The new 'transparency' act leaves control of what users see in the hands of Google and other digital giants.
In June, whistleblower Zach Vorhies dumped internal Google documents exposing the company's shady practices and political agenda. Rather than investigate, US lawmakers are offering Big Tech political cover and a legislative decoy.
Internal
documents and secret recordings continue to make abundantly clear what many already knew and others strongly suspected about Google and other digital goliaths; that Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and others manipulate their content and their users.
Stepping into the fray, Senator John Thune (R-S.D.) has
boasted that his new bill - the
Filter Bubble Transparency Act - is the silver bullet for bursting user information filter bubbles, the predictable information dead ends that reinforce users' pre-existing perspectives.
He would have us believe that the use of personal user data by search engine algorithms is the real problem with the internet.But this issue is the least of the problems that users face online. The bill's co-sponsors hope we've forgotten - or never knew - that Google and the rest are not the unbiased, politically neutral information sources or social media platforms that they (so poorly) pretend to be. Far from it.
Google
blacklists sources and prevents them from appearing in news results or featured links. Google's blacklist is a
manually curated file including over 500 websites that are excluded from news results.
Google applies
fringe ranking to sites, downgrading those sites - but not
The New York Times and
The Washington Post - that promote
"conspiracy theories" and
"fake news." Fringe ranking involves the manual grading of sites, although only those whose conspiracy theories or fake news stories fail to meet Google's criteria for credible, plausible narratives are downgraded.
Google and YouTube use "hate speech" labeling, downgrading sites and videos they believe contain "hate speech." YouTube scoring is apparently based solely on whether videos
express "supremacism."Google and
YouTube use
"authoritativeness
" scoring to rank sites and videos. The authoritativeness score is necessarily
based on whether a news site or video conforms to Google or YouTube's notions of credible and respectable views.
Last is the little-known fact that Google ranks websites against Wikipedia pages, treating Wikipedia as an unbiased and authoritative source. As Zach Vorhies told me in a private chat, "the core issue is that sites are not being ranked according to user data, they are being ranked against Wikipedia." Websites are
downgraded if Wikipedia pages contain negative information about them. Yet, as information age philosopher Jaron Lanier has
noted,
Wikipedia is notorious for its left-leaning political bias and its overwriting of known facts to suit its agenda. The issue has been addressed on
Wikipedia itself.
Together, Google's site-ranking methods
favor liberal and left-leaning sites - but Google goes even further by steering voters toward preferred candidates and, in an insider video, the company made clear that it
intends to intervene in the 2020 presidential election.
Comment: The 'powers that be' in the US want to maintain control over social media to shape public perception, and as tech giants are part of the US government hydra they will be given free rein to continue their mission. The bill is more likely a ruse to placate the sheeple while nothing of substance changes.