Google Uses Wikipedia to Suppress Competition

google, Wikipedia

Google tends to push Wikipedia results to the top and to use them in snippets despite Wikipedia being unreliable, untrustworthy, biased, and unpredictable. This is not naivete but a ruthless anti-competitive strategy. Wikipedia is owned by Wikimedia, a typical San Francisco nonprofit foundation, to which Google and its top officers donated millions of dollars. But most of its income is apparently derived from small donations by visitors, mostly referred by Google. The business relations between Google and Wikimedia go both ways. Continue reading Google Uses Wikipedia to Suppress Competition →

Social Media Damages Adolescents’ Health (WUWT)

healthcare, preprint

WUWT has published my two-parts paper, showing that:

  • the overwhelming body of clinical research demonstrates that social media severely damages adolescents’ health

  • the social media companies suppress and corrupt ongoing research and distort well known results

  • the academic establishment, MSM, and the rest of the left wing political machine aid this suppression

  • there is similarity and overlap between climate alarmism and social media damage quietism Continue reading Social Media Damages Adolescents’ Health (WUWT) →

Twitter Labeled Trump Supporters “Russian-linked,” Mixed Humans with Bots

anti-social media, dems

On or around October 31, 2017, Twitter testified about so-called Russian activities related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.  This and consequent testimonies were slanted to support the Democratic conspiracy theory of “Russian interference.” It might have been prepared together with congressional Democrats.

Even with this understanding, a closer look at Twitter testimonies reveals surprising findings:

  • Twitter and the DNC interpreted the word Russian as a reference to the native language and/or place of birth of an individual, not employment by the Russian government or even Russian citizenship. Large part (possibly most) of the so-called Russian-linked accounts belong to American citizens with no relation to the Russian government. At the same time, Twitter elected to disregard accounts making election related tweets from indeterminate locations, and likely to represent foreign governments and other entities.
  • Answering questions from senators, Twitter repeatedly used the term automated account as a synonym of a bot, thus dehumanizing Twitter users. The use of automation is allowed and even encouraged by Twitter, which provides a special Application Programming Interface (API) for this purpose. The automation might be as simple as manually scheduling tweets for a later time or auto-responding when the user is away from his or her computer.

Continue reading Twitter Labeled Trump Supporters “Russian-linked,” Mixed Humans with Bots →

Even The Atlantic Questioned Loyalty of Big Tech

Big Tech,

15 Things We Learned From the Tech Giants at the Senate Hearings

The Atlantic, Nov 2, 2017

“Most Russian advertising on Facebook was used to build up pages, which then distributed their content “organically.”

The $100,000 of advertising that has been a big focus of Congressional interest was used primarily to build audiences for a variety of Russian-linked pages. In other words, they paid to buy likes and build the distribution channels through which they would pump disinformation.”  Continue reading Even The Atlantic Questioned Loyalty of Big Tech →

Notes Misc

uncategorized,

2018-11-06: Where I voted (Austin TX), the voting machines’ user interface is very counter-intuitive and inconvenient for older people. A dial for selecting checkboxes and buttons Back and Forward are intuitive for the Millenials, but not for senior citizens. That probably caused many of them to make mistakes, with the net effect negative to Republicans.

2018-08-06: NR: Facebook blocks an ad of a Republican candidate, referring to her childhood in Communist Cambodia.