Tech Giants Google and Youtube go full 1984
According to Wired Magazine, tech giant Youtube, has been losing money to advertisers pulling out due to their ads being shown alongside extremist videos posted on the site.
Kent Walker, the general counsel at Google, explained in a Financial Times op-ed piece how the company is using several ways to handle these extremist video posts. Google is the parent company of Youtube.
Google plans to use what is called machine learning and artificial intelligence. “We have used video analysis models to find and assess more than 50 percent of the terrorism-related content we have removed over the past six months,” Walker said. He talked about how “new content classifiers” would be used to help automate the filtering process. In my opinion, this amounts to Orwellian style controls on free speech.
Even though Google and Youtube will use machine learning and AI, humans will still be involved in the process. These “Flaggers” as they are called, will decide whether or not a video or web posting contains “Extremist Views” or not. The problem as I see it, there will be these social justice warriors going around shutting down videos they don’t like, or who don’t agree with their personal views. Already there have been many legitimate youtubers that have had their videos demonetized because the views expressed may offend someone. Essentially, anyone who is conservative, Christian, gun-owners, free speech advocates will be targeted. This creates a chilling effect on free speech. Speech you don’t agree with is not necessarily hate-speech.
The statement that really drives my point home is where Walker said, “…we will be taking a tougher stance on videos that do not clearly violate our policies – for example, videos that contain inflammatory religious or supremacist content.” So, in essence, videos that are in the “gray area” will be flagged and demonetized. The video creators will be issued warnings as well.
Most of this criticism toward Google is coming from the UK and Europe, after a string of terrorist attacks in the UK. In their minds, instead of curbing the influx of Islamic extremists into their country, it makes more sense to them to go after free speech. Home secretary Amber Rudd and UK Prime Minister Theresa May both want “cyberspace to be regulated” and “safe spaces” for extremist content to be removed from the internet.
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook talked about how they want to tackle terrorists and extremists on their social network. He said they are also using “machine learning” and AI techniques. I find this incredible because I have personally witnessed many conservative articles removed and banned from the site, while jihadist, Islamic extremist content is allowed to remain. I don’t buy this at all.
In the end, as we slip further and further into the dystopian future portrayed in George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, the less hope I have for the future of free speech. If you haven’t read those books, I highly recommend that you do, because once you do, you will realize the world is becoming more and more like them. Globalism is on the march in this world, and we are fighting an information war to combat this. One article alone is not enough to stop it, but every day more and more people are getting involved by sharing articles such as this one, and starting their own blogs on the topic. It’s important to red-pill as many people as possible in order to have any chance at all of stopping this phenomenon of becoming our future. I find it interesting that all of these plans were in place over a hundred years ago, and they told us they were doing it in many ways. Now in 2017, here it is, staring us straight in the face, it’s happening, but most of us aren’t aware of it. Most of us live in a state resembling sleep, and if you try to present this information they get mad at you. The reason is it’s easier to lie to some than it is to convince someone they’ve been lied to.
