Google Heading Toward a ‘1984’ Scenario?

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (ChurchMilitant.com) – Google’s latest “tools for fact-checkers” are raising questions about just how close the tech giant is to sparking a scenario like the one found in George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, 1984.

In a video posted earlier this month by Google News Initiative, LaToya Drake, head of the North America News Lab team within the GNI, posited “how Google helps the fact-checking ecosystem with tools that journalists, fact-checkers and researchers can use to improve information quality around the world.”

She focused on two tools the tech giant built, namely, Fact Check Explorer and Claim Review. 

Fact Check Explorer

“Google’s Fact Check Explorer is designed to facilitate the work of fact-checkers, journalists and researchers in discovering what has and hasn’t been debunked all over the globe,” Drake claimed. “The tool uses a markup language called ‘Schema’ that tells Google that this is a fact check produced by a reputable fact-checking organization.”

But all the organizations Google deems “reputable” are known to lean toward or embrace leftist politics. Furthermore, many of them have themselves faced criticism for numerous failures to provide accurate fact checks. 

In June, for example, the New York Post published an article titled “Titanic Sub Snopes Fail on Elon Musk Shows ‘Fact Checks’ = Lefty Bull.” The article detailed some of the erroneous “fact checks” offered by Snopes, an organization that Google Fact Check Explorer uses. 

In fact, Snopes has a history of disinformation. In 2021, a BuzzFeed article titled “The Cofounder of Snopes Wrote Dozens of Plagiarized Articles for the Fact-Checking Site” forced Snopes to conduct an internal review. The Snopes review confirmed the cofounder used a pseudonym, the Snopes byline and his own name to publish 54 articles with plagiarized material on topics such as “same-sex marriage licenses.”

But none of this information about Snopes is included in Fact Check Explorer for those who wish to verify the information. Searching for “Snopes cofounder plagiarized” or “Is Snopes trustworthy?” yielded no results. Perhaps the data has yet to be entered, or perhaps Google does not consider the New York Post or BuzzFeed as reputable sources.

But search terms for hot-button topics like “climate change is a hoax” returned 22 hits, and none of those hits are from sources that argue climate change is a hoax. One of the returns showed “claim by social media users: man-made climate change is a hoax” with a USA Today rating of “false.” Another return showed “claim by social media posts: climate change is not happening” with a FactCheck.org rating of “false.” There are no opposing “fact checks” regarding the Left’s climate change narrative or other topics such as COVID-19 and abortion. 

ClaimReview

In the video mentioned, Drake stated that the “ClaimReview schema is a markup language that aims to improve the quality of information available on the internet. It provides a way for journalists and fact-checkers to flag fact-checked articles from platforms, search engines and apps.”

She directs interested parties to the website ClaimReviewProject.com. The website explains, “ClaimReview is a tagging system that fact-checkers can use to identify their articles for search engines and social media platforms such as Google Search, Google News, Bing, Facebook and YouTube. The platforms then use the tags to promote and highlight fact-check articles.”

A Google article from June states, “Fact Check Explorer is a Google tool powered by claim review markup (which helps Google detect and display a fact check), in which you can find fact checks which have been investigated by independent organizations from around the world.”

But there seems to be a disconnect between Fact Check Explorer and ClaimReview. ClaimReview’s front page shows images of three fact-checking examples. The middle one shows an analysis in which The Washington Post gave four “Pinocchios” in 2019. The analysis is titled “Planned Parenthood’s False Stat: ‘Thousands’ of Women Died Every Year Before Roe.” The author concluded, “These numbers were debunked in 1969 — 50 years ago — by a statistician celebrated by Planned Parenthood. There’s no reason to use them today.”

But a query of The Washington Post’s article in Fact Check Explorer yielded no results. However, when the query “Did thousands of women die from abortion before Roe?” is entered, Fact Check Explorer yielded two results. The first is to a USA Today article titled “Fact Check: Abortion-Related Deaths Continued After Roe v. Wade, but Occurred Less Often” and the second to a PolitiFact article titled “Deaths From Abortions Still Happen, but They Declined Sharply After Roe v. Wade.” 

It seems the investigator using Fact Check Explorer is being steered to a Google-approved conclusion. 

Data Commons

Another Google tool Drake does not mention in the video is Data Commons. 

According to its website, “Data Commons aggregates data from a wide range of sources into a unified database to make it more accessible and useful.” The tool “covers many topics, from demographics and economics to emissions and the climate.”

The “wide range of sources” includes the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the World Bank. The Data Commons website adds, “We have received help from our many academic collaborations, including, UC San Francisco, Stanford University, UC Berkeley and Harvard,” all well-known liberal universities.  

According to the website, “Data Commons welcomes patches and contributions to this project from everyone, new or experienced!” But another page on “prerequisites” for contributing states that it will “ensure that the DC team (support@datacommons.org) has approved the addition of the dataset.” So while anybody can submit, Google must pre-approve the submission.

Though one is free to use or not use Fact Check Explorer, that same freedom does not apply to using Data Commons when using Google to search the internet, since, as another website notes, “The statistical queries on Google Search are powered by DataCommons, an open-source repository of publicly available datasets.”

This could be cause for alarm, especially since the tech giant dominates the global search engine market share. As of May, 93.12% of all online searches were done through Google. Bing searches accounted for 2.77%, Yahoo! For 1.11% and DuckDuckGo for 0.51%.

Toward a 1984 Scenario

A few outlets such as The Exposè and The People’s Voice recently covered Google’s “tools for fact-checkers.”

“We truly have entered the era of George Orwell’s doublethink and doublespeak,” concluded the article in The Exposè, referencing George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel 1984. 

But unlike Fact Check Explorer and ClaimReview, a search for “climate change is a hoax” on Google does currently yield some results on the first page that are critical of climate change. So for the time being, Google, which uses Data Commons for statistical queries, has not completely eliminated opposing voices.

Even so, the tech giant’s ramped-up promotion of its “tools for fact-checkers” represents another step toward private-sector tyranny, pushing the world ever closer to a 1984 scenario.