To my Fellow Techies: It's Time to Understand Google News and the Mainstream Media
I've been following the AI conversation closely, and it's been great to see my fellow techies engaging in important dialog here on X.
IMO what @kevinnbass wrote here is perhaps the most important thing anyone has said so far about it.
Regulatory capture is *political* capture.
If you'll permit me, I'll add my own take to this.
Political capture is *mass media* capture.
Totalitarian regimes understood the importance of information control. That's why Pravda was the only paper allowed in the USSR, and The People's Daily the only paper allowed in the PRC. That's why they were posted daily on the streets. Sure, you could hold other opinions. Just keep them to yourself.
What Does Mass Media Capture
During the 2024 election, I documented how Google News was weaponized to defeat Donald Trump. @theMRC raised similar issues with Apple News. MS Now has, of course, always been a Democrat mouthpiece from Day One.
This isn't a political post. You can love Donald Trump. You can hate him. Or you can be like most people and have no strong opinion either way. That's not the point of this article. All three represent America, and all three are entitled to freedom of speech.
This article is about reach. And the mass media is being mobilized and weaponized to assign opinions to your fellow Americans. Or did you not notice that most Americans now are terrified of "data centers", just as they were terrified of Trump, white supremacists, nuclear energy, global warming, global cooling, Russia, and everything else the past 40 years.
Think of how your neighbor, your parents, your friends get their news. It's from their phone or their laptop. The home page they see when they start up that they never bothered to change. Who controls them? Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
It took a Herculean effort by President Trump to fight this in 2024.
1) By forming a coalition with the MAHA wing which included RFK and Tulsi Gabbard Democrats
2) By going onto new media that the Democrats didn't control (yet)
3) By getting shot. No, he didn't do this intentionally but yes, it provided a momentary pause in the relentless negative coverage.
4) By doing some of the most impressive political campaigning in the history of Presidential politics—driving a garbage truck. Serving fries at McDonalds.
5) By allowing @X to remain free, contrary to the best efforts of his predecessor. Without @elonmusk walking in with the sink on 10/27/22, nearly every independent and conservative political voice you see today would still be banned, either because of "dangerous speech" involving elections or vaccines. And yet, the hammer would be coming down on "dangerous AI speech" today.
6) And the most important one: by aligning with Charlie Kirk, who was the only person on the Right who could bring together voices such as Ben Shapiro, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Mark Levin. All of these voices are mortal enemies today, trying to destroy each other rather than doing the simple thing their supposed friend Charlie Kirk would have begged them to do: talk to each other.
And EVEN with all of this, Trump only won by 1.5 percentage points.
Through the 2024 campaign I would go onto Google News every day, search for "Kamala" and "Trump", and put them side-by-side to identify bias.
There's something important to remember. The people who perpetrated assaults on Free Speech, in government, in academia, and in corporate America never had to answer for what they did. They just went underground. And you're seeing them rear their heads again in this AI debate.
Sundar Pichai is doing a nice job of making nice with both sides of the political aisle now. But there's something that's obvious to any of us who have worked in large public companies. The CEO has near zero control over what his junior employees two or three levels below him do.
There is a "deep state" in every corporation. If leaders do not do what @jensenhuang did the other day and proactively disallow it, political bias will affect every corner of their company. Just go onto any subreddit on Reddit.com and post something nice about President Trump and you'll instantly see what that looks like.
I thought my days of flagging bias in Google News was over. But here we are again.
How is bias continuing to affect Google News? Here's a screenshot I took just now. Pay very close attention.
This is a search on "ai". I did this in incognito mode and scrolled down to news that Google feels is the most relevant to searches for "ai".
1) Google News does not have a balanced list of "news sources". Here on X I'm able to see posts from people like @beffjezos and @davidsacks alongside posts from people like @berniesanders and @tedlieu. I can evaluate them on the marketplace of ideas.
Note that Google restricts their information to outlets that it chooses. This includes "Gates Notes"—the personal blog of Bill Gates, The New Yorker and NPR—two sites that are routinely used to spread progressive left propaganda, and "California State Portal"—a government site.
There is no intellectual diversity here. There is only one side of the issue being hammered to the general public. The thousands of blogs and X posters are free to speak. They just aren't allowed to be heard.
2) Even among "mainstream" news outlets, it quotes stories intended to paint a one-sided picture of the issue.
The New Yorker, predictably, leads with a headline meant to terrify the public. Very few people will click into the article to read it. The vast majority will see the headline, form an opinion, and confirmation bias takes over from there.
Notice that what AP does is more subtle. They're doing what Scott Adams used to call "thinking past the sale". The question isn't whether data centers are dangerous--we're told that "Democrats and Republicans agree" that they are. That's nearly 100% of the country, and if you're not with them, you're to be ostracized.
Finally, notice what CNN and Axios do (you'll see identical headlines from The New York Times). They focus on "New Incidents" that Open AI found. Conveniently timed for exactly when Jacob Coxon is starting to leave the news cycle. They need to continually feed it.
I'm very happy to see my fellow techies engaging on X. But for those who aren't aware of how the media is used to manipulate public opinion, I'd urge you all to study up on it.
It may feel like we're making a difference by posting here on X, but only 10% of the nation is hearing us.
90% is still getting their news shoveled into their brains—and their opinions assigned to them—by Google News, Apple News, and MS Now.
The goal from now to November? Capture the American public. Sweep in a Democrat-controlled Congress. Institute draconian regulations on AI that will allow them to choose winners and losers rather than the free market. Finish the job that they started to fundamentally transform the United States of America.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In this case, "the past" was just 5 years ago.