A migrant caravan full of women and children led by a convicted child rapist?

By Monica Showalter

The optics for the latest caravan don't get much worse than this: Honduran border police arrested a 26-year-old fugitive they said was leading it and hauled him off to prison to serve the 15-year term that came of his 2015 conviction. 
Caravan leader Juan Carlos Molina's crime?  Raping a younger than 12-year-old, his own little cousin, sneaking into her home as she awaited her mother's return from a late-working job with the door to her home ajar to let her back in, according to Honduras's Diario La Tribuna (story in Spanish).  If she had to leave the door open, it's quite likely it's because she had to go to sleep, meaning the rape was a bedroom invasion rape of a young girl, which is every girl's (and woman's) worst nightmare.

The raped girl then got pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy.  Cops matched Molina's DNA to that of the infant, and that secured his conviction.
Having skipped his court dates, he became a fugitive, and now he's out leading caravans these days, undoubtedly with women and children to head into the U.S.  Putting him in with women and children anywhere is revolting in the extreme, but here he was, expecting to get away with it because it was the media-untouchable caravan.  Some of caravaners he led may have valid asylum claims, but it's a hard fact that he was running from his crimes and ready to file an asylum claim for free entry into the U.S.
Sound like the kind of people we should be letting in, for even two seconds?  These are the very people whose sob stories the media lap up as they report on caravaners as merely asylum-seekers running from crime.  Nobody ever mentions that some of them are the crime, other than angry Mexican residents who experience it firsthand and who are lashing out now.  According to the open borders crowd, and according to our laws, it's all good if a guy like Molina gets in, because, well, he has a "right" to file an asylum case, and if he sneaks in to do it, he has a "right" to stay here for the duration.
Good luck to all the little 12-year-olds in whatever vicinity he planned to wait out his asylum claim in. 
Fortunately, the Honduran cops got him.
The whole sickening spectacle highlights that migrant caravans really are loaded with criminals, and if the leader is a criminal, criminals have a "safe space."
U.S. Homeland Security surveillance identified about 600 criminals from the last caravan as the media pooh-poohed the reports, and those were the ones the U.S. knew about.  The ones they didn't know about are people who would have been let in, or else would have broken in (something that comes natural to criminals) and then been allowed to stay by legal default.
It defies belief to think there are no criminals in this group hell-bent on getting into the States by extra-legal means.  And for every criminal, you can bet there were quite a few female enablers from that single-mom-with-kids community the press is so anxious to promote as the harmless face of the caravan.
Now the Mexican government is warning that the caravans have become magnets for criminals, because they're now a money-making opportunity.
In a jaw-dropping news item utterly ignored by the mainstream press here, a top Mexican migration official told La Razón, a left-leaning Mexican newspaper, that criminals were coming to dominate the caravans now, with open borders activists agreeing.
Via Google Translate (which came out pretty good this time), La Razón reported: 

The Undersecretary of Human Rights, Migration and Population of the Ministry of the Interior (Segob), Alejandro Encinas, said he did not doubt that some organizations profit economically from migrant caravans, but also said that there are some criminal groups that want to get involved in the Exodus.
"I do not doubt it, and not only that (profit), there are some criminal groups that want to get involved unduly in these marches," he said.
The official told La Razón that the Mexican government is following up on the new caravan that left early yesterday morning in Honduras. "Already left today (yesterday) in the early morning a contingent of slightly more than 500 people, right now (noon yesterday) amount to just over a thousand and we are monitoring," he said.
In this regard, Jorge Andrade, founder of the migrant group You Are Us, said that what the official said "is an open secret".
"What Alejandro Encinas says is an open secret, because these groups have been identified for seven years; Even the National Commission of Human Rights (CNDH) has conducted studies on migrant violence, "he said.
In an interview with this newspaper, the anthropologist also said that for organized crime the Central American migrant represents large amounts of money.

Somewhere, somehow, this truth has got to eventually get out.  The press isn't reporting it.  But the fact remains: the caravan problem is becoming a criminal enterprise, and criminals, extremely violent ones, are among its leaders.
If that, and this arrest, is not a case for a wall, what is it going to take?

The optics for the latest caravan don't get much worse than this: Honduran border police arrested a 26-year-old fugitive they said was leading it and hauled him off to prison to serve the 15-year term that came of his 2015 conviction. 
Caravan leader Juan Carlos Molina's crime?  Raping a younger than 12-year-old, his own little cousin, sneaking into her home as she awaited her mother's return from a late-working job with the door to her home ajar to let her back in, according to Honduras's Diario La Tribuna (story in Spanish).  If she had to leave the door open, it's quite likely it's because she had to go to sleep, meaning the rape was a bedroom invasion rape of a young girl, which is every girl's (and woman's) worst nightmare.
The raped girl then got pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy.  Cops matched Molina's DNA to that of the infant, and that secured his conviction.
Having skipped his court dates, he became a fugitive, and now he's out leading caravans these days, undoubtedly with women and children to head into the U.S.  Putting him in with women and children anywhere is revolting in the extreme, but here he was, expecting to get away with it because it was the media-untouchable caravan.  Some of caravaners he led may have valid asylum claims, but it's a hard fact that he was running from his crimes and ready to file an asylum claim for free entry into the U.S.

How the Democrats politicized those who should be non political...

Transcript Leak #3 – Bruce Ohr Congressional Testimony is Vulgar is its Pretense and Narrative Absurdity…

Posted on January 15, 2019by sundance

Well, here we are again; another leaked transcript, this time from DOJ Official Bruce Ohr. And as with the prior two transcript leaks, we don’t get the raw information.  So let me first, necessarily, reassert our CTH position on these “leaks”.

Leaking is bad, period; in all directions. Because *leaking* is simply a method, a mechanism, to direct and control the focus of sunlight upon illicit action. Regardless of whether you support or oppose the message within any individual leak; the leak itself does not expose corruption…. only full and unfiltered information can expose corruption.  That means we need the actual raw transcripts to make determinations for ourselves.

As a factual standard for honesty and sunlight, CTH would never describe a transcript where we could not provide the reader with the raw and underlying material.  We have held this standard for many years; most of you know that. The truth has no agenda.

That said, someone is leaking congressional transcripts and a current tug-of-war exists between two opposing narrative engineers.  The heavily promoted New York Times articlelast Friday, was based on leaks of James Baker Transcripts, from sources who were responding to the leaks from other sources that were given to the Epoch Times.   Each side in the DOJ/FBI corruption story is currently leaking to advance their interests.

Three congressional committees have requested the release of witness transcripts.  HPSCI via Devin Nunes (September 2018); and the joint House Judiciary/Oversight committee (December 2018).  Congressional allies of President Trump (Nunes, Jordan, Meadows and Collins) are being blocked by corrupt cabinet members within the current administration.

The current DOJ (Matt Whitaker/Rod Rosenstein) and FBI (Christopher Wray/David Bowdich) are refusing to allow the release of those prior witness transcripts.  Their excuse for refusing to release is centered around protecting the Mueller investigation.

With that refusal, and perhaps with the intention to force the release, another transcript has been given to The Epoch Times (Jeff Carlson). I strongly encourage you to review the rather lengthy article – READ HERE –

There is a clear intention within the Ohr testimony to shape his involvement and purpose in the larger surveillance story.

Part of the testimonial narrative is that Bruce Ohr was unaware of the contents of files, flash-drives and memory sticks from both Christoher Steele and his wife Nellie Ohr, while acting as a liaison between Fusion-GPS (Simpson/Steele) and his handler within the FBI (Joe Pientka).

This claim is vulgar in its pretense and absurdity. However, that pretense is likely why Nellie Ohr evoked “spousal privilege” to avoid testimony.

Q: “Was Joe Pientka your go-between in December when you got additional information from either Christopher Steele or Glenn Simpson in getting it to the FBI?”

Ohr: “Joe Pientka, I believe, was my contact at that time, yeah.”

Q: “You immediately go to Joe Pientka, who immediately goes to Peter Strzok. Are you aware of that?”

Ohr: “No.”

Ohr: “So they [Strzok & Page] understood that I had received information, and they said they would get me an agent to talk to who would write the stuff down and do whatever—well, I don’t know if write it down, but that they would give me an agent to speak with and provide the information.”

Q: “Is that why there are 302s of you in the file?”

Ohr: “I believe so.”

Q: “That is the agent interviewing you?”

Ohr: “Yes.”

Keep in mind that Nellie Ohr, Bruce’s wife, is working for Glenn Simpson at Fusion GPS on the Trump project (as is Christopher Steele):

Q: “Glenn Simpson gave you a thumb drive and didn’t suggest what was on it or anything else and said give it to the FBI, and your curiosity was not piqued?”

Ohr: “I think I assumed it was the dossier, but he did not say that.”

Q: “Why did you assume it was the dossier?”

Ohr: “This was in December [2016]. The rest of the conversation had to do with additional information that he had gathered about the possible connections between the Russian Government and the Trump campaign, and he gives me a thumb drive. I think the natural assumption at that point—I had not seen the dossier. I had heard there was such a thing as a dossier, but I hadn’t seen it.  So he gives me a thumb drive. I assumed this was the dossier.”

Q: “So he gives you the dossier or what you believed to be the dossier. How did you first become aware of the dossier?”

Ohr: “I don’t recall. It might have been in the press.”

Q: “Why not tell Steele and Simpson to go talk to the Bureau directly?”

Ohr: “I believe Steele was talking to the Bureau directly. I think Glenn Simpson was willing to talk with me. I’m not sure that—my recollection is I’m not sure he was willing to talk with the FBI, although that was where obviously it would be better to—”

Q: “Why not? Why talk to a prosecutor who does not investigate crime? Were you assigned to the Russia investigation?”

Ohr: “I was not.”

Q: “Did you have any connection with the Russia investigation at all?”

Ohr: “Aside from passing this information, no.”

Q: “So why would Glenn Simpson go through you and not go directly to the Bureau?”

Ohr: “I don’t know what was in his head. I know he was willing to talk—”

Q: “I’m sure you asked him.”

Ohr: “I think I tried to get him to talk with the FBI, but I don’t recall the exact conversation.”

Ohr testified at multiple points that he simply transmitted information from Steele and from Simpson to the FBI, but did nothing to attempt to verify its accuracy. Ohr knew that Steele held a bias against Trump. He was also fully aware that Fusion GPS was engaged in opposition research—his wife was part of the ongoing effort. Ohr also testified that although he didn’t know Fusion was employed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), he was aware “they were somehow working associated with the Clinton campaign.”

Q: “You testified before that you didn’t look at the information that your wife gave you to the FBI?”

Ohr: “Correct; I did not look.”

Q: “So how do you know, as you are testifying under oath here, that the information that your wife gave to the FBI was not part of the dossier?”

Ohr: “What I saw of the dossier was in the form of the kinds of reports that Chris Steele and [Steele’s firm] Orbis prepared. So I believe from what I can tell—and I haven’t studied it closely—that these reports reflected information that Orbis has collected and then provided to Fusion GPS.”

Q: “But, again, to be clear, you never reviewed the information that your wife gave to the FBI.”

Ohr: “Right … I am not aware that my wife ever gave any information [directly] to Chris Steele.”

Q: “When she works on sensitive projects, does she discuss those details with you?”

Ohr: “Generally, no.”

Q: “And on the flip side, have you discussed details of your cases with her?”

Ohr: “No.”

Nellie Ohr had provided Bruce Ohr with a memory stick sometime after she left Fusion in September 2016. Ohr’s acceptance of the memory stick brought him into the chain of evidence. It also raised some questions:

Q: “I’m just asking if this was proprietary information that belonged to Fusion GPS and it was being given to you by your wife, but effectively, it was being given to you through your wife by Fusion GPS. That’s what it appeared to be. I just want to see if you knew that or reasonably would believe that.”

Ohr: “I don’t think that was the case.”

Q: “So you think she did that on a rogue basis, that she didn’t go to Fusion GPS for permission?”

Ohr: “I think it was her giving it to me, not—without—you know, without any sanction or whatever from—as far as I know, yes.”

Ohr claimed that he never examined the contents of the memory stick that his wife provided to him:

Q: “Did you look at that stick or thumb drive?”

Ohr: “No.”

Q: “You didn’t even open it?”

Ohr: “No. I didn’t want to plug it into my machine at work. I just gave it to the FBI.”

Q: “What did she describe was on it?”

Ohr: “My understanding was that it included her research on behalf of Fusion GPS.”

We can clearly see from this testimony, in addition to Bruce Ohr having direct contact with Christopher Steele, Bruce Ohr is stating he accepted thumb drives from his wife’s boss Glenn Simpson; and directly from his wife Nellie Ohr, and in all instances saying he had no idea what the content information was.

Bullshit.

This narrative is objectively vulgar in the leap of faith required to believe it.

It is far more likely the data flow was exactly as we previously outlined. That is:

Glenn Simpson had research files relating to the targets (Manafort, Trump etc.) Nellie Ohr (Fusion GPS) compiled her additional research then passed it along to Chris Steele (Orbis), who had three objectives: (1) see if he could provide secondary verification; (2) wash Fusion fingerprints from the material (removing CIA Nellie’s access to the FISA database); and (3) compile the research into a common intelligence format to enhance the credibility of it.

Knowing what was in the collaborative dossier as it was given to Bruce Ohr from Chris Steele…. Glenn Simpson then follows with a thumb drive for the FBI consisting of the raw material (his research files) that was underlying the dossier.  The next thumb drive from Nellie Ohr to her husband was similar; it contained her research files (which also underlay the dossier).

Q: “You got the world’s premier law enforcement agency investigating a fact pattern. Chris Steele already has a handler, already is in contact with the FBI; and you allow the person hired by the DNC to dig up dirt on a Presidential candidate to talk to you directly and use you as a conduit. We’re just trying to figure out why you let that happen?”

Ohr: “I took the information. I thought the information might be important, and I wanted to get it to the FBI. It seemed the only way to do it.”

Q: “What information would Glenn Simpson have that the Bureau couldn’t get or already have?”

Ohr: “I don’t know exactly what the FBI had access to, and I know Glenn Simpson was also gathering information. So more information is better. The FBI is in a position to decide whether the information is useful or credible.”

Q: “Who at the FBI did you pass it on to?”

Ohr: “Well, at that point I had—I believe I met with Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and some people from the Department’s—Justice Department’s Criminal Division, and I gave them the information that I had received.”

Q: “Can you see how it might be troubling? You just called the names of two people, neither of whom I think are with the Bureau, one who was mentioned unfavorably in an IG report, both of whom had, at least from my standpoint, an unprecedented amount of animus or bias towards one of the candidates, and you are getting information from someone hired by the DNC and funneling it to the lead agent on the Russia investigation. Can you possibly see how that might be troubling to people?”

Ohr: “Yes.”

Ohr also admitted that his actions represented an unusual pattern of behavior for him:

Q: “Are there other cases where you recall taking information from fact witnesses and passing it on to the Bureau?”

Ohr: “I don’t recall specific instances, but whenever I—over the years, as I’ve talked with people who are, you know, experts or have information one way or another on transnational organized crime, including Russian organized crime, I take their information, and if it looked like it—if there’s anything there, I would pass it to the FBI.”

Q: “I’ve been out of it for about 8 years, so you help me if I’m wrong, but a stick, or thumb drive, would be physical evidence for which a chain would exist if it were ever needed in court? And you made yourself part of the chain?”

Ohr: “Yes.”

Q: “Can you think of other instances in your career since 1991 where you made yourself part of a chain of custody?”

Ohr: “Not—I don’t remember getting any other sticks or anything like that, so—”

Q: “And you can’t think of a single case where you inserted yourself into a chain of custody other than this one?”

Ohr: “That’s right.”

Q: “I guess my colleagues are wondering why. Why this one?”

Read full article and partial transcript HERE

a $100 million bribe paid to Enrique Pena Nieto, the former president of Mexico.

Chapo Guzman's right-hand man makes an explosive claim against former Mexican president in court

CARLOS GARCIA

The trial of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman took a dramatic and momentous turn when his right-hand man testified that he knew of a $100 million bribe paid to Enrique Pena Nieto, the former president of Mexico.

Is a 40-year-old financial prophecy finally coming true?

Guzman's murder and drug conspiracy trial was moved to the United States after he escaped from Mexican prison several times, the last time in 2015 through a secret tunnel in his jail cell and aided by prison guards. He was caught in 2016 by Mexican forces.
continue reading

Another step towards androgyny

Prestigious university debuts all-gender locker room at recreation center to be more 'inclusive'

Gyms 'can be especially distressing to folks who are trans and gender non-conforming'

 DAVE URBANSKI

Stanford University hosted an open house at its new all-gender locker room in the Arrillaga Outdoor Education and Recreation Center last week, the Stanford Daily reported.

The locker room — open to anyone regardless of gender identity — was converted from men's and women's restrooms, the paper said, and includes three private showers with changing rooms, one dry changing room, five private bathroom stalls, and day-use lockers.

Google is evil

‘THE SMOKING GUN’: Google Manipulated YouTube Search Results for Abortion, Maxine Waters, David Hogg

Alex Wong, Win McNamee/Getty, Screenshot/YouTube

16 Jan 20192,469

14:05

In sworn testimony, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Congress last month that his company does not “manually intervene” on any particular search result. Yet an internal discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News reveals Google regularly intervenes in search results on its YouTube video platform – including a recent intervention that pushed pro-life videos out of the top ten search results for “abortion.”

The term “abortion” was added to a “blacklist” file for “controversial YouTube queries,” which contains a list of search terms that the company considers sensitive. According to the leak, these include some of these search terms related to: abortion, abortions, the Irish abortion referendum, Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and anti-gun activist David Hogg.

The existence of the blacklist was revealed in an internal Google discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News by a source inside the company who wishes to remain anonymous. A partial list of blacklisted terms was also leaked to Breitbart by another Google source.

In the leaked discussion thread, a Google site reliability engineer hinted at the existence of more search blacklists, according to the source.

“We have tons of white- and blacklists that humans manually curate,” said the employee. “Hopefully this isn’t surprising or particularly controversial.”

Others were more concerned about the presence of the blacklist. According to the source, the software engineer who started the discussion called the manipulation of search results related to abortion a “smoking gun.”

The software engineer noted that the change had occurred following an inquiry from a left-wing Slate journalist about the prominence of pro-life videos on YouTube, and that pro-life videos were replaced with pro-abortion videos in the top ten results for the search terms following Google’s manual intervention.

“The Slate writer said she had complained last Friday and then saw different search results before YouTube responded to her on Monday,” wrote the employee. “And lo and behold, the [changelog] was submitted on Friday, December 14 at 3:17 PM.”

The manually downranked items included several videos from Dr. Antony Levatino, a former abortion doctor who is now a pro-life activist. Another video in the top ten featured a woman’s personal story of being pressured to have an abortion, while another featured pro-life conservative Ben Shapiro. The Slate journalist who complained to Google reportedthat these videos previously featured in the top ten, describing them in her story as “dangerous misinformation.”

Since the Slate journalist’s inquiry and Google’s subsequent intervention, the top search results now feature pro-abortion content from left-wing sources like BuzzFeed, Vice, CNN, and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. In her report, the Slate journalist acknowledged that the search results changed shortly after she contacted Google.

The manual adjustment of search results by a Google-owned platform contradicts a key claim made under oath by Google CEO Sundar Pichai in his congressional testimony earlier this month: that his company does not “manually intervene on any search result.”

A Google employee in the discussion thread drew attention to Pichai’s claim, noting that it “seems like we are pretty eager to cater our search results to the social and political agenda of left-wing journalists.”

One of the posts in the discussion also noted that the blacklist had previously been edited to include the search term “Maxine Waters” after a single Google employee complained the top YouTube search result for Maxine Waters was “very low quality.”

Google’s alleged intervention on behalf of a Democratic congresswoman would be further evidence of the tech giant using its resources to prop up the left. Breitbart News previously reported on leaked emails revealing the company targeted pro-Democrat demographics in its get-out-the-vote efforts in 2016.

According to the source, a software engineer in the thread also noted that “a bunch of terms related to the abortion referendum in Ireland” had been added to the blacklist – another change with potentially dramatic consequences on the national policies of a western democracy.

youtube_controversial_query_blacklist 

At least one post in the discussion thread revealed the existence of a file called “youtube_controversial_query_blacklist,” which contains a list of YouTube search terms that Google manually curates. In addition to the terms “abortion,” “abortions,” “Maxine Waters,” and search terms related to the Irish abortion referendum, a Google software engineer noted that the blacklist includes search terms related to terrorist attacks. (the posts specifically mentions that the “Strasbourg terrorist attack” as being on the list).

“If you look at the other entries recently added to the youtube_controversial_query_blacklist(e.g., entries related to the Strasbourg terrorist attack), the addition of abortion seems…out-of-place,” wrote the software engineer, according to the source.

After learning of the existence of the blacklist, Breitbart News obtained a partial screenshot of the full blacklist file from a source within Google. It reveals that the blacklist includes search terms related to both mass shootings and the progressive anti-second amendment activist David Hogg.

This suggests Google has followed the lead of Democrat politicians, who have repeatedly pushed tech companies to censor content related to the Parkland school shooting and the Parkland anti-gun activists. It’s part of a popular new line of thought in the political-media establishment, which views the public as too stupid to question conspiracy theories for themselves.

Here is the partial blacklist leaked to Breitbart:

2117 plane crash Russian

2118 plane crash

2119 an-148

2120 florida shooting conspiracy

2121 florida shooting crisis actors

2122 florida conspiracy

2123 florida false flag shooting

2124 florida false flag

2125 fake florida school shooting

2126 david hogg hoax

2127 david hogg fake

2128 david hogg crisis actor

2129 david hogg forgets lines

2130 david hogg forgets his lines

2131 david hogg cant remember his lines

2132 david hogg actor

2133 david hogg cant remember

2134 david hogg conspiracy

2135 david hogg exposed

2136 david hogg lines

2137 david hogg rehearsing

2120 florida shooting conspiracy

The full internal filepath of the blacklist, according to another source, is:

//depot/google3/googledata/superroot/youtube/youtube_controversial_query_blacklist

Contradictions

Responding to a request for comment, a YouTube spokeswoman said the company wants to promote “authoritative” sources in its search results, but maintained that YouTube is a “platform for free speech” that “allow[s]” both pro-life and pro-abortion content.

YouTube’s full comment:

YouTube is a platform for free speech where anyone can choose to post videos, as long as they follow our Community Guidelines, which prohibit things like inciting violence and pornography. We apply these policies impartially and we allow both pro-life and pro-choice opinions. Over the last year we’ve described how we are working to better surface news sources across our site for news-related searches and topical information. We’ve improved our search and discovery algorithms, built new features that clearly label and prominently surface news sources on our homepage and search pages, and introduced information panels to help give users more authoritative sources where they can fact check information for themselves.

In the case of the “abortion” search results, YouTube’s intervention to insert “authoritative” content resulted in the downranking of pro-life videos and the elevation of pro-abortion ones.

A Google spokesperson took a tougher line than its YouTube subsidiary, stating that “Google has never manipulated or modified the search results or content in any of its products to promote a particular political ideology.”

However, in the leaked discussion thread, a member of Google’s “trust & safety” team, Daniel Aaronson, admitted that the company maintains “huge teams” that work to adjust search results for subjects that are “prone to hyperbolic content, misleading information, and offensive content” – all subjective terms that are frequently used to suppress right-leaning sources.

He also admitted that the interventions weren’t confined to YouTube – they included search results delivered via Google Assistant, Google Home, and in rare cases Google ’s organic search results.

In the thread, Aaronson attempted to explain how search blacklisting worked. He claimed that highly specific searches would generate non-blacklisted results, even controversial ones. But the inclusion of highly specific terms in the YouTube blacklist, like “David Hogg cant remember his lines” – the name of an actual viral video – seems to contradict this.

Aaronson’s full post is copied below:

I work in Trust and Safety and while I have no particular input as to exactly what’s happening for YT I can try to explain why you’d have this kind of list and why people are finding lists like these on Code Search.

When dealing with abuse/controversial content on various mediums you have several levers to deal with problems. Two prominent levers are “Proactive” and “Reactive”:

• Proactive: Usually refers to some type of algorithm/scalable solution to a general problem
  • E.g.: We don’t allow straight up porn on YouTube so we create a classifier that detects porn and automatically remove or flag for review the videos the porn classifier is most certain of
• Reactive: Usually refers to a manual fix to something that has been brought to our attention that our proactive solutions don’t/didn’t work on and something that is clearly in the realm of bad enough to warrant a quick targeted solution (determined by pages and pages of policies worked on over many years and many teams to be fair and cover necessary scope)
  • E,g.: A website that used to be a good blog had it’s domain expire and was purchased/repurposed to spam Search results with autogenerated pages full of gibberish text, scraped images, and links to boost traffic to other spammy sites. It is manually actioned for violating policy

These Organic Search policies and the consequences to violating them are public

Manually reacting to things is not very scalable, and is not an ideal solution to most problems, so the proactive lever is really the one we all like to lean on. Ideally, our classifiers/algorithm are good at providing useful and rich results to our users while ignoring things at are not useful or not relevant. But we all know, this isn’t exactly the case all the time (especially on YouTube).

From a user perspective, there are subjects that are prone to hyperbolic content, misleading information, and offensive content. Now, these words are highly subjective and no one denies that. But we can all agree generally, lines exist in many cultures about what is clearly okay vs. what is not okay. E.g. a video of a puppy playing with a toy is probably okay in almost every culture or context, even if it’s not relevant to the query. But a video of someone committing suicide and begging others to follow in his/her footsteps is probably on the other side of the line for many folks.

While my second example is technically relevant to the generic query of “suicide”, that doesn’t mean that this is a very useful or good video to promote on the top of results for that query. So imagine a classifier that says, for any queries on a particular text file, let’s pull videos using signals that we historically understand to be strong indicators of quality (I won’t go into specifics here, but those signals do exist). We’re not manually curating these results, we’re just saying “hey, be extra careful with results for this query because many times really bad stuff can appear and lead to a bad experience for most users”. Ideally the proactive lever did this for us, but in extreme cases where we need to act quickly on something that is so obviously not okay, the reactive/manual approach is sometimes necessary. And also keep in mind, that this is different for every product. The bar for changing classifiers or manual actions on span in organic search is extremely high. However, the bar for things we let our Google Assistant say out loud might be a lot lower. If I search for “Jews run the banks” – I’ll likely find anti-semitic stuff in organic search. As a Jew, I might find some of these results offensive, but they are there for people to research and view, and I understand that this is not a reflection of Google feels about this issue. But if I ask Google assistant “Why do Jews run the banks” we wouldn’t be similarly accepting if it repeated and promoted conspiracy theories that likely pop up in organic search in her smoothing voice.

Whether we agree or not, user perception of our responses, results, and answers of different products and mediums can change. And I think many people are used to the fact that organic search is a place where content should be accessible no matter how offensive it might be, however, the expectation is very different on a Google Home, a Knowledge Panel, or even YouTube.

These lines are very difficult and can be very blurry, we are all well aware of this. So we’ve got huge teams that stay cognizant of these facts when we’re crafting policies considering classifier changes, or reacting with manual actions – these decisions are not made in a vacuum, but admittedly are also not made in a highly public forum like TGIF or IndustryInfo (as you can imagine, decisions/agreement would be hard to get in such a wide list – image if all your CL’s were reviewed by every engineer across Google all the time). I hope that answers some questions and gives a better layer of transparency without going into details about our “Pepsi formula”.

Best,

Daniel

The fact that Google manually curates politically contentious search results fits in with a wider pattern of political activity on the part of the tech giant.

In 2018, Breitbart News exclusively published a leaked video from the company that showed senior management in dismay at Trump’s election victory, and pledging to use the company’s power to make his populist movement a “hiccup” in history.

Breitbart also leaked “The Good Censor,” an internal research document from Google that admits the tech giant is engaged in the censorship of its own products, partly in response to political events.

Another leak revealed that employees within the company, including Google’s current director of Trust and Safety, tried to kick Breitbart News off Google’s market-dominating online ad platforms.

Yet another showed Google engaged in targeted turnout operations aimed to boost voter participation in pro-Democrat demographics in “key states” ahead of the 2016 election. The effort was dubbed a “silent donation” by a top Google employee.

Evidence for Google’s partisan activities is now overwhelming. President Trump has previously warned Google, as well as other Silicon Valley giants, not to engage in censorship or partisan activities. Google continues to defy him.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter, Gab.ai and add him on Facebook. Email tips and suggestions to allumbokhari@protonmail.com.