 |
| Courtesy of commons.wikimedia.org |
Recent headlines have stated that Facebook has been caught filtering conservative blogs and news items from their timeline. Google is said to have been caught skewing and filtering political search in an attempt to favor Hillary Clinton. When you Google something, you expect Google to provide you the best results based on your intended search criteria. After all, Google has publicly stated that this is their goal (read: Google is Playing Musical Chairs with Ranking and it will Cost Us Billions)! However, the steady stream of articles stating the contrary implies the opposite. When you post something on Facebook, you want your friends, family and co-workers
 |
| Courtesy of www.youtube.com |
These companies are deciding what you, your friends, family and coworkers are allowed to see! To make matters worse, it's very hard to part the curtains on these big companies, but there seems to be ample evidence (if you believe all the articles out there) that they are either lying, cheating, trying to deceive us (or their algorithms have just gone crazy). The truth is, the media
In this episode or Working the Web to Win, we will delve into these alleged deceptive practices that Internet Giants Google and Facebook have been reportedly engaging in. Are Google and Facebook
 |
| Courtesy of www.youtube.com Watch it! |
Now in case you think that these are the raving of a mad republican, conservative, you’d be wrong. I am conservative on some issues, but I am a lifelong Democrat. However, I have always voted for the person who I believe is the most honest (if a politician can be called honest) and the person who offered what I believed to be the best solutions to the main problems of the day.
Many of you know me as a security and privacy advocate. I have stated many times that we give these large corporations’ too much access to our personal data and too much control of our interpersonal and business communications. Now many in the press are not only saying they are spying on us by collecting massive amounts of data from us, they are also trying to manipulate our decision making processes with deception, bias and lies. Here's my real life example!
I saw a video posted by a friend to my Facebook timeline by SourceFed.com which talked about how Google skews and
The next day, I had a lot of trouble finding my post on Facebook. It was not showing up in my timeline. After about an hour of searching, I found it by doing a graph search. When I did find it, the video image was no longer showing in the post. Facebook had altered my timeline and the post.
 |
| My Facebook page now showing post. |
I went back and
So if you think I’m the only one who is a little paranoid about this issue, you would be absolutely wrong. At the beginning of this article I mention several articles about censorship and bias in the media. Now I want to provide several examples of these articles so you can make up your own mind and begin to see the sheer magnitude of this issue.
After experiencing my Facebook episode first hand, I decided to do a little research to see if others had seen this kind of search censorship and timeline manipulation. Lo and behold, there were hundreds of articles relating to this subject. Again, our blogs note page dated 6-28-16 has many more links to articles and you can do a search for yourself to see the large number of articles out there. I recommend doing your search using Yahoo, Bing or even DuckDuckGo just so you have peace of mind. The following is just a small sample of what I saw.
 |
| Courtesy of pixabay.com |
In an article called “Google Search Algorithm Could Steal the Presidency”, the author, Adam Rodgers states, “IMAGINE AN ELECTION—A close one. You’re undecided. So you type the name of one of the candidates into your search engine of choice. (Actually, let’s not be coy here. In most of the world, one search engine dominates; in Europe and North America, it’s Google.) And Google coughs up, in fractions of a second, articles and facts about that candidate. Great! Now you are an informed voter, right? But a study published this week says that the order of those results, the ranking of positive or negative stories on the screen, can have an enormous influence on the way you vote. And if the election is close enough, the effect could be profound enough to change the outcome.” That’s right, they are saying that
Now this does not prove that Google is directly acting in a biased way. It is possible that their algorithm favors certain types of posts or it’s possible the liberals have figured out how to game the system in some way. Google denies any
In another article on PJ Media, by Rick Moran, Moran states that “Google's algorithm is proprietary, so forget about anyone seeing it to determine the cause of this effect. But it would be interesting to see if one party or the other was usually or always negatively impacted by the ranking of search results. The rankings of positive and negative stories are a by-product of the algorithm -- not the intent of Google managers. But could Google -- or a campaign -- actually game the system to manipulate a desired result?” What a great question!
 |
| Courtesy of www.youtube.com Watch the video |
Even the Huffington post, (not a bastion of conservatism) ran an article where Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder, (another person not in the conservative camp) states at a conference in Mexico City, that “Google was now Hillary’s secret weapon,” and it was reported that he provided lots of material showing that this Google conspiracy was the real deal. I don’t want to single out Google here. Since I have provided several examples about Google, let’s look at some of the recent articles published purporting Facebooks censorship and media bias as well.
On May 9th , 2016, in Fox Nation, a report by Michael Nunez Gizmodo had the headline “Report: Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News”. Gizmodo’s article states that “Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users. Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all.” Now if that doesn’t scare you read on.
 |
| Courtesy of www.youtube.com Watch the video |
Since Facebook’s initial denial of any bias or filtering, the world’s most popular social network has instituted special anti-bias training for its editorial staff to make sure bias is not taking place. After reading this, the first question that came to my mind was; If Facebook wasn’t engaged in editorial bias, then why would they need anti-bias training?
More recently, Facebook has allegedly shown that it's still trying to influence politics because they have been accused of editorial bias with regards to Brexit election in England. This time they are accused of being on the conservative side. The article states, “The Brexit-related accusations came about after it was noticed that Facebook offered a ready-made status update proclaiming to be “in Now it should be no secret that the media has been filtering the news
 |
| Courtesy of commons.wikimedia.org |
Today internet media giants like Facebook, with 1.5 billion subscriber’s and Google, which controls more than 70% of all internet searches, have a
Although media bias is not something new, the fact that a few companies control the access
 |
| Courtesy of www.flickr.com |
Make sure you do your due diligence on everything you read on the internet. Anyone can publish anything and call it the truth. To make matters even worse,
That’s my opinion, I look forward to reading yours.
 |
| Get your free copy. |
If you feel your business could use some help with its marketing, contact us at 904-410-2091,We will provide a free marketing analysis to help you get better results. If you found this article useful, please share it with friends, family and co-workers. You can find other articles on our blog by typing in your desired search term in the search box at the top of this blog. I recommend reading The Piracy of Privacy - The Looting of Privacy in America, The State of Internet Privacy & Security in America Today and Is Google Watching You? for starters. Also, don’t forget to plus us, on Google+.
Hector Cisneros is COO and director of Social Media Marketing at Working the Web to Win, an award-winning Internet marketing company based in Jacksonville, Florida. He is also co-host of the weekly Internet radio show, "Working the Web to Win" on BlogTalkRadio.com, which airs every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern. Hector is a syndicated writer and published author of “60 Seconds to Success.”
Related articles
Related articles
They can't tell people what to think so much as what to think about by placing things at the top of the newsfeeds. In that way, they certainly are having great influence.
ReplyDeleteSimple minds are easily controlled.
ReplyDelete