russia starts a trials of a potential coronavirus vaccine in the country has also rolled out new measures to curb the spread of covert 19. as the number of infections surges in the u.s. the secretary of state points the finger at russia accusing it of spreading false information. last orders in the u.k. as the prime minister orders the closure of all pubs and restaurants while medics are working around the clock to treat cope with 1000 patients complain of pressure and the. latest on these stories going to r.t. dot com stay with us now though for the big picture. i'm a holland cook in washington this is the big picture on our t.v.

america. google has become of verb it's internet search tool is that commonplace in our everyday lives like kleenex and scotch tape it's become a generic term google's corporate mission statement is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful which google says it accomplishes by considering many factors including the words in your question the content of pages the expertise of sources and your language and location recently we introduce you to activist merriam 9 who spoke of google manipulating search results at the expense of alternative health information and while google's parent company itself. has pharmaceutical subsidiaries if you miss that show you can find

it where you'll find all our shows at youtube dot com slash the big picture our t. and merriam introduced us to a former google software engineer who says there are other ingredients in the secret sauce they were intending to sculpt the information landscape so that they could create their own version of what was objective lee true that for he has worked at google for 11 years he was a senior software engineer until he discovered what he calls their artificial intelligence censorship weapons sack welcome to the big picture. good to be on here thank you for having me on when the search and social media go alliance or accused of putting their thumb on the scale the standard defenses the algorithms make the call tell us what else factors into results when we search. so it turns out

that google is using an army of employees to rate and rank the entire internet and a person website place or thing are ranked according to their expertise authoritativeness and trustworthy score this eat score is actually derived by what we could p.v. has to say about the website person or topic and from those from that each score the pages assigned a secret page rank score and then that is used to calibrate the search algorithms and rank pretty much the entire internet well that scares me right away because when you say wiki pedia everything i've ever seen on wikipedia i always make efforts to confirm elsewhere so they're starting out on shaky ground aren't they. yeah i mean we competed has been politicized and it's been vandalized over. and

over and over again and more recently in the last quick 4 years there's been a lockdown install to many many articles of political nature on wikipedia and you know if it's no longer an open system then the question is who have who has access to the system and do they have you know the truth and honesty and integrity . you know in mind when they're editing articles are they really just trying to score political points something else it always comes up when the internet royalty or dragged before congress is google a platform or is it a publisher. right well you know section 230 of the communications decency act carved out liability protections as long as the. big tech companies didn't. censor political content and now it appears that everything that is passing through their platform is now ranked according to

a political agenda and so the question is should those companies still maintain their liability shield or are they violating the spirit of you know section 230 of the communications decency act well they're trying to sway a lot of other people. right they're trying to have the protections of a platform yet act with the discretion as a publisher yet merriam her name told us how google downplays alternative health information give us some examples of who and what else you have seen deemphasized in google search. well one of the largest alternative health public publishers which is dr mercola has seen his organic search traffic to his page pretty much collapse down to less than one percent of what it was before and you know this happened also with self hacked and these other. come. bodies that are involved in

disseminating information about health they've seen all the organic traffic just really collapse and the question that you know we should be asking ourselves is you know should just to one company be able to decide that entire segment of the economy should just essentially end and you know you see this with you know right now it's a war against alternative health. it's also a war against anyone that has any vaccine has it in c. and also you know climate scientists that you know assert that global warming is a sun driven phenomenon are seeing their you know publications being hit with something called news guard which intercepts sort of like the the searches that people are doing on you tube and injecting a statement of you know this this is controversial and it's probably not show it's

almost like a nutritional label for and so this is this is really quickly you know seeping into regular in the searches what about politics for all the talk that donald trump benefited from this information in social media hasn't he actually suffered from google search. yes absolutely and the thing is that a lot of it starts in google news articles that come in at 4 am in the morning. train the machine learning algorithms in order to match keywords that people are going to be searching for politics that date to the certain articles that exist and so for example you know what i was able to see as a full time employee is that i was able to you know search for. kids in cages and or you know immigration issues and it was going and what was happy. thing is

that google search was rerouting me to articles by c.n.n. and m.s.n. b c and these really these establishment media players that were in real time changing and redirecting my searches to land in these what i consider propaganda articles and you know this just this doesn't just happen on on you know a particular instance it happens pretty much every single day when people go and search your own story is a chilling tale tell us what happened when you went public with the project veritas . well i 1st you know when i'm honestly public so i was under a veil of secrecy and about whom identity was but then after that disclosure i decided that after some harassment by google that i was just going to go public with everything and right before i did google red flagged me with the local police of san francisco and they did a wellness check at my location. i decided that i was going to answer the door and

then escalated they used a flimsy excuse to say that i had a bomb threat in my house and shut down the streets on the lunts here from 20th to valencia all the way to 22nd the balance of vacuity my neighbors the stores in the theater around the street i eventually came out of my house with my hands up with guns pointed at me where i surrendered to police so that they could give me a 6 part question here about whether i had suicidal thoughts did you ever fear for your life when google and the cops came after you and do you now. you know i really did i was scared that you know accepting a lot of accidents happened in the past and so after realizing that the cops were not going to leave my house. i started to worry that they would come into my house and. something bad may happen because you don't know what's going to have. and so i

figured that hey if they're going to confront me that i might as well come out with this much public attention is possible and so when i came out of my house i realized that everyone had cameras that were directed at me and so if there was going to be any funny business then let it appear on 20 different cameras in broad daylight rather than inside of my house where the only cameras that could be working may be the body cams and maybe they might have a sudden malfunction sudden function hey is that there's lots more to google than search and we have heard about the mails being scanned and the google chrome browser tracing our steps what is the true cost of these free services and do you recommend against using anything google. where you know we have a saying in silicon valley which is if the product is free you are the product and so really google's entire platform is based upon surveillance of your data and

then bundling that up and selling your habits online to various intelligence agencies around the world and so the question is whether google spying on you is you know is invalid that's their entire business model is to spy on you of course they're spying on you and for people that are looking to sort of detox from all the surveillance capitalism that's secretly been employed i really recommend that they move away from g. mail on to something like proton mail move away from something like chrome browser or firefox and move to what i use which is the brave browser which is based on the open source version of the chrome browser but with all of the spying you know services being ripped out by a really smart programmer and we can find that brave browser if we google it. yeah or dot dot go or use the start page search engine. engine to find it ok yes

should the government regulate or break up companies like google and facebook and twitter the 1st amendment is a slippery slope. you know i've been thinking a lot about this google has you know in its possession extremely advanced and artificial intelligence i think that some artificial intelligence needs to be regulated by i don't think that google as a whole needs to be regulated i think that it does need to be broken up. you tube should not be under the corporate control of google because google just can't keep its hands out of the you know honeypot we've seen them try to hack culture hack politics and for them to be able to use their influence to you know hide searches and decide what the public is to see on its various services needs to be looked at scrutinized and and broken off from the main company so that for he is thank you

for joining us and for your conscience and for speaking out. there's lots more in the big picture after this short break i'm holland cook in washington you're watching r.t. america. each simulating civilization will be able to run using a tiny fraction of its resources. hundreds of thousands millions of runs through all of human history almost all. beings with our kinds of experiences with them to simulated ones rather than on simulated ones and conditional on that they are good

we should think fearful of the one of the simulated ones. a fairly super cool for sure to both of us looks like there was a news media it was so on the internet to start with you should also be achieved ok feeling i mean misty's football for the 2 of them would not only do it has made them for bush but i will push the castle for the show going to get us no. good answer so. yes.

when the new york times said a dollar a week i said sold my digital subscription biz not include the times crossword puzzle for which they charge more but i can read and search the times on my i phone i pad on my computer which is where increasingly we get our news so you can imagine the fuss within usa today when the poynter institute reported that knowledgeable sources said the nation's newspaper could seize publishing its print edition publisher méribel perot's wadsworth quickly responded that going out has no plans to discontinue the print edition of usa today which remains an important part of our business and with going to its merger with gatehouse media looming she said we believe the combination of our 2 companies will transform the landscape in the print and digital news business the associated press estimates that more than 1400

american cities and towns have lost newspapers in just the past 15 years and cities as big as pittsburgh have no 7 days a week print edition are hard copy newspaper is merely obsolete or headed for extinction let's ask digital disruptor nagel news editor of go local proverb dot com a local digital news publication making waves in the ocean state rhode island kate welcome. and thanks for having me i recently learned from coverage that you put out that the once proud providence journal has asked for an exemption from the state's time and a half overtime requirement and the teamsters there accused the company of creating what they call a part time work force with no vacation pay kate as cutbacks of whack the journal in recent years how are their numbers their circulation and how are your clicks. so i think column a case in point with what's happening with the teams there is in the department of

labor a training here as just a proof point that the model doesn't work. you know in 2019 does it really make sense to have barrels of and slabs of paper going through machines that have to be cut that have to be sorted that have to get put on trucks that have to be driven around and dropped off. you know the once proud providence journal had a weekday circulation of 200000 that's down to about 30000 we spoke with the teamsters holland one of the things that they make the case for which we certainly agree with them they have an antiquated provision here holland that they are the paper of record that legal notices from cities and towns have to spend money on now they question why are you the paper of record if you're 30000 and why then if you're getting the subsidy from these localities can't you pay that over time to your workers again i think the proof is in the putting and could your platform be

deemed to paper of record. you know i'll tell you. a monthly basis we get 700000 unique visitors now holland you know there are around market of about a 1000000 residents about 800000 of them would be considered the reading audience if you will year over year revenue has gone up 50 percent year over year holland 43 percent in our readership and clearly obviously the ability to geo target is something that we have from a digital standpoint that paper certainly don't very cool know how the revenue is there less advertising and the problem is journal and beauty competitor for those ad dollars have you seen the journal's rates take a hit how tough has it been for you to compete for that business without a tangible print product. so you know give you a cab in the news editor i am on that side of the aisle on the sales side but going

on our say we do have the top advertisers and the market more in alpert medical school at brown university the air. port you know from emerging technology companies green technology we have pound for pound the best advertisers i think here in the market they see the value they know where the eyes are you know both from a deliverable standpoint when you can show them but just from an anecdotal standpoint knowing that we break the biggest stories and that's again where the eyes are holland now big digital you maher more nimble than print when it comes to your side of the building the content and content can date before the ink dries and i've often seen you scoop at the journal but what legacy broadsheets hair of the digital up starts don't is momentum because as you said you know for decades the pro joe has been a trusted source talk about the way you are using facebook and twitter to bring our eyes and ears to go local proverb dot com. so you talk about the momentum holland i

mean let's just take a little step back back and go local started in 2010 i joined in 2013 but back in 10 the providence journal had 150 reporters in its newsroom that number holland is hovering around 15. so they struggle yeah it's a precipitous loss it's clearly visible you know yet heard you talking at a prior segment about the role of digital in the i phone that's exactly why go local had been started by the local founder josh benson knowing that the media landscape was going to change just drastically with the advent of the i phone and it clearly has now again that geo targeting ability to push stories out to stories out quickly virally we have hundreds of thousands now i gave you that number of unique visitors but social media contacts both within the market and southern new

england as well so you get a good story holland it's not unique just or an island it moves around the country it moves around the world sure that speed of light that again print operation just can't match news editor go local proverb dot com thank you for joining us from providence thanks for having me. now let's welcome back georgetown university professor chris chambers chris i know what kate and her team are up to because i live in rhode island but how common is what they're doing there this digital pure play news platform how common is that elsewhere. it's pretty common harlan i mean so so much so that the legacy newspapers are trying to copy it on their own but but you are seeing these new outfits basically disrupting the local legacy daily sadly they're also also disrupting the local 'd legacy print neighborhood papers which have taken up

a lot of slack from the the the legacy big dailies the cover neighborhood. school and crime sorts of of things that the legacy papers have moved on from in order to be more sexy and to be more global so you know there's a good and bad in all of this but i think it's something so common that the big legacy dailies are trying to copy it and i wouldn't be surprised if you're going to see the kind of the pushback to try to take over the the up starts that are that are that are pushing them back so it's going to be very interesting in the next 5 years well here in d.c. we recently mourn the passing of washington express that free weekday tabloid the washington post stuffed into boxes all over town especially near metro subway and bus stops there good natured cover story that they said hope you enjoy your stick and phones and editor dan pack of our own news that when we launched in 2003 there

was no such thing as an i phone into that environment came expressed a lively attractive quick read newspaper kind of a print precursor to the way news is now fed to us on our devices chris as well targeted to commuters as express was and with the resources of the washington post . hind end being free should we conclude that their problem was it was print. i would say so i mean you have to understand that this is this is almost an anthropological and sociological sort of thing with our devices i think it was it was the the paper delivery system the paper format the paper medium was was was transformed overnight by these devices because when when when when this paper came out the only thing people were really reading on devices were books ironically. you know books that were put on you know things like these these these

new sorts of platforms and and tablets overnight this change and again it's almost an anthropological. thing you know where people especially younger people really didn't need the tangible feel of paper and a lot of times these these expresses were basically thrown away and became you know garbage on the subway platforms so you know and the phone is a lot more intimate in terms of holding it in your hand and looking down at it versus a paper it's only old people like me who remember the days of being on a bus or train and actually reading a paper so you know this thing transformed overnight so i think it was the paper aspect of this that did them in as for the where that's the how but you mentioned the where when you talked a minute ago about these suburban local local local papers are they generally healthy than the big metro broadsheets now. these suburban and sometimes urban

neighborhood papers it depends on the on the community largely they are doing pretty well with subscriptions and ads the problem is you know look across the board they're not really paying their journalists in months. but they do make an impact on me that matter fact they make so big of an impact you saw what happened with the capitol gazette in annapolis maryland where a lunatic attacked the paper because they were making a difference and murdered some of the journalists there and some of the editors and that it was a very healthy local paper but again it depends on the community they are getting bigger in communities say in the state of florida for example where a lot of the local legacy dailies they're gone i mean you know the you know you have basically miami and tampa and then everything in between might be gone so they

are taking up the slack there so i think they're taking up some of that old dad revenue and some of the subscription revenue but again it's a question of also how much you pay your professionals chris as mainstream media become a page or if term. i think mainstream media's has become project of i think it's so pretty hard if that you might as well just that you are it is it's amazing i mean because it needs so many things that so many different people now i think we really need to start speaking in more technical terms unfortunately about platforms and format and stuff like that because i think that it is taking on such a crazy meaning now that we really don't we don't even know what it means now and there might even be people that would describe it to r.t. or scribe it to a local suburban newspaper depending on your point of view so we really have to talk about platforms audience. formats of cetera et cetera and i think that

is where the future is going thank you georgetown university professor chris chambers. thank you and thank you for watching the big picture if you see us somewhere else you can now also watch our team america live at youtube dot com slash our america and we're live and direct. channel 321 pluto t.v. 279 if you have dish 80 and all of our shows are available anytime anywhere on any device at youtube dot com slash the big picture are to holland washington and at holland cook on twitter where if you follow me i'll follow you question more.

the washington consensus led by the united states says the liberal world order must be defended at almost all costs said differently the foreign policy blog demands the post cold war you know polar moment be preserved but alas it would seem the most i call the world has already arrived. so she and i as a nation from which to us and investors. as a whole she is a mother for for the for the river trip improved for the chairman that these guys are left to try to accomplish. the. purpose.

it was because the global world was going to have to close to its knees is it in your voice you just of us have played up us moving the support of the family and you're fighting with the left or about. the left coast approaches about 4 to 6 months because of the sound. hello and welcome to. me sophie shevardnadze. with technology evolving at a cost make speech and artificial intelligence is no longer just

a hollywood dream as a path ahead of us a dangerous $1.00 will our lives still be real while i'm here in oxford university to ask all these questions to one of the most prominent thinkers in this field nick bostrom. in a classroom it's really great to have you with us so you're a philosopher or author who writes about what's going to happen to us basically possibly so one of the ideas that you put forward is this idea of vulnerable world right so correct me if i were wrong but if i get this correctly it's it's basically that humanity may come up with a technology that may do list to extension and therefore we would need computer surveillance while that might be an oversimplification but the vulnerable world hypothesis. is the hypothesis that some level of technological development.