Does Silicon Valley Manipulate Users? New film The Creepy Line argues that it does....
Stossel: Does
Silicon Valley Manipulate Users?
New film The Creepy
Line argues that tech giants sometimes silence
conservatives and try to steer America left.
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Leaked emails show some
Google engineers blaming their company for Trump's 2016 win, suggesting that
the site should censor outlets like The Daily Caller and Breitbart.
Google
says the company never did that, but for many people, it raises the question:
could Google executives flip an election?
"Google's senior
management was heavily in favor of Hillary Clinton," The Creepy Line writer
Peter Schweizer tells John Stossel. "Their ability to manipulate the
algorithm is something that they've demonstrated the ability to do in the
past...and the evidence from academics who monitored 2016 was clearly that they
did."
Stossel
says that it doesn't prove that Google's results were biased. It may just be
that major media outlets ran more positive headlines about Clinton, and since
Google's results rely on the major media, that would bring more positive
Clinton headlines, even without any bias on Google's part.
Even if Google's search algorithm is fair,
major social media outlets do manipulate us by determining what we can not see.
The film plays a clip of
psychologist Jordan Peterson, who points out: "They're not using
unbiased algorithms to do things like search for unacceptable content on
twitter and on YouTube and on Facebook–those aren't unbiased at all. They're
built specifically to filter out whatever's bad."
Stossel
notes that Google and Facebook employ human content monitors, some of whom
despise conservatives, to determine what is "bad."
Peterson
himself has reason to worry. After he criticized a Canadian law that would
mandate use of people's preferred pronouns (like "ze" or
"xir"), Google briefly shut down Peterson's YouTube channel. They
even blocked him from his own Gmail account.
"That's
a real problem," says Peterson. "You come to rely on these things and
when the plug is pulled suddenly then that puts a big hole in your life."
Stossel
wonders: what can consumers do about possible social media manipulation or
censorship? One speaker in Schweizer's film says, "delete your
accounts!" Stossel tells Schweizer: "I don't want to delete my
accounts–and you can't, without cutting yourself off from much of the best of
the world."
Schweizer
admits that it's a challenge, but says he's switched to Google's competitors.
For simple searches,
Schweizer uses DuckDuckGo.com instead of Google.
For email, Schweizer uses the
encrypted service ProtonMail.com, based in Switzerland, rather than
Gmail.
The web browser Brave provides
an alternative to Google's Chrome. Brave was founded by Brendan Eich, who
created the browser Firefox but was then forced to leave his own company
because he once donated to a ballot proposition against gay marriage.
But
most people won't switch. Stossel hasn't switched. He wonders if a few
individuals switching will change much.
"That's
all we have? A pathetic act that won't make any difference?" he asks.
Schweizer
replies: "If people make clear to Google that they don't like their
manipulation, and they don't like their invasion of privacy ... they will be
forced to make changes. That's part of the reason we love and support the market
the way we do."
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