It is stunning how quickly the Internet was closed off 2017-2023. Perhaps most importantly, Google began politicizing search results in April 2017 with "Project Owl," which sought to suppress "problematic searches" [their term, not mine].
To accomplish this, Google began removing "problematic" autocomplete selections. Since then, there have been a number of cases of Google's autocomplete bias getting so heavy-handed it went viral on other platforms, but the thumb on the scale is usually invisible.
Google also began manual rating/curation of their "featured snippets" answers.
Google also began boosting, in their own words, "authoritative" content in search results. This meant more mainstream news articles, Wikipedia, government pages, Reddit, and NGO reports, and fewer blogs, forums, and independent writing that might be a better match.
Project Owl was one of the prototypes for a wave of similar measures at other platforms. The playbook looked something like (1) find something "problematic" [eg Holocaust denial] on platform that no one would associate with the company itself [in this case of Google, less than 0.25% of results] (2) AstroTurf media campaign "criticizing" the company (sometimes with ad boycott thrown in) (3) sympathetic prog insiders at company work to close down platform, usually using mainstream media or disinformation NGOs as epistemic authorities (and sometimes three letter agencies).
This is separate from YouTube, Gmail, or more recently Gemini, all of which have had similar campaigns. Google is probably the most powerful company in the world.
Source of images: searchengineland.com/googles-projec…
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