Google fires more employees protesting giant deal with Israel
Press TV – April 23, 2024
Google has fired about 20 more employees over recent protests against a deal between the US technology giant and Israel.
The activist group No Tech for Apartheid said on Monday that the new layoffs bring to more than 50 the total number of Google workers dismissed in the past week.
“The corporation is attempting to quash dissent, silence its workers and reassert its power over them,” said Jane Chung, a spokesperson for No Tech for Apartheid.
Meanwhile, a Google spokesperson confirmed the company had sacked more employees after continuing its investigation into the April 16 anti-Israel demonstrations, which included sit-ins at offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California.
The protesters held posters reading, “No More Genocide For Profit,” “No cloud apartheid,” “We Stand with Palestinian, Arab and Muslim Googlers” and “Don’t be evil, stop retaliation”.
They denounced Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract awarded to Google and Amazon to supply the Israeli regime with cloud computing services.
The contract dates back to 2021. However, the protests followed a report in Time magazine earlier this month, citing an internal company document, that the Israeli ministry of military affairs is a Google Cloud customer.
No Tech for Apartheid said the report showed that Google had “built custom tools” for the Israeli ministry of military affairs and had “doubled down on contracting” with the regime’s army after the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip began.
Israel waged its brutal war on the besieged Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out a historic operation against the usurping entity in retaliation for the regime’s intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
The Tel Aviv regime has so far killed at least 34,183 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 77,143 others.
Since the start of the onslaught, the US, Israel’s most dedicated ally, has fast-tracked arms shipments to the occupying regime and blocked UN resolutions that called for a Gaza truce.
Google To Start Running “Prebunk” Ads and Quizzing YouTube Viewers To Fight So-Called “Misinformation”
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | February 20, 2024
Prebunking – until relatively recently it was just one of the fringe concepts in the relentless “war on misinformation industrial complex.”
A short way to describe it is as a dystopian version of debunking false or incorrect information. But here the idea is to stop users (“help them identify”) unwanted content, before they can even see it.
A short way to describe what’s wrong with the “war on misinformation” is that it all too easily turns into a smokescreen for plain censorship of lawful and factually correct speech.
And now, prebunking is moving from ideations pushed by murky “fact-checking” and similar outfits, to the very top of the mainstream – Google.
The company that in effect controls the search market and some of the largest social platforms in the world (outside China) has announced that its latest anti-misinformation campaign will incorporate prebunking.
No doubt with an eye on the US election later in the year, Google’s attention is now on Europe, specifically the EU ahead of the European Parliament vote in June.
Google is acting in unison with the EU and its Digital Services Act which require tech giants to act on whatever is chosen to be considered “misinformation” and suppress it. Much of this is (at least they say so) driven by “Russia Scare,” and so both Google’s Jigsaw unit and the EU are talking about “democracy at risk.”
As for Google’s version of “prebunking,” it, at least in Europe, comes in the form of animated ads, reports say. They will play not only on YouTube but also other platforms like TikTok, and target Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Poland – the EU countries with the largest number of voters.
Jigsaw says prebunking bypasses “polarized debates” and “works equally effectively across the political spectrum.”
User experience may suffer at the expense of this “pre-reeducation.”
“Viewers watching the ads on YouTube will be asked to fill in a short multiple-choice questionnaire, designed to gauge what they have learned about misinformation,” Reuters describes Google’s prebunking technique.
These days, agencies like Reuters describe Jigsaw as an internal Google unit “which operates to tackle threats to societies.”
How noble of Jigsaw, and obliging towards Google of Reuters – but in 2016, reports were still talking about Jigsaw as rather what it really is – a rebrand of Google Ideas.
And, The Guardian explained at the time, this was “the web giant’s controversial diplomatic arm, founded in 2010 and headed by ex-US State Department policy wonk Jared Cohen,” adding – “Jigsaw’s stated mission is to use technology to tackle geopolitics.”
(Geo)politics may these days have been rebranded as “misinformation.”
But otherwise, little has changed.
Facebook Rolls Out “Link History” Showing How it Tracks All The Websites Users Visit
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | January 3, 2024
Facebook, just like the rest of Big Tech, has historically made a great effort to track users across the internet, even when they are not logged into the platform, for data collecting and ultimately monetary reasons.
Now, reports say that a new way to achieve this has been recently launched by the giant, and notably, for the first time this type of tracking is made visible. Called Link History, the new feature is found in the Facebook app as essentially one of the permissions, and “documents” every link a user clicks while using the app.
Once again, fully in vein of what Google, Microsoft, etc., are doing, Facebook says the change – putting all links in one place – is there for better user experience, and again habitually, while the feature is not mandatory, it is there by default and “hiding” behind a pretty solid wall of an “opt-out.”
Whatever the case may be, most users don’t bother jumping over that wall, allowing corporations to at once offer a choice – and in most cases have it their way.
In order to deactivate this on their app, users first need to be aware Link History exists, and then navigate to the appropriate setting in order to “opt out.”
But there is no shortage of criticism of this latest move, from the privacy point of view (although mainstream tech press curiously chooses to single out Facebook while praising Google and Apple as some sort of “privacy warriors” now).
This should be viewed as part of the big (political) picture where keeping pressure on Facebook as still the most influential social media is especially important in an election year – while at the same time rightfully questioning Facebook’s (persistent) motivation for pursuing cross-site user tracking.
A classic example of two things getting to be true at the same time.
Facebook (Meta) doesn’t exactly pretend it is working solely to make sure users “never lose a link again” and enjoy other things that benefit them. A part of Link History’s announcement spells this out: “When you allow link history, we may use your information to improve your ads across Meta technologies.”
What the statement doesn’t clarify is if any of the well-known, ultra-invasive methods it uses to track users will actually change in any way with the introduction of Link History.
Google Experiments With “Faster and More Adaptable” Censorship of “Harmful” Content Ahead of 2024 US Elections
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 20, 2023
In the run-up to the 2020 US presidential election, Big Tech engaged in unprecedented levels of election censorship, most notably by censoring the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story just a few weeks before voters went to the polls.
And with the 2024 US presidential election less than a year away, both Google and its video sharing platform, YouTube, have confirmed that they plan to censor content they deem to be “harmful” in the run-up to the election.
In its announcement, Google noted that it already censors content that it deems to be “manipulated media” or “hate and harassment” — two broad, subjective terms that have been used by tech giants to justify mass censorship.
However, ahead of 2024, the tech giant has started using large language models (LLMs) to experiment with “building faster and more adaptable” censorship systems that will allow it to “take action even more quickly when new threats emerge.”
Google will also be censoring election-related responses in Bard (its generative AI chatbot) and Search Generative Experience (its generative AI search results).
In addition to these censorship measures, Google will be continuing its long-standing practice of artificially boosting content that it deems to be “authoritative” in Google Search and Google News. While this tactic doesn’t result in the removal of content, it can result in disfavored narratives being suppressed and drowned out by these so-called authoritative sources, which are mostly pre-selected legacy media outlets.
Like Google, YouTube confirmed that it will enforce its existing censorship policies ahead of the 2024 elections, including those that apply to election “misinformation” and “harmful conspiracy theories.” These policies resulted in the censorship of tens of thousands of videos and many popular channels in the buildup to and aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.
The video sharing platform will also boost videos from authoritative sources — a policy that resulted in independent creators being 14x less likely to be recommended on election-related content after the 2020 elections.
Additionally, YouTube will demonetize videos that it deems to contain “demonstrably false claims that could undermine trust or participation in elections.”
Outside of these direct censorship tactics, YouTube will label “altered or synthetic election content” that doesn’t violate any of its rules. Although these labels won’t result in content suppression, similar labels on other platforms have confused users and resulted in them believing that real but selectively edited videos are fake. Plus, legacy media outlets often use these labels to bolster their censorship demands.
Collectively, these announcements from Google and YouTube signal an intention to supercharge the mass censorship playbook that was deployed during the 2020 election and resulted in a two-tiered system where independent creators that dared to have dissenting or alternative opinions about the election were censored while legacy media outlets had their election narrative boosted across Google’s platforms.
Related:
Google removes Israel boycott app
MEMO | December 5, 2023
Google has removed a mobile app from its store that helps people boycott companies linked to Israel.
The @NoThanks boycott account on social media confirmed that its NoThanks app was temporarily removed because its description contained a sentence about determining if “your hand supports killing children in Palestine or not.”
“The app has been suspended from the Google store for this sentence, I have removed it in the new update and the store will review it and release it again.”
However the new version was also suspended, but the developer is in talks with Google Play to have it reinstated.
“This app,” NoThanks explained on X, “is a peaceful form of protest, and it’s essential to clarify that the app is not antisemitic, despite attempts by other certain news and reports to describe it as such.”
The creator of the NoThanks boycott app revealed on 7 November that it will assist individuals in identifying companies that support Israel by scanning product barcodes to obtain information about the product’s origins and the company selling it.
By 29 November, the app had been downloaded over 100,000 times on Google Play. Earlier today, the developer said emails had now been circulated calling for him to be sacked from his internship for trying to harm “businesses run by Jews”, according to the author of the email.
YouTube Boasts About Elevating “Quality” Content, Collaborating With the WHO, and Suppressing “Misinformation”
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | November 15, 2023
YouTube (Google) is yet another in a series of tech behemoths that feel the need to declare their stance on content, including its effective algorithmic manipulation, just as US primaries are ushering the country into another year of presidential elections.
Beating around that bush – Google representatives now talk about processes, procedures, and tools of censorship of health-related information that, unfortunately, can easily be “repurposed” to serve other, for example, political ends.
Much of the conversation rests on what Google wants to portray as its laurels from “the previous epidemic” – which too many people and creators see from a diametrically opposed point of view, as a dark time of nearly unbridled censorship and suppression of free speech.
A video now published by Yahoo Finance reveals not only that Google has a “chief clinical officer,” but also how that officer, Michael Howell, sees the role of this super powerful tech corporation in determining what users are likely to see, see first, or see at all on a platform like YouTube.
Howell, naturally, sees nothing wrong with this and even, to all intents and purposes, brags that YouTube is working to make sure legacy media have advantage over independent creators, and that the latter may easily face censorship.
That’s the takeaway from his words, which he chose to phrase thus: YouTube works to “lift up high quality content, even as we work to lower, and make less prominent content that isn’t accurate or helpful to users.”
The whole interview is positioned as an exploration of how “misinformation grows and spreads” supposedly in sync with the amount of content and the number of users. There is even the assertion made by Yahoo that medical sector “misinformation” is not only very present among users but also “in the broader medical community.”
While this may or may not signal continued censorship of “disfavored” medical professionals, YouTube Head of Healthcare & Public Health (yes, that’s a YouTube job title these days, too) Dr. Garth Graham shared that the platform is the first to start “labeling health information that’s coming from licensed doctors, licensed nurses, licensed healthcare professionals.”
And even after all these years of sometimes completely arbitrary censorship YouTube is supposed to be taken as a “credible source of information (users) can trust” – as it works with the National Academy of Medicine and of course, the World Health Organization (WHO) to craft its definitions, and then “raise that up” – i.e., algorithmically promote, at the expense of other content.
Graham had more curious things to say, such as that while clearly committed to censoring what (or, whatever) Google decides is “delicate (sic) and dangerous information” – people are still supposed to view it as an “open platform”!
Either Graham doesn’t know what an open platform is, or he hopes YouTube/Google users don’t.
There’s also a good amount of patronizing toward those users, as in them needing to be hand-held (by Google) pretty much all the way in order to discern information from misinformation and make appropriate decisions.
“So, you know, we’re an open platform, but the real goal is how do you balance getting good information to people at the right time (…) while making sure that we remove delicate or dangerous information.”
Asked how Google has already managed (shocker) to get the government to participate in posting videos promoting their policies and what “conversations” preceded this, the Google exec said that “the entire healthcare eco-system” was already “energized” to get their message across.
And he counted the government as well as hospitals and physicians as part of this eco-system. One of them, last but not least, is the WHO.
What we know for certain from a great number of internal documents that have emerged over the past months both from Twitter and Facebook is that these two were being “led” to do certain things by the government and its agencies.
Google’s position in the interview is suggested to be the opposite – namely, at one point Howell is asked if the company basically instructed all these national and international healthcare players on what content to make, and have “trending” (mostly artificially, one might add.)
Howell dances around this question – or statement – by saying that the (pandemic) produced a community of creators from the health sector.
But as we know, many of them also got their voices silenced, however, that is not something anyone should expect Google to address.
Instead, the talk is obviously about the “approved” community of healthcare creators.
But, says Howell: “If there’s no good content out there that people want to watch, it’s very hard to show (that) content to users.”
And, cynics would say – then you write an algorithm that shoves that content into everybody’s “recommended” videos anyway.
But, Howell decided to claim that “people responded well to YouTube’s partnerships” – where that last word means, government and international bodies and institutions.
RFK Jr. Sues YouTube and Google, Alleges ‘Misinformation Policies’ Violated His First Amendment Rights
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 4, 2023
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Children’s Health Defense founder and chairman on leave, this week filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, alleging the social media giant violated his First Amendment rights.
According to Kennedy, who is running for the Democratic nomination for president of the U.S., YouTube engaged in a “censorship campaign” that included removing videos of his speech at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire and interviews he did with clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson and podcaster Joe Rogan.
The complaint, filed Aug. 2 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges the U.S. government has taken “extraordinary steps” under Joe Biden’s leadership “to silence people it does not want Americans to hear,” including himself and many others.
That censorship makes it difficult for Kennedy to reach millions of voters and also for his supporters to amplify his message, the complaint says.
The lawsuit predicts the censorship will continue throughout Kennedy’s campaign, intensifying as the primaries approach.
“Mr. Kennedy often speaks at length about topics people would like to ignore, including the negative health effects of toxic chemicals and potential safety concerns about the COVID-19 shots,” the complaint reads. Then YouTube uses its “medical misinformation” policies — developed in partnership with federal government agencies and the Biden administration — to justify removing his videos.
In doing so, the platform censored not only Kennedy’s comments on medical issues, but the entire content of his speeches and interviews, according to the suit.
Although YouTube is a private company, it is not simply a publisher, the complaint alleges — it has become “an important platform for political discourse in America, a digital town square that voters trust as a place to get news and opinions about the issues of the day.”
According to the complaint:
“YouTube operates as a public forum, the digital equivalent of a town square. As such, it cannot remove protected speech, especially political speech, based on its viewpoint. …
“There is a sufficiently close nexus between YouTube and the federal government such that YouTube’s actions may be fairly treated as that of the government itself.”
Although YouTube cited its own COVID-19 vaccine misinformation policies to censor Kennedy, those policies “rely entirely on government officials to decide what information gets censored,” according to the lawsuit.
For example, the suit says YouTube doesn’t allow content that “contradicts local health authorities’ (LHA) or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19,” and the guidance on those policies only changes based on government decisions.
Kennedy also called YouTube’s medical misinformation policies “unconstitutional” because they are “vague” and “overbroad” and “because they give unnamed government officials, who the policies depend entirely on, the unfettered discretion to decide what information gets removed from YouTube.”
Kennedy is seeking injunctive relief to prohibit YouTube from further censoring his speech, and the restoration of any videos of his political speech removed during the campaign.
Kennedy also seeks a declaration that Google and YouTube violated his First Amendment rights and that its medical disinformation policies are unconstitutional.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
WHO Initiative Would ‘Promote Desired Behaviors’ by Surveilling Social Media
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 30, 2023
The World Health Organization (WHO) is proposing a set of recommendations for “social listening surveillance systems” designed to address what it describes as a “health threat” posed by online “misinformation.”
The WHO’s Preparedness and Resilience for Emerging Threats (PRET) initiative claims “misinformation” has resulted in an “infodemic” that poses a threat — even in instances where the information is “accurate.”
PRET has raised eyebrows, at a time when the WHO’s member states are engaged in negotiations on two controversial instruments: the “pandemic treaty” and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR).
The latest draft of the pandemic treaty contains language on how WHO member states would commit to “social listening.” Under article 18(b), WHO member states would commit to:
“Conduct regular community outreach, social listening, and periodic analysis and consultations with civil society organization and media outlets to identify the prevalence and profiles of misinformation, which contribute to design communications and messaging strategies for the public to counteract misinformation, disinformation and false news, thereby strengthening public trust and promoting adherence to public health and social measures.”
Remarking on PRET’s “social listening” proposals, Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom” and a former New York University liberal studies professor, told The Defender :
“The WHO’s PRET initiative is part of the UN’s attempt to institute global ‘medical’ tyranny using surveillance, ‘social listening’ and censorship. PRET is the technocratic arm of the WHO’s proposed pandemic treaty, which, if accepted by nation-states, would amount to the surrendering of national and individual sovereignty to this ‘global governance’ body.
“What better way to establish a one-world government than by using so-called global crises that must be addressed by nothing short of ‘global governance’? I remind readers that you cannot comply your way out of tyranny.”
WHO could use artificial intelligence to monitor social media conversations
A WHO document outlining the PRET initiative — “Module 1: Planning for respiratory pathogen pandemics, Version 1.0” — contains a definition of infodemic:
“Infodemic is the overabundance of information — accurate or not — which makes it difficult for individuals to adopt behaviors that will protect their health and the health of their families and communities.
“The infodemic can directly impact health, hamper the implementation of public health countermeasures and undermine trust and social cohesiveness.”
The document recommends that in response to the “infodemic,” countries should “incorporate the latest tools and approaches for shared learning and collective action established during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
According to the WHO document, this can be done if governments “establish and invest in resources for social listening surveillance systems and capacities to identify concerns as well as rumors and misinformation.”
Such resources include “new tools and approaches for social listening … using new technologies such as artificial intelligence to listen to population concerns on social media.”
According to the document:
“To build trust, it’s important to be responsive to needs and concerns, to relay timely information, and to train leaders and HCWs [healthcare workers] in risk communications principles and encourage their application.”
Risk communications “should be tailored to the community of interest, focusing on and prioritizing vulnerable groups,” the WHO said.
“Tailored” communication was a hallmark of public health efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic.
For instance, in November 2021, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council launched the Mercury Project, which aimed “to increase uptake of COVID-19 vaccines and other recommended public health measures by countering mis- and disinformation” — in part by studying “differential impacts across socio-demographic groups.”
Similarly, PRET states that it will “incorporate the latest tools and approaches for shared learning and collective action established during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
These “tools and approaches” could be deployed during “acute respiratory events,” according to the document, which recommends that governments:
“Develop and implement communication and behavior change strategies based on infodemic insights, and test them during acute respiratory events including seasonal influenza.
“This includes implementing infodemic management across sectors, and having a coordinated approach with other actors, including academia, civil society, and international agencies.”
This is not the first time the WHO has addressed the so-called “infodemic.”
A WHO review published Sept. 1, 2022, titled “Infodemics and health misinformation: a systematic review of reviews,” found that “infodemics and misinformation … often negatively impact people’s mental health and increase vaccine hesitancy, and can delay the provision of health care.”
In the review, the WHO concluded that “infodemics” can be addressed by “developing legal policies, creating and promoting awareness campaigns, improving health-related content in mass media and increasing people’s digital and health literacy.”
And a separate, undated WHO document advises the public on how we can “flatten the infodemic curve.”
WHO, Google announce collaboration targeting ‘medical misinformation’
The WHO’s PRET proposals coincided with a new multi-year collaboration agreement with Google for the provision of “credible health-related information to help billions of people around the world respond to emerging and future public health issues.”
The agreement was announced on May 23 by Dr. Karen DeSalvo, Google’s chief health officer, on the company’s blog. She wrote:
“Information is a critical determinant of health. Getting the right information, at the right time can lead to better health outcomes for all. We saw this firsthand with the COVID-19 pandemic when it was difficult for people worldwide to find useful information online.
“We worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) on a range of efforts to help people make informed decisions about their health — from an SOS alert to surfacing locally relevant content about COVID-19 to YouTube policies on medical misinformation.”
One way Google will collaborate with the WHO is through the creation of more “knowledge panels” that will prominently appear in search results for health-related questions on the platform.
“Each day people come to Google Search looking for trustworthy information on various health conditions and symptoms,” DeSalvo wrote. “To help them access trustworthy information our Knowledge Panels cite content from reliable sources covering hundreds of conditions from the common cold to anxiety.”
“Working closely with WHO, we’ll soon expand to cover more conditions such as COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease], hypertension, type 2 diabetes, Mpox, Ebola, depressive disorder, malaria and more,” she added.
Google will make these Knowledge Panels available in several languages, including English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish.
DeSalvo’s May 23 post also addressed an ongoing collaboration between Google and the WHO, Open Health Stack (OHS), which “help[s] accelerate the digital transformation of health systems around the world” and “lower[s] the barrier to equitable healthcare.”
Google also awarded the WHO with more than $320 million “in donated Google Search advertising via ad grants” allowing the agency “to publish health topics beyond COVID-19, such as Mpox, mental health, flu, Ebola, and natural disasters.”
Google is slated to provide an additional $50 million in ad grants to the WHO this year.
According to Google, the ad grants to the WHO represent the company’s largest such donation to a single organization.
Separately, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tweeted on May 22 about the agency’s own efforts at combating purported “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
The tweet contains a 35-second video, which claims “misinformation” travels “six times faster than the facts,” while promoting the FDA’s “Rumor Control” initiative.
A top priority of FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf, “Rumor Control” was launched in August 2022 and joins other agency initiatives to fight “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
“The growing spread of rumors, misinformation and disinformation about science, medicine, and the FDA, is putting patients and consumers at risk,” according to the FDA’s Rumor Control webpage. “We’re here to provide the facts.”
The initiative asks the public to do “three easy things” to “stop rumors from spreading”: “don’t believe the rumors,” “don’t pass them along” and “get health information from trusted sources like the FDA and our government partners.”
“Rumor Control” appears to have been inspired by an initiative developed by the Virality Project, “a coalition of research entities” from six institutions “focused on supporting real-time information exchange between the research community, public health officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, and social media platforms.”
Documents released as part of the “Twitter files” in March revealed that the Virality Project, based out of the Stanford Internet Observatory, also called for the creation of a disinformation board just one day before Biden announced plans to launch his government-run Disinformation Governance Board.
Similar to PRET’s recommendations to target “accurate” information that nevertheless contradicts establishment public health narratives, the Virality Project worked with Twitter and other social media platforms, recommending they “take action even against ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ and ‘true posts which could fuel hesitancy.’”
These censorship efforts included at least one tweet by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman on leave of Children’s Health Defense.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Google Renews Its Partnership With The WHO
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | May 25, 2023
Google has renewed its partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide what it calls “factual” information about different diseases and conditions. The partnership is positioned as a way to combat what it says is the spread of medical “misinformation” observed during the pandemic.
On Google search, there are already Knowledge Panels at the top of results when users search for certain conditions and diseases.
Soon, the Knowledge Panels will include more conditions and illnesses like depressive disorder, Ebola, COPD, malaria, hypertension, diabetes, Mpox, and others, all using information verified by the WHO.
In a previous partnership, Google awarded more than $320 million to the WHO in Ad Grants to help spread its medical information. In the new partnership, Google awarded the global public health organization an additional $50 million to continue the efforts.
The WHO has been criticized more in frequent years for calling for censorship while itself putting out information during the pandemic that turned out to ultimately be untrue.
Google’s YouTube was criticized for censoring anything that went against the WHO during the pandemic, even if independent commentators ended up being correct.
EU demands more online censorship
RT | April 25, 2023
The European Commission has designated 19 online platforms under its Digital Services Act, a move that opens them up to hefty fines if they target advertisements at certain users, publish illegal content, or fail to “address the spread of disinformation.”
In an announcement on Tuesday, the commission named 17 “Very Large Online Platforms” and two “Very Large Online Search Engines,” defined as those reaching at least 45 million monthly active users. Among the platforms cited are Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, while Google and Microsoft’s Bing are the two designated search engines.
The decision means that as of August, these platforms must be in compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a wide-ranging piece of legislation that came into force in November.
To avoid fines of up to 6% of their global annual turnover, the commission stated that these platforms must label all advertisements as such and avoid targeting ads at users based on “sensitive data” such as their ethnicity, sexuality, or political orientation.
Targeting ads toward children will no longer be permitted, and platforms will have to “redesign their systems to ensure a high level of privacy, security, and safety of minors,” the commission said.
Regarding content moderation, platforms will be required to restrict the “dissemination of illegal content” and “address the spread of disinformation.” The entire text of the DSA mentions the word “disinformation” 13 times without defining it. Free speech activists have argued that the term is often used by governments to silence factually correct yet politically inconvenient narratives.
The commission also warned that platforms and search engines will need to address “negative effects on freedom of expression,” a requirement that could clash with the demand to tackle “disinformation.”
While the DSA was being drafted last year, EU officials singled out Twitter as a company that would be forced to comply with its requirements. Immediately after billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform and set about rolling back some of its restrictive speech policies, EU industry chief Thierry Breton declared that “in Europe, the bird will fly by our European rules.”
Two months later, EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova warned that Twitter would face “sanctions” if it breached the DSA. Jourova cited Musk’s banning of several prominent journalists – who shared information on his whereabouts – as potential DSA violations.
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On The Transgender Agenda
Lies are Unbekoming | May 12, 2016
I’ve been following Jennifer Bilek’s reporting on the Transgender Agenda for the last year.
In my opinion, she is doing the best investigative journalism, in the world, on the top-down nature of this society deforming “input” and “normalization”.
What we don’t understand is the scale of money behind this push, and the individuals controlling this weaponized capital. These are questions that go to the heart of Jennifer’s work. … continue
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- Israeli airstrikes in southern Gaza, invasion in central Gaza, carpet bombing in north – Day 218
- Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center
- Fighter jets, attack drones hammer Rafah; catastrophe looms – Day 217
- What it’s like to be used as a human shield by the Israeli army
- Detailed study finds 99% of pro-Palestine protests at US universities are peaceful
- VIDEO: Armenian Christians under siege by Israel
- Ex-Israeli special forces agent says he went ‘undercover’ at UCLA protest encampment
- The mainstream media distorted our anti-Vietnam War protests 50 years ago. They’re following the same strategy today
- Pete McCloskey, longtime supporter of Palestinians and USS Liberty veterans, has passed away
- Richie Allen
- The Richie Allen Show Returns Tomorrow Wednesday April 24th
- Call Richie Today Monday March 11th From 4.30pm
- Connect To The Richie Allen Show WhatsApp Today
- NHS Asks Patients To Choose From 12 Genders, 10 sexual Preferences & 159 Religions
- The Richie Allen Show Moves To A New Time Slot From Monday Nov 20th
- Starmer Will Sack Shadow Ministers Who Vote For Gaza Ceasefire
- AI Tool Can Predict Heart Attacks Years In Advance
- Nepal Bans TikTok To Preserve Social Harmony
- Bloke Appointed Boss Of Womb Health Charity
- WHO – “Gaza’s Biggest Hospital Becoming A Cemetery”
- No Tricks Zone
- Using Nets On The Seafloor To Retrieve Seafood ‘Roughly The Same As Running 100 Coal-Fired Plants’
- New Paper: Global Warming Leading To HIMALAYAN COOLING, Preventing Glacial Melt!
- DNA Evidence Reveals Domestic Cats, Dogs, African Wildcats, Frogs Lived In The Arctic 9000 Years Ago
- -80°C: Antarctic Vostok Station Records “Extreme Winter Cold”…Not Even Winter Yet!
- The German E-Vehicle Nightmare, 2024 Q1 Sales Plummet 14%… “Graveyard” For Unsold Cars
- Newly Discovered 90,000-Year-Old Human Footprints Reveal How Much Higher Sea Levels Used To Be
- Germany’s Economic Bloodbath Worsens As Green Revolution Causes Economy To Bleed To Death
- Water Vapor Absorbs 84 Times More Radiation Than CO2 … Clouds Drove 89% Of 1982-2018 Warming
- The 97% Consensus Claim Is In Fact 97% Bogus
- Post-1980s Increases In Shortwave Radiation Explains Europe’s Warming Trends Far Better Than CO2
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