industryterm:internet publication

An open letter to Google: Stop the censorship of the Internet! Stop the political blacklisting of the World Socialist Web Site! - World Socialist Web Site
▻http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/25/pers-a25.html

https://www.wsws.org/img/open-graph-icon.png

Gentlemen:

Google’s mission statement from the outset was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Its official code of conduct was proclaimed in Google’s famous motto: “Don’t be evil.” In recent years, you have seriously lost your way. You are now engaged in hiding the world’s information, and, in the process, are doing a great deal of evil.

Google, and by implication, its parent company Alphabet, Inc., are now engaged in political censorship of the Internet. You are doing what you have previously publicly denounced.

Google is manipulating its Internet searches to restrict public awareness of and access to socialist, anti-war and left-wing websites. The World Socialist Web Site (www.wsws.org) has been massively targeted and is the most affected by your censorship protocols. Referrals to the WSWS from Google have fallen by nearly 70 percent since April of this year.

Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting. The obvious intent of Google’s censorship algorithm is to block news that your company does not want reported and to suppress opinions with which you do not agree.

Ben Gomes, Google’s vice president for search engineering, attempted to justify the imposition of political censorship with a blog post on April 25, claiming that the changes to the algorithm were a response to “the phenomenon of ‘fake news,’ where content on the web has contributed to the spread of blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information.”

Google, according to Gomes, has recruited some 10,000 “evaluators” to judge the “quality” of websites. These evaluators are trained to “flag” websites that are deemed to “include misleading information” and “unsupported conspiracy theories.” Gomes explained that the blacklists created by these evaluators will be used, in combination with the latest developments in technology, to develop an algorithm that will impose censorship automatically, in real time, across future search results.

Whatever the technical changes Google has made to the search algorithm, the anti-left bias of the results is undeniable. The most striking outcome of Google’s censorship procedures is that users whose search queries indicate an interest in socialism, Marxism or Trotskyism are no longer directed to the World Socialist Web Site. Google is “disappearing” the WSWS from the results of search requests. For example, Google searches for “Leon Trotsky” yielded 5,893 impressions (appearances of the WSWS in search results) in May of this year. In July, the same search yielded exactly zero impressions for the WSWS, which is the Internet publication of the international movement founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

As stated above, since April, other left-wing publications that present themselves as progressive, socialist or anti-war also have suffered significant reductions in their Google search results:

alternet.org fell by 63 percent
globalresearch.ca fell by 62 percent
consortiumnews.com fell by 47 percent
mediamatters.org fell by 42 percent
commondreams.org fell by 37 percent
internationalviewpoint.org fell by 36 percent
democracynow.org fell by 36 percent
wikileaks.org fell by 30 percent
truth-out.org fell by 25 percent
counterpunch.org fell by 21 percent
* theintercept.com fell by 19 percent

Google justifies the imposition of political censorship by using a loaded term like “fake news.” This term, properly used, signifies the manufacturing of news based on an artificially constructed event that either never occurred or has been grossly exaggerated. The present-day furor over “fake news” is itself an example of an invented event and artificially constructed narrative. It is a “fake” term that is used to discredit factual information and well-grounded analyses that challenge and discredit government policies and corporate interests. Any invocation of the phrase “fake news,” as it pertains to the WSWS, is devoid of any substance or credibility. In fact, our efforts to combat historical falsification have been recognized, including by the scholarly journal American Historical Review.

#Google #Censure #Fake_news #Appétit_géants

Liu Xiaobo, We Miss You - The New York Times
▻https://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/liu-xiaobo-we-miss-you

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/07/09/opinion/sunday/09Kristof/09Kristof-facebookJumbo.jpg

The Mandela of our age is dead, and Liu Xiaobo will at least now find peace after decades of suffering outrageous mistreatment by the Chinese authorities.

Liu, 61, is the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to die in custody since the Nazi era, and his death is an indictment of China’s brutal treatment of one of the great figures of modern times.

Even as Liu was dying of cancer, China refused to allow Liu to travel for treatment that might have saved his life. In a move that felt crass and disgusting, the Chinese authorities filmed the dying Liu without his consent to make propaganda films falsely depicting merciful treatment of him.

…

For those of you who don’t know Liu, a few glimpses of him:

1. He was a brilliant professor who in the spring of 1989 was a visiting scholar safely ensconced at Columbia University. But when the Tiananmen student democracy protests began, he rushed back to China to support the protesters. When the troops opened fire on protesters on the night of June 3-4, 1989, he could have fled but stayed to negotiate with the Army and arrange a safe exit for students from the center of Tiananmen Square. In the 1990’s as well, he could have moved to the West, but instead he stayed to fight for freedom in his own country

2. His was also a great love story, and the Chinese brutalized his wife, Liu Xia, to put pressure on him. Liu Xia was emotionally fragile, and although she was never even charged with any crime she was confined to house arrest. The Chinese government knew that Liu Xiaobo would never crack, so it deliberately inflicted great isolation and suffering on his wife to gain leverage over him. Yet the couple persevered, and he once wrote a beautiful tribute to her: “Your love is the sunlight that leaps over high walls and penetrates the iron bars of my prison window, stroking every inch of my skin, warming every cell of my body … and filling every minute of my time in prison with meaning.

3. Dissidents are often unreasonable people, for it takes something special to risk everything and challenge an oppressive state. Liu Xiaobo started out his career unreasonable, as an enfant terrible academic, but steadily became more moderate and reasonable in his career. His call for democracy, Charter 08, is a model of reasonableness, and he periodically complimented his persecutors on their professionalism to make clear that he did not resent them—and that is one reason I compare him to Mandela.

4. It’s not clear that President Xi bears responsibility for Liu’s death, but that may well be the case. Although Liu died of liver cancer and had had hepatitis, a risk factor, Chinese prisons are notorious for their poor medical care, and prison authorities often deny medical care to dissidents as a way of putting pressure on them. It seems to me quite plausible that Liu’s cancer would have been discovered earlier, when it was more treatable, if he had not been incarcerated.

5. Liu’s death in custody is also a window into how far backward Xi has taken China. For parts of the 1990’s and 2000’s, Liu was free and able to write for overseas and Internet publications. (I last spoke to him shortly before his arrest in 2008; State Security cut the phone connection after I identified myself.) China under Xi is less free than China was 20 years ago. I wrote an open letter to Liu a few days ago, describing him as perhaps the man I admire most, and I wish he could have seen it—but I’m sure the authorities did not allow him to do so.

6. Most Chinese have never heard of Liu Xiaobo, because the state propaganda apparatus has suppressed discussion of him. Thus the paradox: The first person to win a Nobel for work in China has died, and he is little mourned in his own land. Yet for those of us who followed his extraordinarily important and courageous work over the decades, there is a great sense of emptiness and sadness—not so much sadness for Liu himself, who is now free of persecution, but sadness for China’s backward march and sadness for the timidity of world leaders at the brutalization of one of the great men of modern times. There is so much we can learn from Liu’s courage, decency and vision, and some time I look forward to placing flowers at the memorial to him at Tiananmen Square.