OTTAWA—Google has followed fellow tech giant Meta in announcing it will block Canadian news content from its search engine in Canada after days of negotiations with the Liberal government hit an impasse over its recently passed online news bill.
“We have been saying for over a year that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism in Canada and may result in significant changes to our products,” a blog post from Kent Walker, the company’s president of global affairs, read Thursday.
Christian employees at Google are expressing concern that the company included an anti-Christian performer in its lineup of company-promoted pride month events and frustration with Google’s long failure to officially respond to complaints.
Promoted by a vice president in a company email, the event was listed on a company event calendar until after a media inquiry on Wednesday, June 21. Christian Googlers are troubled that their employer would promote a performance that features openly anti-Christian themes.
Google “fundamentally started as a CIA project,” according to journalist and author of Propaganda in the Information Age, Alan MacLeod, who has warned that tech giants’ ties with intelligence agencies pose big problems for freedom of information as well as freedom of speech.
MacLeod, who has extensively researched the ties between the national security state and Big Tech, explained to journalist Whitney Webb on the Unlimited Hangout podcast how a prior investigation by Dr. Nafeez Ahmed found that the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) were “bankrolling” research by Sergey Brin at Stanford University, which “produced Google.”
‘I’m heartbroken.’ Google Canada employees start getting layoff notices
A week after announcing 12,000 job cuts globally, Google parent company Alphabet begins notifying Canadian workers of layoffs, many in the Kitchener-Waterloo tech corridor
If you search for the words ‘Tom Slater Tyre Nichols’ on Google right now, the first thing you will see is the following message: ‘It looks like the results below are changing quickly. If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for reliable sources to publish information.’
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department and several states sued Google on Tuesday, alleging that its dominance in digital advertising harms competition.
The government alleges that Google’s plan to assert dominance has been to “neutralize or eliminate” rivals through acquisitions and to force advertisers to use its products by making it difficult to use competitors’ products.
Google is burying the campaign websites of its fiercest critics on Capitol Hill.
Shortly after MRC Free Speech America released its study showing that Google suppressed Senate Republicans’ campaign websites in its search results, it now appears that Google is hitting members of both the House and Senate who have been critical of Google’s tactics. This is happening just as the country is gearing up to vote during the midterm elections on Nov. 8.
According to a series of internal communications discovered in court, Google employees joked about Chrome’s “Incognito mode” and criticized the company for failing to meet users’ expectations of privacy.
Google is currently the target of a class action lawsuit in California over its misleading claims of privacy.
Ottawa slams Google-backed survey criticizing Canada’s online news bill as an attempt to ‘avoid accountability’
OTTAWA—A national survey commissioned by Google painting Ottawa’s online news bill as flawed and a potential vehicle for misinformation has been slammed by the federal government as an attempt to “avoid accountability.”
Abacus Data on Friday published a report on Canadians’ views about Bill C-18, a piece of legislation that would compel online platforms like Google and Facebook to share some of the revenues they generate from posting news content on their sites with the outlets that produce the stories. The bill, known as the Online News Act, is now being studied by the House of Commons heritage committee.
Issues & Insights (I&I) is a terrific conservative website whose writers came from the editorial board of Investors Business Daily. I&I writes smart content that goes after the left, often mercilessly — and, hey, it features PJ Media on its list of recommended websites, so you can see how intelligent I&I is.
The Republican National Committee is accusing Google of suppressing critical fundraising and get-out-the-vote emails “like clockwork” at the end of each month, adding to GOP concerns that Big Tech is putting its thumb on the scale to benefit Democrats in the midterm elections.
The company has offered no explanation. Earlier this year, Google said it took steps to keep campaign emails out of junk mail files.
According to Google engineer Blake Lemoine, an artificial intelligence (“AI”) chatbot application called LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, has achieved sentience, or independent self-aware consciousness.
Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation, have dismissed Lemoine’s claims and placed him on paid administrative leave for breach of confidentiality.
An apocalyptic ‘cult’ led by an eccentric misogynist accused of sexual abuse of young men has taken over a division of Google, a whistleblower has claimed.
Kevin Lloyd, 34, claims that he was fired from his job as a video developer at Google last year because he began questioning the influence of the cult.
In August, Lloyd filed a discrimination case in California Superior Court, alleging he was fired for digging into Fellowship of Friends – a group based in the small Californian town of Oregon House, and whose members made up a large percentage of employees in his division.
One of the most-used tools on the internet is not what it used to be.
Afew weeks ago my house had a septic-tank emergency, which is as awful as it sounds. As unspeakable things began to burble up from my shower drain, I did what any smartphone-dependent person would: I frantically Googled something along the lines of poop coming from shower drain bad what to do. I was met with a slew of cookie-cutter websites, most of which appeared hastily generated and were choked with enough repetitive buzzwords as to be barely readable. Virtually everything I found was unhelpful, so we did the old-fashioned thing and called a professional. The emergency came and went, but I kept thinking about those middling search results—how they typified a zombified internet wasteland.
Google has taken the extraordinary step of writing to every MP and senator expressing fears that the online news bill is being rushed through Parliament without proper debate or consideration.
In its letter, Google warns that the bill needs more scrutiny because of its implications, including for the way the search engine ranks content and elevates information from “trusted sources” such as the government.
