Google Working with Liberal Groups to Snuff Out Conservative … – PJ Media

See below for an important update.

Google revealed in a blog post that it is now using machine learning to document "hate crimes and events" in America. They've partnered with liberal groups like ProPublica, BuzzFeed News, and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to make information about "hate events" easily accessible to journalists. And now, there are troubling signs that this tool could be used to ferret out writers and websites that run afoul of the progressive orthodoxy.

In the announcement, Simon Rogers, data editor of Google News Labs, wrote:

TheDocumenting Hate News Index built by theGoogle News Lab, data visualization studioPitch Interactiveand ProPublica takes a raw feed of Google News articles from the past six months and uses theGoogle Cloud Natural Language APIto create a visual toolto help reporters find news happening across the country. Its a constantly-updating snapshot of data from this year, one which is valuable as a starting point to reporting on this area of news.

The Documenting Hate project launched in response to the lack of national data on hate crimes.While the FBI is required by law to collect data about hate crimes, the data is incomplete because local jurisdictions aren't required to report incidents up to the federal government.

All of which underlines the value of the Documenting Hate Project, which is powered by a number of differentnews organisations and journalistswho collect and verify reports of hate crimes and events. Documenting Hate is informed by both reports from members of the public and raw Google News data of stories from across the nation.

On the surface, this looks rather innocuous. It's presented by Google as an attempt to create a database of hate crimes information that should be available with a quick Google search, it should be noted. But a quick glance atthe list of partners for this project should raise some red flags:

ProPublica poses as a middle-of-the-road non-profit journalistic operation, but in reality, it's funded by a stable of uber-liberal donors, including George Soros's Open Society Foundations and Herb and Marion Sandler, billionaire former mortgage bankers whose Golden West Financial Corp. allegedly targeted subprime borrowers with "pick-a-pay" mortgages that led to toxic assets that were blamed for the collapse of Wachovia. The Southern Poverty Law Center, of course, is infamous for targeting legitimate conservatives groups, branding them as "hate groups" because they refuse to walk in lockstep with the progressive agenda. And it goes with out saying that The New York Times and BuzzFeed News lean left.

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Google Working with Liberal Groups to Snuff Out Conservative ... - PJ Media