Political Backlash Grows Over Google's Pressure To Censor "Independent" Think Tank

It was only a matter of time until this happened...

For years now, the politicos of the Left have embraced a perfectly symbiotic relationship with the "progressive" leaders of Silicon Valley.  Tech titans, like Google"s Eric Schmidt who got very cozy with the Hillary Clinton campaign, have poured million of dollars of their tech fortunes into Democratic coffers all while colluding with elected officials, "independent" think tanks and "institutions of higher indoctrination" to ram their progressive agenda down the throats of the American public. 

It was a great relationship for Democrats because Silicon Valley"s elites had all the money of Wall Street without the negative stigma...until now.

Google"s recent problems with censorship, which came first in the firing of James Damore and was quickly followed up by the firing of an "independent" research team at a think tank funded by Google, has exposed what many have known for some time but others were too enamored to see, namely that Silicon Valley companies like Google are every bit as motivated by their relentless pursuit of power and wealth as Wall Street...they"re just better at wrapping their motivations in a nice progressive bow.

Unfortunately, the cat is now out of the bag and it has forced a growing number of the Left"s most progressive politicians to distance themselves from America"s new breed of "evil corporations."  As The Hill notes this morning, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Keith Ellison have already started to distance themselves:

Google is facing blowback after one of its most prominent critics was fired from a think tank funded by the tech giant.

The incident is raising new questions about Google’s influence over think tanks and academic research.

The controversy has caught the attention of lawmakers, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) calling the firing “troubling” and warning academic institutions not to compromise their work for financial backers.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) also tweeted his support for the researchers pushed out of the think tank.

Open Markets does terrific work on monopoly power and inequality. Excited for their new chapter!https://t.co/5nTuUjjchK

— Rep. Keith Ellison (@keithellison) August 31, 2017

Of course, as we pointed out last week, this latest backlash against Google comes after Barry Lynn, formerly a top researcher at New America, was fired after publishing a paper praising European Union antitrust regulators for fining Google nearly $3 billion for purportedly rigging its search algorithm to favor its own services over its rivals.

According to the New York Times, the New America Foundation has received more than $21 million in funding from Google, Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt and his family’s foundation since the think tank was first established in 1999. The money helped establish New America as an “elite voice” in policy debates on the American left.

“But not long after one of New America’s scholars posted a statement on the think tank’s website praising the European Union’s penalty against Google, Mr. Schmidt, who had been chairman of New America until 2016, communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar.”

Slaughter, a close ally of the Clintons who’s best known for her 2012 Atlantic Cover Story “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” quickly caved.

The statement disappeared from new America’s website, only to be reposted without explanation a few hours later. But word of Mr. Schmidt’s displeasure quickly rippled  through New America, which employs more than 200 people, including dozens of researchers, writers and scholars, most of whom work in sleek Washington officers where the main conference room is called the “Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab. The episode left some people concerned that Google intended to discontinue funding, while others worried whether the think tank could truly be independent if it had to worry about offending its donors.”

Not surprisingly, Google has somehow managed to continue arguing with a straight face that they fund "independent research" with "undue influence."  Of course, as Matt Bruenig, a former researcher at the liberal think tank Demos points out, "undue influence" isn"t actually required if their is an implicit understanding with donors that results in "self-censorship."

Google insists they fund think tanks independent of their corporate interests.

“We support hundreds of organizations that promote a free and open Internet, greater access to information, and increased opportunity,” Google spokesperson Riva Sciuto said in an emailed statement to The Hill.

“We don"t agree with every group 100% of the time, and while we sometimes respectfully disagree, we respect each group’s independence, personnel decisions, and policy perspectives.”

Google is not alone in the tech industry or in American business. Corporations pump large amounts of money into various research groups across different fields. Like Google, they say the research is conducted without undue influence.

Critics remain skeptical.

“Google spends a lot but says it’s not to influence research, which makes you think they waste a lot of money funding groups,” says Stoller.

"The influence operates on a self censorship level,” says Matt Bruenig a former researcher at the liberal think tank Demos, and founder at the People’s Policy Project, a crowdfunded think tank.

“If you’re an employee you understand the contours of what you should be writing, what you shouldn"t be writing based on what the donors are doing.”

Meanwhile, for anyone who has been paying attention, Yelp"s VP of public policy summed up the recent Google controversies the best:

“I"ve been working on Google antitrust for 6 years. This is both the most shocking & least surprising thing I"ve read."

"Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn't Like - I Know Because It Happened To Me"

Authored by Kashmir Hill via Gizmodo.com,

The story in the New York Times this week was unsettling: The New America Foundation, a major think tank, was getting rid of one of its teams of scholars, the Open Markets group. New America had warned its leader Barry Lynn that he was “imperiling the institution,” the Times reported, after he and his group had repeatedly criticized Google, a major funder of the think tank, for its market dominance.

The criticism of Google had culminated in Lynn posting a statement to the think tank’s website “applauding” the European Commission’s decision to slap the company with a record-breaking $2.7 billion fine for privileging its price-comparison service over others in search results. That post was briefly taken down, then republished. Soon afterward, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the head of New America, told Lynn that his group had to leave the foundation for failing to abide by “institutional norms of transparency and collegiality.”

Google denied any role in Lynn’s firing, and Slaughter tweeted that the “facts are largely right, but quotes are taken way out of context and interpretation is wrong.”

Despite the conflicting story lines, the underlying premise felt familiar to me:

Six years ago, I was pressured to unpublish a critical piece about Google’s monopolistic practices after the company got upset about it. In my case, the post stayed unpublished.

I was working for Forbes at the time, and was new to my job. In addition to writing and reporting, I helped run social media there, so I got pulled into a meeting with Google salespeople about Google’s then-new social network, Plus.

The Google salespeople were encouraging Forbes to add Plus’s “+1" social buttons to articles on the site, alongside the Facebook Like button and the Reddit share button. They said it was important to do because the Plus recommendations would be a factor in search results—a crucial source of traffic to publishers.

This sounded like a news story to me. Google’s dominance in search and news give it tremendous power over publishers. By tying search results to the use of Plus, Google was using that muscle to force people to promote its social network.

I asked the Google people if I understood correctly: If a publisher didn’t put a +1 button on the page, its search results would suffer? The answer was yes.

After the meeting, I approached Google’s public relations team as a reporter, told them I’d been in the meeting, and asked if I understood correctly. The press office confirmed it, though they preferred to say the Plus button “influences the ranking.” They didn’t deny what their sales people told me: If you don’t feature the +1 button, your stories will be harder to find with Google.

With that, I published a story headlined, “Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers,” that included bits of conversation from the meeting.

The Google guys explained how the new recommendation system will be a factor in search. “Universally, or just among Google Plus friends?” I asked. ‘Universal’ was the answer. “So if Forbes doesn’t put +1 buttons on its pages, it will suffer in search rankings?” I asked. Google guy says he wouldn’t phrase it that way, but basically yes.

(An internet marketing group scraped the story after it was published and a version can still be found here.)

Google promptly flipped out. This was in 2011, around the same time that a congressional antitrust committee was looking into whether the company was abusing its powers.

Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non-disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes. (I had signed no such agreement, hadn’t been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist.)

It escalated quickly from there. I was told by my higher-ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down. The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News.

I thought it was an important story, but I didn’t want to cause problems for my employer. And if the other participants in the meeting had in fact been covered by an NDA, I could understand why Google would object to the story.

Given that I’d gone to the Google PR team before publishing, and it was already out in the world, I felt it made more sense to keep the story up. Ultimately, though, after continued pressure from my bosses, I took the piece down—a decision I will always regret. Forbes declined comment about this.

But the most disturbing part of the experience was what came next: Somehow, very quickly, search results stopped showing the original story at all. As I recall it—and although it has been six years, this episode was seared into my memory—a cached version remained shortly after the post was unpublished, but it was soon scrubbed from Google search results. That was unusual; websites captured by Google’s crawler did not tend to vanish that quickly. And unpublished stories still tend to show up in search results as a headline. Scraped versions could still be found, but the traces of my original story vanished. It’s possible that Forbes, and not Google, was responsible for scrubbing the cache, but I frankly doubt that anyone at Forbes had the technical know-how to do it, as other articles deleted from the site tend to remain available through Google.

Deliberately manipulating search results to eliminate references to a story that Google doesn’t like would be an extraordinary, almost dystopian abuse of the company’s power over information on the internet.

I don’t have any hard evidence to prove that that’s what Google did in this instance, but it’s part of why this episode has haunted me for years: The story Google didn’t want people to read swiftly became impossible to find through Google.

Google wouldn’t address whether it deliberately deep-sixed search results related to the story. Asked to comment, a Google spokesperson sent a statement saying that Forbes removed the story because it was “not reported responsibly,” an apparent reference to the claim that the meeting was covered by a non-disclosure agreement. Again, I identified myself as a journalist and signed no such agreement before attending.

People who paid close attention to the search industry noticed the piece’s disappearance and wrote about it, wondering why it disappeared. Those pieces, at least, are still findable today.

As for how effective the strategy was, Google’s dominance in other industries didn’t really pan out for Plus. Six years later, the social network is a ghost town and Google has basically given up on it. But back when Google still thought it could compete with Facebook on social, it was willing to play hardball to promote the network.

Google started out as a company dedicated to ensuring the best access to information possible, but as it’s grown into one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world, its priorities have changed. Even as it fights against ordinary people who want their personal histories removed from the web, the company has an incentive to suppress information about itself.

Google said it never urged New America to fire Lynn and his team. But an entity as powerful as Google doesn’t have to issue ultimatums. It can just nudge organizations and get them to act as it wants, given the influence it wields.

Lynn and the rest of the team that left New America Foundation plan to establish a new nonprofit to continue their work. For now, they’ve launched a website called “Citizens Against Monopoly” that tells their story. It says that “Google’s attempts to shut down think tanks, journalists, and public interest advocates researching and writing about the dangers of concentrated private power must end.”

It’s safe to say they won’t be receiving funding from Google.

*  *  *

Update, September 1, 1:55 p.m.: Yesterday, we asked Google’s communications team for a response to this story. Initially, after reviewing contemporaneous internal Google emails about the Forbes story, two PR reps told us there was no way to know whether Google was responsible for deleting the cache and issued a short statement saying only that Forbes took down my story because it was “not reported responsibly.”

This morning, Google’s vice president of global communications, Rob Shilkin, emailed me to say definitively what two of his colleagues wouldn’t: “We had nothing to do with removing the article from the cache.” When I asked Shilkin how he came to that conclusion, he said it was based on old internal Google email threads. Since his colleagues had old email threads about the issue but never denied that Google took down the cache, I asked Shilkin if I could see the threads myself. He declined. His entire email, which he agreed to publish, is below.

Hi Kashmir

I wanted to clear the air on this. We have always enjoyed working respectfully with you and are sad to hear that you’ve carried this since 2011. I’m sorry about how this went down, and wanted to give you the tick-tock from our end.

From our perspective, this was a disagreement over whether a meeting was held under NDA. As you know, you attended a Forbes business meeting with the Google sales team, which was presenting on the (then) new +1 button. It didn’t strike our sales team as unusual that someone from Forbes’ editorial was in the meeting because they’d often attend these types of meetings - Editorial is often involved in a publication’s social strategy.

However, like most of our client meetings that discuss new features, it was held under an NDA (it sounds like Forbes didn’t inform you of this before you attended and had we known you were going to report on the meeting, we would have raised that concern).

Our sales team called their fellow attendees of the meeting from Forbes to express surprise that the article was based on a meeting held under NDA. I understand that one of our PR reps raised this concern to you, and then your editor. I understand that our PR rep asked that the piece come down from Forbes’ website, as it was reporting on a confidential business meeting.

Your editor agreed - he told our PR rep that the article was being removed because it involved reporting on an NDA meeting. As for the Google cache, it’s trivial for a website owner to request its cache to be cleared (see here). I assume this is what happened because we had nothing to do with removing the article from the cache. I hope our team has enough credibility, among those who work with us, that you know that we couldn’t and wouldn’t engage in this type of behavior - never have, never will.

You have long held our and the tech industry’s feet to the fire on privacy issues. And you have written (more than) a few critical stories about Google+ and many other things Google-related :) To my knowledge, never have we had any issues like this, with even the most critical story. On this one piece, there seems to have been an unfortunate misunderstanding over whether all the attendees at a meeting believed they were under an NDA.

I won’t pretend to love how you shared your concern about this incident but - after a stiff drink - I’m glad you raised it. I hope that in the intervening six years, we’ve re-earned your trust. And if not, we’ll keep trying.

Regards

Rob

 

"People Are So Afraid Of Google Now": Here's Why

Google, pardon Alphabet’s efforts to influence the American political discourse (not to mention presidential election outcome) stretch far beyond the company’s penchant for subtly disadvantaging independent and conservative thinkers on platforms like YouTube. By financially supporting left-leaning policy shops, Google’s parent company has helped raise a liberal army intent on hashing out policy minutiae to help bend US policy to their benefactors’ advantage.

But what happens when these supposedly “independent” think tanks publish something that displeases their corporate master? As one researcher at the left-leaning New America think tank learned, the punishment is swift and severe.

Barry Lynn, formerly a top researcher at New America, learned that lesson the hard way after publishing a paper praising European Union antitrust regulators for fining Google nearly $3 billion for purportedly rigging its search algorithm to favor its own services over its rivals.

According to the New York Times, the New America Foundation has received more than $21 million in funding from Google, Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt and his family’s foundation since the think tank was first established in 1999. The money helped establish New America as an “elite voice” in policy debates on the American left.

“But not long after one of New America’s scholars posted a statement on the think tank’s website praising the European Union’s penalty against Google, Mr. Schmidt, who had been chairman of New America until 2016, communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar.”

Slaughter, a close ally of the Clintons who’s best known for her 2012 Atlantic Cover Story “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” quickly caved.

The statement disappeared from new America’s website, only to be reposted without explanation a few hours later. But word of Mr. Schmidt’s displeasure quickly rippled  through New America, which employs more than 200 people, including dozens of researchers, writers and scholars, most of whom work in sleek Washington officers where the main conference room is called the “Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab. The episode left some people concerned that Google intended to discontinue funding, while others worried whether the think tank could truly be independent if it had to worry about offending its donors.”

The answer to that last question, as employees of New America quickly learned, is, obviously, no, it can"t. A few days after the incident Slaughter summoned to Lynn to her office, where she summarily dismissed him – along with 10 of his underlings.

“Those worries seemed to be substantiated a couple of days later, when Ms. Slaughter summoned the scholar who wrote the critical statement, Barry Lynn, to her office. He ran a New America initiative called Open Markets that has led a growing chorus of liberal criticism of the market dominance of telecom and tech giants, including Google, which is now part of a large corporate entity known as Alphabet, for which Mr. Schmidt serves as executive charman.

Ms. Slaughter told Mr. Lynn that ‘the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,’ according to emails from Ms. Slaughter to Mr. Lynn. The email suggested that the entire Open Markets team – nearly 10 full-time employees and unpaid fellows – would be exiled from New America."

While she asserted in the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, that the decision was ‘in no way based on the content of your work,’ Ms. Slaughter accused Mr. Lynn of ‘imperiling the institution as a whole.’”

Lynn, who eventually shared his story with the NYT, blasted Google’s aggressive tactics, which the company has denied through its communications machine.

And the punchline, which also serves as the title for this post: "Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings.” said Lynn. “People are so afraid of Google now.”

In a series of statements published on Twitter, Slaughter and New America slammed the NYT’s story as “absolutely false.”

Let me be clearer in era of fake news; facts are largely right, but quotes are taken way out of context and interpretation is wrong. https://t.co/ynlNR8FDEx

— Anne-Marie Slaughter (@SlaughterAM) August 30, 2017

New America"s Response to the New York Times: https://t.co/JGmSk1oldY pic.twitter.com/VS6DJTKVIH

— New America (@NewAmerica) August 30, 2017

In a separate email sent last year, Slaughter castigated Lynn for organizing a conference where he intended to criticize tech companies’ hegemonic influence.

“We are in the process of trying to expand our relationship with Google on some absolutely key points,” Ms. Slaughter wrote in an email to Mr. Lynn, urging him to ‘just THINK about how you are imperiling funding for others.’”  

Slaughter is now reportedly helping the Open Markets team secure financing for a new, separate nonprofit entity. However, no money will be forthcoming from Google.

Google spent more than $9.5 million on lobbying during the first half of 2017, more than almost any other company. It has helped organize conferences at which key regulators overseeing investigations into the company were presented with pro-Google arguments, sometimes without disclosure of Google’s role in funding NA, according to the NYT.

The company has also donated to more than 170 groups from across the political spectrum, according to voluntary disclosures on its website.

What was that about “don’t be evil”?