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SEARCH ENGINES & THE HIJACKING OF PEOPLE’S MINDS…

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What follows is at least as disturbing as the unintended consequences of Social Media. Even sites I considered more trustworthy than Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc., can be used to quite literally to “hijack people’s minds” for terrible purposes. The example below may have been a cause for many more of the global massacres in the last two decades. While disturbed, I am very grateful to The Southern Poverty Law Center for this and all the other work they do on behalf of humanity… FW

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GOOGLE AND THE MISEDUCATION OF DYLANN ROOF

THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER, JANUARY 18, 2017

How did Dylann Roof go from being someone who was not raised in a racist home to someone so steeped in white supremacist propaganda that he murdered nine African Americans during a Bible study?  The answer lies, at least in part, in the way that fragile minds can be shaped by the algorithm that powers Google Search. It lies in the way Google’s algorithm can promote false propaganda written by extremists at the expense of accurate information from reputable sources. Roof’s radicalization began, as he later wrote in an online manifesto, when he typed the words “black on White crime” into Google and found what he described as “pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders.” The first web pages he found were produced by the Council of Conservative Citizens, a crudely racist group that once called black people a “retrograde species of humanity.” Roof wrote that he has “never been the same since that day.” As he delved deeper, because of the way Google’s search algorithm worked, he was immersed in hate materials. Google says its algorithm takes into account how trustworthy, reputable or authoritative a source is. In Roof’s case, it clearly did not. Watch the video: Roof was convicted and sentenced to death in the June 17, 2015, massacre at the historic Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston. But there are many others who may be susceptible to the kind of racist propaganda that influenced him. ===================================================== © Copyright 2016, by William R. Idol, except where indicated otherwise. All rights reserved worldwide. Reprint only with permission from copyright holder(s). All trademarks are property of their respective owners. All contents provided as is. No express or implied income claims made herein. We neither use nor endorse the use of spam. =====================================================