DePaul University banned “gay lives matter” poster to avoid offending Muslims

Liberal academia is all about catering to special interest groups, at least until such groups find themselves at odds with one another in pushing their respective agendas. Such a scenario recently occurred at DePaul University in Chicago, where school faculty had to decide between defending the free speech rights of a gay speaker or pandering to the potential hurt feelings of Muslims, to which they chose the latter.

Problems began after James Kirchick, a gay reporter who had planned to give a talk at the school on radical Islam and its hardline position against homosexuality, was to be introduced with posters that read “Gay Lives Matter.” An obvious reference to the “Black Lives Matter” group, these posters were intended to be plastered around campus prior to the event – that is until school officials got wind of it.

According to reports, the campus group Turning Point USA was planning to help out with the event until it was notified that the lecture could not be advertised with these posters, which it claimed were part of an effort to “co-opt” the message of Black Lives Matter. Turning Point denied these allegations, but the school dug its heels in and refused to allow the posters to be used, effectively shutting down one group’s free speech in favor of another.

“This is a disappointing decision by the university to prohibit our poster,” stated Matt Lamb, one of the leaders of the Turning Point, which helped facilitate bringing Kirchick to campus. “The event by our DePaul chapter is calling attention to the harms that big government, authoritarian regimes pose to LGBT citizen’s (sic) most basic human rights.” (Related: More on issues pertaining to censorship is available at Censorship.news.)

Palestinian group calls for protest of Kirchick talk while deliberately misleading its members

The lecture, which was entitled, “Dictatorships and Radical Islam: The Enemies of Gay Rights,” was not only offensive to Black Lives Matter, according to reports, but also to Muslims on campus who may not have preferred that the truth about their religion be exposed. Members of the group DePaul Students for Justice in Palestine, who vocally oppose what they say are Kirchick’s Zionist leanings, published a post to Facebook announcing their intent to protest the event.

In this announcement, the group removed the word “radical” from the talk’s title to insinuate that Kirchick’s view is that all of Islam is the enemy of gay rights. This subtle change didn’t go unnoticed by Kirchick himself, who tweeted a message asking his followers, “Notice missing word?” The Palestinian group also wrote that Kirchick is “a white, Zionist, neoliberal journalists, to speak on [expletive] he knows nothing about.”

As far as Black Lives Matter and the alleged co-opting of its name, Turning Point says the posters themselves were only for the event. The intent was to catch the attention of students and faculty using familiar language – and only on this one occasion, not to be used in perpetuity as some kind of slogan or brand.

“We do not see how the branding of Black Lives Matter is exclusive from all other lives and we cannot make a similar statement in a different movement,” says Turning Point USA President Jason Plotzke, as quoted by The College Fix. “Sure, it is related and based off the BLM slogan, but with no intent to undermine the movement. We are not even using the poster to push an entire movement, but rather a specific event. We, as students in an academic setting, should be allowed to market our events as we see fit.”

Sources for this article include:

Breitbart.com

TheCollegeFix.com

PURE EVIL: How Google steals content, crushes small publishers and monopolizes the internet for profit

If you don’t yet realize how Google has become the most EVIL corporation in the world, check out this article from TheWeek.com which reveals how Google steals content from small publishers, crushes their revenue, puts them out of business and monopolizes the internet.

The article, entitled, “Google is a monopoly — and it’s crushing the internet,” reveals how Google destroys small publishers by literally stealing their content and denying them revenues, putting them out of business:

The latest example of monopolist platform abuse comes from Adrianne Jeffries with the story of CelebrityNetWorth.com. This was a small business started by a man named Brian Warner, who found in 2008 that there was no good data on how much Larry David was worth. After some digging, he figured it out — and discovered that there was tremendous demand for information about celebrity wealth. He started a small media business, eventually hiring a staff of 12 to conduct detailed investigations — sometimes even corresponding with the celebrities themselves.

Then Google came up with an idea for “Featured Snippets,” which places answers to search queries at the top of the search page. Instead of having to click through to find the answer to a question, it will simply tell you a summary of the top search results.

Before rolling it out, Google asked Warner if they could scrape his data and credit him. Warner declined, but Google did it anyway. The algorithm they use for the snippets is notoriously error-prone — and worse, the celebrity net worth ones often failed to credit his site. Many would scrape other sites that had themselves aggregated CelebrityNetWorth.com. The overall result was devastating:

In February 2016, Google started displaying a Featured Snippet for each of the 25,000 celebrities in the CelebrityNetWorth database, Warner said. He knew this because he added a few fake listings for friends who were not celebrities to see if they would pop up as featured answers, and they did. “Our traffic immediately crumbled,” Warner said. “Comparing January 2016 (a full month where they had not yet scraped our content) to January 2017, our traffic is down 65 percent.” Warner said he had to lay off half his staff.

Google deliberately destroys businesses, in other words, while stealing their content to consolidate yet more power and profit for themselves. That’s how monopolies operate, of course: Consolidating power and influence while destroying anyone who might threaten their position of dominance.

Why it’s now urgent to break up the Google monopoly and save our Republic

The Google monopoly needs to be broken apart for the good of consumers, competition and freedom of information. If we allow Google to continue to monopolize search, videos, ad revenues and even advanced robotics, we are going to soon wake up in a world where Google is overthrowing governments and nations, running the world as a monopolist, fascist corporation.

As I describe in this article about Google evil:

If we don’t stop Google, it’s only a matter of time before Google’s robot division attains sufficient physical capabilities and A.I. prowess to be unleashed as Terminator-style Hunter-Killer robots to target human beings on the battlefield (or perhaps to even target political enemies). It’s not as far off as you might suppose. Before you know it, Google will be building massive armies of corporate-run robot soldiers, and Google will become a military might unto itself. What will Google do with all that power?

As Google itself has already demonstrated, it will wield power to silence its enemies, suppress the truth, enslave humanity and dominate everything in sight. It’s not difficult to see how, given another 25 years of such evil run amok, Google could overthrow entire nations and supplant the governments we know today with its own totalitarian corporate dictatorship. To envision how Google might operate in a future where it controls the most dangerous humanoid robots armed with weapons, just ask yourself how Google operates today. Does Google respect humanity or does it try to enslave it? Does Google tolerate competition and criticism, or does it try to silence those who speak out against it? Does Google protect the privacy of its users, or does it sell you out with back door access to the NSA that violates your Fourth Amendment privacy every second of every day?

The answer is abundantly clear: Google has become the world’s most evil — and dangerous — corporation. It has become a danger to human freedom, human knowledge and even human life. If we don’t stop Google’s march toward totalitarian dominance, the future of our world will look like a destitute dystopian society of enslaved humans, all kept ignorant and uninformed about reality (thanks to Google’s suppression of truth).

No criticism of the “accepted, fact-checked reality” will be allowed on YouTube, Google or much of the internet, as any person who dares contradict the Leftist totalitarian narratives will be immediately stripped of ad revenues, search engine visibility and public credibility.

Google — which should probably be renamed “OBEY” — will have achieved its ultimate goal of silencing all dissent, controlling all knowledge and overthrowing any governments that oppose it. In this future, Google will run all elections, and all winners of such elections will be little more than Google’s puppets, rubber stamping their legislative schemes that continue to grant more power to everything Google.

Freedom will die.

Dissent will become extinct.

Reason will be labeled “hate speech.”

Conformity will be mandatory.

And one day, half the human population will be declared “obsolete” and no longer needed by the globalists because Google’s advanced robots will replace human labor. At that point, the depopulation ovens will run 24/7, all powered by Google’s A.I. algorithms, of course, which will calculate the most efficient expenditure of energy to terminate a human life.

This is the future for humanity if Google is not stopped.

Google invents “snowflake” technology making computers feel offended and intolerant just like college students…

Be careful what you search for online because you might just end up “triggering” your search engine. In an effort to combat what it deems as inappropriate internet content, tech giant Google has reportedly tweaked its search platform to get “offended,” like a human would, whenever someone searches for something that Google has flagged as vulgar, such as videos of the terrorist group ISIS beheading or shooting its victims.

Similar to how a college student majoring in women’s studies might respond to a fellow classmate who suggests that men are the more rational of the two sexes, Google now has the ability to get upset and throw a fit whenever someone searches for something that the system doesn’t like, effectively hiding it from view.

Following the recent terror attack in Westminster, outcry over the ease with which members of the public can search Google for, say, a handbook on how to effectively blow up a building, has led to efforts that would block such information from ever appearing in Google search results. It’s censorship disguised as “terror prevention,” and something that the world is likely to see more of as corporations like Google coalesce to it.

According to reports, Google is busy at work refining this tracking tool to better identify “inappropriate” content in order to basically pull it from the web. Consequently, users who search for anything on the Google blacklist, even for educational or other purposes, will now have their search results filtered and sanitized without their consent.

“Currently teams of humans are checking the systems to see if they are doing a good job,” reports the Daily Mail Online about this first phase of the program. “Google now wants the computers which monitor content being uploaded through YouTube and other channels to understand the nuances of what makes a video offensive.”

Google to eventually hand over control of internet censorship to AI-like computer systems

As part of a dual effort that includes also trying to stamp out so-called “fake news,” Google hopes to eventually convert its censorship system, which currently relies on human oversight to identify “offensive” content, to one in which computers alone will be able to make that call. Human input won’t even be necessary; in other words,  AI-equipped computer systems will eventually be able to do all the censoring on their own.

The way that Google hopes to construct such a system is to continue feeding it a stream of human-vetted examples of both “safe” and “unsafe” content, from which it can effectively learn the differences between the two over time. YouTube videos, for instance, will continue to be broken down frame by frame and analyzed by a human being whose job it is to teach the system using data patterns.

As for the current success of the program, Google claims that its system is already flagging five times more content than it had prior, though the company has yet to release official figures to prove this.

“Computers have a much harder time understanding context, and that’s why we’re actually using all of our latest and greatest learning abilities now to get a better feel for this,” says Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, about the endeavor.

Taking the program another step further, Google also hopes to eventually develop a system in which potential ISIS recruits and other suspected terrorists can be fed customized advertising content on their Google advertising banners that will deter them from wanting to join jihadist groups. As it turns out, there is apparently a very high demand for ISIS material online, experts claim, that needs to be better addressed for national security purposes.

Sources for this article include:

DailyMail.co.uk

Wired.com

Google, Facebook algorithms a whole new kind of “Orwellian censorship,” warns News Corp CEO

We all learned in grade school that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees the freedom of speech for all Americans. What some people may not know, however, is the historical context behind freedom of speech. Like most other amendments in the Bill of Rights, the right to speak freely and openly was meant to be a check on the federal government. In most other countries during the time of our founding and even in many countries today, citizens are tortured or even killed for speaking out against the government. The Founding Fathers wanted to break from that type of system and empower the people to speak up if and when the government begins to take steps towards tyranny.

Today, there is an ongoing effort within the progressive movement to silence speech that is not aligned with their ideology – that is, any speech that promotes the tenets of conservative republicanism. Whether it’s talk radio, college professors and administrations or on social media, the left’s assault on free speech is relentless. Such censorship will no doubt put America on a slippery slope, and may one day lead to the formation of a centralized, tyrannical state.

This is essentially the point being argued by Robert Thomson, the Chief Executive Officer of News Corp. Thomson warns that algorithms used to censor certain speech on Facebook and Google have “left us perched on the edge of the slippery slope of censorship.” Thomson’s comment comes in response to an investigation that was conducted by The Times, which revealed that automated adverts often place brand name products on pornography and extremist websites. For instance, the investigation found that an authorized Nissan dealer’s advertisements were automatically placed on the YouTube page of the far-right English Defense League. Additionally, an advertisement for Argos was shown alongside sexually explicit YouTube videos, and an advertisement for Marie Curie, a charity based in the UK, was found on a racist song that was posted by Combat 18, a neo-nazi terrorist cell.

While speaking at the Asia Society in Hong Kong, Thomson explained that the issue is actually a lot more serious than damaged reputations. “The embarrassment for these advertisers, naturally conscious of their image, is understandable, but the situation is far more serious than mere loss of face,” he said. Thomson went on to point out that the consequences of these algorithms and the automated adverts could be far more significant than we think. “Because of YouTube, that is Google, there is a real chance that some of these clients have been funding extremism, whether it be Islamist excess or neo-fascist nonsense, depending on the type of advertising….” He added that those who are YouTube partners “could earn about 55 percent of the revenue from a video.”

Later in his speech, Thomson put things a bit more bluntly, saying, “The word Orwellian is flagrantly used and abused. But when it comes to the all-powerful algorithms of Google, Amazon and Facebook, otherwise known as GAF, Orwellian is unused.”

Recently, Google decided to take a page from Facebook’s playbook by altering its news-collection algorithm so that it can locate and censor information it deems fake or inaccurate.

The problem with this endless hunt to find “fake news” on the Internet is that those in charge may very well abuse their power and begin censoring things that should not be censored. Who is to say, for example, that those people who make up Google’s team of fake news hunters aren’t a bunch of leftists out to shut down conservative speech? While today the target seems to be pornography and extremist sites, who is to say that tomorrow it won’t be articles published by Breitbart or Fox News?

The line has to be drawn somewhere. Incidentally, that line was already drawn over two centuries ago in what we call the United States Constitution.

Sources:

PressGazette.co.uk

TheGuardian.com

TheTimes.co.uk