March 1, 2018

Google Misses the Mark in Censoring the Word ‘Gun’

By engaging in anti-gun virtue signaling, the Internet giant displays its leftist bias.

The eggheads at Google decided to express their leftist bias by censoring any shopping searches that included the word “gun.” Evidently, they believed this was their way to fight against “gun violence.” Not surprisingly the whole fiasco blew up in Google’s face. Humorously, the algorithm created by Google’s sharpshooters to filter out gun-related shopping searches was not sophisticated enough to differentiate between an actual firearm shopping search and that which simply employed the word “gun.” For example, anyone searching for that popular Tom Cruise movie from the 1980s, “Top Gun,” found only a “no results” message. Hours later, after being widely mocked on social media for the faulty algorithm, Google restored its previous search parameters.

The truth is, this latest stunt by the Internet giant is merely par for the course. Google currently is being sued by two different parties regarding incidents of discrimination related to freedom of speech. James Damore, a former Google engineer, is suing for wrongful termination related to an internal memo he wrote in response to questions posed during a company diversity class. Damore’s ideas didn’t fit Google’s leftist dogma. Damore recently described the Silicon Valley culture as a place where extraordinarily powerful tech companies “get to define what offensive is.” In explaining just how biased Google is, Damore said, “Not only is Google’s fact-checking highly partisan — perhaps reflecting the sentiments of its leaders — it is also blatantly wrong, asserting sites made ‘claims’ they demonstrably never made.”

Prager University, the conservative nonprofit whose videos are a regular feature on our website, is also suing Google for discriminating against its video content on YouTube. PragerU claims that “Google/YouTube’s use of restricted mode filtering to silence PragerU violates its fundamental First Amendment rights under both the California and United States Constitutions, constitutes unlawful discrimination under California law, is a misleading and unfair business practice, and breaches the warranty of good faith and fair dealing implied in Google/YouTube’s Terms of Use, including their guidelines and policies for restricted access filtering of video content.”

In its rush to hire tech totalitarians to censor content no its platform, YouTube is hiring 10,000 “moderators” to “flag content,” but notes, “As we work to hire rapidly and ramp up our policy enforcement teams in 2018, newer members may misapply some of our policies resulting in mistaken removals.” In other words, guilty until proven innocent.

Back to Google’s anti-gun virtue signaling, it has been demonstrated by none other than The Washington Post that purchasing a firearm over the Internet is not as simple as click-buy-receive. Rather, there are regulations in place that require both a certified firearms dealer and a background check before a buyer can get his hands on the firearm. Google’s sophomoric act did more to damage its own reputation than that of any pro-Second Amendment advocate.

(Edited.)

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