YouTube says it was a system &#8220;error&#8221; that caused the platform&#8217;s moderation system to delete comments critical of China&#8217;s Communist Party and not the work of a heavy-handed YouTube censor.
<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/27/21271611/youtube-deletes-comments-critical-china-communist-party-fixed">The Verge reports</a> that YouTube users began flagging the disappearance of YouTube comments containing the Chinese characters for the words “communist bandit” and “50-cent party,&#8221; both of which are phrases typically deployed against the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP.
&#8220;The former phrase is an insult dating back to China’s Nationalist government,&#8221; the Verge says, &#8220;while the latter is derogatory slang for internet users paid to defend the CCP from criticism online. It originates from the claim that these users are paid 50 Chinese cents per post.&#8221;
Users said the platform deleted the objectionable comments &#8220;in a matter of seconds.&#8221;
The problem began in October, but YouTube addressed the issue on Tuesday, blaming the problem on an overzealous “enforcement system&#8221; and apologized for the error.
YouTube told The Verge &#8220;that the issue that caused comments containing these phrases to be deleted had been fixed for a number of these terms, but that it was still investigating the deeper causes of the error.&#8221; A quick test of the moderation system reveals that the phrases are no longer subject to censorship.
Technology watchdogs, though, say YouTube&#8217;s excuse does not make sense.
&#8220;A spokesperson told The Verge only that the deletions were not the result of any change to YouTube’s moderation policy, and that the company has been relying on its automated systems more than ever recently as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, implying that the automatic deletions are connected.&#8221;
“We’re always working to resolve issues on YouTube,” a YouTube spokesperson <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/youtube-china-communisty-party-comments.html">added to CNBC</a>. “Upon review by our teams, we have confirmed this was an error in our enforcement systems.”
But, the tech news outlet points out, an overzealous automatic moderator only partially explains the censorship, and given that the deletions began in October, not March, it&#8217;s difficult to blame the problem on coronavirus.
It&#8217;s also strange that comments critical of the Chinese government would fall under censorship outside of China&#8217;s borders, particularly given that YouTube is blocked in China. Chinese users have a proprietary Chinese version of YouTube, just as they have a version of Twitter, Google, and Amazon. Google was, at one point, building a censored search engine for China, &#8220;Project Dragonfly,&#8221; but scrapped the program after it became public and Google employees objected.
Republican Senator Ted Cruz was quick to target YouTube&#8217;s parent company, Google, over the incident, and suggested that a Federal investigation may be warranted.
“Why is Google/YouTube censoring Americans on behalf of the CCP? This is WRONG,” Cruz tweeted on Tuesday. “Big Tech is drunk with power. The Sherman Act prohibits abusing monopoly power. DOJ (Department of Justice) needs to stop this NOW.”
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Youtube comment

YouTube Blames System ‘Error’ For Deleting Comments Critical Of Chinese Communist Party

Censorship

China

Google

YouTube

Joe Rogan, the stand-up comedian and host of The Joe Rogan Experience, has partnered with Spotify in a reported nine-figure, multi-year deal that will make his full show an exclusive to the company by the end of the year. 
“Bringing the JRE to Spotify will mean that the platform’s more than 286 million active users will have access to one of culture’s leading voices,” said the company in a <a href="https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-05-19/the-joe-rogan-experience-launches-exclusive-partnership-with-spotify/">statement</a>, which referred to Rogan as having helped “lay the foundation” to the modern “podcasting renaissance.”
Spotify also emphasized that the show will remain free to all users, and that Rogan’s full-length video episodes — each of which is hours-long and  can rake in millions of YouTube views — will be made available as “in-app vodcasts.”
“Starting on September 1, the entire JRE library will be available on Spotify as well as all the other platforms,” said Rogan in a video statement. “Somewhere around the end of the year, it will become exclusive to Spotify, including the video version of the podcast.”
“I am not going to be an employee of Spotify, we’re going to be working with the same crew, doing the exact same show,” said Rogan, who assured fans of his free-form style that they would not be disappointed. “The only difference will be is it will now be available on the largest audio platform in the world.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Announcement: the podcast is moving to spotify! 
Starting on September 1 the podcast will be available on Spotify as well as all platforms, and then at the end of the year it will move exclusively to Spotify,… <a href="https://t.co/7IRHET5eZo">https://t.co/7IRHET5eZo</a>
— Joe Rogan (@joerogan) <a href="https://twitter.com/joerogan/status/1262812859983151104?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 19, 2020</a></blockquote>
A source familiar with the matter told <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/spotify-strikes-exclusive-podcast-deal-with-joe-rogan-11589913814?mod=hp_lead_pos11">The Wall Street Journa</a>l that the multi-year licensing deal is worth more than $100 million, but The Journal could not verify the length of the agreement. In the hours after the announcement, Spotify stock closed at $175.01 per share on Tuesday evening, marking an over 8% increase from opening. 
Over the last eleven years, Rogan has grown his podcast into an internet phenomenon, releasing near-daily episodes that feature free-form discussions with comedians, scientists, journalists, cultural figures, among other guests. 
Each discussion typically rivals the length of most movies, and the most popular ones command millions of views. His 2018 episode with Tesla CEO Elon Musk has drawn 34 million views on YouTube alone, and his 2.5 hour discussion with Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro last year has been viewed over 8 million times. Rogan&#8217;s show has also featured discussions with politicians, including Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). 
As <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-has-backed-away-from-sanders-campaign-wont-stump-for-bernie-until-he-disavows-joe-rogan">The Daily Wire</a> previously reported, Rogan said that he would probably support Sanders in the California primary, a move that reportedly prompted Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to distance herself from Sanders after he promoted a video clip of Rogan’s quasi-endorsement. 
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Performances At The Ice House Comedy Club

Joe Rogan Signs Exclusive Deal With Spotify, Moving Show Off YouTube

Joe Rogan

YouTube has yanked a video posted to the platform in April by veteran scholar of epidemiology Dr. Knut Wittkowski, wherein he warns about the consequences of lockdown orders.
Wittkowski, formerly the head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at Rockefeller University in New York City, argued that shelter-in-place policies could actually result in more deaths in the long term throughout the now-removed video.
The general argument made by Wittkowski is that lockdown orders prolong any efforts in developing so-called herd immunity, which is our only weapon in “exterminating” the novel coronavirus outside of a vaccine and that could optimistically take longer than 18 months. Focusing on shielding the most vulnerable to the virus (our elderly and folks with comorbidities) while allowing the young and healthy to build up immunity would, in the end, save more lives, he explained.
Though Wittkowski feels his video was prophetic and he has already been vindicated, YouTube has seemingly cited supposed misinformation as their rationale for pulling the video.
“We quickly remove flagged content that violates our Community Guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of global or local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance,&#8221; YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi told <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/05/16/youtube-censors-epidemiologist-knut-wittkowski-for-opposing-lockdown/">The New York Post</a> in a statement regarding the censored video. &#8220;We are committed to continue providing timely and helpful information at this critical time.”
A nearly identical statement was sent to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/video-of-frontline-doctors-challenging-lockdown-removed-from-youtube">The Daily Wire</a> by Choi last month when we inquired about the platform pulling a video of two California E.R. doctors questioning national media lockdown dogma for their area during a press briefing.
“I was just explaining what we had,” Wittkowski explained to the Post, unclear about why his video, produced by the British film company Journeyman Pictures, was pulled. “They don’t tell you,&#8221; he added. &#8220;They just say it violates our community standards. There’s no explanation for what those standards are or what standards it violated.”
As noted by the Post, &#8220;Roughly one-third of all US COVID-19 deaths have been among nursing home patients and staff, a problem that Wittkowski says was deeply exacerbated in New York by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s March 25 executive order requiring nursing homes to accept individuals with the virus.&#8221;
“Cuomo can’t undo his mistake of forcing nursing homes to take in infected people when the horse is out of the barn,” the epidemiologist  said, unimpressed by Cuomo&#8217;s recent reversal of the deadly policy.
Wittkowski will not wear a mask and eats at underground restaurants, the Post noted. “We don’t have to fear anything but fear. Wasn’t that an American who said that?&#8221; he quipped.
The <a href="https://www.aier.org/article/stand-up-for-your-rights-says-bio-statistican-knut-m-wittkowski/">American Institute for Economic Research</a> is currently hosting Wittkowski&#8217;s YouTube-banned video.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/epidemiologist-warns-of-unintended-consequences-from-lockdowns">Epidemiologist Warns Of Unintended Consequences From Lockdowns</a>
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

COVID-19 structure

Viral Video Of Epidemiologist Warning Against Lockdown Pulled From YouTube. Epidemiologist Responds.

Coronavirus

COVID-19

The video has been viewed 47,828,146 times.
We all knew him simply as &#8220;the double rainbow guy.&#8221; But his name was Paul Vasquez, and, sadly, he&#8217;s passed away at the age of 57.
&#8220;Paul &#8216;Bear&#8217; Vasquez lived simply. He sheltered on the side of a mountain outside Yosemite National Park, grew his own food and woke up every morning to one of the most magnificent views in California,&#8221; <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/11/us/paul-vasquez-double-rainbow-death-trnd/index.html">CNN</a> reported. &#8220;The world may never have known him if not for a spectacular double rainbow.&#8221;
From his incredible vantage point in the hills of Yosemite, Vasquez captured a double rainbow on his cellphone &#8212; and narrated the whole thing.
&#8220;Double rainbow! It&#8217;s a double rainbow all the way. Whoa. Whooa! Oh my God, oh my God!&#8221; he says in the video, shot in 2010.
&#8220;Oh my God, it&#8217;s a full-on double rainbow all the way across the sky!&#8221; he says quietly before letting out a full-throated whoop. &#8220;It&#8217;s started to look like a triple rainbow!&#8221;
The sheer beauty of the scene overwhelms him and he breaks out into sobs of joy. &#8220;What does this mean?!&#8221; he asks. &#8220;It&#8217;s so bright and vivid. Ohh. OHHH! It&#8217;s so beautiful!&#8221; he says as his sobs grow louder.
&#8220;Double complete rainbow, in my front yard!&#8221; he says, the sobs grower even louder. &#8220;It&#8217;s too much! I don&#8217;t know what it means. Oh my God! It&#8217;s so intense!&#8221;
<iframe title="Yosemitebear Mountain Double Rainbow 1-8-10" width="500" height="375" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OQSNhk5ICTI?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
But Vasquez was more than just &#8220;the double rainbow guy.&#8221;
He was born in east Los Angeles, where he grew up, eventually working as a firefighter. But Vasquez yearned for the mountains.
&#8220;Vasquez thrived in the California wilderness. He moved from East Los Angeles &#8230; to Yosemite in 1985. He worked in a variety of roles at the national park and later out of the park as a cage fighter and truck driver,&#8221; CNN reported.
<blockquote>He married, had children and divorced. Finally, he settled at his humble perch on the side of a mountain in Mariposa, 10 miles from the edge of Yosemite, where he grew his own food and cultivated marijuana plants.
&#8220;When you live alone like this, you connect to nature on a deeper level,&#8221; he told CNN nearly five years ago. &#8220;When you can yell at the top of your lungs and no one cares or knows, it gives you a type of freedom that most people have no understanding of.&#8221;</blockquote>
Vasquez didn&#8217;t care much about money. In 2015, he made just $6,000 a year.
&#8220;In some aspects, I feel really, really rich,&#8221; he said. &#8220;I may not have a lot of dollars, but I have 100 mile views with complete privacy that hundreds of millions of people have seen. I got it pretty good.&#8221;
For a short time, Bear had his moment of fame, even making an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” as well as in ads for Microsoft and Smartwater. He starred in an in-flight safety video for Delta Air Lines.
He joked about that fame in 2015, saying: &#8220;I&#8217;m the world&#8217;s authority on rainbows.&#8221;
“You can&#8217;t look at a double rainbow anymore and not think about me,&#8221; he said.
And he&#8217;s right.
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">member</a>.

Double rainbow over pasture with evergreen trees and clouds

‘IT’S SOOOOOO BEAUTIFUL!’ ‘Double Rainbow Guy’ Dies At 57

<div>
On Monday, YouTube removed a video of two frontline California doctors challenging lockdown from an ABC News affiliate&#8217;s page, citing a violation of the platform&#8217;s &#8220;community guidelines.&#8221;
The two doctors, Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi of Accelerated Urgent Care, told reporters last week in a taped press conference that nationwide lockdown policies are not an appropriate reaction to what current data indicates about the China-originated novel coronavirus, but are instead causing measurable public health issues, like spikes in domestic violence, sexual abuse, depression, and spreading fear to non-COVID-19 related would-be patients that are skipping out on vital health care.
Erickson compared COVID-19 to the season flu by using extrapolated data from both nonrandomized testing done at Accelerated Urgent Care and antibody testing across the nation, which are randomized. (Note: extrapolation of nonrandomized data would likely skew the fatality rate down, since the people getting tested typically believe they might have the virus, thus making them more likely to test positive for the virus than the general public.)
YouTube told The Daily Wire on Tuesday that the first part of the presser was removed from the platform for containing &#8220;content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance.&#8221; If the content was included with additional &#8220;context,&#8221; the platform added, the video would be allowed.
“We quickly remove flagged content that violate our <a href="https://www.youtube.com/about/policies/#community-guidelines" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.youtube.com/about/policies/%23community-guidelines&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1588203515146000&amp;usg=AFQjCNH6R5hzIDN2g1Ibtxnw3_t3vu1PDQ">Community Guidelines</a>, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance,&#8221; YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi told The Daily Wire in an emailed statement Tuesday. &#8220;However, content that provides sufficient educational, documentary, scientific or artistic (EDSA) context is allowed &#8212; for example, news coverage of this interview with additional context. From the very beginning of the pandemic, we’ve had clear policies against COVID-19 misinformation and are committed to continue providing timely and helpful information at this critical time.”
Erickson told <a href="https://www.turnto23.com/news/coronavirus/video-interview-with-dr-dan-erickson-and-dr-artin-massihi-taken-down-from-youtube">23 ABC News Bakersfield</a> of the video pull, &#8220;Anytime you push against the grain, you are going to have people who don&#8217;t like it.&#8221;
During the video presser, the doctors said the virus is not what we planned for, coming nowhere near the 2.2 million deaths projected without intervention or the hundreds of thousands projected considering lockdown measures.
&#8220;If you study the numbers in 2017 and 2018, we had 50 to 60 million with the flu,&#8221; Erickson <a href="https://www.aier.org/article/open-up-society-now-say-dr-dan-erickson-and-dr-artin-massihi/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-ol-has-click-handler="">said</a> during the press conference, The Blaze noted. &#8220;And we had a similar death rate in the deaths the United States were 43,545 — similar to the flu of 2017-2018. We always have between 37,000 and 60,000 deaths in the United States, every single year. No pandemic talk. No shelter in place. No shutting down businesses.&#8221;
The doctors argued lockdown was fomenting fear which in turn has created non-COVID-related patients skipping out on lifesaving care at hospitals and emergency rooms.
“When I talk to E.R. physicians around the country, what’s happening?” he said. “Well, because COVID has become the focus, people with heart disease, people with cancer, hypertension, and various things that are critical are choosing not to come in based on fear. So what that’s doing is forcing the health care system to focus on COVID and not focus on a myriad of other things that are critical because we don’t have the staff there and the major complaint is fear.”
A doctor on the frontlines of COVID-19 hotspot New York City similarly said in an op-ed posted Monday at The New York Post that the extended lockdowns were creating more harm than good, especially past the initial surge.
The significant drop in 911 ambulance runs, which is currently “significantly below the average,” suggests “a large share of those staying home surely have emergency medical and surgical conditions not related to the novel coronavirus. The growing numbers ­dying at home during this crisis must include fatal myocardial infarctions, asthma exacerbations, bacterial infections and stroke,&#8221; argued Daniel G. Murphy, MD, the chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx.
Pediatric volume in the ER “has practically disappeared,” he added. “Visits to primary-care pediatricians are also down, with vaccine schedules falling behind. Everyone seems to be avoiding the health system — an important and unfortunate consequence of the stay-at-home strategy.”
</div>
<div>Before the video of Erickson and Massihi was removed, it received nearly 5.5 million views.</div>
23 ABC News Bakersfield has appealed YouTube&#8217;s decision to removed the video.
<div>
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.  
</div>

Coronavirus around blood cells

Video Of Frontline Doctors Challenging Lockdown Removed From YouTube

Speaking on CNN’s &#8220;Reliable Sources&#8221; with host Brian Stelter, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki stated that anything that would contradict World Health Organization recommendations would be removed from the platform.
Wojcicki said, &#8220;We have actually seen a 75 percent increase in the news coming from authoritative sources since the beginning of 2020. So, we have seen a lot of demand there. But then we also —&#8221;
Stelter interrupted, &#8220;What does that mean? That means an increase in video views for those?&#8221;
Wojcicki continued, &#8220;Yes. And so we talk about that as raising authoritative information. But then we also talk about removing information that is problematic, you know. Of course, anything that is medically unsubstantiated. So people saying, like, take vitamin C, you know, take turmeric, like, those are — will cure you. Those are the examples of things that would be a violation of our policy. Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy. And so remove is another really important part of our policy.&#8221;
After a live-streamed video aired on April 6 with David Icke, whom the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52198946">BBC describes</a> as a “conspiracy theorist,” in which Icke claimed about the coronavirus that there &#8220;is a link between 5G and this health crisis,” as well as claiming that a coronavirus vaccine would include &#8220;nanotechnology microchips&#8221; permitting humans to be controlled and that billionaire Bill Gates should be jailed, YouTube deleted the video.
When the BBC queried why YouTube allowed the video to be aired, a YouTube spokesperson replied:
<blockquote>We have clear policies that prohibit videos promoting medically unsubstantiated methods to prevent the coronavirus in place of seeking medical treatment, and we quickly remove videos violating these policies when flagged to us. Now any content that disputes the existence or transmission of Covid-19, as described by the WHO [World Health Organization] and local health authorities is in violation of YouTube policies.
This includes conspiracy theories which claim that the symptoms are caused by 5G. For borderline content that could misinform users in harmful ways, we reduce recommendations. We&#8217;ll continue to evaluate the impact of these videos on communities around the world.</blockquote>
Wojcicki’s statement apparently goes further, as the statement from YouTube to the BBC said the platform would consider “content that disputes the existence or transmission of Covid-19, as described by the WHO” to be in violation of YouTube’s policies, but Wojcicki now broadens that prohibition to include “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations.”
YouTube removed videos of Brazilian president Jair Messias Bolsonaro in which he extolled the virtues of hydroxychloroquine, saying it was the best treatment for COVID-19. <a href="https://www.axios.com/youtube-coronavirus-misinformation-videos-google-d9ce89cb-0de0-4f50-8a25-5923e078a858.html">Axios</a> reported on April 7, “YouTube is also aggressively enforcing existing medical misinformation policies that prohibit promoting false cures or encouraging people not to see a doctor. And it expanded that policy to bar promoting actions that go against recommendations from national health authorities. It was on that basis that the company took down posts by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who has downplayed the virus and the importance of social distancing and other precautions.”
Bolsonaro has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQmP9IB5oiA">stated</a>, “There is no coronavirus vaccination or highly effective medicine, but I still think hydroxychloroquine is quite effective. It will make the virus disappear quickly.&#8221;
When Neal Mohan, YouTube’s product chief, was asked if someone could post a video endorsing a drug yet to be approved by the FDA for treating coronavirus, he responded, &#8220;That gets at the challenge. It&#8217;s a balancing act&#8230;. We are not medical experts ourselves.&#8221;
Video below:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcocki says users are using the platform during the coronavirus crisis.
It started with basic information but now users “want to know about life under quarantine&#8230; like exercise at home. How do I fix my freezer? How do I give myself a haircut.” <a href="https://t.co/p8jxTUBRte">pic.twitter.com/p8jxTUBRte</a>
&mdash; Reliable Sources (@ReliableSources) <a href="https://twitter.com/ReliableSources/status/1251910060311265280?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 19, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The Daily Wire, headed by bestselling author and popular podcast host Ben Shapiro, is a leading provider of conservative news, cutting through the mainstream media’s rhetoric to provide readers the most important, relevant, and engaging stories of the day. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1587599148037000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFYpEM4wd1oTRDuU2nApzdWt7wN5w">subscriber</a>.

WIRED25 Summit: WIRED Celebrates 25th Anniversary With Tech Icons Of The Past &amp; Future

WATCH: YouTube CEO: We’ll Remove Any Content That Goes Against WHO Recommendations

World Health Organization

On Wednesday, former NASA engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober released a video on germs.
In the video, Rober runs several experiments in a third grade classroom using a powder and lotion that glow under a black light in order to demonstrate how germs are spread, the ways we fail when washing our hands, and how touching your face is a difficult habit to break.
“I found this powder called Glo Germ, and just like real germs, when it’s on your hands, you can’t see it, but unlike real germs, if you turn a black light on, it becomes visible,” Rober states. “But it transfers to things you touch, so it provides a really good way to visualize exactly how germs spread.”
Rober first examines the classroom with a black light to spot any surfaces where there might be fluorescence. Then the game is on. The YouTuber applies Glo Germ powder to the teacher’s hands, who then shakes the hands of three random students. Rober also applies the powder to one student’s hands during recess.
At lunch, Rober checks out the surfaces in the classroom. They are covered – desks, doorknobs, bins, and student hands show large amounts or traces of powered. Rober even notes that the kids were “pretty diligent about washing their hands.” Even so, the Glo Germ was everywhere.
“What’s crazy is that germs could live on a hard surface like this for up to nine days,” Rober says.
The YouTuber then speaks about how phones are loaded with germs, and that washing your hands has little impact if after washing, you immediately grab your phone that hasn’t been sanitized.
“Think about when the last time was that you cleaned your phone,” he states.
Rober’s experiment, he hopes, will demonstrate the importance of washing your hands and using hand sanitizer after touching elevator buttons, holding onto railings, pumping gas, etc.
Rober then talks about face-touching.
“The ultimate defense against catching a virus is just don’t touch your face,” Rober notes. “Your eyes, nose, and mouth are like the single weak spot on the Death Star when it comes to viruses.”
Multiple photos are shown of the third-graders touching their faces – but it wasn’t just the students who were habitual face-touchers. Under the black light, the teacher had numerous glowing smears across her face despite trying her best to avoid face-touching.
Rober decides to try the face-touching experiment on himself, applying the Glo Germ powder to his own hands. Several hours later, the black light shows that even he, with the full understanding that touching his face would transfer the powder, had multiple markings from unconsciously touching his face.
“On average, we touch our face 16 times and hour, which is why washing hands is so important,” Rober says.
In Rober’s last experiment, he has the third-graders apply glowing hand lotion, then wash their hands. After they all wash, Rober examines their hands, and finds weak spots – wrists, fingernails, etc.
As to how this all relates to coronavirus, Rober says that the idea is to “flatten the curve” so we don’t overwhelm our health care system, and that social distancing is key in the fight against the virus.
“I’m a practical optimist,” Rober says. “The upside is while this virus is bad, it could be way worse, and this gives us a chance as a global community to get some systems and methods in place to handle something potentially even more drastic in the future.”
Rober concludes by noting that perhaps some social norms will change as a result of this virus, and that the impact of this pandemic may help lower future deaths related to the seasonal flu, which kills up to half a million people annually “due in large part to people not practicing good germ hygiene.”
There’s more to this excellent video that wasn’t included here, so check it out below:
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/I5-dI74zxPg" width="720" height="385" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>

Hand on escalator rail

WATCH: With Black Light Powder, YouTuber Demonstrates How Germs Spread, And How To Stay Healthy

Mark Rober

On Wednesday, right-leaning political personality and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html">&#8220;Intellectual Dark Web&#8221;</a> icon Dave Rubin announced the launch of a previously teased venture whose goal is to combat the status quo of rampant Big Tech censorship, de-platforming, and de-monetization practices: <a href="https://locals.com">Locals.com</a>.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
If you’re a creator and you want to own your own community, set your own rules, post video and audio to a curated feed, chat with supporters, sell tickets to events, build your own network with other creators and much more, join us on <a href="https://t.co/WLIO0Cxwe0">https://t.co/WLIO0Cxwe0</a>
The future is now. <a href="https://t.co/JfSRcGbMDq">pic.twitter.com/JfSRcGbMDq</a>
&mdash; Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) <a href="https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1202288504006307841?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 4, 2019</a></blockquote>
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With the tag line of &#8220;Own your community, Own your future,&#8221; Locals pitches itself to content creators as a one-stop &#8220;home for all your content&#8221; through which creators can &#8220;[p]ost videos, photos, podcasts, messages, and polls,&#8221; as well as &#8220;[s]ell tickets to events, and offer exclusive content to your supporters.&#8221; The site advertises that it can strengthen content creators&#8217; relationship with their fans by removing the Big Tech middlemen and serve as a networking/community hub by allowing content creators to easily and freely associate with others. Perhaps most importantly, Locals tells creators to &#8220;[s]et your own rules&#8221; for interaction, in marked distinction with the &#8220;inconsistent and unfair moderation&#8221; of Big Tech.
Rubin, who is currently the only person publicly identified with launching the Locals project, spoke exclusively with The Daily Wire for a wide-ranging interview about the origins and importance of Locals.
&#8220;Everyone knows there is a massive problem with Big Tech,&#8221; Rubin began. &#8220;We have all outsourced all of our ability to communicate with each other to these Big Tech behemoths — no one really owns their content or knows what their terms of service are.&#8221;
Creators have very little access to their own audiences, Rubin continued, because Big Tech companies are clearly manipulating their algorithms and engaging in clandestine shadow-banning-type behavior. With the status quo, content creators have no way of ensuring that they can actually reach all of their followers and subscribers.
&#8220;For someone like me, from a libertarian/classical liberal way of thinking,&#8221; Rubin went on, &#8220;it’s time to reverse this. It’s time for creators, who are the real drivers of social media — the people who are generating clicks and creating podcasts — to be in control. It&#8217;s time for a new model.&#8221;
Locals, Rubin explained, &#8220;is a community-based app and desktop website where you can post audio, post video, communicate with your fans, and so forth. It’s subscription-only, so that takes care of all the bots and trolls and anonymous haters. One of the reasons that everyone hates everything online is that you have smart people arguing with these pink fox anime avatars on Twitter.&#8221;
Rubin&#8217;s signature &#8220;Rubin Report&#8221; program is the very first Local, he said, and he promised that more big-name creators will be rolled out soon. It will be up to each content creator to decide how much to charge for access to his/her Local, beginning with as little as three dollars per month. Each Local not only sets his/her own rules, but also owns his/her users&#8217; data — &#8220;so that, even if you leave Locals,&#8221; Rubin noted, &#8220;you can still communicate directly&#8221; with your fans.
Suffice it to say this is a very different model than the one currently deployed by Big Tech giants like YouTube.
&#8220;There are so many people out there around the world who have all this great stuff to say, but these platforms are controlled by external platforms who manipulate,&#8221; Rubin said, coming to a crescendo. &#8220;I want to give every creator the chance to be truly independent. I created a tech company, not a platform.&#8221;
Combatting Big Tech censorship is an increasingly popular political agenda for the American Right. Freshman Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has made taking on Big Tech a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-josh-hawleys-bill-taking-big-tech-josh-hammer">focal point of his first year</a> in office. Earlier this week, furthermore, numerous leading conservative thinkers co-signed an <a href="https://americanmind.org/essays/for-real-american-greatness-a-tech-new-deal/">essay</a> for the Claremont Institute&#8217;s American Mind online journal that called for a &#8220;Tech New Deal&#8221; intended to ultimately &#8220;ensure[] America can extend its greatness well into the digital age.&#8221;

Dave Rubin

Dave Rubin Launches ‘Locals,’ A New Venture To Combat Big Tech Censorship

Facebook

Free Speech

Intellectual Dark Web

Josh Hawley

Technology

Twitter

The Daily Signal, the Heritage Foundation&#8217;s investigative reporting, news, and commentary outlet, says that one of their videos, a YouTube testimonial from a pediatrician about gender transition surgery for children, was censored by YouTube for &#8220;hate speech.&#8221;
<a href="https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/11/05/youtube-wont-let-a-medical-doctor-say-this-sentence/">According to the Daily Signal&#8217;s</a> Kate Trinko, the group&#8217;s 2017 video starring Dr. Michelle Cretella, &#8220;pediatrician with many years’ experience and the executive director of the American Academy of Pediatricians,&#8221; was pulled off YouTube because, in the video, Cretella suggested that, “if you want to cut off a leg or an arm you’re mentally ill, but if you want to cut off healthy breasts or a penis, you’re transgender.”
&#8220;The Daily Signal recently learned that our video of Cretella had been removed from YouTube. In its place, YouTube displayed this message: “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech,&#8221; the group says.
Attempts to contact YouTube proved futile. &#8220;Over the past few months, The Daily Signal worked with YouTube to try to reach a resolution. Ultimately, we were told the only way we could get the video back on YouTube was to delete the previously mentioned sentence.&#8221;
That amounts to censorship, the Daily Signal says, and it should scare anyone who seeks to put material up on the platform.
The Daily Signal admits that Cretella&#8217;s statement is controversial, but that doesn&#8217;t make it &#8220;hate speech,&#8221; even under a broad definition. It simply makes it &#8230; controversial. The topic itself &#8212; transgenderism and gender transition measures for children &#8212; is a hot topic, and Cretella&#8217;s point is that society views some bodily alterations with scorn and others with an open embrace. Cretella&#8217;s statement doesn&#8217;t even reference transgenderism or gender transition surgery specifically.
But, it seems, a YouTube viewer reported it for hate speech anyway, and YouTube agreed with the designation.
YouTube began an effort to scrub &#8220;hate speech&#8221; from its platform last year, and added a description of &#8220;hate speech&#8221; to its terms and conditions: “Hate speech is not allowed on YouTube. We remove content promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on any of the following attributes.&#8221; Those attributes include “Gender Identity and Expression” and “Sex/Gender.&#8221; Since then, the company has been adding categories to what it considers &#8220;hate speech,&#8221; including statements that claim one group is superior.
The Daily Signal says they &#8220;agree with the spirit behind YouTube’s hate speech policy,&#8221; and that they believe &#8220;transgender individuals, and any individual struggling with gender identity issues, should be treated with love and respect.&#8221; They also say that &#8220;private companies, including YouTube, should be allowed to set and enforce their own rules.&#8221;
They do not believe that Cretella&#8217;s statement rises to the level of &#8220;hate speech,&#8221; and they do believe that consumers have the right to protest what they believe to be unfair treatment.
YouTube has met with criticism over its censorship policies from both the left and the right. Recent changes to YouTube&#8217;s hate speech criteria have resulted in <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/youtube-holocaust-censorship-hate-speech-google-facebook-1444090">educational videos being removed </a>and <a href="https://www.engadget.com/2019/06/05/youtube-hate-speech-policy-nazi-holocaust-sandy-hook/">ever-expanding &#8220;hate speech&#8221; categories</a>. The issue of policing hundreds of hours of video uploaded every minute, however, makes enforcing any type of &#8220;hate speech&#8221; code shockingly difficult.

YouTube Space, London

YouTube Bans Daily Signal Video On Gender Transitions Over ‘Hate Speech’

Transgender

Conservative non-profit PragerU is facing off with tech giant YouTube in court on Friday over the platform’s continued restriction of dozens of PragerU videos that the nonprofit says has far more to do with ideology than any supposedly “neutral” criteria imposed by YouTube.
Ahead of the legal showdown, PragerU has figured out a creative way to give the public — and YouTube employees — a chance to see some of the videos the platform has decided to restrict from children and others.
As the organization announced in a Facebook post this week, PragerU will be driving a box truck with giant LED screens around Silicon Valley on Thursday to promote its content and its cause. Organizers of the mobile screening say they plan to spend a lot of time directly in front of the YouTube headquarters as well HQs of some other big tech companies.
In an interview with <a href="https://pjmedia.com/trending/prageru-truck-to-blast-banned-videos-on-screens-in-front-of-youtube/">PJ Media</a> Tuesday, PragerU’s Chief Marketing Officer Craig Strazzeri summarized the plan of action and their rationale for rolling out the LED screen-covered truck.
&#8220;We rented a box truck with LED video screens on the side and we’re going to be playing all the PragerU videos that YouTube has restricted,&#8221; Strazzeri told the outlet. The plan, he said, will be to buzz the towers of industry giants Google, Twitter, and Facebook ahead of their big day in court Friday.
&#8220;It’s obvious that our videos are educational and appropriate for young people,&#8221; he said, countering YouTube’s defense that they are applying a consistent standard for restricting content.
&#8220;All young people should be watching our videos,” Strazzeri added. “We do hope that lots of people will be given the chance to see our videos.”
The restricted video truck stunt, Strazzeri suggested, is part of their effort to not just win in California court but “win in the court of public opinion.&#8221;
The case that kicks off Friday is one of two lawsuits — one state-level and the other federal — PragerU has brought against Google/YouTube related to the restriction of its educational content. The federal case was heard by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in August and is still awaiting a verdict.
The state-level case provides the nonprofit a chance to level additional complaints regarding breach of contract and consumer fraud.
PragerU maintains that YouTube handles their content differently than other publishers, unfairly limiting the reach of some videos by designating them as restricted. The organization’s consumer fraud complaint stems from their contention that YouTube promises to be an ideologically and politically neutral platform but instead allows bias to influence how it treats content and publishers. <a href="https://pjmedia.com/trending/round-2-prageru-lawsuit-claims-google-youtube-violated-calif-law-on-free-speech-discrimination/">Tyler O&#8217;Neil</a> summarizes the case:
<blockquote>
In the California case, PragerU brought four separate claims against Google and YouTube: that the companies violated the free speech protections of Article 1 Section 2 of the California Constitution; that they violated the Unruh Civil Rights Act by engaging in political and viewpoint discrimination against PragerU; that they violated the state&#8217;s business code through unfair competition; and that they breached the implied terms of their contract.
</blockquote>
Over 80 of PragerU&#8217;s videos have been &#8220;restricted&#8221; and over 40 have been demonetized by the platform. The nature and specifics of the content, PragerU says, do not warrant such action and similar content online that has not be restricted or demonetized is evidence of viewpoint discrimination and unfair practices.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/leaked-google-doc-describes-shapiro-peterson-james-barrett">Leaked Google Doc Describes Shapiro, Peterson, PragerU As ‘Nazis Using The Dog Whistles’</a>

PragerU Finds Creative Way To Bring Attention To YouTube ‘Censorship’

Prager University

On Tuesday, Blaze personality and &#8220;Louder With Crowder&#8221; host Steven Crowder <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHHQl3ND6bk">went live on his YouTube channel</a> to present evidence he believes shows YouTube and Google censoring 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard and removing her videos and YouTube channel from American search results at key times.
Crowder, who came across the evidence as a result of his prior dealings with YouTube &#8212; including enduring a coordinated attack on his ability to monetize his channel, pushed by Vox Media &#8212; claims that, following former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton&#8217;s attacks on Gabbard, Friday, YouTube throttled Gabbard&#8217;s channel, removing it from American search results, even though the channel and videos remained visible in other countries.
Crowder and his team report that they used several different VPNs to conduct searches for Gabbard&#8217;s content, each VPN for a different nation. The team then recorded the results of their experiment. Crowder released the videos on his Twitter feed Tuesday afternoon during his live broadcast.
The first video shows results for Gabbard on Friday, after Clinton claimed that Gabbard was a Russian asset and that Russia was assisting in promoting Gabbard in order to upend the 2020 presidential election with a viable third party candidate.
&#8220;We searched for Tulsi Gabbard, her channel and her videos all showed up first,&#8221; Crowder claimed on his livestream. &#8220;When we switched our VPN to the United Sates &#8230; nothing.&#8221;
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YouTube search results on Sunday, October 20th for &quot;Tulsi Gabbard&quot; first set to US results, then Spain via VPN. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CrowderExposesYouTube?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#CrowderExposesYouTube</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/YouTube2020ElectionBlacklist?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#YouTube2020ElectionBlacklist</a> <a href="https://t.co/ZZXwFoeEMF">pic.twitter.com/ZZXwFoeEMF</a>
&mdash; Steven Crowder (@scrowder) <a href="https://twitter.com/scrowder/status/1186729969784803328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 22, 2019</a></blockquote>
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The second video shows Gabbard&#8217;s results returning to normal on Sunday, well after she had passed out of social media&#8217;s trending topics. The results, Crowder says, &#8220;magically switched back to being identical.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
YouTube search results on Sunday, October 20th for &quot;Tulsi Gabbard&quot; first set to US results, then Spain via VPN. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CrowderExposesYouTube?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#CrowderExposesYouTube</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/YouTube2020ElectionBlacklist?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#YouTube2020ElectionBlacklist</a> <a href="https://t.co/ZZXwFoeEMF">pic.twitter.com/ZZXwFoeEMF</a>
&mdash; Steven Crowder (@scrowder) <a href="https://twitter.com/scrowder/status/1186729969784803328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 22, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Crowder called the results &#8220;chilling,&#8221; and suggested that the searchers were proof that YouTube&#8217;s algorithm can be altered and that YouTube can effectively control the flow of information to its users.
The late-night Internet host then went on to say that he believes, based on his own experience working with YouTube in the wake of his channel&#8217;s demonitziation, that it is a YouTube employee (or employees) &#8212; a real person or persons &#8212; &#8220;flipping the switch&#8221; on Gabbard&#8217;s channel and not simply a result of a flaw in YouTube&#8217;s master algorithm or location-based search result tailoring.
Months ago, when Crowder was demonitized by YouTube, following a protracted battle with a far-left journalist, the team at &#8220;Louder with Crowder&#8221; noticed that the organic reach of their videos was declining, resulting in a dearth of new users, despite what Crowder claims were record views: &#8220;Our views were better than ever, so was our retention &#8230; all the most valued metrics according to YouTube.&#8221;
Crowder says his team then began to dig into reasons for the decline in his organic reach, eventually discovering what Crowder terms &#8220;peculiarities&#8221; and &#8220;tomfoolery&#8221; in YouTube&#8217;s search function. Trying to find one of his own &#8220;Change My Mind&#8221; videos, Crowder says he ran a YouTube search using the basic search term, &#8220;Steven Crowder change my mind.&#8221; When nothing showed up, he and his team ran similar searches, he says, and alerted viewers, who reported the &#8220;exact same result.&#8221;
Other viewers claimed Crowder was &#8220;doctoring&#8221; photos of his own search results, because they had no trouble with their search function.
The issue, Crowder says he and his team discovered, only applied to American viewers. Using alternate VPNs, the team discovered that &#8220;blacklisting on this channel was occurring in the United States exclusively.&#8221; Crowder claims that he was sent proof of this phenomenon from &#8220;all across the world.&#8221;
When Crowder did an impromptu video on the issue &#8212; and asked his audience to consider whether the same phenomenon could happen to others, including political candidates who ran afoul of YouTube and its parent company, Google &#8212; he says he received a phone call from someone at YouTube who said they could make changes that would &#8220;ameliorate the situation.&#8221;
Crowder now charges that his conversation with a YouTube &#8220;higher up&#8221; demonstrates that YouTube employees can manually control the algorithm, leaving situations like Tulsi Gabbard&#8217;s the fault of subjective censorship from within Google&#8217;s ranks.
Crowder says he will continue to gather evidence of YouTube&#8217;s alleged censorship and has encouraged his audience to do the same.
Gabbard, meanwhile, is already embroiled in a lawsuit against Google, YouTube, and parent company, Alphabet, alleging similar censorhip on Google&#8217;s AdSense platform, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/technology/tulsi-gabbard-sues-google.html">according to the New York Times</a>. Gabbard&#8217;s litigation centers around claims that Google throttled Gabbard&#8217;s AdSense ads when she was trending on Twitter during the first Democratic debate, even though she and her team had purchased ads on key search terms related to her campaign.
You can watch Crowder&#8217;s full report here:
<iframe title="PROOF: YOUTUBE CENSORED TULSI GABBARD | LOUDER WITH CROWDER" width="500" height="375" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YHHQl3ND6bk?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The Presidential Candidate Forum on LGBTQ Issues

REPORT: Steven Crowder Claims YouTube Is Selectively Censoring Tulsi Gabbard

Steven Crowder

Tulsi Gabbard

No, no, no. Hell, no!
That&#8217;s my response to the latest trial balloon floated by the White House to join with Silicon Valley on a creepy program monitoring Americans&#8217; &#8220;neurobehavioral signs&#8221; to (purportedly) prevent gun violence.
President Donald Trump&#8217;s old friend, former NBC head Bob Wright, has been pushing an Orwellian surveillance scheme called &#8220;Safe Home&#8221; — &#8220;Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes&#8221; — that would cost taxpayers between $40 million and $60 million. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, reports that the plan could incorporate &#8220;Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home,&#8221; as well as &#8221; fMRIs, tractography and image analysis.&#8221;
Here&#8217;s the big lie: Wright&#8217;s group promises that privacy will be &#8220;safeguarded,&#8221; profiling &#8220;avoided&#8221; and data protection capabilities a &#8220;cornerstone of this effort.&#8221;
There&#8217;s so much bullcrap packed in that statement it should be banned as a global warming pollutant. Anything involving Google should trigger automatic danger warnings of invasive data mining. We do not need the federal government partnering with Google to red-flag citizens. We need the federal government to red-flag Google.
Let me remind you that Google has already admitted to data mining children&#8217;s emails without consent and in violation of the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act. This school year, untold thousands, if not millions, of children were required to sign on to Google email and Chrome in order to access homework, schedules and classroom discussions — without obtaining parental consent. Thanks to &#8220;1-to-1&#8221; programs forcing students across the country to use laptops and tablets when paper and pencil would suffice, iPads loaded with Google for Education are metastasizing in tech-crazed, fad-addled school districts oblivious to privacy concerns.
At my high school sophomore son&#8217;s school, every student was told to download an app called &#8220;E-Hallpass,&#8221; which is seamlessly connected to their Google login, to track how much time students spend in the bathroom. It&#8217;s all in the name of &#8220;safety,&#8221; of course. And there&#8217;s no opportunity for parents to provide their preemptive feedback or consent.
Minnesota educator Jennifer Dahlgren told me this week: &#8220;Too many schools use Google docs and sheets to store and share (private) student information, as well as using Google as their secure email! I have brought this up in staff meetings as a concern and no one else seems bothered. Not good!&#8221;
Just last week, the Federal Trade Commission approved a settlement with Google/YouTube over its violation of the federal Children&#8217;s Online Privacy Protection Act. YouTube had been stealthily mining data of unsuspecting YouTube users under the age of 13. It will reportedly pay a pittance for this massive child abuse — somewhere between $150 million to $200 million, which amounts to just a few months&#8217; of YouTube ad revenue. In other words: a hill of beans.
Earlier this summer, Google agreed to a $13 million settlement over its Street View program, whose roaming cars in more than 30 countries secretly collected emails, passwords and other personal data from Wi-Fi networks. The Wall Street Journal reported on how the company&#8217;s dishonest dismissal of the breach as a &#8220;mistake&#8221; was exposed by investigators who found that &#8220;Google engineers built software and embedded it into Street View vehicles to intentionally intercept the data from 2007 to 2010.&#8221;
It&#8217;s not just Google. Under the cloak of &#8220;science,&#8221; Big Tech and Big Government are on the cusp of instituting a mental health social credit score system incorporating dubious predictive analytics.
Who defines &#8220;mental health&#8221; risk factors? There is no consensus on how much mental health predicts violence. And don&#8217;t forget: The mental health profession is filled with partisan zealots who think all Trump voters are dangerous. Camera-hogging psychiatrists and psychologists clog left-wing news shows recklessly and fecklessly pretending to &#8220;diagnose&#8221; the president himself through their own unhinged political lenses.
Mental health data mining in schools is already happening. The Pioneer Institute reported that federal, state and local governments splurged on more than $30 billion in 2018 to implement social-emotional learning monitoring in K-12 public schools. I&#8217;ve reported on Google apps previously such as ClassDojo (which collects intimate behavioral data and long-term psychological profiles encompassing family information, personal messages, photographs and voice notes) and on federally funded TS Gold testing (which monitors &#8220;developmental domains including social emotional, physical, language and cognitive development&#8221;). Students are rated and recorded on their ability to do things like &#8220;respond to emotional cues,&#8221; &#8220;interact cooperatively&#8221; and &#8220;cooperate and share ideas and materials in socially acceptable ways.&#8221;
Who defines &#8220;socially acceptable?&#8221; Liberal educators who are mindlessly addicting our kids to Silicon Valley technology and brainwashing them to conform or be excluded?
The last thing Washington should be doing is handing over yet another set of keys to Silicon Valley spies with a voracious appetite for our private information — and our children&#8217;s precious minds. You want to make children safer? De-platform Google and the other data-mining predators from public schools now. It&#8217;s insanity to let them roam free.
Michelle Malkin&#8217;s email address is MichelleMalkinInvestigates@protonmail.com. To find out more about Michelle Malkin and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

MALKIN: Stop Mental Health Data Mining Of Our Kids

Mental Illness

Trump Administration

I learned last week from a Silicon Valley whistleblower, who spoke with the intrepid investigative team at Project Veritas, that my namesake news and opinion website is on a Google blacklist.
Thank goodness the Big Tech giant hasn&#8217;t taken over the newspaper syndication business yet. Twenty years of column writing have allowed me to break news and disseminate my opinions without the tyranny of social justice algorithms downgrading or whitewashing my words. But given the toxic metastasis of social media in every aspect of our lives, especially for those who make their living exercising the First Amendment, it may only be a matter of time before this column somehow falls prey to the Google Ministry of Truth, too.
Armed with internal memos and emails, former Google software engineer Zachary Vorhies exposed how MichelleMalkin.com (online since 1999) was placed on a news blacklist banning my content from appearing on newsfeeds accessed through Android Google products. I do not advocate violence, publish porn or indulge in vulgarity or profanity (other than my occasional references to Beltway crapweasels). But I triggered the Google Social Credit System and there&#8217;s no going back.
My apparent sin: Independently growing a large organic following of readers on the internet who share my mainstream conservative views on immigration, jihad, education, social issues, economic policy, faith and more.
Other conservative victims of the Google ban hammer include: Twitchy (a Twitter aggregation site I founded in 2012), FrontPage Magazine (founded by prolific conservative author and journalist David Horowitz), the Daily Caller (founded by Fox News host and journalist Tucker Carlson), Legal Insurrection (founded by Cornell University law professor and investigative blogger William Jacobson), NewsBusters (founded by Media Research Center in 2005), The Gateway Pundit (founded by grassroots social media pioneer Jim Hoft in 2004), the American Thinker (another of the veteran conservative blogs founded in 2003 by Thomas Lifson), LifeNews.com (an independent, pro-life news site founded in 1992 by Steven Ertelt), the Catholic News Agency and The Christian Post.
I suspect, because so many of the blacklisted sites belong to the original generation of conservative bloggers, that Google&#8217;s ideology-based censorship significantly predates the timeframe of the documents that Vorhies (who worked at Google for eight years) shared with Project Veritas. Indeed, my first substantiated censorship by Google/YouTube, which was covered by The New York Times, occurred 13 years ago in 2006. Around that time, it also became clear to me that humans, not algorithms, were manipulating Google Images to prioritize unspeakably crude photoshopped images of me disseminated by left-wing misogynists. And not long after, my heavily trafficked blog posts started dropping off the search engine radar altogether.
Several previous Google insiders have confirmed that the Big Tech giant discriminates against right-leaning journalists, pundits and personalities — not to mention free-thinking employees within its own workforce who&#8217;ve been persecuted, fired and even harassed by police for their whistleblowing. Leaked documents also show that a small cadre of meddling social justice overlords at Google Central Command manually manipulate search engine results — despite the company elite&#8217;s brazen denial of the practice at a recent congressional hearing.
In the early days of New Media, entrepreneurs on the left, right and center rallied around the transparency and open access mantra, &#8220;Information just wants to be free.&#8221; Now, in the wholly disingenuous names of &#8220;trust&#8221; and &#8220;safety,&#8221; the overlords of the internet want to throttle information with which they disagree. Google employees actively demote content on YouTube deemed &#8220;controversial queries,&#8221; according to internal documents from Vorhies, including the following phrases:
—Abortion is barbaric.
—Abortion is wrong.
—Abortion is murdering.
—Abortion is a crime.
&#8220;Do vaccines cause autism,&#8221; &#8220;climate change hoax,&#8221; and &#8220;Girl speaks about the danger in Germany due to rape refugees&#8221; were also all red-flagged as dangerously &#8220;fringe&#8221; by the Google P.C. police. So was President Donald Trump&#8217;s factual statement that immigration chaos has led to &#8220;people that are from all over that are killers and rapists and they&#8217;re coming into this country,&#8221; which one open borders employee complained was &#8220;explicit bias&#8221; that &#8220;we should take a stand on.&#8221;
So they&#8217;re for foreign killers and rapists coming into this country? Noted.
Internal staff complaints catalyze search engine manipulation, so political agitation among Google employees is a harbinger of speech clampdowns to come. Just last week, more than 1,000 Google employees lobbied the company to shun any contract work with U.S. Customs and Border Protection or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Given that Google works with the hate racket and smear machine known as the Southern Poverty Law Center, you bet I&#8217;m worried that my immigration blog and column archives (not to mention all my reporting on the treasonous Silicon Valley CEOs in my upcoming book, &#8220;Open Borders Inc.&#8221;) will trip the Google Social Credit wire.
With Google&#8217;s homegrown menaces squelching our freedom of expression, damaging our reputations and livelihoods through slimy and secretive blacklists, and hampering our ability to do honest research — not to mention mining student data in schools by tethering children to Google apps/email/Chromebooks and holding their academic progress hostage to Google&#8217;s high-tech leash — who needs foreign enemies? China ain&#8217;t got nuthin&#8217; on America&#8217;s &#8220;Don&#8217;t Be Evil&#8221; thought control freaks.
Michelle Malkin&#8217;s email address is MichelleMalkinInvestigates@protonmail.com. To find out more about Michelle Malkin and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Google Logo Projection

MALKIN: Triggering The Google Social Credit System

Project Veritas

On Friday, Google issued a new set of &#8220;<a href="https://about.google/community-guidelines/">community guidelines</a>&#8221; for employees of the company.
&#8220;Community guidelines exist to support the healthy and open discussion that has always been a part of our culture,&#8221; states the first paragraph. &#8220;They help create an environment where we can come together as a community in pursuit of our shared mission and serve our users.&#8221;
Among the latest guidelines are statements such as: &#8220;be responsible,&#8221; and &#8220;be thoughtful,&#8221; as well as &#8220;respect each other.&#8221;
Further, the guidelines read:
<blockquote>While sharing information and ideas with colleagues helps build community, disrupting the workday to have a raging debate over politics or the latest news story does not. Our primary responsibility is to do the work we’ve each been hired to do, not to spend working time on debates about non-work topics.
Avoid conversations that are disruptive to the workplace or otherwise violate Google’s workplace policies.</blockquote>
If something should arise that might be viewed as a violation of the policies in place at Google, the guidelines state that managers &#8220;are expected to address [such] discussions &#8230; &#8221;
The document also addresses demeaning language: &#8220;Don&#8217;t troll, name call, or engage in ad hominem attacks — about anyone. This includes making statements that insult, demean, or humiliate (whether individually or by reference to groups) other employees, our extended workforce, our business partners, or others (including public figures), or that violate other standards of conduct or policies against harassment and bullying.&#8221;
The guidelines note that employees must be careful about the potential dissemination of private company data.
Google&#8217;s latest set of guidelines are a revised version of a document from <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-community-communication-guidelines-2018-6">last year</a> in which &#8220;trolling, name-calling, and ad hominem attacks&#8221; were prohibited. The document also contained more generalized policy regarding respect and avoidance of &#8220;discussions or behavior&#8221; that are &#8220;disruptive.&#8221;
These revised guidelines come on the heels of several controversies in which the tech giant has been involved, the most prominent of which was the firing of engineer James Damore.
In 2017, Damore authored an internal memo, titled: &#8220;Google&#8217;s Ideological Echo Chamber.&#8221; The 10-page document, which hit a nerve inside the company and was eventually leaked, posited that &#8220;differences in distribution of traits between men and women&#8221; could be a factor in the lack of female representation in tech. Damore went on to address potential solutions to the issue. The former Google engineer also wrote about the ways in which he believed the company was oppressing dissenting viewpoints.
The TL;DR version posted at the top of the document <a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf​">states</a>:
<blockquote>Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.
This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.
The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.
Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression
Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression
Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.</blockquote>
After the memo leaked, Damore was fired from Google for allegedly &#8220;perpetuating gender stereotypes.&#8221; In a statement following the termination, Google CEO Sundar Pichai <a href="https://fortune.com/2017/08/08/google-anti-diversity-memo-sundar-pichai-letter/">said in part</a>:
<blockquote>First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it. However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.</blockquote>
Damore proceeded to file a lawsuit against Google for discrimination, eventually moving to settle &#8220;through arbitration&#8221; in October of 2018, reports <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-19/ex-googler-s-anti-conservative-bias-case-headed-to-arbitration">Bloomberg</a>.
Google and YouTube (which was acquired by Google in 2006) are coming under intense scrutiny as more and more conservative outlets and content creators are alleging discrimination on the basis of political ideology.
PragerU, a YouTube channel that features conservative educational content, has <a href="http://www.bgrfirm.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/PRAGER_U-_v_GOOGLE-YOUTUBE_complaint_10-23-2017_FILED.pdf">filed a lawsuit</a> against the video platform for alleged demonetization and restriction of videos.
According to a statement on PragerU&#8217;s website, the channel filed the suit in the &#8220;United States District Court for the Northern District of California to stop Google and YouTube from unlawfully censoring its educational videos and discriminating against its right to freedom of speech.&#8221;
Here&#8217;s a video in which an attorney representing PragerU details the case:
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Google Issues New Employee Guidelines To Address ‘Raging Debate Over Politics’

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) targeted YouTube and their parent company Google for profiting off of and promoting the far-left network &#8220;The Young Turks&#8221; after commentator Hasan Piker ranted about how &#8220;America deserved” the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, that killed 3,000 innocents. As Crenshaw has noted in the past, Google, and Big Tech in general, have been quick to smear and censor mainstream conservative voices.
During a Twitch livestream on Tuesday, Piker, the nephew of &#8220;Young Turks&#8221; co-created Cenk Uygur, said the United States &#8220;deserved 9/11&#8221; and nastily mocked Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL, for losing his eye during his second deployment overseas from an IED explosion.
&#8220;This guy has the understanding of foreign policy of, like, a 12-year-old. What the f***. What the f*** is wrong with this dude? Didn&#8217;t he go to war and like literally lose his eye because some mujahideen — a brave f***ing soldier — f***ed his eye hole with their d***?” Piker mouthed off. &#8220;Isn&#8217;t that how he f***ing lost his dumba** eye, because he got his f***ing eye hole f***ed, by a brave soldier?&#8221;
In tweets expanding on his vile commentary, Piker wrote, in part, &#8220;dan crenshaw [sic] is crying on a comedian&#8217;s podcast about how not offended he was about a joke made against him almost an entire year ago. right wing victimhood is a brain disease.&#8221; He also added the following asterisk: &#8220;crying from his remaining eye.&#8221;
Quote-tweeting Piker, Crenshaw posted: &#8220;The only thing that offends me is your inability to use capital letters in any of your tweets. But really it is the fact that Google/YouTube profit from and promote The Young Turks and by extension your disgusting defense of the 9/11 terrorist attacks against Americans.&#8221;
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">The only thing that offends me is your inability to use capital letters in any of your tweets.
But really it is the fact that Google/YouTube profit from and promote The Young Turks and by extension your disgusting defense of the 9/11 terrorist attacks against Americans. <a href="https://t.co/703Vy4r9dT">https://t.co/703Vy4r9dT</a>
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) <a href="https://twitter.com/DanCrenshawTX/status/1164628229367488512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 22, 2019</a></blockquote>
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At a House Homeland Security Committee hearing in June, the congressman grilled Google and Facebook executives over their anti-conservative bias. &#8220;You do not have a constitutional obligation to enforce the First Amendment, but I would say that you absolutely have an obligation to enforce American values and the First Amendment is an underpinning of American values,&#8221; Crenshaw <a href="https://crenshaw.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=89">underscored</a>.
Uygur, the co-creator and main voice at “The Young Turks” network, penned an <a href="https://dparchives.library.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/pennsylvania?a=d&amp;d=tdp19911122-01.2.24&amp;e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------">op-ed</a> at the University of Pennsylvania promoting the denial of the Armenian genocide in 1991. &#8220;Any historian can prove to you beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Jewish Holocaust took place,&#8221; he wrote. &#8220;Armenians claim that there was another genocide in this century. They claim that the Turkish government, between the years of 1915 and 1923, carried out a genocide of the Armenian people. They claim that the truth of this matter is also beyond reproach. … Well, I question it. The claims of an Armenian Genocide are not based on historical facts. If the history of the period is examined it becomes evident that in fact no such genocide took place.&#8221;
In 2016, Uygur rescinded the op-ed. &#8220;I rescind the statements I made in my Daily Pennsylvanian article from 1991 entitled, &#8216;Historical Fact of Falsehood?[&#8216;] When I wrote that piece, I was a 21 year-old kid, who had a lot of opinions that I have since changed,&#8221; the host said in a <a href="https://legacy.tyt.com/2016/04/22/rescinding-daily-pennsylvanian-article/">statement</a>. &#8220;Back then I had many political positions that were not well researched. For example, back in those days I held a pro-war rally for the Persian Gulf War. Anyone who knows me now knows that I am a very different person today.&#8221;
YouTube hit mainstream conservative comedian Steven Crowder with <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48082/youtube-demonetizes-crowder-free-speech-advocates-daily-wire">video demonetization</a> in June for calling then-Vox commentator Carlos Maza a &#8220;lispy queer.&#8221;
Last August, Big Tech players like Facebook and Google cracked down on content from Infowars owner Alex Jones. &#8220;Facebook removed four pages controlled by him, while Google removed the official &#8216;Alex Jones Channel&#8217; on its platform,&#8221; <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/06/apple-pulls-alex-jones-infowars-podcasts-for-hate-speech.html">CNBC</a> reported. &#8220;The YouTube channel for InfoWars, the media company owned by Alex Jones, still remains live. Pinterest also removed the InfoWars board, while Spotify took down his most well-known show completely.&#8221;
In May, Facebook and Instagram (which is owned by Facebook, Inc.) <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/46720/facebook-instagram-ban-far-right-figures-laura-amanda-prestigiacomo">permanently banned</a> &#8220;dangerous individuals and organizations&#8221; from their platforms, including Jones, self-described investigative journalist Laura Loomer, Infowars&#8217; Paul Joseph Watson, provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
As noted by The Daily Wire&#8217;s Molly Prince, an internal Google memo claimed prominent conservatives, such as Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, PragerU&#8217;s Dennis Prager, and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, are all Nazis.
WATCH:
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Dan Crenshaw

Crenshaw Blasts YouTube/Google After ‘Young Turks’ Commentator Says ‘America Deserved 9/11’

Last week, at the invitation of Sen. Ted Cruz, I spoke to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Google&#8217;s having placed more than 60 Prager University videos on its restricted list. Any family that filters out pornography and violence cannot see those particular videos on YouTube (which is owned by Google); nor can any school or library.
This statement is as much about what I and PragerU stand for as it is about Google. Those interested in viewing the presentation can do so <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llt6kiwKwVI">here</a>:
It is an honor to be invited to speak in the United States Senate. But I wish I were not so honored. Because the subject of this hearing — Google and YouTube&#8217;s (and for that matter, Twitter and Facebook&#8217;s) suppression of internet content on ideological grounds — threatens the future of America more than any external enemy.
In fact, never in American history has there been as strong a threat to freedom of speech as there is today.
Before addressing this, however, I think it important that you know a bit about me and the organization I co-founded, Prager University — PragerU, as it often referred to.
I was born in Brooklyn, New York. My late father, Max Prager, was a CPA and an Orthodox Jew who volunteered to serve in the U.S. Navy at the start of World War II. My father&#8217;s senior class thesis at the City College of New York was on anti-Semitism in America. Yet, despite his keen awareness of the subject, he believed that Jews living in America were the luckiest Jews to have ever lived.
He was right. Having taught Jewish history at Brooklyn College, written a book on antisemitism and fought Jew-hatred my whole life, I thank God for living in America.
It breaks my heart that a vast number of young Americans have not only not been taught how lucky they are to be Americans but have been taught either how unlucky they are or how ashamed they should be.
It breaks my heart for them because contempt for one&#8217;s country leaves a terrible hole in one&#8217;s soul and because ungrateful people always become unhappy and angry people.
And it breaks my heart for America because no good country can survive when its people have contempt for it.
I have been communicating this appreciation of America for 35 years as a radio talk show host, the last 20 in national syndication with the Salem Radio Network — an organization that is a blessing in American life. One reason I started PragerU was to communicate America&#8217;s moral purpose and moral achievements, both to young Americans and to young people around the world. With a billion views a year, and with more than half of the viewers under age 35, PragerU has achieved some success.
My philosophy of life is easily summarized: God wants us to be good. Period. God without goodness is fanaticism and goodness without God will not long endure. Everything I and PragerU do emanates from belief in the importance of being a good person. That some label us extreme or &#8220;haters&#8221; only reflects on the character and the broken moral compass of those making such accusations. They are the haters and extremists.
PragerU releases a five-minute video every week. Our presenters include three former prime ministers, four Pulitzer Prize winners, liberals, conservatives, gays, blacks, Latinos, atheists, believers, Jews, Christians, Muslims and professors and scientists from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and a dozen other universities.
Do you think the secretary-general of NATO; or the former prime ministers of Norway, Canada or Spain; or the late Charles Krauthammer; or Philip Hamburger, distinguished professor of law at Columbia Law School, would make a video for an extreme or hate-filled site? The idea is not only preposterous; it is a smear.
Yet, Google, which owns YouTube, has restricted access to 56 of our 320 five-minute videos and to other videos we produce. &#8220;Restricted&#8221; means families that have a filter to avoid pornography and violence cannot see that video. It also means that no school or library can show that video.
Google has even restricted access to a video on the Ten Commandments &#8230; Yes, the Ten Commandments!
We have repeatedly asked Google why our videos are restricted. No explanation is ever given.
But of course, we know why: because they come from a conservative perspective.
Liberals and conservatives differ on many issues. But they have always agreed that free speech must be preserved. While the left has never supported free speech, liberals always have. I therefore appeal to liberals to join us in fighting on behalf of America&#8217;s crowning glory — free speech. Otherwise, I promise you, one day you will say, &#8220;First they came after conservatives, and I said nothing. And then they came after me. And there was no one left to speak up for me.&#8221;
Thank you.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in April 2018, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Exodus. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

PRAGER: America, Google And Me: My Senate Speech

Dennis Prager

A newly-published leaked document contains what appears to be an email exchange among Google employees participating in a &#8220;transparency-and-ethics&#8221; discussion that includes a reference to PragerU, Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro as &#8220;nazis using the dog whistles.&#8221;
The <a href="https://www.projectveritas.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/on_peterson-REDACTED.png">document</a> was published by <a href="https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/25/breaking-new-google-document-leaked-describing-shapiro-prager-as-nazis-using-the-dogwhistles/">Project Veritas</a> Tuesday, a day after the conservative group released its report on how political and ideological bias influences the ways in which Google connects users to content. The group obtained the &#8220;newly leaked document from Google&#8221; via their tipline.
&#8220;The email apparently was sent as part of the Google &#8216;transparency-and-ethics&#8217; group internal communications and suggests that content from PragerU, Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro should be disabled from the &#8216;suggestion feature,'&#8221; Project Veritas reports.
&#8220;Today it is often 1 or 2 steps to nazis, if we understand that PragerU, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro et al are nazis using the dog whistles you mention in step 1,&#8221; reads the <a href="https://www.projectveritas.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/on_peterson-REDACTED.png">email</a> that appears to have been sent to over a dozen other Google employees. &#8220;I can receive these recommendations regardless of the content of what I&#8217;m looking at, and I have recorded thousands of internet users sharing the same experience. I don&#8217;t think correctly identifying far-right content is beyond our capabilities. But if it is, why not go with Meredith&#8217;s suggestion of disabling the suggestion feature?&#8221;
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BREAKING: LEAKED <a href="https://twitter.com/Google?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Google</a> doc from &#8216;transparency-and-ethics group&#8217; calls <a href="https://twitter.com/benshapiro?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@benshapiro</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/prageru?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@prageru</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jordanbpeterson</a> &#8220;nazis using the dogwhistles&#8221; and recommends the disabling of the &#8220;suggestions&#8221; feature. FULL ARTICLE: <a href="https://t.co/oIdcykyWTk">https://t.co/oIdcykyWTk</a> <a href="https://t.co/MyC2cOthue">pic.twitter.com/MyC2cOthue</a>
&#8212; James O&#8217;Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) <a href="https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1143578145666326528?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 25, 2019</a></blockquote>
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Project Veritas published the document a day after its exposé on Google which contains testimony from a whistleblower, additional leaked internal documents, and undercover video footage of an interview with the head of Google&#8217;s &#8220;<a href="https://qz.com/1501998/google-created-a-responsible-innovation-team-to-check-if-its-ai-is-ethical/">Responsible Innovation</a>&#8221; team, which monitors the responsible implementation of A.I. technologies.
&#8220;They want to act as gatekeeper between the user and the content they want to access, so they&#8217;re going to come in and they&#8217;re going to filter the content,&#8221; the whistleblower told Project Veritas&#8217; James O&#8217;Keefe. &#8220;They&#8217;re going to say, &#8216;We don&#8217;t want to give the user access to that information because it&#8217;s going to create an outcome that&#8217;s undesireable to us.'&#8221;
As <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48804/whistleblower-heres-how-google-functions-highly-james-barrett">The Daily Wire</a> reported, in the video O&#8217;Keefe and the insider discuss &#8220;leaked internal documents appearing to show how the search engine manipulates what information users see based on its &#8216;fair and equitable&#8217; priorities, which at times filters out or deemphasizes factual information that its creators deem &#8216;unfair.'&#8221;
YouTube, which is owned by Google, has since pulled the video &#8220;due to a privacy claim by a third party.&#8221; This is the second Project Veritas video focused on Big Tech bias YouTube has pulled in two weeks.
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BREAKING: YOUTUBE/GOOGLE HAS REMOVED OUR GOOGLE INVESTIGATION as it was approaching 50K likes and a million views. IMPORTANT: Please download it on <a href="https://twitter.com/bitchute?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@bitchute</a> and repost it. <a href="https://t.co/chDsGF0QCk">https://t.co/chDsGF0QCk</a>
&#8212; James O&#8217;Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) <a href="https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1143330626784960512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 25, 2019</a></blockquote>
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Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48824/youtube-pulls-project-veritas-video-google-bias-james-barrett">YouTube Pulls Project Veritas Video On Google Bias</a>

Ben Shapiro

Leaked Google Doc Describes Shapiro, Peterson, PragerU As ‘Nazis Using The Dog Whistles’

In an op-ed for <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/donald-trump-jr-2020-election-donald-trump-democrats-2016">Fox News</a> published Tuesday, Donald Trump Jr., son of President Trump and executive vice president of the Trump Organization, presents the case for why the stakes are even higher in 2020 than they were in 2016, and it starts with one straightforward assertion: &#8220;We are no longer dealing with the party of Hillary Clinton, let alone the party of Bill Clinton.&#8221;
&#8220;My father and his re-election campaign are all that stand between the prosperous, faithful, and peaceful America of the Trump economic boom, and the revenge-hungry, far-left extremist party of &#8216;The Resistance,'&#8221; writes Trump.
That Resistance &#8212; formed in response to his father&#8217;s stunning victory over Clinton, whom all the politicians, pollsters and political analysts deemed the prohibitive favorite &#8212; is steered by &#8220;a previously marginalized radical fringe,&#8221; which has rapidly become &#8220;the ideological vanguard of any future Democratic administration,&#8221; he writes.
&#8220;It&#8217;s important for voters to recognize what kind of a country lurks beneath the relentless, cheap attacks on family and country that serve to frame the Democrats&#8217; campaign as a return to &#8216;normalcy,'&#8221; he states.
Among the goals of even the self-described &#8220;moderate&#8221; Democratic presidential hopefuls is a call for radical policies, including those that would move us closer to &#8220;open borders.&#8221; &#8220;In a few short years, supporting ever greater numbers of poor illegal immigrants and opposing any serious attempt to enforce existing laws have become articles of faith on the left,&#8221; he writes.
Along with the Democrats&#8217; &#8220;march toward open borders&#8221; is their increasing embrace of a socialist agenda, which &#8220;actively encourages the subversion of the American economy.&#8221;
As demonstrated by the Left&#8217;s unfair castigation of the Covington Catholic high schoolers, he suggests, the Democrats &#8220;long for a country that will tolerate absolutely no dissent&#8221; from their radical agenda. &#8220;Democrats want a country where Catholic high schoolers can be harassed in the street for wearing MAGA hats and then smeared as racist bigots in media, threatened with expulsion, and ruined simply for not immediately giving in,&#8221; he writes.
And the Left is applying that same free speech-suppressing approach to social media, where Big Tech is finding ways to shut down voices of dissent from the Right. With Democrats fully in charge, there will be no one to check their abuse of power.
&#8220;If you don&#8217;t like how they would remake America, you might as well just be yelling into the void,&#8221; he warns. &#8220;The Democrats will defend their allies in Silicon Valley from any consequences for their sustained, unmitigated campaign to censor all but the most milquetoast of views from the internet.&#8221; (<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/donald-trump-jr-2020-election-donald-trump-democrats-2016">Read the full op-ed here</a>.)
Trump&#8217;s warnings about the clamp-down on speech by Big Tech come amid a series of reports suggesting a concerted effort to squeeze out right-leaning voices on social media platforms. In an interview that aired last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48210/google-ceo-youtube-will-begin-targeting-content-james-barrett">admitted</a> that the world&#8217;s leading search engine &#8220;rank[s] content based on quality&#8221; and is working to &#8220;prevent borderline content,&#8221; and that YouTube is now implementing the same approach. By &#8220;borderline content,&#8221; Pichai explained, he means &#8220;content which doesn&#8217;t exactly violate policies, which need to be removed, but which can still cause harm.&#8221;
The same week the interview was published, YouTube <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48090/youtube-announces-mass-ban-all-hateful-content-james-barrett">announced</a> sweeping changes to how it was handling content it deemed &#8220;discriminatory&#8217; or &#8220;harmful&#8221; to the community.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48089/watch-steven-crowder-youtube-demonetizing-him-james-barrett">WATCH: Steven Crowder On YouTube Demonetizing Him: Here&#8217;s What This Is Really About</a>

Donald Trump Jr: Here’s Why The Stakes Are Even Higher In 2020

Democratic Party

Donald Trump

Donald Trump Jr.

In a chilling move that suggests Big Tech is coordinating to censor conservative voices, YouTube deleted a video produced by Project Veritas exposing alleged censorship of conservative and Christian content by Pinterest. Along with YouTube&#8217;s removal of the video, Pinterest put the whistleblower who provided the documents featured in the report on administrative leave and permanently banned pro-life group Live Action, which was listed on its &#8220;porn domain block list,&#8221; as shown in the video. Twitter also appears to have joined with the other platforms in targeting Project Veritas, hitting founder James O&#8217;Keefe for supposedly violating someone&#8217;s personal privacy through his journalistic investigation and blocking content involving Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro.
As <a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/48249/watch-whistleblower-pinterest-censors-conservative-james-barrett">The Daily Wire</a> reported, Project Veritas released an exposé video on Pinterest featuring testimony from an employee of the company and internal documents he presented to O&#8217;Keefe indicating that the popular social media platform was quietly censoring some conservative content and voices. Among those that appear to have been targeted by the platform is Shapiro, who was censored in a &#8220;zero tolerance moment,&#8221; Live Action, links to which were blocked on the platform, and a video series exposing Planned Parenthood, which was included in a censor list as a &#8220;harmful&#8221; &#8220;conspiracy.&#8221;
Since the release of the report, Pinterest has placed the whistleblower, Eric Cochran, on administrative leave and permanently suspended Live Action&#8217;s account.
But it&#8217;s not only Pinterest which is cracking down on those involved in the exposé; on Wednesday, YouTube deleted Project Veritas&#8217; video report, citing &#8220;privacy&#8221; violations and informing the organization that it could not show the name of the employee at Pinterest who placed Live Action on the block list or the documentation of that action.
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YouTube has REMOVED our Pinterest Insider story The battle is on SUPPORT the insider who leaked the documents and got fired HERE: <a href="https://t.co/FLBzuLE65R">https://t.co/FLBzuLE65R</a> <a href="https://t.co/zWLfW2leRQ">pic.twitter.com/zWLfW2leRQ</a>
&#8212; James O&#8217;Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) <a href="https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1138939941134786561?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
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In a statement to The Daily Wire, Project Veritas said that while YouTube outlines the content supposedly in violation in the video, the platform &#8220;does not give us any recourse by which to make the requested &#8216;blur&#8217; since they&#8217;ve taken down the video.&#8221; Doing so would be &#8220;anathema to presenting information the public has a right to know,&#8221; the organization argues.
&#8220;The established media and technology are so afraid of investigative journalism they need to censor it,&#8221; O&#8217;Keefe tweeted Wednesday. &#8220;YouTube calls REPORTING on someone by showing their face and name, and how they added a pro-life group to a porn blacklist, a &#8216;privacy complaint.&#8217; Would they do this to NYT?&#8221;
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
The established media and technology are so afraid of investigative journalism they need to censor it. YouTube calls REPORTING on someone by showing their face and name, and how they added a pro-life group to a porn blacklist, a &#8220;privacy complaint.&#8221; Would they do this to NYT?
&#8212; James O&#8217;Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) <a href="https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1138953443811500033?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
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As reported by <a href="https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2019/06/12/twitter-suspends-project-veritas-for-leaking-pinterests-internal-documents-classifying-ben-shapiro-as-a-white-supremacist-n2548132">Town Hall</a>, Twitter has also hit O&#8217;Keefe for the Pinterest exposé, specifically evidence that Shapiro was targeted by the platform, which was censored for exposing &#8220;other people&#8217;s private information,&#8221; according to a Twitter insider.
&#8220;Twitter has decided that investigative journalism is in violation of their terms of service &#8211; @Project_Veritas has been temporarily suspended from posting for tweeting internal communications from @Pinterest which show them calling @benshapiro a &#8216;white supremacist,'&#8221; O&#8217;Keefe tweeted Thursday. &#8220;What does this mean for journalists around the world? For their sources in government, tech, education, etc? Is Twitter your newspaper&#8217;s editor?&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
What does this mean for journalists around the world? For their sources in government, tech, education, etc? Is Twitter your newspaper&#8217;s editor?
&#8212; James O&#8217;Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) <a href="https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1138817877472157696?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
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<div class="embed tweet"></div>

In an interview with The Daily Wire Thursday, O&#8217;Keefe called the situation a &#8220;watershed moment&#8221; for both free speech and Big Tech. &#8220;I think that this is a watershed moment in the history of the First Amendment and Big Tech,&#8221; he said. &#8220;What we have seen here is one brave individual come forward, risking everything, in order to combat the collusion that we&#8217;re witnessing among these powerful companies. What Eric wants is for twelve more people in the industry who are likewise concerned about free speech and transparency to come forward. If they do, we will see real change.&#8221;
Pinterest has responded to some of the allegations presented in the YouTube-blocked video: &#8220;Religious content is allowed on Pinterest, and many people use our service to search for and save Pins inspired by their beliefs,&#8221; the company said in a statement to <a href="https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/11/tech-insider-blows-whistle-on-how-pinterest-listed-top-pro-life-site-as-porn-bible-verses-censored/">Project Veritas</a>. &#8220;To protect our users from being targeted based on personal characteristics such as their religion, we have policies in place so that ads and recommendations don&#8217;t appear alongside certain terms.&#8221;
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48249/watch-whistleblower-pinterest-censors-conservative-james-barrett">WATCH: Whistleblower: Pinterest Censors Conservative, Pro-Life Content; Pinterest Reacts</a>

BIG TECH CRACKDOWN: YouTube DELETES Project Veritas Video On Pinterest Censorship

James O'Keefe

On Monday, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki apologized to the LGBT community for not taking &#8220;more definitive action against conservative pundit Steven Crowder&#8217;s channel,&#8221; according to <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/10/18660473/youtube-lgbtq-susan-wojcicki-carlos-maza-steven-crowder">The Verge</a>, which is a publication of Vox Media.
Speaking at the Code conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, Wojcicki said, &#8220;I know that the decisions we made was very hurtful to the LGBTQ community and that wasn&#8217;t our intention at all. That was not our intention, and we were really sorry about that, and I do want to explain why we made the decision we did.&#8221;
Vox journalist Carlos Maza, who is gay, had pressured YouTube to punish Crowder for his remarks regarding Maza; ultimately YouTube decided not only to demonetize Crowder but also punish other creators in an incident dubbed the #VoxAdpocalypse.
When demonetizing Crowder, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48089/watch-steven-crowder-youtube-demonetizing-him-james-barrett">YouTube stated</a>:
<blockquote>
Even if a creator&#8217;s content doesn&#8217;t violate our community guidelines, we will take a look at the broader context and impact, and if their behavior is egregious and harms the broader community, we may take action. In the case of Crowder&#8217;s channel, a thorough review over the weekend found that individually, the flagged videos did not violate our Community Guidelines. However, in the subsequent days, we saw the widespread harm to the YouTube community resulting from the ongoing pattern of egregious behavior, took a deeper look, and made the decision to suspend monetization. In order to be considered for reinstatement, all relevant issues with the channel need to be addressed, including any videos that violate our policies, as well as things like offensive merchandise.&#8221;
</blockquote>
Maza <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48138/voxs-carlos-maza-whines-about-ted-cruz-defending-amanda-prestigiacomo">wasn&#8217;t satisfied</a> with YouTube demonetizing Crowder. He stated, &#8220;Conservatives have spent years arguing that even basic content moderation is a form of &#8216;censorship.&#8217; Their goal is to scare platforms like [YouTube] away from enforcing their hate speech policies. And it&#8217;s working, because YouTube doesn&#8217;t have the guts to protect its creators. You can&#8217;t give these people an inch. They won&#8217;t stop crying &#8216;liberal bias!&#8217; until they&#8217;re allowed to use hate speech with impunity. And that&#8217;s exactly what [YouTube] is allowing them to do.&#8221;
After Axios journalist Ina Fried pressed Wojcicki to expand on her apology to the LGBTQ community, Wojcicki responded:
<blockquote>
First of all, I&#8217;m really, personally very sorry. It was not our intent, YouTube has always been a home of so many LGBTQ creators, and that&#8217;s why it was so emotional. And that&#8217;s why I think this really &#8230; Even though it was a hard decision, it was harder that it came from us &#8212; because it was such an important home. And even though we made this decision &#8230; we have so many people from the LGBTQ community and we&#8217;ve always wanted to support the community openly in spite of this hard issue that we have right now.. As a company we really want to support this community. It&#8217;s just from a policy standpoint, we need to be consistent &#8212; look, if we took down that content, there would be so much other content that we would need to take down.&#8221;
We don&#8217;t want to just be knee-jerk; we need to think about it in a very thoughtful way; be able to speak with everyone; we&#8217;ll speak with people in the LGBTQ community, make sure that we&#8217;re incorporating that going forward in terms of how we think about harassment, and then make sure that we are implementing that in a fair and consistent way going forward.
</blockquote>
Video below:
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
&#8220;Are you really sorry for anything that happened to the LGBTQ community? Or are you just sorry they were offended?&#8221;
Watch <a href="https://twitter.com/SusanWojcicki?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SusanWojcicki</a>&#8216;s response at <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CodeCon?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#CodeCon</a>: <a href="https://t.co/5MqJxL8QVS">pic.twitter.com/5MqJxL8QVS</a>
&#8212; Recode (@Recode) <a href="https://twitter.com/Recode/status/1138231255445598208?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 10, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>

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Menu

YouTube

YouTube Blames System ‘Error’ For Deleting Comments Critical Of Chinese Communist Party

Joe Rogan Signs Exclusive Deal With Spotify, Moving Show Off YouTube

Viral Video Of Epidemiologist Warning Against Lockdown Pulled From YouTube. Epidemiologist Responds.

‘IT’S SOOOOOO BEAUTIFUL!’ ‘Double Rainbow Guy’ Dies At 57

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WATCH: YouTube CEO: We’ll Remove Any Content That Goes Against WHO Recommendations

WATCH: With Black Light Powder, YouTuber Demonstrates How Germs Spread, And How To Stay Healthy

Dave Rubin Launches ‘Locals,’ A New Venture To Combat Big Tech Censorship

YouTube Bans Daily Signal Video On Gender Transitions Over ‘Hate Speech’

PragerU Finds Creative Way To Bring Attention To YouTube ‘Censorship’

REPORT: Steven Crowder Claims YouTube Is Selectively Censoring Tulsi Gabbard

MALKIN: Stop Mental Health Data Mining Of Our Kids

MALKIN: Triggering The Google Social Credit System

Google Issues New Employee Guidelines To Address ‘Raging Debate Over Politics’

Crenshaw Blasts YouTube/Google After ‘Young Turks’ Commentator Says ‘America Deserved 9/11’

PRAGER: America, Google And Me: My Senate Speech

Leaked Google Doc Describes Shapiro, Peterson, PragerU As ‘Nazis Using The Dog Whistles’

Donald Trump Jr: Here’s Why The Stakes Are Even Higher In 2020

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