The Manipulators Read online

  YouTube in July 2018 announced an overhaul to its search algorithm that would “prominently surface authoritative sources” on certain topics.33 When Google and YouTube say they’re going to “prominently surface authoritative sources,” what they mean is they’re going to boost liberal establishment media outlets like CNN higher in the search results while making right-of-center outlets and conservative viewpoints harder to find. What this means in practice is if you search for “gay wedding cake” on YouTube, looking for insight on the religious freedom battle being fought in the courts about whether a Christian baker can be forced to violate his conscience, all of the top results will be from “authoritative sources,” including a skit from liberal late night host Jimmy Kimmel, which isn’t authoritative at all. He completely butchers the details of the case and misleads his viewers.34 A video in which conservative comedian Steven Crowder requests gay wedding cakes from Muslim bakers (and is turned down), is nowhere near the front page,35 despite having a staggering 6.7 million views, by far the most views on the subject.36 The next most popular video on the topic: a Ben Shapiro interview with Dave Rubin, a gay, liberal YouTube host who defends the right of Christian bakers to follow their consciences. That video, too, has millions of views, but is nowhere near the front page. The third most popular video is a clip from The View in which actress Candace Cameron Bure defended the bakers. It’s nowhere near the front page, either.

  Likewise, when I search for “transgender bathrooms,” the top results are two-year-old news clips, many of which have garnered fewer than 100,000 views. Ben Shapiro has multiple videos on the subject with view counts in the millions. Once again, they’re buried far away from the first page of search results.

  According to internal Google communications and documents I obtained, in June 2018, upset Google employees succeeded in banning an advertisement for a video that explained Christian teaching on marriage. The video was flagged in an internal listserv, “Yes at Google,” which is run by Google’s human resources department. The listserv has more than 30,000 members and is devoted to policing “microaggressions” and “micro-corrections” within the company, according to its official internal description. A Google vice president assured angry employees that the video would no longer run as an advertisement.

  In the video, Christian radio host Michael L. Brown welcomed gay Christians but said they are called to follow the same Christian teachings on sex and marriage. In the video, he describes same-sex relationships as “like other sins, but one that Jesus died for.” Brown, it’s worth noting, is no extremist on the issue; he has spoken out against the Westboro Baptist Church’s hateful rhetoric against gay people; and the belief that sexual relationships are meant to take place in the context of a marriage between one man and one women—as argued by Brown—is central to most major Christian denominations’ marital teachings. But those teachings are unconscionable at Google. Google HR highlighted in the listserv a “representative” comment from an employee who took offense that Brown’s video had appeared as an advertisement on channels operated by gay and lesbian YouTubers. “I cannot see how this can be allowed when the specific idea of LGBT videos is to allow the creators to feel free to share their content and be comfortable that anti-LGBT advertisers would not be attached to their content,” the employee wrote. “This seems very counter to our mission, specifically around PRIDE 2018 timeframe.” Google’s vice president for product management and ads, Vishal Sharma, agreed that the video was too offensive to air as an advertisement. “Thank you for raising this very important issue. It means a lot to me personally and those of us working on this across the Ads and YouTube teams. YouTube is an open platform, and we support the free expression of creators with a wide range of views,” Sharma wrote in his response, which was included in the listserv. “But we don’t allow advertising that disparages people based on who they are—including their sexual orientation—and we remove ads that violate this basic principle,” Sharma continued. “After careful and multiple reviews over the course of a few days, our teams decided to remove the ad in question here as it violates our policy. We’ve communicated this to the advertiser and have been in touch with creators who have been actively engaged on this issue,” he added, again expressing his gratitude for Google employees’ bringing this matter to his attention.

  YouTube’s censorship of a video produced by the Daily Signal, the media arm of The Heritage Foundation, offers a clear example of how the company’s step-by-step approach to censorship is choking out conservative speech on the most important issues of our time. The Daily Signal released a video in December 2017 featuring Dr. Michelle Cretella, a longtime pediatrician and executive director of the American College of Pediatricians. Cretella laid out straightforward, scientific facts, like: “Biological sex is not assigned. Sex is determined at conception by our DNA and is stamped into every cell of our bodies.”37 “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.” For over a year, the video remained up on YouTube with no issue—and why shouldn’t it have? After all, a medical professional providing a medical opinion on an important topic is the kind of “authoritative content” YouTube is supposed to be prioritizing. But of course the whole point of YouTube retooling its platform was to enforce the liberal establishment’s point of view. So the video had to go. YouTube pulled the video in 2019, citing one sentence from the video, in which Cretella said: “See, 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.”38 It’s an objectively true statement—but it’s not allowed on YouTube.

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  In a January 25, 2019, blog post, YouTube announced the company would be “taking a closer look at how we can reduce the spread of content that comes close to—but doesn’t quite cross the line of—violating our Community Guidelines.” Like Facebook’s algorithm change, this shift means punishing content that’s not actually breaking the rules. “To that end, we’ll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11,” the blog post read.39 YouTube cited alarmist examples like 9/11 “truther” videos as a shield against criticism, but this was a significant step towards manipulating its users. Recommended videos, the ones you see on the homepage and off to the side of whatever video you’re watching, are a major eyeball driver on YouTube. They’re meant to be similar to what your interests are—but now YouTube is working to redirect your interests if the company deems them harmful, even if none of the videos in question violates YouTube’s rules. “YouTube is a particularly tragic case in my view, because that was the one area where independent media, even more than Twitter and maybe even more than Facebook, where one-man operations could really rise to prominence, it was sort of like a new talk radio, you could have a small, simple set-up and attract audiences of tens and hundreds of thousands,” Allum Bokhari, a prolific tech reporter, told me. “You look at the recent YouTube changes, and they’re elevating all these mainstream media outlets, and they’re also elevating Fox News as the token conservative, but it’s essentially the same situation as the 1990s, where you have all these liberal networks and the one token conservative outlet.”

  He continued, saying “the idea that YouTube is going to take away that engine of success and that opportunity that was there for millions and millions of people, and just give all the power back to the mainstream media networks that they were originally disrupting is pretty tragic. These tech platforms—they marketed themselves as disruptors, as this new way to reach people. I mean YouTube’s slogan is still broadcast yourself, user-created content… but here they are elevating these media empires that already have tons of resources, over their own content creators. One of the videos they downranked was a woman sharing her story of bein
g pressured to get an abortion. It was a perfectly fine video, just one woman’s anecdote with hundreds of thousands of views, and there was no reason why that video shouldn’t be at the top of the abortion search results, but instead they’ve replaced it with all these videos from Vice News and BBC and BuzzFeed, and they’re giving this special advantage to media outlets that don’t deserve it and already have tons of resources anyway. It just makes no sense.”

  YouTube announced that the initial changes would affect less than one percent of videos on its platform—which even if true, was still an enormous amount of content.40 Five billion videos are watched on YouTube every single day.41 If YouTube pulled recommendations to even just half of one percent of those videos, that would be twenty-five million videos every day. And of course, in a June 2019 blog post, YouTube announced that it was expanding the program.42 This time, YouTube left out how many videos would be affected, simply saying that “even more” videos would be smothered by the algorithms. “Our systems are also getting smarter about what types of videos should get this treatment, and we’ll be able to apply it to even more borderline videos moving forward,” read the blog post. Which videos exactly are being suppressed? YouTube won’t say. You’ll just have to take them at their word that they’re playing fair. “As we do this, we’ll also start raising up more authoritative content in recommendations, building on the changes we made to news last year. For example, if a user is watching a video that comes close to violating our policies, our systems may include more videos from authoritative sources (like top news channels) in the ‘watch next’ panel,” the announcement continued. In other words: YouTube would shove CNN videos down the throats of viewers who strayed too far.

  It’s not a coincidence that YouTube’s algorithm changes have shifted in favor of the corporate media outlets that many YouTube users were trying to escape in the first place. YouTube isn’t going to be a place for everyone anymore. It’s going to be a place for professional YouTube channels—primarily establishment liberal news organizations. That’s not what YouTube was for most of its existence. It’s not what made YouTube, YouTube. But that is what is happening.

  Between changing its approaches to search results and its format for recommended videos, YouTube is actively picking winners and losers on its platform, driving viewers to some channels and away from others, and promoting some opinions and demoting opposing ones. The big winner: the liberal establishment media. The big losers: conservative and independent channels43 and small channels that were demonetized.44

  What YouTube and Google are doing is overriding user choice. Most people searching for “abortion” on YouTube aren’t interested in watching a CNN news video—they’re looking for information and viewpoints that CNN won’t show, which is why pro-life content outperforms pro-abortion content when the playing field is neutral, and why YouTube first became a popular outlet for conservative commentators who dissented from the liberal media establishment. But Google and YouTube are now playing the role of hall monitor, and they are hardly neutral; they have an institutional point of view that is left-wing, and they are working with the liberal establishment media to stifle dissenting conservative voices.

  Google announced in April 2017 that it would be placing articles from select fact checkers at the top of search results.45 The left-leaning sites Snopes and PolitiFact, were among the outlets to receive these special privileges.46 Snopes already had a track record of hiring left-wing bloggers and publishing slanted fact checks when they began working with Google, and that pattern has only continued. When Snopes botched its fact check of the Covington Catholic controversy, (where students from the school were harassed by a leftist American Indian activist and a black nationalist group called the Black Hebrew Israelites), Google placed the inaccurate fact check at the top of its search results.

  In late 2017, Google expanded the fact check program to provide additional context on media outlets. The plan bore a striking resemblance to what Google vice president David Besbris had proposed in a leaked internal chat: “We’re working on providing users with context around stories so that they can know the bigger picture. We can play a role in providing the full story and educate them about all sides.” Google’s algorithm plugged fact-checks from liberal outlets like Snopes into context bars for media outlets—but not all media outlets. The fact-checking operation targeted right-of-center outlets almost exclusively. It was also blatantly wrong.

  Google’s fact check repeatedly attributed false claims to conservative outlets, even though they demonstrably never made those claims.47 It was so bad that fact-checking outlets had to publicly distance themselves from the program, blaming Google for the bad results. Google only pulled the program in January 2018 after an investigation by The Daily Caller News Foundation, my employer, revealed the blatant inaccuracies throughout. Google blamed the faulty fact-checks on a bug in its algorithm, but they still haven’t explained why conservative outlets were the ones targeted. Google still privileges select publications like Snopes, giving them top placement in Google Search and Google News.

  Censorship can be imposed without banning conservative media outlets or burying them in search results. Another way is by threatening to boycott companies that advertise on conservative media by labeling such media “extremist.” Leftwing activists and journalists sometimes join forces on these campaigns. YouTube cut off thousands of accounts from its monetization program beginning in March 2017, after media investigations found ads on YouTube running alongside extremist content. The initial investigation by the Times of London focused on content produced by neo-Nazi groups and Islamic extremists,48 but ensuing coverage from other media outlets labeled pro-life videos as “extremist,” and pressured Google to target them as well.49 The ensuing changes didn’t just sweep up ISIS propaganda flagged by media outlets, it shook up the entire YouTube landscape, hurting smaller and independent publishers in the process.

  YouTube nearly doubled the size of its “Trusted Flagger” program over the course of 2017, adding fifty government agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to the program, YouTube public policy director Juniper Downs told a Senate committee in January 2018. YouTube empowers the third-party organizations—“Trusted Flaggers”—to help police content on the platform by mass flagging content and working closely with engineers who design YouTube’s algorithms, according to Downs’ testimony and my conversations with a YouTube spokeswoman in January 2018.50 Downs described some of the steps Google had taken at that point to suppress “offensive” or “inflammatory” content that falls short of violating YouTube’s rules. “Some borderline videos, such as those containing inflammatory religious or supremacist content without a direct call to violence or a primary purpose of inciting hatred, may not cross these lines for removal. But we understand that these videos may be offensive to many and have developed a new treatment for them,” she said. “Identified borderline content will remain on YouTube behind an interstitial, won’t be recommended, won’t be monetized, and won’t have key features including comments, suggested videos, and likes. Initial uses have been positive and have shown a substantial reduction in watch time of those videos.”

  YouTube’s demonetization push was meant to accommodate advertisers who seek to avoid controversial content, the company spokeswoman told me at that time. But the pressure didn’t let up. Two months after that conversation, the multinational corporation Unilever threatened to pull all of its ads from Facebook, Google, and Twitter unless the tech giants ramped up their content moderation. The corporation cited concerns about fake news and hate speech.51 If placing advertisements on YouTube is now seen as a political statement, then advertisers are going to push for content that’s palatable to left-wing activists in order to avoid protests and boycotts and protect their clients. And YouTube will happily comply; in 2018, it was reported that YouTube had, yet again, mistakenly deleted conservative channels from the site.52 In February 2018, YouTube demonetized a conversation between liberal YouTube host Da
ve Rubin (a staunch critic of left-wing censorship), Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro. YouTube only reinstated the video after I said I was writing an article about YouTube censorship. YouTube once more blamed faulty algorithms.53

  Censorship: A PR Decision

  Google insists that they have processes in place to prevent political bias from influencing their policies. Individual Google employees can’t just demonetize videos, Google tells the public. Reality paints a different picture: Google tailors its demonetization decisions to keep liberal reporters and activists happy. In fact, in court documents filed on December 29, 2017, Google’s lawyers emphasized that “Decisions about which videos fall into that [demonetization] category are often complicated and may involve difficult, subjective judgment calls.” Indeed.

  Internal documents I obtained show the extent to which Google’s public relations team quarterbacks the content-policing process. One email exchange shows a Google spokeswoman making snap decisions—in direct response to media inquiries—about which YouTube videos to demonetize and which channels to scrutinize. The catalyst was an email from a reporter from The Guardian, a left-leaning British publication, asking about specific videos. The reporter’s inquiry was based in part on complaints from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a left-wing smear factory. Among the videos the SPLC found problematic was one satirizing gender differences. The Google public relations representative forwarded the email to the censorship team and ordered it to review the videos, “making sure they are not monetized.” In other words, censorship decisions are viewed as public relations decisions, not as content decisions. That’s not how the process is supposed to work—and it is certainly not how Google says the process works. Public relations representatives are supposed to explain the censorship process—not dictate it to please liberal reporters. The exchange also highlights how left-wing interest groups with an egregious track record of dishonesty (like the SPLC) partner with liberal reporters to pressure big tech to censor right-of-center voices.