Google has announced a $300 million “News Initiative,” which will support and promote what the company deems to be “high quality journalism,” and work towards monitoring “misinformation” during elections.
“Google says the News Initiative is focused on three broad goals — strengthening quality journalism, supporting sustainable business models and empowering newsrooms through technological innovation,” reported Tech Crunch, Tuesday. “It’s also committing to spend $300 million over the next three years on its various journalism-related projects.”
During a press conference, Google Chief Business Officer Phillipp Schindler declared, “Our mission is inherently tied to your business… The economics are very clear: If you do not grow, we do not grow,” and added Google has “two clear business incentives” to support and promote “high quality journalism.”
“First, he said Google search ‘by its very nature depends on the open web and depends on open access to information and that obviously depends on high quality information.’ Second, he noted that Google’s DoubleClick ad business is all about splitting revenue with publishers, with $12.6 billion paid out to partners last year,” Tech Crunch explained. “Schindler also announced a partnership with the Harvard Kennedy School’s First Draft to launch something called the Disinfo Lab, which will ‘use computational tools and journalistic oversight to monitor misinformation during elections.’ And there’s a separate project called MediaWise, a partnership with the Poynter Institute, Stanford University and the Local Media Association. Google.org’s Jacqueline Fuller described this as a $3 million, two-year media campaign to improve media literacy among teens.”
Despite the fact that Google will be funding attempts to “monitor disinformation during elections,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has claimed that Google was “directly engaged in Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” during the 2016 presidential election.
Google has also frequently targeted conservative and libertarian news sources, partnering last year with a fact-checking service funded by far-left billionaire George Soros.
In 2017, Google changed their search engine to combat “fake news,” and “hate speech,” and this year the company introduced a fact-checking feature that was revealed to almost exclusively target conservative media, including Breitbart News and the Daily Caller.
Prager University, also known as PragerU, is currently engaged in a lawsuit against Google, alleging targeted censorship against conservatives, while during a lawsuit filed against Google following the company’s firing of employee James Damore, after he published a viewpoint diversity manifesto, lawyer Harmeet Dhillon claimed Google is a “bubble of very very liberal groupthink,” which considers diversity to be anyone who isn’t Caucasian or Asian.
Further allegations also claimed routine discrimination against white male employees at Google.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington, or like his page at Facebook.
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