Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, says the company will “engineer” specific algorithms for RT and Sputnik to make their articles less prominent on the search engine’s news delivery services.
“We are working on detecting and de-ranking those kinds of sites – it’s basically RT and Sputnik,” Schmidt said during a Q & A session at the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada on Saturday, when asked about whether Google facilitates “Russian propaganda.”
“We are well of aware of it, and we are trying to engineer the systems to prevent that [the content being delivered to wide audiences]. But we don’t want to ban the sites – that’s not how we operate.”
The discussion focused on the company’s popular Google News service, which clusters the news by stories, then ranks the various media outlets depending on their reach, article length and veracity, and Google Alerts, which pro-actively informs subscribers of new publications.
RT has criticized the proposed move – whose timescale has not been publicized – as arbitrary and a form of censorship.
Source: Google will ‘de-rank’ RT articles to make them harder to find – Eric Schmidt
"Pursuing Truth, Defending Liberty"
Pure, 100%, US government sanctioned censorship, and a clear warning of things to come when net neutrality ends.
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Haven’t seen it for myself, but I’ve heard that a few days ago Google started adding links to fact-checking sites, such as Snoopes(we know how UNBIASED they are, LOL!) to their search results for sites like InfoWars, Prison Planet etc. And then you’ve probably heard of the Twitter ‘purge’ of conservatives and other undesirables that is supposed to happen on Dec. 18th.
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Thing is, if this is what is happening NOW, what the heck is the Internet going to look like after losing the Net Neutrality we all cherish.
I’m thinking we’ll have to go back to gorilla BBS operating.
Email will die as it will be totally insecure, and I’m not sure if Skype will survive either.
As for websites TPTB don’t like?
The phrase “You’ve been terminated” will become commonplace..
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