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Comment by malvosenior | Hacker News Reader

It's incredible that The New York Times continues to chase the Russian troll story about election interference but not once mention that Google executives were recently caught saying that they will not allow another Trump "situation" and they plan to actively manipulate search and news results to make that happen.

Google has so much more leverage than any "troll" yet doesn't even get a passing mention because The New York Times and Google agree on which political party they'd like to see win the 2020 election.

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Google is in an unfortunate catch 22. If they choose to act, that impacts the election. If they choose not to act, that also impacts the election.

The most obvious thing I've seen is they appear to be killing off independent news in favor of the old guard. We'll see what happens as this continues to unfold.

The ethical choice would be to not make any partisan or skewed editorial decisions. As it stands, they're using their immense leverage to advocate for left wing politics. A story that dearly needs to be told but isn't by the same mainstream media sources you correctly identify as Google's chosen sources.

Left wing independent sources are getting cut too. David Pakman and others have opened up about how the changes are really hurting then.

The reporting on that was kind of dubious. I'm not surprised that mainstream media didn't cover it https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/6/27/18760463/projec...

The Verge are exactly the type of skewed media that is being promoted by Google. Really it doesn't matter who reported on the Google story as the Google executive's words speak for themselves, as do the leaked internal Google documents that explicitly state that they would modify results to get the political view they're looking for.

I urge people to take a look for themselves and make up their own mind.

Do you have a link where the words speak for themselves? The quote mentioned

>Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation, it’s like a small company cannot do that.

is only really a problem if you assume something bad for 'trump situation' as opposed to just preventing Russian trolls hacking overseas elections.

I definitely take those words at face value, especially since Russian "trolls" didn't "hack" our election. It's not exactly a secret that Valley tech companies hate Trump with a burning passion. The docs also speak for themselves.

Verge is doing Google's bidding? I get the feeling that any information that counters the narrative that you're selling is "fake news", right?

Western intelligence agencies all agree that a foreign adversary is working to influence elections. This is a problem. The monopoly power of a handful of tech giants is also a problem but bringing it up in this context is a perfect example of whataboutism.

The Verge is absolutely doing Google's bidding here. Google's words and documents speak for themselves. Just like The Verge reporting on Damore without actually publishing his own words. This is actually fake news. You can't just manufacture stories and not supply the primary source because it counters your spin.

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