Google whistleblower Zach Vorhies, co-author with Kent Heckenlively of the new book Google Leaks: A Whistleblower’s Exposé of Big Tech Censorship, explained how Google “re-wrote their news algorithms to specifically go after Trump” in an interview with the Epoch Times.
Vorhies passed hundreds of internal documents to Project Veritas in 2019, including items from the company’s YouTube search blacklist showing direct interference in democratic votes.
In his interview with the Epoch Times, Vorhies displayed internal files showing how Google ranks news stories. “This is called realtime, hive-mind scoring,” said Vorhies. “They literally built it, they re-wrote it according to the fight that Trump was having with [James] Comey.”
President Donald Trump regrets letting FBI director James Comey remain in his position, admitting in an interview he should have fired him sooner.
Asked by Epoch Times interviewer Joshua Phillipp whether this was just a way for Google to surface top news stories, Vorhies pointed out that the quality of search results has declined, with users looking to competing search engines.
“It’s not for increasing market share in the United States… their competitors are having exponential growth.”
“The way that they allowed the mainstream media to structure their stories so they could remain at the top of their search index, their news index.”
Phillipp noted that the Epoch Times used to frequently be in the top ten news results for news stories, but were “taken out” at some point.
Breitbart News has also been censored by Google, with search analysis data revealing that by 2020, the visibility of Breitbart links on Google has dropped by 99.7 percent compared with 2016, despite no corresponding fall in traffic. Breitbart News also revealed that visibility on searches for “Joe Biden” dropped to zero.
Google Biden Search Graph
Vorhies explained that Google assigns each website a PageRank score, which it does not reveal to website owners. Vorhies noted that Google has even ignored congressional subpoenas for PageRank scores.
“They base the score off of what the mainstream media says, and also what Wikipedia says. Now the problem with Wikipedia is that they’ve gone from using primary sources to using secondary sources that describe the primary sources.”
“In other words, media organizations are controlling the entire system,” said Phillipp.
“Yeah. So when you get a negative story, your website will likely face a [PageRank] penalty within the next 3-6 months. So it’s really important for businesses out there if they get hit, if they get slandered, to go force a retraction because if they don’t it’s going to end up on Wikipedia and then this defamation-laundering engine known as Wikipedia will cause their search ranking engine on Google to go down.”
“The PageRank score used to change very slowly, like the criteria was incrementally updated, without that many changes from quarter to quarter, now the changes are coming much more rapidly. That’s because the authoritativeness is changing so rapidly. So for example, if you cite the WHO and Dr. Fauci from a year ago — today that’s going to be misinformation.”
“Now that we have this rapid changing of the narrative pretty much every month now, they need to have an automated way which they can… shift the definition of truth and then re-rank all the different news articles based on that.”
Breitbart News will continue to report on Google censorship.
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