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Social Engineering

Entry 2003, on 2019-09-24 at 17:15:36 (Rating 4, Politics)

Imagine a company so corrupt, so arrogant, so dangerous, that they were prepared to feed their own warped political view of the world onto all of their users without telling them what they were doing. Imagine this company was by far the most successful in its field and was ultimately the source for most of the information garnered by people in the technologically advanced world. And imagine the people in that world were horrified by how despotic regimes, like that running China, manipulated what its citizens could see, but were too naive to realise the same was happening to them.

Well you don't have to imagine, because it is undeniably happening to most internet users - probably including you - right now, most likely without you even understanding how. That company is called Google, and if you use its products, especially its search engine - which I freely admit is technologically very good - then you had better understand what it is you are really getting, because it probably isn't what you think.

OK, after that ominous - and possibly somewhat hyperbolical - start I had better explain what it is I am ranting about this time. It is that Google has a very obvious political agenda. That agenda is based on extreme political correctness, and extreme devotion to the modern far-left social engineering program. But not only are the leaders of Google personally devoted to this dogma, but they are dedicated to forcing it on their employees (ask James Damore), and on you and me: their users.

No doubt they think they are "doing the right thing", but when people are convinced that their moral standards are better than anyone else's, and that it is their duty to spread those superior ethics to everyone else, well I think we can all see the danger inherent in that.

There is absolutely no doubt that Google are doing this. They are manipulating their users in subtle and not so subtle ways to accept their vision of a brave new world. Other tech companies do it too, of course. In fact, it seems that mindless political correctness is a prerequisite to be part of the new technological elite which primarily exists in California.

Twitter is a well known source of anti-right sentiment, often banning users with non-politically correct views but allowing almost identical, or worse tweets from people with opinions they approve of. And Facebook seems to apply its censorship policies unevenly too, by blocking posts which are inconvenient to its ideology. Apple is very PC, although it doesn't try to control its users so much, apart from stopping certain apps from being available at the app store.

I always knew this was happening, but I was never aware of the extent of the problem until I did some testing. In fact, my attention was drawn to this through the book "The Madness of Crowds" by Douglas Murray, where he explained this exact phenomenon, amongst many others.

Murray is a British author, journalist, and political commentator. His inconvenient views include criticism of modern European society's treatment of Islam and refugees, so he has few friends amongst the social justice warriors. The Guardian published a superficial criticism of the book without really responding to any of the points, or even conceding that the book might be worth reading just as an interesting source of alternative ideas. No doubt the reviewer had made up his mind what his overall tone was going to be before even reading the book.

The Guardian is notoriously left-wing and politically correct, but Murray has actually written material for it, so they should get credit for allowing that alternative opinion, and I still use it as a source, but I am always aware of their biased position on most issues.

To test Murray's claims (because we should never accept anything at face value) I tried similar searches myself. Here are the results...

First, I did a Google image search on the phrase "white men". The results on the first screen showed 10 white men, 3 black men (including the first and third image), 4 women of various ethnic backgrounds (including the second image). So the first actual white man was the fourth image, but the real problem was the uneven material included in the captions that went with the images. Here's some examples: "Biases that benefit white men", "White men are bad; even a six-year-old tells me so", and "White men killed more American police".

Next, I did a Google image search on the phrase "white women" and got the following results: 8 pictures of white women, 3 of black women (including the second image), and 4 black men (including the fourth and fifth). And, even worse, of the items featuring white women, all had negative connotations, such as "The Trouble With White Women", "Racism problem of Liberal White Women", "white women who voted for Trump", "An Open Letter To The White Woman", "How white women use strategic tears", "White women are posing as black", and "Stop Placing White Women on a Pedestal".

Finally, I did a search on "black men". All the results were of black men. There was not a single white person or woman anywhere to be seen, so clearly Google can get the search right if they try (but, of course, they don't). The captions were almost all positive, such as: "Good Black Men", "resilience of black men", "Best Black Men Haircuts to Try", and "Black Is Tranquil". To be fair, there was one negative caption: "Abusive Black Men". After all, they are still men, so deserve some negativity!

I gave up using Google a while back, because I dont like their politics, so I thought I would see what my search engine of preference, "DuckDuckGo" gave for similar searches. Maybe it was better, because most of the results were of white men, but there were several black men and women shown too, as well as two explicitly pornographic images! And again, I got the negativity with captions like "Biases that benefit white men" and "White men killed more American police than any other". So is that better or worse than Google? It's difficult to say.

So clearly we are getting very poor service from these companies, not because they don't have the ability to provide good results, but because they want to deliberately provide bad results. I could forgive the former possibility, but I think the latter is inexcusable. although there are a few possible excuses which I will cover before finishing this post.

First, do they, as private companies, have the right to do this? Well, that depends on your perspective, but I would say at the very least there should be some sort of warning that the results (and the users viewing the results) are being manipulated. Maybe a warning should say something like "these results have been artificially adjusted to provide positive racial balance" and an option "Try again without filtering".

Second, is the bias in the results justified if it enhances racial harmony and negates negative stereotypes? Well, if it did (and we don't actually know if it does or not) that might be a partial justification, although I still would rather use a search to provide accurate results rather than political propaganda, no matter how well intentioned it is.

Third, is my perception that white people are the victims of racism here either wrong - in other words the results are what an unbiased search would return - or just a result of my inability to admit that my privilege is being challenged? Well that seems so absurd that I don't need to answer. Do the searches yourself, on any politically contentious subject, and you will see that Google itself is extremely racist, and not afraid to indulge in a bit of social engineering!

Comment 1 (5179) by Jim on 2019-12-20 at 14:03:11:

This is common knowledge for many people. I'm a bit surprised it has taken you this long to figure out this is going on. It's not just the web, because TV, radio, and newspapers aren't much better. Welcome to reality.

Comment 2 (5185) by OJB on 2019-12-23 at 09:17:43:

I knew it was happening, of course. But just how blatant it is, and how easy it is to demonstrate, was new to me. Google are manipulating us, and it's not particularly subtle!

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