Google 2.0
--
The Intercept reports on an American math professor turned senior Google research scientist, Jack Poulson, who has resigned over a Google project to develop a search app for Android use in Communist China. This search app is "designed to remove content that China’s authoritarian government views as sensitive, such as information about political dissidents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest."
Might as well throw in floodlights for the Gulag while they're at it -- oh, wait, we already did that.
Poulson said no to Google, shining a floodlight of his own on Google's stark moral depravity. His story is here. Five in all have resigned; 1,400 employees have signed a related petition. This leaves only about 86,600 other Googlians who are content to be complicit in the defense of PRC, the totalitarian menace controlling some one billion subjects, executing openly aggressive global designs, and promoting Bob Woodward's new book.
Google has named its Red Chinese cyber-censor, "Dragonfly." I wonder what name it has chosen for the search engine capabilities it developed to sift American conservatives like chaff? Or, in my own case, to ensure, somehow, some way, that stink bombs from the 2013 smear campaign against American Betrayal remain attached to my name -- and not, of course, any of the greater and more luminous examples of praise and defense, or my own many exhaustive rebuttals, beginning with the Breitbart essays now collected in The Rebuttal: Defending American Betrayal from the Book-Burners. (To my amazement, this collection of essays by myself and others, including Vladimir Bukovsky and M. Stanton Evans, about the frantic disinformation campaign led by ex-Communists against AB continues to be of interest to readers.)
During the fifteen years I was writing a syndicated newspaper column, Google News was densely populated by my weekly output. For some time, though, with a much lighter "footprint," I have noticed that quite a few attacks on American Betrayal now feature as "news" of me.
Today's toxic Google harvest starts on Page Two (tragically, another woman named "Diana West" was a recent murder victim, dominating Page One). These include: "Diana West, Still Wrong" October 31, 2013; "Why Scholars Are Challenging Howard Zinn and Diana West" August 8, 2013; "Editorial: Our Controversy With Diana West" August 7, 2013; "Why I Wrote a Take-Down of Diana West's Awful Book" August 7, 2013; "Diana West's Epic Fail," September 11, 2013. There is also one book review; a lousy one, of course, also five years old.
Most of these five-year-old pieces appeared at small conservative news sites such as PJMedia and Frontpage, which I doubt are themselves top Google search engine choices normally.
It's a curiosity to me, but instructive. Conservatives expect Google and the Left to combine to whitewash Marxist subversion and censor everything that combats it. This is the essence of Google's contemptible collaboration with the Red Chinese dictatorship to enforce pro-Communist censorship with "Dragonfly." (Isn't it somehwat heartening to know China apparently can't figure out how to do this itself?) But note: Google will find its allies wherever they are, even embedded on the Right, when it comes to the mission of suppressing news or history of Marxist subversion.