Google Manipulated YouTube Search Results for Abortion, Maxine Waters, David Hogg

‘THE SMOKING GUN’: Google Manipulated YouTube Search Results for Abortion, Maxine Waters, David Hogg

The term "abortion" was added to a "blacklist" file for "controversial YouTube queries," which contains a list of search terms that the company considers sensitive. According to the leak, these include some of these search terms related to: abortion, abortions, the Irish abortion referendum, Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and anti-gun activist David Hogg.

The existence of the blacklist was revealed in an internal Google discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News by a source inside the company who wishes to remain anonymous. A partial list of blacklisted terms was also leaked to Breitbart by another Google source.

In the leaked discussion thread, a Google site reliability engineer hinted at the existence of more search blacklists, according to the source.

"We have tons of white- and blacklists that humans manually curate," said the employee. "Hopefully this isn’t surprising or particularly controversial."

Others were more concerned about the presence of the blacklist. According to the source, the software engineer who started the discussion called the manipulation of search results related to abortion a "smoking gun."

The software engineer noted that the change had occurred following an inquiry from a left-wing Slate journalist about the prominence of pro-life videos on YouTube, and that pro-life videos were replaced with pro-abortion videos in the top ten results for the search terms following Google’s manual intervention.
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As the saying goes, a secret will not stay secret once more than one know it. How Google Manglement imagined that not one of hundreds who knew what they were doing would leak it eludes me. Manglers can be blindingly stupid sometimes.

Companion article:
LEAK: ‘Huge Teams’ Engaged in Manual Interventions on Google Search Results

Google has "huge teams" working on manual interventions in search results, an apparent contradiction of sworn testimony made to Congress by CEO Sundar Pichai, according to an internal post leaked to Breitbart News.
"There are subjects that are prone to hyperbolic content, misleading information, and offensive content," said Daniel Aaronson, a member of Google’s Trust & Safety team.

"Now, these words are highly subjective and no one denies that. But we can all agree generally, lines exist in many cultures about what is clearly okay vs. what is not okay."

"In extreme cases where we need to act quickly on something that is so obviously not okay, the reactive/manual approach is sometimes necessary."

The comments came to light in a leaked internal discussion thread, started by a Google employee who noticed that the company had recently changed search results for "abortion" on its YouTube video platform, a change which caused pro-life videos to largely disappear from the top ten results.

In addition to the "manual approach," Aaronson explained that Google also trained automated "classifiers" – algorithms or "scalable solutions" that corrects "problems" in search results.

Aaronson listed three areas where either manual interventions or classifier changes might take place: organic search ("The bar for changing classifiers or manual actions on span in organic search is extremely high"), YouTube, Google Home, and Google Assistant.

Aaronson’s post also reveals that there is very little transparency around decisions to adjust classifiers or manually correct controversial search results, even internally. Aaronson compared Google’s decision-making process in this regard to a closely-guarded "Pepsi Formula."
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There have been suspicions about this for a long time, but Google has always assured us in the past they are upholding the utmost integrity when it comes to their web searches.
Well it looks like in recent years that integrity has been beginning to slip.