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So the recorded Google employees were deepfakes? Or are you saying that autocomplete results for "men can " in Google search are totally natural and not at all

by dekrg 7y ago

So the recorded Google employees were deepfakes? Or are you saying that autocomplete results for "men can " in Google search are totally natural and not at all political engineering done by Google?

komali2 7y ago
I don't trust project veritas or its motives, at all. There will be possibly be a time in the future when we can reasonably prove our identities and all things we have done with those identities. In this future, Reputation will be at least as valuable as any other form of measure of worth, because it will also be a world filled with bullshit. In that world, we will want to be very selective with our attention, and who gets that attention. In the past, project veritas has gone out of their way to misrepresent those they are "interviewing," has lied and made hilarious, absurd, claims to "gotcha" people. They engage in rhetorical dishonesty and fallacy. They aren't worth anyone's time. I won't waste my valuable attention and time "disproving" every heaping pile of dung that Veritas shits out. They already lost my trust ages ago.
- jjulius 7y ago
  Thanks for chiming in here. I just read through the original PV post[1] and also skimmed through some of the documents in PV's "Doc Dump"[2] related to the article. The documents they dumped don't have a political bias to them - they're literally about trying to get factual/fair news displayed to people as best as possible. Beyond that, I'm not even going to bother with videos. Like you said, O'Keefe has a very selective/gotcha method of editing his videos, and his claims and methods have long been both suspect and invalidated. Were I to have found anything worthwhile in the documents they dumped or the quotes in the article on their site, I might have given the video a view, but there's nothing "suspect" against Google in the dumped documents to begin with. This, like most other PV work, is bogus. [1]https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/24/insider-blows-whistle-exec-reveals-google-plan-to-prevent-trump-situation-in-2020-on-hidden-cam/ https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/24/insider-blows-whis... [2]https://www.projectveritas.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/SS1DocDump.pdf https://www.projectveritas.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/SS...
raisedbyninjas 7y ago
So I actually watched the video. Jen Gennai said that if Google is broken up the pieces won't be as effective at thwarting the next "Trump Situation". The frauds a Veritas interpret this as preventing the free and fair election of their favored candidate. Mrs. Gennai said she used imprecise words in a bar conversation when she didn't know she was being recorded. She likely meant that are making an attempt to reduce the spread of fake news, information silo-ing in their news aggregation and still keep user engagement up. Automating the identification of truth is certainly hard, and maybe harder without the resources of a unified Google.
- jlawson 7y ago
  The idea that a single group of people should be 'auditing the identification of truth' with no transparency, no diversity of viewpoint, and no accountability is frighteningly Orwellian. We are headlong sprinting towards a dark future of corporate control over human expression and democracy itself. And you're helping the megacorps consolidate power because the already convinced you that the people criticizing them are icky.
  - raisedbyninjas 7y ago
    Truth arbitration does indeed have dark potential and I'll be critical of it without transparency of the process. The people in the video criticizing Google convinced me they are icky because I listened to what they say.
  - vangelis 7y ago
    You're free to not give Google money and to create your own services. Otherwise buddy, that's just capitalism.
afthonos 7y ago
Years ago, Bill Kristol accused the lawyers representing Guantanamo Bay detainees of being anti-American for doing so. Up until that point, Bill Kristol has been a pundit I read semi-regularly as a reasonable voice I disagreed with. From that point on, I have never read anything else he had to say. Ever. If an article mentions him, I stop reading. If I accidentally end up on a column of his, I immediately hit the back button. If I happen to be watching TV (very rare) and he appears, I change the channel. By trampling over a foundational precept of justice to get his rhetorical points du jour, he forever forfeited his right to my time. You may say that is extreme. I say: anything worth saying has dozens of people saying it already. If I want diverse points of view, the internet has them in abundance. So I lose nothing and, in a small way, I can try to make things better. The point is: Project Veritas is comically partisan. Literally nothing has been too underhanded for them: taking things out of context, outright lying about what they found, splicing video to make it look like people said things they didn’t, you name it and they’ve done it. So no, they don’t get to be listened to. Ever. No one who worked there gets listened to. Ever. Someone else will speak whatever truths they speak, and meanwhile we need not listen to their lies.
- jlawson 7y ago
  They posted the full unedited video. It doesn't reveal anything deceptive about the editing of the first edited-for-time video. EDIT: Going to the substance - you really think Google employees don't want to prevent Trump's re-election? Because every possible indicator (campaign donations, personal speech, company policy) says that they do. The Veritas video is part of a massive pattern of evidence pointing to the same conclusion. They've got a dog in the fight, and there is no mechanism to stop them abusing their non-accountable, opaque, non-democratic power over the modern mediums of communication. Another question - If this isn't enough evidence to convince you, what would be? What's the standard or proof? Would you apply that same standard to accusations that, say, Trump wants America to be just white people? Or are you just using an isolated demand for rigor [0]? [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
  - jjulius 7y ago
jjulius 7y ago
>So the recorded Google employees were deepfakes? Nobody said he used deepfakes. I'm sure that the interviews with Googlers whose faces/voices were on camera were legitimate, and selectively edited just like every single one of his videos. Contrary to other media outlets whose track records of honesty can lend credence to their anonymous sources, O'Keefe's extensive track record of dishonesty and deception casts a long shadow of doubt on his shadowy, voice-modified interviewee that provides additional context to the unbiased documents PV leaked. >Or are you saying that autocomplete results for "men can " in Google search are totally natural and not at all political engineering done by Google? Machine learning-based search suggestions are probably going to be a little weird for a while. That's literally all that is.
- petermcneeley 7y ago
  I went through the okeef wiki and ya it certainly seems like there is a great deal of dishonesty in his "reporting" style. But the dismissive "that's literally all that it is." Makes me wonder who is it you are trying to convince. Like how does that cognitive device work on more clear examples like in the case of http://www.unz.com/isteve/great-moments-in-google-american-inventors/ http://www.unz.com/isteve/great-moments-in-google-american-i...

by dekrg 7y ago

So the recorded Google employees were deepfakes? Or are you saying that autocomplete results for "men can " in Google search are totally natural and not at all political engineering done by Google?

komali2 7y ago

I don't trust project veritas or its motives, at all. There will be possibly be a time in the future when we can reasonably prove our identities and all things we have done with those identities. In this future, Reputation will be at least as valuable as any other form of measure of worth, because it will also be a world filled with bullshit. In that world, we will want to be very selective with our attention, and who gets that attention. In the past, project veritas has gone out of their way to misrepresent those they are "interviewing," has lied and made hilarious, absurd, claims to "gotcha" people. They engage in rhetorical dishonesty and fallacy. They aren't worth anyone's time. I won't waste my valuable attention and time "disproving" every heaping pile of dung that Veritas shits out. They already lost my trust ages ago.

jjulius 7y ago
Thanks for chiming in here. I just read through the original PV post[1] and also skimmed through some of the documents in PV's "Doc Dump"[2] related to the article. The documents they dumped don't have a political bias to them - they're literally about trying to get factual/fair news displayed to people as best as possible. Beyond that, I'm not even going to bother with videos. Like you said, O'Keefe has a very selective/gotcha method of editing his videos, and his claims and methods have long been both suspect and invalidated. Were I to have found anything worthwhile in the documents they dumped or the quotes in the article on their site, I might have given the video a view, but there's nothing "suspect" against Google in the dumped documents to begin with. This, like most other PV work, is bogus. [1]https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/24/insider-blows-whistle-exec-reveals-google-plan-to-prevent-trump-situation-in-2020-on-hidden-cam/ https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/24/insider-blows-whis... [2]https://www.projectveritas.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/SS1DocDump.pdf https://www.projectveritas.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/SS...

raisedbyninjas 7y ago

So I actually watched the video. Jen Gennai said that if Google is broken up the pieces won't be as effective at thwarting the next "Trump Situation". The frauds a Veritas interpret this as preventing the free and fair election of their favored candidate. Mrs. Gennai said she used imprecise words in a bar conversation when she didn't know she was being recorded. She likely meant that are making an attempt to reduce the spread of fake news, information silo-ing in their news aggregation and still keep user engagement up. Automating the identification of truth is certainly hard, and maybe harder without the resources of a unified Google.

jlawson 7y ago
The idea that a single group of people should be 'auditing the identification of truth' with no transparency, no diversity of viewpoint, and no accountability is frighteningly Orwellian. We are headlong sprinting towards a dark future of corporate control over human expression and democracy itself. And you're helping the megacorps consolidate power because the already convinced you that the people criticizing them are icky.
- raisedbyninjas 7y ago
  Truth arbitration does indeed have dark potential and I'll be critical of it without transparency of the process. The people in the video criticizing Google convinced me they are icky because I listened to what they say.
- vangelis 7y ago
  You're free to not give Google money and to create your own services. Otherwise buddy, that's just capitalism.

afthonos 7y ago

Years ago, Bill Kristol accused the lawyers representing Guantanamo Bay detainees of being anti-American for doing so. Up until that point, Bill Kristol has been a pundit I read semi-regularly as a reasonable voice I disagreed with. From that point on, I have never read anything else he had to say. Ever. If an article mentions him, I stop reading. If I accidentally end up on a column of his, I immediately hit the back button. If I happen to be watching TV (very rare) and he appears, I change the channel. By trampling over a foundational precept of justice to get his rhetorical points du jour, he forever forfeited his right to my time. You may say that is extreme. I say: anything worth saying has dozens of people saying it already. If I want diverse points of view, the internet has them in abundance. So I lose nothing and, in a small way, I can try to make things better. The point is: Project Veritas is comically partisan. Literally nothing has been too underhanded for them: taking things out of context, outright lying about what they found, splicing video to make it look like people said things they didn’t, you name it and they’ve done it. So no, they don’t get to be listened to. Ever. No one who worked there gets listened to. Ever. Someone else will speak whatever truths they speak, and meanwhile we need not listen to their lies.

jlawson 7y ago
They posted the full unedited video. It doesn't reveal anything deceptive about the editing of the first edited-for-time video. EDIT: Going to the substance - you really think Google employees don't want to prevent Trump's re-election? Because every possible indicator (campaign donations, personal speech, company policy) says that they do. The Veritas video is part of a massive pattern of evidence pointing to the same conclusion. They've got a dog in the fight, and there is no mechanism to stop them abusing their non-accountable, opaque, non-democratic power over the modern mediums of communication. Another question - If this isn't enough evidence to convince you, what would be? What's the standard or proof? Would you apply that same standard to accusations that, say, Trump wants America to be just white people? Or are you just using an isolated demand for rigor [0]? [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
- jjulius 7y ago

jjulius 7y ago

>So the recorded Google employees were deepfakes? Nobody said he used deepfakes. I'm sure that the interviews with Googlers whose faces/voices were on camera were legitimate, and selectively edited just like every single one of his videos. Contrary to other media outlets whose track records of honesty can lend credence to their anonymous sources, O'Keefe's extensive track record of dishonesty and deception casts a long shadow of doubt on his shadowy, voice-modified interviewee that provides additional context to the unbiased documents PV leaked. >Or are you saying that autocomplete results for "men can " in Google search are totally natural and not at all political engineering done by Google? Machine learning-based search suggestions are probably going to be a little weird for a while. That's literally all that is.

petermcneeley 7y ago
I went through the okeef wiki and ya it certainly seems like there is a great deal of dishonesty in his "reporting" style. But the dismissive "that's literally all that it is." Makes me wonder who is it you are trying to convince. Like how does that cognitive device work on more clear examples like in the case of http://www.unz.com/isteve/great-moments-in-google-american-inventors/ http://www.unz.com/isteve/great-moments-in-google-american-i...