From removing a “don’t be evil” clause in their code of conduct to wrongly firing an ethics researcher, Google has been caught in a web of scandals over the last few years.
And now, top engineer Zach Vorhies is quitting Google. He worked for the company between 2008-2013 and later returned in 2016 as a Senior Software Engineer, where he wrote code for Google’s YouTube app. The reason Vorhies decided to quit Google is what caught everyone’s attention. It’s not a surprise that former president Donald Trump was fighting media in every corner for four years, but little did we know how much Google algorithms had it out for him too.
According to Vorhies, Google had tweaked its algorithms to ensure that people only saw negative stories from the mainstream media about former president Donald Trump when they used the search engine. He admits that the Big Tech platform altered its news algorithms to harm the president’s reputation, as well as the 2020 presidential election.
Vorhies goes into detail about the anti-Trump algorithms in his new book “Google Leaks: A Whistleblowers Expose of Big Tech Censorship.” He described it as “real-time, hive-mind scoring” and that they literally rewrote the code according to specific feuds Trump was having.
The top engineer left the company and walked out with 950 pages about Google’s censorship project “Machine Learning Fairness,” which was handed over to the Department of Justice. The censorship project was designed to manipulate public opinion through a hidden agenda and corrupt the platforms it hosts including Google Search, YouTube, and News products.
Vorhies admits that people already suspect this thing is happening through certain keywords that trigger a particular algorithm. He notes several examples of newly written stories about Trump that are laced together with older ones to ensure that they all remain at the top of search results. He said he is sharing his story so that they can “take conspiracy theory and turn it into conspiracy fact.”
When asked about the quality of search results, Vorhies said that the searches are not for increasing market share in the United States, but for their competitors having exponential growth. He said it was the way that the mainstream media would structure the stories that allowed them to remain at the top of the search and news index. He said Google’s page ranking used to change slowly and that it works much faster now, with posts being labeled as false information regarding certain topics.
Vorhies also talked about one of Google’s main flaws which are when Wikipedia uses a quote or piece of information from a slanderous article and allows that narrative to stay up, even if the piece of information was retracted. He explains how this allows mainstream media to create a narrative based on any false sources and run with it. Google pages then get scored and ranked based on what the mainstream media and Wikipedia say about those false narratives. Vorhies describes it as a “defamation laundering engine” and that it is dangerous for Big Tech to be controlling this much free speech and truth in America.
Whether you like Trump or not, Google is becoming too much of a censorship company and less like a tech company. They need to be investigated (and ultimately abandoned in all political ideologies). The time of targeting and silencing conservatives is over. Even their own workers are over the corruption. More importantly, what is the Department of Justice doing with the 950 pages of evidence against them?
