Introduction: Big Tech is at it Again

I honestly did not expect "The Dangers of Centralization" to become a series, but as learn more and more on what Big Tech has been up to, I think it's necessary to make it one.

Previously, I discussed how the collusion between the government and mainstream social media platforms is an authoritarian unholy marriage. Twitter got hit with two lawsuits that revealed the company cooperating with entities like the states of Massachusetts and California, and the National Association of State Election Directors to suppress certain opinions. Press Secretary Jen Psaki revealed that the Biden administration has been cooperating with Facebook to crack down on medical "misinformation" and I discussed the major flaws behind this partnership.

That said, for a while, Big Tech didn't really need government to censor "wrongthink". Thanks to Section 230, the mainstream social media platforms have enjoyed wielding publisher power under the protections of being utilities.

I've already talked about Twitter and Facebook, but what has Google been up to? Well, recently, Google's Jigsaw unit published an article on Medium titled "Hate 'Clusters' Spread Disinformation Across Social media. Mapping Their Networks Could Disrupt Their Reach". Similar to Jen Psaki's assertion that if you are banned from one platform, you should be banned from others, the article suggests that users should be surveilled cross platform as a mean to more easily block shared links to "harmful content".

Stopping the "Hate Clusters"

The article starts off describing how “extremists and people who spread misinformation” use more than one platform to communicate with others. In a seemingly frustrated tone, Google Jigsaw talks about how moderating content on one platform is not enough as the removed content will reappear on other sites.

The organization collaborated with a team at George Washington University to look for "hate clusters". By their metrics, a cluster is considered "hateful" if 2 out of the 20 most recent posts contained "hate content" which was defined as such: posts that "[advocate] for hatred, hostility, or violence toward members of a race, ethnicity, nation, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, immigration status, or other defined sector of society as detailed in the FBI definition of Hate Crime”. In total, they found 1245 public clusters on Telegram, Facebook, Instagram, Gab, 4chan, and VKontakte that "actively spread hate and misinformation".

After that, Google Jigsaw talks about how the hyperlinks between these clusters quickly spread "hateful posts" and "COVID-19 misinformation narratives" across platforms. Again in a seemingly frustrated tone, the article suggests that the decentralized nature of the clusters is intentional to "subvert content moderation efforts and gain resilience to deplatforming". For instance, while Facebook blocks links to 4chan, someone can share a link from VKontakte that contains the 4chan link.

Google Jigsaw suggests that blocking hyperlinks to "unmoderated" platforms can “add friction that potentially deters those en route to harmful content” and “weaken the redundancies of the hate network”. In conclusion, the article advocates for real-time mapping of the "online hate network" to stop "hate and misinformation".

My Thoughts: That Big Brother Corporatist Stench

Every time I see Big Tech talk about "hate content" or "misinformation", I roll my eyes. Much of the time, the definition is stretched to the point that it includes mere dissent. In fact, that is the case in this article.

Google Jigsaw's definition for "hate content" is far too broad. I have no qualms against defining posts that advocate for violence against a protected group as "hate content". However, including posts that contain "hostility" under the same umbrella jeopardizes the validity of Google Jigsaw's definition. Hostile can be defined as "opposed in feeling, action, or character" or "not friendly, warm, or generous; not hospitable" according to Dictionary.com. As a result, posts that advocate "hostility" against a certain group may include posts that just simply contain dissent.

I also checked the FBI's definition on what is a hate crime and it's substantially different in terms of specificity:

A hate crime is a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias. For the purposes of collecting statistics, the FBI has defined a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.” Hate itself is not a crime—and the FBI is mindful of protecting freedom of speech and other civil liberties.

Other than the fact that Google Jigsaw added "immigration status" whereas the FBI made no such mention of, the FBI also emphasized that "hate itself is not a crime".

In addition, as I have established in my Jen Psaki article, the crackdown on medical "misinformation" has been inconsistent and wrongful. Allison Morrow revealed YouTube's (also owned by Google) hypocrisy on its enforcement as her video revealed how mainstream news corporations consistently break YouTube's rules and not get their videos taken down while hers did:

YouTube also removed Bret Weinstein's podcast video where he and Dr. Pierre Kory on ivermectin for medical "misinformation" despite the fact that the former is an evolutionary biologist and the latter is a physician. Here on Publish0x, I talked about how ivermectin can inhibit COVID-19's replication mechanism and showed data where it substantially reduced cases in countries like Brazil and India.

The removed video that is thankfully, available on Odysee, a platform that Google would likely consider it to be part of the so-called "hate network".

Throughout 2020, the lab leak hypothesis that theorized that COVID-19 came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was suppressed on social media. Users who dared to suggest that the virus did not naturally occur and was engineered were suspended. The mainstream media also played an active role in downplaying the hypothesis only to admit that it actually has merit a year later with some outlets attempting to stealth edit their old articles.

All in all, Google's hope to control the flow of opinions and information is authoritarian and laughably naïve. Not only are there a bunch of alternative centralized platforms like Rumble, but there are several decentralized platforms such as Odysee, Minds, Ruqqus, Pocketnet, and Hive. Some of them run on the blockchain to ensure transparency and censorship resistance. On top of that, there are multiple ways to share links without sharing the actual links, including sharing archived versions, leaving spaces in the URL and telling people to replace them with a dot, or sharing a condensed link.

Lastly, there's also the fact that while Google is the biggest search engine, it is not the only one. There is DuckDuckGo, Qwant, and MetaGer for privacy-focused metasearch engines. And then, there's also Brave Search which is both privacy-focused and independent, and Presearch (referral link and a tutorial on how to run a node on Linux Mint) which is decentralized. Even if Google manipulates its search results, there are several alternatives that do not, ultimately making its Big Brother wet dream a pipe dream.