President Trump: Investigate Google and Facebook

PO Box 130

West Shokan, NY 12494
September 18, 2019

The President

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC  20500

Dear Mr. President:

Recent allegations* concerning interference in American elections by Facebook and Google suggest that they may have violated and may plan to violate various sections of election law. For example, political advertisers are required to disclose the person or organization responsible for political advertising, yet Facebook does not disclose itself as a source of political advertising.  As well, Google's slanted search results are undisclosed political advertising.  Recently, editor-in-chief of Psychology Today  Dr. Robert Epstein  testified that Google and Facebook have manipulated elections.  This is more extreme than election advertising, but it can be subsumed under its rubric.  

I urge the Justice Department to investigate and if violations are found to criminally prosecute Facebook and Google management, including Messrs. Zuckerberg, Brin, and Page, if there is evidence of failure to comply with federal election law.

As well, because the two tech firms pose a threat to American democracy, shuttering and sequestering their sites prior to upcoming elections may be appropriate.  Facebook in general may have deleterious effects on American society. While Google's technology is better than its competitors', the harm from its ham-handed and possibly criminal actions exceeds the limited social benefits from its technology.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

*This letter also was sent via the Internet

Cc:  The Honorable William P. Barr, Attorney General

Ms. Ellen West,  Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs, Google
Ms. Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook

Michael Hansen: It Can Happen, and It Is Happening, Here

Filmmaker Michael Hansen describes how the pro-Antifa speech suppression prevalent in Scandinavia and Canada has spread to the US via Amazon, Youtube, and Google.  The question that is percolating in my mind is why alternative hosting sites aren't more popular.

Video Claims That Google Is Functioning as an Arm of the Democratic Party

Google's Orewellian-named  ML Fairness system functions as a politically motivated information-massage system. It is consistent with the totalitarian trend among the Democrats, the media, social networking, and higher education.  I no longer use Google as my first choice for Web searches, although their technology is still the best.  I start with Bing and use Google as a backup. Hopefully, innovators will come up with technology that surpasses Google's, but that has yet to happen.  Relying on Google for information about current events is as stupid as relying on the spokesperson for the Democratic Party for information about the Republican Party.

Firewall Needed: Google and the NSA

The Washington Post reports that Google and the National Security Agency are teaming up to identify the hackers who penetrated Google's China system. The article points out the need to balance privacy and security. That is a key libertarian problem that has become increasingly intricate with the advance of technology. Phone tapping posed issues that were unknown when the founding fathers wrote the Constitution, and now Internet technology poses ever more complex privacy problems. Here in the eastern Catskills, "hippies" will not get onto a computer because of fear of government. I'm not sure if this correlates with illegal behavior, but I know two people with good educations who will not get on any computer and never have. The article says that:

"collaboration is not easy, in part because private companies do not trust the government to keep their secrets and in part because of concerns that collaboration can lead to continuous government monitoring of private communications. Privacy advocates, concerned about a repeat of the NSA's warrantless interception of Americans' phone calls and e-mails after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, say information-sharing must be limited and closely overseen."

Another aspect of an arrangement between US spook agencies and information services is the potential for international tension. It is likely that agents of the communist government were in involved in the hacking. Might pressure from the NSA create tensions with China?

The article quotes Matthew Aid, author of "The Secret Sentry":

"I'm a little uncomfortable with Google cooperating this closely with the nation's largest intelligence agency, even if it's strictly for defensive purposes."

Given that the collaboration between Google and NSA is primarily one involving sharing of information about the hackers' techniques and code, it would seem that the collaboration maximizes freedom. But given that Google has a lot of potentially embarrassing information about a large swathe of the American public, it needs to have NSA-proof systems philosophies in place to ensure a firewall between its data and the potentially suppressive activities of the government.

Has Google Suppressed Atlas?

Bob Robbins has forwarded this blog from Texas Darlin saying that Google has excised the Atlas Shrugs blog and other anti-Obama sites from its search engine:

"Google, the world’s number one search engine, is apparently adjusting its search engines to restrict access to anti-Obama information on the world wide web. I don’t know of a more intelligent, hard-working, ethical anti-Obama blogger than Atlas Shrugs. If Google is disappearing Pamela’s work, it’s flagrant political content-based censorship. Welcome to Obama’s Regime. And they say he’s a 'liberal?'"

Pamela Geller writes:

"A couple of days ago I was wiped off google search pages. Yes, if you google Pamela Geller or Atlas Shrugs, I come up, that is not the issue. My work is not there, it does not come up in google's search results. It is critical to building Atlas that I be searchable.Youtube searches are still intact as are images."

I Googled "Pamela Geller Atlas Shrugs" and came up with 32,200 hits, five times what I get when I Google "Mitchell Langbert". But when I Google "Obama birth certificate" I do not see Atlas Shrugs right away, which I would think I should. When I type in "obama birth certificate +atlas +shrugs" I get back 28,100 hits, including from the Atlas Shrugs site, which seems all right to me. I don't really understand how search engines work, or how Google might be editing or altering access.

But one thing's for sure. Google does a great job in providing search and blogging support. On the other hand, by virtue of its virtuosity does Google get too much information about us? I'm not casting aspersions about Google (nor am I clear about what has happened with Pamela) but the left-liberal ideology is largely the dominant paradigm, and it has been used systematically to secure concentrated corporate power even as leftists claim to favor the "underprivileged", minorities and the like. What has happened to the underprivileged and minorities? Take a walk around some of Brooklyn's worst neighborhoods, which were nothing like this before the left started to become ascendant in the 1930s.

Is big business capable of suppression of conservative bloggers on behalf of the pro-Obama progressive left? Of course. So whatever has gone on with respect to Geller's site, I respect what she says.

New York Sun Covers Shut-Down of Mitchell Langbert's Blog/Google Apologizes

The New York Sun's Anna Phillips has covered the shut down of this and other anti-Obama blogs last week. Google has posted a general apology here. The Google text follows the Sun article.

Google insists that the problem is purely due to their computer algorithm. I do not know enough to argue, but it seems too coincidental that the Hillary Clinton campaign was having a similar problem several months ago when Hillary was running against Obama, and now I and other Republican anti-Obama bloggers have had the very same problem.

Just by way of self-defense, although it may look like I spend more time on the political diatribe-type blogs, the academic-type blogs such as my write-up of Howe's book on the Whigs take up 4/5ths of my blogging time. Thus my claim to Ms. Phillips about the blog being two thirds academic stuff is probably an understatement, although it may appear to be an overstatement.

Anna Phillips's Sun Article:

>Anti-Obama Bloggers Say They Were Silenced

Web loggers who are campaigning against Senator Obama's presidential run are accusing Google and Obama supporters of silencing them after their Web logs were marked as spam and their accounts temporarily frozen.

On Thursday, hours after publishing a post about an online petition demanding that Mr. Obama publicly produce his birth certificate, an associate professor of business administration at Brooklyn College, Mitchell Langbert, found that he could no longer access his Web log.

Google's Blogger hosting service had suspended "Mitchell Langbert's Blog," which Mr. Langbert describes as "two-thirds academic stuff I'm working on and one-third politics," until it could verify the Web log was not a "spam blog," or a site designed solely to increase the page views of associated Web sites.

A day later Google lifted the block on the account, but the incident and earlier Web log freezes in late June have led Mr. Langbert and other anti-Obama bloggers to accuse the Illinois senator's supporters of intentionally identifying their blog addresses to Google as spam blogs. They also say the company has reflexively suspended the sites.

"These tech-savvy smart alecks have figured out that if you report a blog you don't like, you can do some damage to a person," Mr. Langbert said.

A spokesman for Google, Adam Kovacevich, said in a statement that an overzealous antispam filter was responsible for the blocks.

"We believe this was caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the 'Just Say No Deal' network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam," he said. "We have restored posting rights to the affected blogs, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression."

Several of the blogs that were blocked, including hillaryorbust.com and comealongway.blogspot.com, are part of the "Just Say No Deal" network of anti-Obama blogs. But Mr. Langbert's blog is not, leading him to conclude that Obama supporters had targeted him.

On her right-leaning blog "Atlas Shrugs," Pamela Geller keeps a list of blogs that Google has temporarily blocked. "The blockings do come in waves," she said. "The last wave was this past week, and now it got very quiet."

Some writers have had their blogs unblocked, while others have moved them to WordPress, a rival blog host.

"I don't think" Google has "malicious intentions at all, it's just that spammers can literally overrun a service if you're not careful, so their defenses have become overzealous," a spokesman for WordPress, Matthew Mullenweg, said in an e-mail.

"We always have human review before turning off an active blog," he said. "People invest so much time into their blogs, to treat it with anything less than the utmost respect is criminal."

<

Two Google Apologies (h/t Phil Orenstein):

Google Apology

Spam Fridays

"While we wish that every post on this blog could be about cool features or other Blogger news, sometimes we have to step in and admit a mistake.

"We've noticed that a number of users have had their blogs mistakenly marked as spam, and wanted to sound off real quick to let you know that, despite it being Friday afternoon, we are working hard to sort this out. So to those folks who have received an email saying that your blog has been classified as spam and can't post right now, we offer our sincere apologies for the trouble.

"We hope to have this resolved shortly, and appreciate your patience as we work through the kinks."

AND

You Are Not Spam

You knew that already, and now we do too. We have now restored all accounts that were mistakenly marked as spam yesterday. (See: Spam Fridays)

We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We’ve tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data.

At Blogger, we strongly believe that you own and should control your posts and other data. We understand that you trust us to store and serve your blog, and incidents like this one are a betrayal of that trust. In the spirit of ensuring that you always have access to your data, we have been working on importing and exporting tools to make it easier to back up your posts. If you'd like a sneak peek at the Import / Export tool, you can try it out on Blogger in Draft.

Our restoration today was of all blogs that were mistakenly marked as spam due to Friday's bug. Because spam fighting inherently runs the risk of false positives, your blog may have been mis-classified as spam for other reasons. If you are still unable to post to your blog today you can request a review by clicking Request Unlock Review on your Dashboard.