Accomplishes by considering many factors including the words in your question the content of pages the expertise of sources and your language and location recently we introduce you to activist merriam had 9 who spoke of google manipulating search results at the expense of alternative Health Information and while googles Parent Company itself has pharmaceutical subsidiaries if you missed that show you can find it where youll find all our shows at youtube dot com slash the big picture r. T. And merriam introduced us to a former Google Software engineer who says there are other ingredients in the secret sauce they were intending to sculpt the information landscape so that they could create their own version of what was objective lee true that for hes worked at google for 11 years he was a senior Software Engineer until he discovered what he called. So there are 2 official intelligence censorship weapons sack welcome to the big picture. Good to be on here thank you for having me on when the search and social media go lie at cirque used of putting their thumb on the scale the standard defenses the algorithms make the call tell us what else factors into results when we search. So it turns out that google is using an army of employees to rate and rank the entire internet and a person website place or thing are ranked according to their expertise authoritativeness and trustworthy score this eat score is actually derived by what we can p. V. Has to say about the website person or topic and from those from that score the pages assigned a secret page rank score and then that is used to calibrate the search algorithms and rank pretty much the entire internet well that scares me right away because when you say wiki pedia everything ive ever seen on wikipedia i always make efforts to confirm elsewhere so theyre starting out on shaky ground arent they. Yeah i mean we competed has been politicized and its been vandalized over and over and over again and more recently in the last quick 4 years theres been a lockdown installed a many many articles of political nature on wikipedia and you know if its no longer an open system then the question is who have who has access to the system and do they have you know the truth and honesty and integrity. You know in mind when theyre editing articles are they really just trying to score political points Something Else it always comes up when the internet royalty or dragged before. Congress is google platform or is it a publisher. Right well you know section 230 of the Communications Decency act carved out Liability Protections as long as the. Big Tech Companies didnt. Censor political content and now it appears that everything that is passing through their platform is now rearing to according to a political agenda and so the question is should those Companies Still maintain their liability shield or are they violating the spirit of you know section 230 of the Communications Decency act well theyre trying to sway a lot of other people. Right theyre trying to have the protections of a platform yet act with the discretion of the publisher yeah merriam her name told us how google down plays alternative Health Information give us some examples of who and what else you have seen deemphasized in Google Search. Well one of the largest alternative Health Public publishers which is dr mercola has seen his organic search traffic to his page pretty much collapse down to less than one percent of what it was before and you see you know this happened also with self hacked and these other. Companies that are involved in disseminating information about health theyve seen all the organic traffic just really collapse and the question that you know we should be asking ourselves is you know should just this one company be able to decide that entire segment of the economy should just essentially end and you know you see this with you know right now its a war against alternative health. Its also a war against anyone that has any vaccine has it in c. And also. You know climate scientists that you know assert that Global Warming is a sun driven phenomenon are seeing their you know publications being hit with something called news guard which intercepts sort of like the the searches that people are doing on you tube and injecting a statement of you know this this is controversial and its probably not show its almost like a nutritional label for and so this is this is really quickly you know seeping into regular in searches what about politics for all the talk that donald trump benefited from this information in social media hasnt he actually suffered from Google Search. Yes absolutely and the thing is that a lot of it starts in google news articles that come in at 4 am in the morning. Train the Machine Learning algorithms in order to match keywords that people are going to be searching for politics that date to the certain articles that exist and so for example you know what i was able to see as a full Time Employee is that i was able to you know search for. Kids in cages and or you know immigration issues and it was going and what was happening is that Google Search was rerouting me to articles by c. N. N. And m. S. N. B c and these really these established Media Players that were in real time changing and redirecting my searches to land in these what i consider propaganda articles and you know this just this doesnt just happen on on you know a particular instance it happens pretty much every single day when people go and search your own story is a chilling tale tell us what happened when you went public with the project a veritable. Yes. Well i 1st you know went anonymously public so i was under a veil of secrecy and about whom identity was but then after that disclosure i decided that after some harassment by google that i was just going to go public with everything and right before i did google red flagged me with the local police of San Francisco and they did a Wellness Check at my location. I decided that i was going to answer the door and then escalated they used a flimsy excuse to say that i had a bomb threat in my house and shut down the streets on the lunts here from 20th to valencia all the way to 22nd of evacuating my neighbors the stores in the theater around the street ive actually came out of my house with my hands up with guns pointed at me surrendered to police so that they could give me a 6 part question here about whether i had suicidal thoughts did you ever fear for your life when google and the cops came after you and do you now. You know i really did i was scared that you know accepting a lot of accidents happened in the past and so after realizing that the cops were not going to leave my house. I started to worry that they would come into my house and. Something bad may happen because you dont know whats going to happen so i figured that hey if theyre going to confront me that i might as well come out with this much public attention is possible and so when i came out of my house i realized that everyone had cameras that were directed at me and so if there was going to be any funny business then let it appear on 20 different cameras in broad daylight rather than inside of my house where the only cameras that could be working may be the body cams and maybe they might have a sudden malfunction function ok is that theres lots more to google than search and we have heard about the mails being skin. And the Google Chrome browser tracing our steps what is the true cost of these Free Services and do you recommend against using anything google. Where you know we have a saying in Silicon Valley which is if the product is free you are the product and so really googles entire platform is based upon surveillance of your data and then bundling that up and selling your habits online to various intelligence agencies around the world and so the question is whether google spying on you is you know is invalid that their entire Business Model is to spy on you of course theyre spying on you and for people that are looking to sort of detox from all the surveillance capitalism thats secretly been employed i really recommend that they move away from g. Mail on to Something Like proton mail move away from Something Like chrome browser or firefox and move to what i use which is the brave browser which is based on the open source version of the chrome browser but with all of the spying you know services being ripped out by a really smart programmer and we can find that brave browser if we google it. Yeah or dot dot go or use the start page Search Engine to find it has shut the government regulate or break up Companies Like google and facebook and twitter the 1st amendment is a slippery slope. You know ive been thinking a lot about this google has you know in its possession extremely advanced and Artificial Intelligence i think that some Artificial Intelligence needs to be regulated by i dont think that google as a whole needs to be regulated i think that it does need to be broken up. You tube should not be under the corporate control of google because. Google just cant keep its hands out of the you know honeypot weve seen them try to hack culture hack politics and for them to be able to use their influence to you know hide searches and decide what the public gets to see on its various Services Needs to be looked at scrutinized and and broken off from the main company so that for he is thank you for joining us and for your conscience and for speaking out. Theres lots more in the big picture after this short break im holland cook in washington youre watching r. T. America. And thats. Not. Her interest up her i know. That. I know. Dear you were thank you for finally changing the change your i understand youre tired of networks that were new with you you were turning her. d into them. As they are. No matter what. You know me d im famous for my views. And let me. Yours truly scottie d nell hughes. A dark industry comes to life in los angeles every night. Dozens of women sells their bodies on the streets many of them underage. Los Angeles Police reveal a taste of their daily challenge no if youre going to exploit a child here in los angeles there were going to come out to see officers going undercover as 6 workers and customers to fight the 6 trades. As the democrats gear up to officially start their 2020 president ial primary it is fitting to assess Donald Trumps performance in office a report card of sorts where is he kept his promises and where has he come up short will any of this really matter in november. Go since. A little bit messed up by our d. N. A. In some way over look really im not sure it is such a quick thing you know im sure you look better now than when he had hair come on its nice of you to say so but i went home when i was 25 animals and so create them. When the New York Times said a dollar a week i said sold my digital subscription does not include the times crossword puzzle for which they charge more but i can read and search the times on my i phone i pad on my computer which is where increasingly we get our news so you can imagine the fuss within usa today when the Poynter Institute reported that knowledgeable sources said the nations newspaper could seize publishing its print edition publisher meribel perots wadsworth quickly responded that can and has no plans to discontinue the print edition of usa today which remains an important part of our business and with going to its merger with Gatehouse Media looming she said we believe the combination of our 2 companies will transform the landscape in the print and digital News Business the Associated Press estimates that more than 1400 American Cities and towns have lost newspapers in just the past 15 years and cities as big as pittsburgh have no 7 days a week print edition are hard copy newspaper is merely obsolete or headed for extinction lets ask digital disruptor nagel news editor of go local proverb dot com a local digital news publication making waves in the ocean state rhode island kate welcome. And thanks for having me i recently learned from coverage that you put out that the once proud Providence Journal has asked for an exemption from the states time and a half overtime requirement and the teamsters there accused the company of creating what they call a part time work force with no vacation pay kate as cutbacks have whacked the journal in recent years how are their numbers their circulation and how are your clicks. So i think a case in point with whats happening with the teamsters and the department of labor training here as just a proof point that the model doesnt work you know in 2019 does it really make sense to have barrels of and slabs of paper going through machines that have to be cut that have to be sorted that have to get put on trucks that have to be driven around and dropped off. You know the once proud Providence Journal had a weekday circulation of 200000 thats down to about 30000 we spoke with the teamsters holland one of the things that they make the case for which we certainly agree with them they have an antiquated provision here holland that they are the paper of record that Legal Notices from cities and towns have to spend money on now they question why are you the paper of record if youre 30000 and why then if youre getting the subsidy from these localities cant you pay that over time to your workers again i think the proof is in the putting and could your platform be deemed to paper of record. You know ill tell you. A monthly basis we get 700000 unique visitors now holland you know there are around market of about a 1000000 residents about 800000 of them would be considered the reading audience if you will year over year revenue has gone up 50 percent year over year holland 43 percent in our readership and clearly obviously the ability to geo target is something that we have from a digital standpoint that paper certainly dont very cool know how the revenue is there less advertising and the problem is journal and beauty competitor for those ad dollars have you seen the journals rates take a hit how tough has it been for you to compete for that business without a tangible print product. So you know give you a cab and the news editor at. I am on that side of the aisle on the sales side but going on our say we do have the top advertisers and the market more and Alpert Medical School at Brown University the airport you know from emerging Technology CompaniesGreen Technology we have pound for pound the best advertisers i think here in the market they see the value they know where the eyes are you know both from a deliverable standpoint when you can show them but just from an anecdotal standpoint knowing that we break the biggest stories and thats again where the eyes are holland digital you more nimble than print when it comes to your side of the building the content and content can date before the ink dries and ive often seen you scoop at the journal but what legacy broadsheets half of the digital ops starts dont is momentum because as you said you know for decades the pro joe has been a trusted source talk about the way you are using facebook and twitter to bring our eyes and ears to go local prov dot com. So you talk about the momentum holland i mean lets just take a little step back back and go local started in 2010 i joined in 2013 but back in 10 the Providence Journal had 150 reporters in its newsroom that number holland is hovering around 15. So they struggle yeah its a precipitous loss its clearly visible you know yet heard you talking at a prior segment about the role of digital in the i phone thats exactly why the local had been started by the local founder josh benson knowing that the media landscape was going to change just drastically with the advent of the i phone and that clearly has now again that geo targeting ability to push stories out to stories out quickly virally we have hundreds of thousands now i gave you that number of unique visitors but. Media contacts both within the market and southern new england as well so you get a good story holland its not unique just or an island it moves around the country it moves around the world sure that speed of light that again a print operation just cant match news editor go local proverb dot com thank you for joining us from providence thanks for having me. Now lets welcome back Georgetown University professor Chris Chambers chris i know what kate and her team are up to because i live in rhode island but how common is what theyre doing there this digital pure play News Platform how common is that elsewhere. Its pretty common harlan i mean so so much so that the legacy newspapers are trying to copy it on their own but but you are seeing these new outfits basically disrupting the local legacy daily sadly theyre also also disrupting the local legacy print neighborhood papers which have taken up a lot of slack from the the the legacy big dailies the cover neighborhood. School and crime sorts of