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Comment by jjulius | Hacker News Reader

Thank you. If Project Veritas is indeed what OP was referencing, then the claim can be easily dismissed without viewing the "source" footage, given Veritas' and O'Keefe's extensive history of selective editing, fraudulent claims, dubious methods and borderline entrapment[1].

Edit: If you're going to downvote me, note that I have no problem discussing why we should lend credence to claims from an individual with a long history of fraudulent claims. I am genuinely interested in hearing why we should trust anything PV produces going forward.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_O%27Keefe#Major_works

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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 political engineering done by Google?

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.

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-whis...

[2]https://www.projectveritas.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/SS...

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.

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.

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.

You're free to not give Google money and to create your own services. Otherwise buddy, that's just capitalism.

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.

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-demand...

>They posted the full unedited video.

Got a link?

>Another question - If this isn't enough evidence to convince you, what would be? What's the standard or proof?

Where's your evidence and standard of proof? Please read the full dumped documents provided by PV[1] and show me where the anti-Trump/Conservative/right-wing bias is. Beyond a video with an edited interview (I honestly can't find the "full unedited video" on their site or Twitter), all PV has is some shadowy "anonymous" source whose entire credibility is called into question by PV's lengthy history of fraudulent claims. PV and you have no proof, so please don't ask us for ours - Hitchens's Razor[2] should apply here.

[1]https://www.projectveritas.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/SS...

[2]"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

This isn’t about Google. I reject Project Veritas as a source of evidence. I take no public position on Google, not least because I work there and don’t speak for them.

This isn’t a demand for rigor, isolated or otherwise, because I genuinely didn’t know what this was about before your comment. The history of the thread went:

- Some vague statement - Someone expressing confusion - Someone else supposing it was a Project Veritas story and discarding it. - Parent to my comment asking how its parent thought the evidence was flawed.

My comment was that in some cases, including this one, the source should be dismissed out of hand. No reading, no weighing evidence, nothing. In SSC terms, this source defects while wearing a T-shirt that says “I cooperate”. You don’t entertain such sources unless you want to poison your discourse and your ability to trust evidence.

None of this has anything to do with whether PV’s accusation this time around is true.

That's a really dangerous attitude to take. Are you really not curious what your own company is up to? Does it matter where the leak came from?

How about this. Go to google.com and type the following:

"women can"

vs.

"men can"

The bias is clear as day and you don't need Project Veritas to tell you.

There were also numerous documents leaked showing extreme left wing bias. You'll probably have seen them as an employee so it's pretty disingenuous to not address the root point (that Goolge is biased) and instead attack the messenger (Project Veritas in this case).

I can’t address the root point in public. You’ll have to take my word for it that I didn’t know what the point was at all when I wrote about sources (though of course, being sentient, I had an idea of the kind of point it would be).

My attitude would be dangerous if Project Veritas were the only entity talking about the dangers of Google. But I find, opening a news tab, that everyone is deeply aware of Google’s reach and power and how it could be problematic. So ignoring known liars doesn’t mean I’m missing vital information. As I said: someone honest is probably making those points, and I certainly listen to such people, from both sides of the aisle, and some of whom I even agree with on some points!

Sadly the mainstream coverage of this issue is woefully lacking. Yes, everyone knows that Google is powerful and that's dangerous but you rarely see very explicit evidence of this and how they are biased. As much as it pains you, you probably should take the 5 minutes required to watch the actual footage. At least then you'll understand why Project Veritas isn't an important part of this story and why people are strongly disagreeing with your position. Jen Gennai's words definitely speak for themselves (as do the leaked documents).

Please source these leaked documents you're referencing. If you read through my posts, I've pointed out multiple times in this thread that the docs Project Veritas leaked pertaining to their latest Google video show no attempt at being biased, nor do they single-out right-wing/Conservative/etc. viewpoints.

Sure:

* https://www.projectveritas.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Sc...

* https://www.projectveritas.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/SS...

That second one has some great examples. They're literally talking about editing the search results for Treyvon Martin and George Zimmerman for instance.

Dismiss PV's analysis if you want. I do the same to some sources.

But it's nonsense to discard a primary source, like that video, because it went through a particular person's hands.

If hypothetically, ThinkProgress (who I do not trust) gets a hidden camera video of Trump talking about his dream of mass-expelling nonwhites from America, I wouldn't just pretend it didn't exist because ThinkProgress is the one who took it. Primary sources are primary sources.

I do not have the technical know-how to evaluate their claim that the video is unedited, nor have they earned the right to my time to validate it if I did. If the video is egregious enough, people with less mistrust than me will do the legwork, validate it, and will push it up the trust chain until I get it from a source I trust, which will say “this was originally leaked to PV, but we have done extensive checking and believe it is genuine.”

At which point, well, I still won’t be able to comment on it, but at least I’ll stop saying “dismiss this source out of hand.” :-)

(EDIT: small tweaks to spelling and phrasing.)

>If the video is egregious enough, people with less mistrust than me will do the legwork, validate it, and will push it up the trust chain until I get it from a source I trust

The issue is that this can't happen because the sources you trust have decided that achieving their political goals (currently - getting rid of Trump) are more important than telling the truth. That's what this entire expose is about, in fact.

Obviously the sources you trust will not pass along information indicating that they are themselves untrustworthy.

When you offload your mental faculties to others, you become their pawn.

People have a duty to at least try to use their brain as an independent judging citizen. Help me, I can't stop these megacorps on my own...

>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.

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-i...

I don't care much about his history. But the video is pretty damning. Unless it's "deceptively edited" in the sense of cutting up her speech and merging it together to form completely different sentences (which seems unlikely, as the video is smooth) or she was just kidding (sure, Trump is "just kidding" all the time!) or deepfakes (possible, but so far noone alleges that)...

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