A former Google engineer has released nearly 1,000 pages of documents that he says prove that the company, at least in some of its products, secretly boosts or demotes content based on what it deems to be true or false, while publicly claiming to be a neutral platform.
The software engineer, Zach Vorhies, first provided the documents to Project Veritas, a right-leaning investigative journalism nonprofit, as well as the Justice Department’s antitrust division, which has been investigating Google for potentially anti-competitive behavior.
Going Public
Vorhies said he worked for Google for eight years, making $260,000 a year, when counting in the gains from the Google stock he owns.“I had every incentive in the world to stay at the company and just collect the paycheck,” he said, noting that most others would do that.
“But I could never live with myself knowing that, if Google was able to implement the plans that they were planning, that I, at the moment of choice, backed out because I was selfish.”
Vorhies first came to Project Veritas more than a month ago, disclosing some documents and answering questions with his face hidden and his voice disguised.
When he returned to work, however, Google sent him a letter demanding, among other things, that he turn over his employee badge and work laptop, which he did, and “cease and desist” from disclosing “any non-public Google files.” Afraid for his safety, he posted on Twitter that if something would happen to him, all the documents he took would be released to the public.
Google then did a “wellness check” on him, he said. The San Francisco police received a call that Vorhies may be mentally ill. A group of officers waited for him outside his house and put him in handcuffs. “This is a large way in which they intimidate their employees that go rogue on the company,” he said.
Vorhies then decided that it would be safer for him to go public.
Vorhies called Google a “political machine” bent on preventing anybody like President Donald Trump from getting elected again. He said there are other Google employees who “see what’s going on and they are really scared.”
Changes at the company that worried him started in 2016, he said.
The documents indicate that Google has ramped up emphasis on suppressing what it deems “fake news.” That has led it to review news content using a variety of manual and automated means to make calls on what is true and what is “misinformation” and sort results accordingly.
Google News
One document describes “Project Purple Rain: Crisis Response & Escalation,” the goal of which is to establish “processes to detect and handle misinformation across products during crises” and “install 24/7 team of trained analysts ready to make policy calls and take actions across news surfaces including News, News 360 and Feed.”“News” appears to pertain to “Google News” and “Feed,” a rebrand of the former “Google Now” product, showing news articles below the search bar on the Google mobile app.
Another document, a presentation that appears to date back to late 2017, explains that websites that apply to be included in Google News results need to pass an automated review that checks their technical parameters, and also a manual review of their “processes, policies, and editorial guidelines.” If accepted, the sites are then repeatedly checked and given “demotion penalties” for infractions.
Then, however, the presentation presents “potential” next steps, which included expanding its screening policies to cover “fringe/controversial” content, such as that which is “factually incorrect, fake, irrelevant.” Furthermore, the document suggests that Google should also address “sensitive” content, such as that which involves “hate,” “diversity,” and “bias” or is “geo-politically sensitive.”
One of the goals of the effort was a “clean & regularly sanitized news corpus,” it reads.
‘Fringe Ranking’
One of the documents says that Paul Haahr, Google’s principal engineer, leads the effort on “fringe ranking” with the goal of “not showing fake news, hate speech, conspiracy theories, or science/medical/history denial unless we’re sure that’s what the user wants.”Feed Blacklist
Yet another document lists websites whose content is manually banned from showing up in the “Feed.”It includes a number of fringe sites on the political right, the more prominent ones including thegatewaypundit.com, truepundit.com, and redstate.com.
It also includes some sites on the progressive left, including mediamatters.org, forwardprogressives.com, occupydemocrats.com, and learnprogress.org.
But it also includes relatively mainstream right-leaning sites such as dailycaller.com, louderwithcrowder.com, and newsbusters.org.
Videos Manually Rated
One presentation slide, apparently photographed from a computer screen, bears the title “Fake news & other fringe: Trashy recap” and says that “every day, top 250 videos [on YouTube] in top 26 locales are rated by multiple human raters” and that “Trashy filtering launched on [YouTube’s] Home [page], Search, Trending [list], and Suggested [videos list].” This has led to a 50 percent decline in user complaints, it states.Bias
The documents Vorhies provided previously, together with his explanations and hidden camera recordings by Project Veritas of other Google employees, indicate that the company has created a concept of “fairness” through which it infuses the political preferences of its mostly left-leaning workforce into its products.Google has repeatedly denied political bias in its products. Vorhies suggested, though, that Google tries to present itself as a neutral platform to preserve legal protection under Section 230, which shields internet services from liability for user-generated content.
“Google is playing both sides of the game,” he said. “On the one hand, they’re saying they are a platform and that they are immune from being sued for the content that they host on their website. On the other hand, they’re acting as a publisher, in which they’re determining the editorial agenda of these certain companies, and they are applying that. If people don’t fall in line with their editorial agenda, then their news articles get deboosted and deranked. And if people do fall in line with their editorial agenda, it gets boosted and pushed to the top.”
