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Jan. 3, 2023 - Epoch Times
15:39
Google Launches “Operation Jigsaw”: 4 Secret Methods of Online Censorship
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This right here is known as Operation Jigsaw.
You see, the brilliant engineers over at Google have come up with a new plan.
It's a plan couched in the idea, as these plans always seem to be, of keeping us safe from misinformation and from harmful language.
And the way to do that, obviously, is to control evermore what you and me are able to see and to say online.
What you're looking at right now on your screen is the homepage for a new Google initiative called the Info Intervention.
Their official website builds this new initiative as a, quote, set of approaches informed by behavioral science research and validated by digital experiments to build resilience to online harms.
Now, if the term behavioral science research makes you think about Pavlov and his experiments on dogs, well, that's actually a pretty good analogy.
Because this new initiative, it has Google essentially using the very same techniques, the very same methodologies on you and me, meaning the users, that Pavlov used on his dogs.
However, while Pavlov was trying to make his dogs salivate, Google is trying to make you question anything that goes against what the fact-checkers have deemed to be misinformation.
Regardless, though, getting back to the actual nuts and bolts of this new initiative, this Info Intervention Initiative, well, it's actually being led by one of Google's subsidiary companies.
It's a company by the name of Jigsaw.
And as you can see from their website, Jigsaw is a complete subsidiary of Google.
They are under complete Google management, and according to their mission statement, their mission is to, quote,"...apply technological solutions from countering extremism, online censorship, and cyber attacks to protecting access to information." Now, that all sounds very benign.
Who wouldn't want to protect the general population from cyber attacks and from extremism?
However, like most things, well, the devil is in the details.
Because you see, citing this research paper right here that was published over in Nature magazine, a paper, by the way, which claimed that shifting people's attention to accuracy can reduce the spread of misinformation online, well, Jigsaw actually partnered together with the authors of that research paper to create the Info Intervention Initiative.
And in terms of what this initiative will actually do, well, in March of last year, Jigsaw published an article in which they did a recap of their online social experiments and concluded by writing this, quote, The biggest form of misinformation is not smashing that like button below this video.
Now, I am, of course, just joking about that.
However, it is true that by smashing those like and subscribe buttons, you are in fact helping this video to spread to ever more people here on this platform and are therefore indeed fighting misinformation.
Regardless though, here's what Jigsaw actually wrote in the conclusion of their article.
And of course, their use of the word inoculate in that statement is likely not an accident.
As they were drawing a direct parallel by saying essentially that they are the vaccine to misinformation.
But within that article, within this article, it didn't actually stay any concrete steps that they were going to take.
It was all very conceptual.
However, we fast forward a few months from when this article was first published, and it's become a lot more clear about what is included in the range of approaches that they are going to use to combat misinformation.
The four methods that Google's Operation Jigsaw will be using to curb supposed misinformation are the following.
Accuracy prompts...
Redirect methods, authorship feedback, as well as something that they call pre-bunking, as opposed to debunking.
These are the four new methods that we can look forward to in the coming year, and so let's go through them together one by one.
The first method for Operation Jigsaw are the accuracy prompts, which are little pop-up windows that show up when you happen to scroll past a piece of content that's been flagged by Google by Google's fact checkers as potential misinformation.
And the stated purpose of the accuracy prompt is to remind us, meaning to remind the users, to only share content that they believe is accurate.
Here's specifically how the prompt will work according to Jigsaw's own website.
A person scrolls through their social feed and comes across content with potential misinformation.
An accuracy prompt is then triggered Now,
if you've been on the internet and you've already seen something like this on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, We're good to go.
Regardless though, moving on, the second method that Operation Jigsaw will be using is called the redirect method.
Here's how Jigsaw's website describes it.
The redirect method is aimed at reaching individuals who are vulnerable to recruitment by violent extremist groups and seeks to redirect users looking for extremist information towards curated content that refutes the extremist messaging.
Here is how specifically the redirect method will work.
A person does an online search using keywords which indicate that he or she might have an interest in something deemed to be extremist propaganda.
Again, deemed as such by the Google Fact Checkers.
Google will then initiate the redirect method, which will pick up on these keywords and intervene.
The intervention will come in the form of an ad, Which is presented to the individual making the search, and the ad contains the approved information on their topic of interest.
And then, upon clicking on the ad, the person is redirected, which is why it's called the redirect method, to content which counters the extremist narratives.
Now, in terms of what types of quote-unquote extremist narratives they will be targeting, well, we do have a bit of a clue.
That's because for the redirect method specifically, Jigsaw actually partnered with another organization called Moonshot.
You can see their website up on your screen.
And according to the Info Intervention website, it says that Moonshot has a history of partnering with other tech companies to deploy advertising which subverts what they refer to as online harms, including quote, white supremacy, violent misogyny, and of course, conspiracy theories.
Now, in terms of what exactly qualifies as a conspiracy theory, well, that is, like most things, up to Google to decide.
Then, the next method of Operation Jigsaw is called Authorship Feedback, which aims to, quite literally, shape what people, meaning you and I, can actually write online.
Essentially, the way that Authorship Feedback works is that when a person is writing, let's say a comment on a blog post, Google will use AI software to detect any toxic language, and then they'll provide real-time feedback to the person writing by highlighting the portions of their comments that might be perceived as being offensive.
Here's specifically how this AI feedback will work in practice.
A person writes a comment that the AI identifies as being quote-unquote toxic, which is a rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to make someone leave a discussion.
Then, as the person is writing, as the person is writing, the AI picks up on the quote-unquote toxic comment using the machine learning technology that supposedly identifies any types of abusive language.
Then, as the person is still writing their comment, meaning while they're still on their keyboard, an authorship feedback message is popped up and alerts the individual that their comment has been identified as being either risky or offensive.
Then, the individual is encouraged to adjust their language before publishing the content.
Now, at the moment, if you look at the screenshot on their website, it looks like you will still have the opportunity to ignore the feedback and post your comment anyway by hitting that post anyway button.
Although it is not exactly clear how long that will last for.
Maybe in the very near future, you'll either be forced to alter your language or just give up on trying to post.
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Regardless though, moving on to the fourth method of Operation Jigsaw, it's called pre-bunking.
This is how Google pitches over on their website what pre-bunking actually means.
Pre-bunking is a technique to pre-amp manipulation attempts online.
By forwarding individuals and equipping them to spot and refute misleading arguments, they gain resilience to being misled in the future.
Now, just to pause here for a super quick moment, I always appreciate how the individuals who create these types of programs in these big tech companies, they always assume that the people they're dealing with are being misled.
It seems to never cross their minds that perhaps they are the ones who are misleading people.
But anyway, who am I to judge?
Regardless though, in terms of the specifics, in terms of how this pre-bunking actually works, well, here's how they describe it.
Let's say you click on a video on YouTube that goes against the established narrative.
What will happen is that a pre-bunking video will be served to you in the form of an ad.
And this ad is basically a short cartoon video that's designed to inform people of what to look out for.
And through the message in the short ad, you will be informed of possible attempts that are being made to manipulate you online.
Now, it is kind of ironic that the ad which is trying to manipulate you is telling you that you are being manipulated, but let's set that aside for now.
In the ad video, you're going to be shown a relevant example of a manipulative technique or a manipulative narrative, and then you're going to be given the official counterpoint to refute those quote-unquote misleading claims.
And then, once this whole process is in place, The AI will start to conduct surveys in order to analyze how well the people who watch these ad videos were able to recall the quote-unquote manipulative techniques that were discussed.
And if you'd like to get a real world example of what these pre-bunking videos will look like, well, here's one of them from Google's own website.
We finally have a vaccine for COVID. But you may run into people who still want you to panic.
They'll use tactics to manipulate smart, honest people like you.
Sometimes these people talk about vaccine injuries.
UN scientists admitted that vaccines...
It's a video showing what appears to be healthcare professionals going through some of the generic claims made by people who are opposed to mass vaccination and labeling those claims as manipulation tactics designed to scare people away from getting the vaccine.
And so, by now, I think that most Americans are pretty familiar with all the techniques that Big Tech uses in order to both control the narrative and to throttle down content that they don't approve of.
However, what we just went through, the four methods of Operation Jigsaw, well, it appears that these will be the next wave of techniques used by Big Tech in order to stifle our ability to communicate freely online.
And as always, it's being done, like everything else in this modern age, under the banner of keeping you and I safe.
Safe from misinformation and safe from harmful content.
But the big question in these scenarios is always the same.
Who exactly gets to determine what exactly constitutes misinformation?
What constitutes a conspiracy theory?
What exactly is extremist content?
And what exactly is toxic language?
Because whoever gets to decide the answers to those questions, well, they essentially get to decide what Americans, what you and me, can see and also what we can say online.
That is a tremendous power.
And to assume that this type of program will be rolled out in some kind of a non-partisan manner is actually quite a large assumption to make, especially given the fact that the employees at the very company that's rolling this out, meaning Google, they gave 96% of their political donations to a single political party.
Regardless, this is what we have to look forward to in the coming year.
If you'd like to read more about Operation Jigsaw and this whole misinformation initiative being pushed forward by Google, I'll throw all my research notes down into the description box below this video for you to peruse.
And also, I'd love to give a big shout-out to Mr.
Eric Schumacher, who helped pull a lot of this research together, as well as to make sense of it.
And then lastly, I would love to know your thoughts regarding this whole matter, this whole initiative.
Do you agree with Operation Jigsaw?
Do you agree with this initiative that Google is implementing?
I'm personally of kind of two minds about it.
Because on the one hand, it would be a net positive, in my opinion, if these big tech companies were actually able to stop real extremist ideologies from spreading.
I mean, it's a known fact that, for instance, the remnants of the Islamic Caliphate, they are actively recruiting people and radicalizing them online.
In fact, there was a case just over the weekend of a young man right here in America who became an Islamic radical, and he attacked three cops in Times Square with a machete.
That happened just a few days ago.
And so it would be great if somehow that were avoided.
But the question really is this.
Could that have been avoided?
Because that kid in Times Square, he was apparently already on the radar of the FBI. And yet the attacks still happen.
And so what then?
Google will implement these new policies in Operation Jigsaw, which will stifle free speech for the common citizens like you and me.
Then some extremists will still fall through the cracks, which will lead Google to ratchet up their censorship regime evermore, And other extremists will fall through the cracks, which will lead to more restrictions on free speech, and then until what?
Until we're not able to speak freely online anymore, and it will all be done step by step in the name of our own safety.
It's in fact similar to gun crime.
Some wag job shoots up a shopping mall, and then all of a sudden, you and me are not allowed to own rifles in our very own homes.
And so, these are the supposed positive and negatives, stopping extremism while at the same time suppressing free speech.
However, there is another, you can say, dimension to all this, which is whether or not we can take Google's motives at face value, the claim that they are really doing this to stop extremism.
Or is it the case that the extremism that they're trying to stop is not necessarily Islamic extremism, but rather, let's say, another 2016-type election where Donald Trump is elected to the White House?
I'd love to know your thoughts on this matter.
Do the positives outweigh the negatives?
And what do you think the real motive is behind Operation Jigsaw and all these misinformation initiatives being launched by Big Tech as well as Google?
Please leave your thoughts in the comments section below.
I'll be reading them later this week.
And also, if you haven't already, while you're making your way down there to the comments section, take a quick moment to smash that like and subscribe button.
And speaking of the subscribe button, by the way, late last week, we passed a big milestone.
Facts Matter got to 1 million subscribers here on YouTube.
It was actually our goal by the end of 2022 to reach 1 million, and we did it.
And so from the entire Facts Matter team, I'd like to thank you all for subscribing and for spending your valuable time watching our episodes here.
In the coming weeks, we've got some super sweet, sweet deep dive episodes that are currently in the works, and so I hope you keep tuning in, even if Operation Jigsaw tells you to tune out.
Anyway, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epoch Times.
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