Julian Assange warns Google will conspire in favor of the Clinton presidential campaign
06/16/2016 / By JD Heyes
(Clinton.news) Wikileaks founder Julian Assange just confirmed what many politicos may have already assumed: That the “mainstream” tech and media giants are in the tank for presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and will lend the power of their influence and reach in any way to help get her elected.
In a video link interview from the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, where he has been seeking asylum, addressing the “New Era of Journalism: Farewell to Mainstream international media” forum in Moscow, Assange said “Google is directly engaged with Hillary Clinton’s campaign” and claimed the tech giant used the U.S. State Department when she headed it up on a “a quid pro quo” basis.
“Of course when she is in power… she is a problem for freedom of speech. We know what she is going to do. And she made the chart for the destruction of Libya, she was involved in the process of taking the Libyan armory and sending it to Syria,” he said, as reported by the Belfast Telegraph.
Assange repeated earlier claims that Clinton is a “war hawk” who “seemingly” wants to start wars.
“What we have with Clinton is someone who is a hawk but who has the tools of legal interventionism, a rhetorical cover to start wars, and someone who seemingly wants to start them… From WikiLeaks’ perspective Hillary Clinton is a problem in terms of war and peace,” he said.
Assange also said that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is now heading the Pentagon innovation board.
“Google is heavily integrated with Washington power, at personal level and at business level. Google, which has increasing control over the distribution channels… is intensely allying itself with the U.S. exceptionalism,” he said. “[Google] shows the will to use that at different levels. It will inevitably influence its audience.”
The founder of WikiLeaks added, “Google is an intensely Washington, DC-aligned company. I see a Google exit from China… It seems much more to do with Google’s feeling that it is part of ‘family America’ and that it is opposed to the Chinese.”
As for Google manipulating its search results and media coverage in favor of Clinton, that is something that appears to already be in play. As reported by the Washington Free Beacon:
Matt Lieberman of SourceFed released a video showing examples of Google skewing its autocomplete results for Clinton, while other search engines simply display the most searched terms.
“While researching for a wrap-up on the June 7 Presidential Primaries, we discovered evidence that Google may be manipulating autocomplete recommendations in favor of Hillary Clinton,” SourceFed wrote. “If true, this would mean that Google Searches aren’t objectively reflecting what the majority of Internet searches are actually looking for, possibly violating Google’s algorithm.”
While there are differences in search engine algorithms, the similarities that SourceFed turned up at other search sites, like Bing and Yahoo, were uncanny – and much different than using the same search terms at Google:
For example, when searching Hillary Clinton “cri,” Google finishes the phrase as “crime reform.” On Yahoo, the result is “criminal charges.” On Google’s own trend website, there were not enough searches for Hillary Clinton and “crime reform” to build a graph of the results.
Typing Hillary Clinton and “ind” gives Google users results on Hillary Clinton and Indiana. On Microsoft’s Bing search engine, a user gets Hillary Clinton and “indictment,” yielding results for the FBI investigation into Clinton’s private email server.
In addition to those discrepancies – and more to Assange’s point about Google cozying up to the U.S. government – Google officials have unfettered access to the Obama White House, and in fact, it is unrivaled, as Watchdog reported last month:
A project examining White House visitor logs shows the Obama administration has extended an open door to Google
Johanna Shelton, Google’s director of public policy — in effect, the company’s top lobbyist — has visited White House officials 128 times since President Barack Obama took office in 2009.
To put that in perspective, senior lobbyists for other companies in the telecommunications and cable industry — including Comcast, Facebook, Amazon, Oracle and Verizon — have visited the White House a combined 124 times in the same span. (That data goes through October 2015.)
In all, Google spent $16.6 million lobbying in 2015. So much for Obama’s (and Clinton’s) ‘there’s too much money in politics’ complaints.
Sources:
Tagged Under: 2016 election, Clinton News, Google, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks
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