that passions are subsiding, we can see from polls like the recent one that Googlers have widely varying opinions on go/pc-considered-harmful.

Of course, we can only assume these supportive Googlers will soon find themselves unemployed.

Fired Coder Speaks Out On Google's "Potentially Illegal Practices", "Recorded Meetings" And "Science Denial"

For those who have managed to avoid this storyline, James Damore, now a former Google employee, caused outrage when he circulated a manifesto on Friday, complaining about Google’s “ideological echo chamber,” alleging women have lower tolerance for stress and that conservatives are more conscientious. By Monday, the chess master, who studied at Harvard, Princeton and MIT and worked at Google"s Mountain View HQ, was fired after the search giant’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said portions of Damore’s 10-page memo “violate our code of conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes” despite saying in the same memo that Google employees shouldn"t be afraid of speaking their minds.

Now, for the first time, the former Googler sat down for a YouTube interview with University of Toronto professor of psychology, Jordan Peterson, to discuss the circumstances leading up to the release of his controversial memo and the fallout that has resulted since. 

In this first exchange, Damore explains that he decided to write his now-infamous memo after attending a "secretive" Google "diversity summit" in which he says presenters talked about "potentially illegal practices" intended to "try to increase diversity...basically treating people differently based on what their race or gender are."

Peterson:  "Why did you do this?"

Damore:  "About a month and a half ago, I went to one of our diversity summits, all of it unrecorded and super-secret and they told me a lot of things that I thought just were not right."

Peterson:  "Ok, what do you mean "unrecorded and super-secret?""

Damore:  "Most meetings at Google are recorded.  Anyone at Google can watch it.  We"re trying to be really open about everything...except for this.  They don"t want any paper trail for any of these things." 

"They were telling us about a lot of these potentially illegal practices that they"ve been doing to try to increase diversity.  Basically treating people differently based on what their race or gender are." 

Peterson:  "Ok, why?"

Damore:  "Because I think it"s illegal.  As some of the internal polls showed, there were a large percentage of people who agreed with me on the document.  So, if everyone got to see this stuff, then they would really bring up some criticism." 

Damore also talks about how he originally published his memo over a month ago but upper-management largely ignored it until it started to garner media attention.  Then, once it went viral, upper management organized a coordinated attack and misrepresented facts in order to silence him.

Damore: "I actually published this document about a month ago; it"s only after it had gone viral and leaked to the news, that Google started caring." 

"There was a lot of upper management that started to call it out and started saying how harmful it is.  This sort of viewpoint is not allowed at Google."

Peterson:  "Yeah, what sort of viewpoint exactly?  The idea that there are differences between men and women that might actually play a role in the corporate world?  That"s an opinion that"s not acceptable?"

Damore:  "Yeah, it seems so.  And there"s a lot of misrepresentation by upper-management just to silence me, I think." 

On why he was fired:

Peterson:  "What was there rationale for firing you exactly?  What was the excuse that was given?"

Damore:  "So, the official excuse was that I was perpetuating gender stereotypes." 

And finally, an interesting tidbit in which Damore once again points out that Google"s progressives are all too eager to put on their science hats when discussing climate change but are less eager to entertain scientific facts when they"re deemed "inconvenient."

Damore:  "I"m not sure how they can expect to silence so many engineers and intelligent people and just deny science like this"

Visualizing The 100 Websites That Rule The Internet

There are over 1.1 billion websites on the internet, but the vast majority of all traffic actually goes to a very select list of them. As Visual Capitalist"s Jeff Desjardins notes, Google.com, for example, has an astounding 28 billion visits per month. The next closest is also a Google-owned property, Youtube.com, which brings in 20.5 billion visits.

Today’s infographic comes to us from Vodien, and it lists the 100 highest ranking websites in the U.S. by traffic, according to website analytics company Alexa.

The information is grouped by company – for example, you can see that Google controls four sites in the Top 100 (Google, Youtube, Blogger, and Google User Content), while Verizon owns the Huffington Post and AOL.com (they will also control Yahoo and Tumblr when that deal closes in Q2). The data is also sorted by industry, so sites in a similar category are grouped in the same color.

A STEEP DROPOFF

The dropoff from #1 to #100 is significant. Google.com has 28 billion visits, but a website like Citi.com (ranked #98) only has 53 million visits a month. That’s a 500x difference!

Meanwhile, a website like Visualcapitalist.com gets one million visits per month, and is ranked #33,000 in the United States – a 50x difference from Citi. Further down the trail – there are literally millions of tiny websites that get thousands or just hundreds of visits per month, and some that don’t get any love at all.

The whole distribution is quite fascinating, and it is clear that the spoils go overwhelmingly to the very top of the food chain. However, that also means that there is an entire world of millions of websites out there that almost no one (except Google’s crawler) has ever seen.